“When scientists analyze people who appear to have tremendous self-control, it turns out those individuals aren’t all that different from those who are struggling. Instead, “disciplined” people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control.” - Atomic Habits

“The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a by-product of work.” - The War of Art

"Secrecy is the first law of Magic" - from Julia Cameron's Artist's Way.Talking about your project seems to spread your energy in every direction other than towards completion.

Four different tests of 63 people found that those who kept their intentions private were more likely to achieve them

W. Mahler found that if a person announced the solution to a problem, and was acknowledged by others, it was now in the brain as a “social reality”, even if the solution hadn’t actually been achieved

Announcing your plans to others satisfies your self-identity just enough that you’re less motivated to do the hard work needed

However, if you believe that you are indistractable, you empower yourself to respond more healthily to whatever distractions get in your way

identity pact is another way to change your response to distractions. Your self-image has a profound impact on your behavior

price pact puts money on the line. If you stick to your intended behavior, you keep the cash. If you get distracted, you forfeit your funds

effort pact is a kind of precommitment that involves increasing the amount of effort required to do something you don’t want to do

you can take back your smartphone in four steps

The right approach is to ask whether the external trigger is serving you, or whether you are serving it

research shows that ignoring a call or message can be just as distracting as responding to one

After all, the most important people in your life deserve better than the leftover time in your day

Go ahead and scroll through social media, but at allotted times

Turn your values into time

Don’t pick your goals, pick your values

“leaves on a stream” method. Imagine yourself beside a stream, on which leaves gently float by. Place each thought and negative feeling in your mind on one leaf and watch them float away

You can’t control how you feel, but you can learn to control how you react to the way you feel.To start, you can change how you think about the bad feelings that can lead to distraction.

The truth is, we overuse video games, social media, and our cell phones not just for the pleasure they provide, but because they free us from psychological discomfort

The opposite of “distraction” is “traction.” Traction is any action that moves us towards what we really want. Tractions are actions, done with intent.

distractions aren’t necessarily your fault, they are your responsibility

“Your most important task as a leader is to teach people how to think and ask the right questions so that the world doesn’t go to hell if you take a day off”.

From urban ancient Greece to agrarian societies, work was either something to be outsourced to others – often slaves – or something to be done as quickly as possible so that the rest of life could happen.

For some of these writers, this future must include a universal basic income (UBI) – currently post-work’s most high-profile and controversial idea – paid by the state to every working-age person, so that they can survive when the great automation comes. For others, the debate about the affordability and morality of a UBI is a distraction from even bigger issues.

In 1845, Karl Marx wrote that in a communist society workers would be freed from the monotony of a single draining job to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner”. In 1884, the socialist William Morris proposed that in “beautiful” factories of the future, surrounded by gardens for relaxation, employees should work only “four hours a day”.

And finally, beyond all these dysfunctions, loom the most-discussed, most existential threats to work as we know it: automation, and the state of the environment. Some recent estimates suggest that between a third and a half of all jobs could be taken over by artificial intelligence in the next two decades.

Work is badly distributed. People have too much, or too little, or both in the same month. And away from our unpredictable, all-consuming workplaces, vital human activities are increasingly neglected. Workers lack the time or energy to raise children attentively, or to look after elderly relations. “The crisis of work is also a crisis of home,” declared the social theorists Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek in a paper last year. This neglect will only get worse as the population grows and ages.

Unsurprisingly, work is increasingly regarded as bad for your health: “Stress … an overwhelming ‘to-do’ list … [and] long hours sitting at a desk,” the Cass Business School professor Peter Fleming notes in his new book, The Death of Homo Economicus, are beginning to be seen by medical authorities as akin to smoking.

Looking at some of those bullet journal masterpieces made me wonder, how much of bullet journaling is just...productivity porn?

I adopted a ‘horses for courses’ approach to keep it in check. I used Facebook primarily to keep in touch with family and real-world friends, I used Twitter for tech discussions and networking, I used LinkedIn sparingly, and I dropped any social media that didn’t fulfill a specific function for me.

“What gets measured gets done, what gets measured and fed back gets done well, what gets rewarded gets repeated.”

If you are one of those people sending hundreds of text messages throughout the day, then you are crazy and throwing your life away.

Do you want a book recommendation to go with this section? I’ve got one you’re not going to hear anywhere else. Go buy the sci-fi book Dune and read it in the context of personal development.The lady-witch advisors, the Bene Gesserit, are what happens when you have fine-tuned mastery over habit.The human computing Mentats are what’s possible through extreme brain training.The Gom Jabbar test of humanity? That’s the mind-over-matter possible through meditation. An animal gives in to the illusion of pain; a human can see through that illusion.The Butlerian Jihad where humanity overthrew and then banned all artificial intelligence? That’s what I keep saying here about making your phone a tool, not your boss.

Without obtaining feedback from aspects of the entire user community, situations like those noted above are likely to exist. In each case, there were significant losses to the business from what was a bad application design.

The only correlating factor has to be the effectiveness of your actions.

You know, people don’t have hours anymore. Like, you don’t have hours at work. You know, people say they work 8 hours a day or 10 hours a day or 12 hours a day. They don’t. They work 15 minutes and 20 minutes and 25 minutes and 6 minutes and maybe 45 minutes if they’re lucky.

Maybe you are the sort of person who finds it hard to motivate yourself to take on such goals. If that’s the case, taking a flexible approach might be best for you. But if you struggle with follow-through — for instance, if you find yourself in situations where there are simply too many other priorities competing for your attention — then adopting a much more rigid approach, one that includes setting specific actions and steps, could be more effective.

once people have set a goal, they are much more likely to complete it when the steps to achievement are set out in a rigid, restrictive way.

Schedule all of your meetings for the afternoon, after lunch.

Nevertheless, we also found out that a later systematic review based on twenty eight very good papers [7] found evidence of the increase in productivity when using the SCRUM method.

high productivity (in terms of published output) is indeed correlated with high levels of collaboration [1-4,24,30,51,52,58,60].

A.J. Lotka. 1926, The frequency distribution of scientific productivity, Journal of the Washington Academy of Science 16, 317-323.

A pioneering insight into the productivity of sci- entists was provided by Lotka in 1926--an insight since confirmed by numerous others. He showed that the number of authors producing n papers is propor- tional to 1/n 2 [32]. Thus, the number of researchers producing just one paper in a given period of time is two orders of magnitude greater than the number of researchers producing 10 papers in the same time and four orders of magnitude greater that the number producing 100 papers. Lotka's findings have led some investigators to ask if prolific authors tend to collaborate more than less prolific authors.

Despite opinions to the contrary, these data suggest that there has been no apparent increase in overall productivity per active author over the last decade. Instead, authors are using their authorship potential more wisely by becoming more collaborative in the way they work, which is driving an apparent inflation in each author’s productivity as well as author bylines. Instead, the underlying driver of the volume increase in articles published is simply the introduction of new entrants/authors into the market. That is not surprising, as the total population of researchers globally continues to rise every year, and they become increasingly subject to the principles of "publish or perish": and so the cycle continues.

“Visit a web page, then select some text and annotate with comments or tags. You’ll see those annotations when you return to the page, and so will other Hypothesis users.”

Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.

“Don’t worry about things. Don’t push. Just do your work and you’ll survive. The important thing is to have a ball, to be joyful, to be loving and to be explosive. Out of that comes everything and you grow.”

The Ultimate Guide to Personal Productivity Methods