• Author:: [[Chris Bailey]]
• Full Title:: The Productivity Project
• Category:: [[books]]

• Highlights first synced by [[readwise]] [[September 2nd, 2020]]

  • visiting an art gallery
  • Whenever you’re in mind-wandering mode, again, make sure you capture what your brain comes up with, so that no great ideas slip through the cracks
  • even tactics like reading novels, which I thought required a lot of attention, often let me flip into daydreaming mode and capture new ideas
  • subgoals for larger projects, spending more time planning out projects to add structure to them, and keeping a running list of things you have to get done for each of your projects
  • Exercising or playing sports • Reading • Meditation • Listening to music • Investing in a creative hobby • Praying • Going for a nature walk • Spending time with friends and family • Going for a massage
  • one of the very first things I’ve done after waking up has been to define the three things I wanted to accomplish over the course of the day
  • When you clear attentional space to think, you give yourself more clarity and feel less pressure. Making small, incremental improvements, rewarding yourself, finding your resistance level, working mindfully, and cultivating your focus and energy levels are all ways of taking it easy on yourself and having fun as you invest in your productivity
  • I left my phone at home and wandered around
  • Recall three things you’re grateful for
  • Look at pictures of cute baby animals
  • recalling three things you’re grateful for
  • I break for at least fifteen minutes every hour
  • knitting, gardening, yoga, going for a long drive, walking somewhere without headphones, taking a candlelit bath, or visiting an art gallery
  • Reward yourself
  • Create an Accomplishments List
  • with only a pen and notepad
  • Time: I observed how intelligently I used my time, how much I got done throughout the day, how many words and pages I wrote/read, and how often I procrastinated. • Attention: I noted what I focused on, how well I focused, and how easily I was distracted. • Energy: I scrutinized how much drive, motivation, and overall energy I had, tracking how my energy levels fluctuated over the course of an experiment
  • Intention and deliberateness are two sides of the same coin, and I think both are essential if you want to live more productively
  • Disconnect from productivity more often

As a general rule, you should be taking more breaks than you are now—that includes breaks throughout the day, and breaks from work in general - Ask yourself for advice - Break tasks down - play the violin until the answer he was searching for seemingly struck him from out of the blue - I went on nature walks at lunchtime - meditation and exercise - video games provide you with a rapid succession of milestones, goals, and rewards, whereas most jobs are far more ambiguous and unstructured - going for a nature walk - journaling one positive experience - One study found that the ideal break length for productivity is seventeen minutes for every fifty-two minutes you work, and while I don’t buy that number completely—everyone is programmed differently—I buy the idea behind it. You should take breaks a lot more frequently than you do now - Journal about a positive experience you had - productivity is made up of three things: time, attention, and energy - Did I get done what I intended to - Know You Can Grow - The reason I found it easier to work smarter during this experiment wasn’t because of the meditation practice itself. It was simply because I had so little time to get work done that week. During the experiment, I continued to write articles and read as much as possible. But since I had so little time to do it in, I frequently had to step back from my work to reflect on whether the writing I was doing was important and worth doing. With so little time, it was my only option - Note: Set time constraints on your work to help focus on doing the important parts. - nothing worked quite as well as simply sitting in a room with a pen and a sheet of paper - I had essentially reverted to a factory mindset and equated productivity with efficiency, instead of looking at how much I accomplished