Chris Bailey Quotes

Becoming aware of what you’re thinking about is one of the best practices for managing your attention. The more you notice what’s occupying your attentional space, the faster you can get back on track when your mind begins to wander, which it does a remarkable 47 percent of the time.

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.

Productivity isn’t about how busy or efficient you are — it’s about how much you accomplish

Your Central Executive: This is your thinking and planning brain that lives in your prefrontal cortex.

We have to work with intention as much as possible — this is especially true when we have more to do than time within which to do it. Intention enables us to prioritize so we don’t overload our attentional space.

work smarter instead of just harder.

What separates the most productive people from everyone else is that they make course corrections every week to gradually get better at everything they do.

Compounding this is the fact that the brain’s prefrontal cortex — the large part of the forebrain that lets us plan, think logically, and get work done — has a built-in “novelty bias.” Whenever we switch between tasks, it rewards us with dopamine — that amazing pleasure chemical that rushes through our brain whenever we devour a medium-sized pizza, accomplish something awesome, or have a drink or two after work.

can be. As David Allen told me, “Your head is not for holding ideas — it’s for having ideas.

By removing every object of attention that’s potentially more stimulating and attractive than what you intend to do, you give your brain no choice but to work on that task.

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

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

Boring Frustrating Difficult Unstructured or ambiguous Lacking in personal meaning Lacking in intrinsic rewards (i.e., it’s not fun or engaging) The more of these attributes a task has, and the more intense these attributes are, the less attractive a task will be to you, and the more likely you’ll procrastinate on it.

Ideas, tasks, and insights only have value when you capture and then act on them. Keeping notepads everywhere has helped me hold on to a ton of them.

Awareness: This means becoming aware of what’s going on in your internal and external environments, which helps you work more mindfully and deliberately.