Anyone can say no to bad ideas, but only a focused person can say no to good ideas. When talking about one of the biggest lessons he learned from Steve Jobs, Jonny Ive said: This sounds really simplistic, but it still shocks me how few people actually practice this, and it’s a struggle to practice, but is this issue of focus. Jobs was the most focused person in the world. Focus isn’t a light switch you can turn on and off. Focus is not the sort of thing you aspire to … or you decide on Monday. It’s something you do every minute. Jobs would often test people, asking them, “how many things h ..read more

We are drowning in information. Most of that information is irrelevant. If only we could sort what matters from what doesn’t. The good news is that you can train your brain to evaluate the quality of information. Not only can you quickly determine if someone knows what they are talking about but you can sort the important information from the irrelevant information and focus your time on what matters. How? It turns out that Nobel Laurette Richard Feynman thought about this problem and created a series of “tricks” that he used repeatedly. In a series of non-technical lectures in 1963, memoriali ..read more

There’s a good chance most of the problems in your life and work come down to insufficient slack. Here’s how slack works and why you need more of it. Imagine if you, as a budding productivity enthusiast, one day gained access to a time machine and decided to take a trip back several decades to the office of one of your old-timey business heroes. Let’s call him Tony. You disguise yourself as a janitor and figure a few days of observation should be enough to reveal the secret of that CEO’s incredible productivity and shrewd decision-making. You want to learn the habits and methods that enabled h ..read more

Innovation doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Doers and thinkers from Shakespeare to Jobs, liberally “stole” inspiration from the doers and thinkers who came before. Here’s how to do it right. *** “If I have seen further,” Isaac Newton wrote in a 1675 letter to fellow scientist Robert Hooke, “it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” It can be easy to look at great geniuses like Newton and imagine that their ideas and work came solely out of their minds, that they spun it from their own thoughts—that they were true originals. But that is rarely the case. Innovative ideas have to come from somewhe ..read more

The key to better results isn’t working harder. Most of us already work long hours. The problem is we don’t always work smart. We all have the same amount of time each day to invest. What differentiates us is how we invest that time toward our goals. The best results come when we concentrate our effort in one direction. The Talent Gap It’s natural to think that people who get better results than us are simply more talented. The problem is that it’s not true. What seems like a difference in talent often comes down to a difference in focus. Results come when you focus on one thing for an uncommo ..read more

Consider the daily schedule of famed novelist Haruki Murakami. When he’s working on a novel, he starts his days at 4 am and writes for five or six continuous hours. Once the writing is done, he spends his afternoons running or swimming, and his evenings, reading or listening to music before a 9 pm bedtime. Murakami is known for his strict adherence to this schedule. In contrast, consider the schedule of an entrepreneur, speaker, and writer Gary Vaynerchuk. He describes his day (which begins at 6 am) as being broken into tiny slots, mostly comprising meetings, which can be as short as three min ..read more

Nothing will change your future trajectory like your habits. We all have goals, big or small, things we want to achieve within a certain time frame. Maybe you want to make a million dollars by the time you turn 30. Or to lose 20 pounds before summer. Or to write a book in the next six months. When we begin to chase a vague concept (success, wealth, health, happiness), making a tangible goal is often the first step. Habits are algorithms operating in the background that power our lives. Good habits help us reach our goals more effectively and efficiently. Bad ones makes things harder or prevent ..read more

Productivity is all the rage. People want to get more done in less time. Productivity systems abound: Getting Things Done, Pomodoro, the Seinfeld thing, etc. There’s certainly something to be said for each of them. But have you thought about something a little simpler and more basic: How to focus? Like, really how to focus your mind on one hard, long project until it’s done? Productivity systems are great in that they keep you accountable for getting lots of task-oriented work completed. But they don’t answer the larger question, which is: What do you do that creates value in your career? And ..read more

Echoing the , Charlie Munger offers some sage advice on multi-tasking: I will say this, I know no wise person who doesn’t read a lot. I suspect that you can read on the computer now and get a lot of benefit out of it, but I doubt it will work as well as reading print worked for me. I think people that multitask pay a huge price. They think they’re being extra productive, and I think they’re (out of their mind). I use the metaphor of the one-legged man in the ass-kicking contest. I think when you multi-task so much, you don’t have time to think about anything deeply. You’re giving the world a ..read more

Comedian Drew Carey outsourced the development of his productivity strategy to David Allen, author of the cult classic, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, who “taught him how to adhere to specific next steps rather than abstract larger goals.” Allen’s system, outlined in Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, focuses “on the minutiae of to-do lists, folders, labels, in-boxes.” When he began working with overtaxed executives, he saw the problem with the traditional big-picture type of management planning, like writing mission statements, defining long-term ..read more