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Cognitive work is a fragile endeavor; environment matters. When we pass the laundry basket outside our home office (a.k.a. our bedroom), our brain shifts toward a household-chores context, even when we would like to maintain focus on our work.

A 40 hour time-blocked work week, I estimate, produces the same amount of output as a 60+ hour work week pursued without structure.

The "open office" is up there with Slack as representing the peak of early 21st century distraction culture — a period which the knowledge sector disregarded the reality of how human brains actually go through the difficult task of creating value through cogitation.

Here's a reminder for the rest of us, nervous about slipping into digital oblivion. What ultimately matters is the fundamental value of what we produce. Everything else is distraction.

ChatGPT is amazing, but in the final accounting it’s clear that what’s been unleashed is more automaton than golem.

Move your focus away from finding the right work, toward working right, and eventually build a love for what you do.

The happiest, most passionate employees are not those who followed their passion into a position, but instead those who have been around long enough to become good at what they do.

Your world is the outcome of what you pay attention to.

Creating things that are too good to be ignored, regardless of the setting, is an activity that almost without exception requires undivided attention.

When work was done at work, and there was no chance of continuing your labors at home, your job didn’t seem nearly as onerous. There’s a lot about early 2000s culture I’m not eager to excavate, but this idea of the constrained workday certainly seems worthy of nostalgia.

Busyness is not the engine of production. It can, in many cases, instead be the obstacle to accomplishing your best work.

The rhythms of our professional lives are not pre-ordained. We craft the world in which we work, even if we don’t realize it.

In knowledge work, productivity is about psychology as much as it is about tools and process. But we often ignore this reality.

Too many of us undervalue concentration, and substitute busyness for real productivity, and are quick to embrace whatever new techno-bauble shines brightest.

One of the core principles of my emerging philosophy of slow productivity is that busyness and exhaustion are often unrelated to the task of producing meaningful results.

Accomplishment is often best measured on the scale of years not days, and when you zoom out to this grander level, the advantages of a focused slowness become hard to ignore.

We craft the world in which we work, even if we don’t realize it.