Chris Bailey Quotes

According to Duhigg, cues that trigger habits fall into one of five categories: a specific time of day, a place, a feeling, the presence of certain people, or a preceding behavior that you have ritualized.

happiness is nothing more than coming to terms with how things change.

But busyness does not translate into productivity if it doesn’t lead you to accomplish anything.

Managing your time becomes important only after you define what you want to accomplish and understand how much energy and focus you have throughout the day.

just because we’re busier doesn’t mean we’re getting more accomplished.

meditation and mindfulness both build your attention muscle,

WHAT I DO ON MAINTENANCE DAY If you’re curious, here’s a complete list of everything I wait to tackle until Sunday morning — all of which takes me, at a leisurely pace, four to six hours: • Grocery shopping • Clean house and office • Create a meal and workout plan • Trim beard and shave • Do laundry • Prepare lunches in Tupperware containers for the week • Water plants • Read articles I’ve saved up throughout the week • Review my projects, and define next steps (this page) • Review my “Waiting For” list • Define three outcomes for the week ahead (this page) • Clear out all my inboxes (this page) • Review my hot spots (this page) • Review my Accomplishments List Naturally, your own Maintenance Day ritual will vary.

Create a distraction-free mode for your team. Dale Partridge, author of People Over Profit, went as far as to equip his team with lamps and squirt guns to encourage them to focus when he was CEO of Sevenly. As he explained to me, “One of the smartest things I did at Sevenly was to build custom walnut desk lamps for the entire team. They turned them on whenever they wanted to focus, and the rule was that no one was allowed to interrupt them when their lamp was on. All forty-five employees were allowed to have up to three hours of uninterrupted focus time per day — we had to limit it because that uninterrupted time was so addictive! I also equipped everyone with a squirt gun they could spray each other with when they were interrupted.

By controlling how much time you spend on a task, you control how much energy and attention you spend on it.

any sufficiently complex decision or idea is also indistinguishable from magic.

making the jump between knowing and doing is what productivity is all about.

I captured them in my notepad so I could deal with them later.

We are what we pay attention to.

Focus: This involves narrowing your attentional spotlight to focus on the task at hand, which helps you work more efficiently.

Continually seeking novel stimuli makes us feel more productive — after all, we’re doing more in each moment. But again, just because we’re busier doesn’t mean we’re getting more accomplished.