Chris Bailey Quotes

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.

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.

had about $10,000 saved up (Canadian dollars — equal to about $30 US dollars, or $1,500 in Monopoly money).

the most productive people are the ones who strike a balance between the two extremes, who understand the power of capturing and organizing what they have to get done, but who also don’t sacrifice real work in favor of being productive about productivity.

drinking caffeine is a way of borrowing energy from later on in the day.

if you want to become more productive, managing your time should take a backseat to how you manage your energy and attention.

when we schedule time for something, what we’re actually doing is simply deciding when we will invest our attention and energy into the task.

When someone says they “don’t have time” for something, what they’re really saying is that a task isn’t as important or attractive as whatever else they have on their plate.

I see drinking alcohol as a way of borrowing energy from tomorrow;

your brain is simply not built to focus on more than one thing at once. In fact, your brain can’t focus on two things simultaneously — instead it rapidly switches between them, which creates the illusion that you’re doing more than one thing at a time.

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

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.

the internet is basically the world’s largest candy store for your limbic system.

I learned the hard way how to step out of the time economy and into the knowledge economy to become more productive.

Notepads Everywhere: I love capturing ideas as they come to me, but because I shut my phone off between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m., it’s not always possible to capture them on my phone. For that reason I keep physical notepads everywhere.