There is a performative dimension to writing emails and cc’ing everybody, like ‘Look at all the work I’m doing.’ It’s annoying - Cal Newport

The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally — walking, jogging, driving, showering — and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem. Depending on your profession, this problem might be outlining an article, writing a talk, making progress on a proof, or attempting to sharpen a business strategy. As in mindfulness meditation, you must continue to bring your attention back to the problem at hand when it wanders or stalls.

Serve something you deeply value (offering some benefit is not enough). Be the best way to use technology to serve this value (if it’s not, replace it with something better). Have a role in your life that is constrained with a standard operating procedure that specifies when and how you use it.

He asks us to treat the minutes of our life as a concrete and valuable substance — arguably the most valuable substance we possess — and to always reckon with how much of this life we trade for the various activities we allow to claim our time.