Productivity

• Measure what is meaningful, not what is easy
• Resolve to Live a Deep Life
• Sam Altman’s productivity tips
• Parkinson’s Law
• Pomodoro technique
• Sometimes you need to remove barriers instead of continuing to improve your product
• Friction typically manifests as many small things
• Marginal gains in many aspects can have a big impact
• compound interest
  • Emphasize insight and gradual growth instead of ticking big goals off a checklist
• Creating things you would use or read yourself is a good sign you are working on something important
• Veil of Ignorance
• Productivity strategies are motivating because we realize our time is finite
• There is no inherent value in being organized, but it creates space for creativity because it reduces overhead
• Don’t let money be a detour to achieving other values
• Persistent effort will lead you to do work in line with your taste
  • Actively developing your taste in your field of work will help you select projects
  • Taste, rather than capacity for output, will continue to be valuable when AI is everywhere in our daily lives
• When procrastination is the root cause, no to-do app will get things done for you.
• Work has been infused with beliefs about self-actualization
  • One possible source of the political tensions in the US is the overproduction of highly educated individuals with poor job prospects
• Hard choices can mean that the differences between the options are small
• Fundamental changes often involve a change in how we view the world
• For the individuals in a team where focus is most valued, it’s also the hardest to achieve
• By continuously working on your own projects, you create things and take accountability rather than passively consuming content

Core activities §

• Like scales in music, the core activities at work appear in most projects
  • One sign that you are well suited for a role is that you enjoy the processes involved
• Be wary of niche competition that produces things that nobody finds valuable
  • Is closely linked to how something is evaluated. Don’t mix up the construct (understanding the world) with the measurement (the exam)

Work on the right things §

• First-principles thinking
• The Hamming question
  • Doing important work starts with working on important problems
  • Keep a list of important problems and test new ideas against them
  • You can increase the surface area for luck by cultivating your curiosity
• Working on the right question means aiming at the core of a problem

Less is more §

• Putting more time into a specific project can have outsized effects on its quality and value
  • If you divide your time between projects evenly, you lose out on some of the benefits from deep focus
• Carefully select projects because Commitment makes good things better and bad things worse
• Many commitments bring a fixed amount of overhead, so keep the number of commitments low
  • Overhead spiral
• Discipline can sometimes mean doing less, not just more
  • Increasing focus in your work means choosing what not to do
• Task selection is more important than trying to stay on top of everything

Cal Newport core ideas §

Time management

Deep work

Fixed-schedule productivity

Slow productivity

Productive meditation