Jason Fried :
Every day you spend more time, and tomorrow you have less than you had yesterday. You can’t make more, and you can’t really buy more, so it’s limited and fleeting and those are the rules.
But there’s something even more limited than time. It’s your attention. Attention is a subset of time, therefore it’s more limited. How you spend your attention is more important than how you spend your time.
Joel Gascoigne:
The idea of the Anti-Todo List is that it is the account of progress for that day. In some ways it’s a “Done” List. This is really powerful, because you can always look back at your Anti-Todo List and see how much you’ve got done (even if the items weren’t on your todo list).
Just like how you get a little rush by crossing something off your todo list, the Anti-Todo List goes even further and suggests that you actually write the items down fresh, and write all the additional tasks you end up accomplishing which weren’t necessarily on your todo list.
I have something like this already. As I mark items off my to-do list, they move to the completed tasks view. However, reviewing this regularly will reveal work patterns and opportunities for improvement.
Results up. Time down.
(via Measure Results, Not Hours, to Improve Work Efficiency - NYTimes.com)
I won’t vouch for the accuracy of the numbers in Atlassian’s infographic, You Waste A Lot Of Time At Work, but the numbers suggest how managing three areas of office life could greatly improve productivity.
Even if all the stats in the infographic are bogus, it’s one of the best designed pages I’ve seen on the web.
We all live on two things: time and money. And people who have extra income don’t get much, if any, extra time to spend it.
Suddenly the knee-jerk response to someone saying they’ve been busy (“That’s a good problem to have”) makes a lot of sense.
Should I check email? No, probably not.
(via Managing Distraction: How and Why to Ignore Your Inbox - Forbes)
John Pavlus, writing back in 2010 when the Lifehacking thing was still really popular:
[I]t’s just plain easier to tinker and tweak something you assume you’re stuck with, for better or worse, than it is to design something better from scratch. It’s less tiring. It’s less frustrating. It’s less frightening. It takes less commitment. There aren’t any unknown unknowns. The failures are less painful and the successes are more frequent.
A strategic approach to to-do lists from a general.
First I make a list of priorities: one, two, three, and so on. Then I cross out everything from three down.
