The best way to get the attention and respect of exceptional people is to do exceptional work.

Like attracts like.

Great news about lots of email is how consistently it forces you to get clear what's really meaningful to your work/life.

The more efficient you get, the more you become "a limitless reservoir for other people's expectations," in the words of the management expert Jim Benson.

What percentage of your list opens every email because they feel like they know and trust you? A healthy email list has a 20 percent open rate. Target that.

When you know you'll get email to zero, you're free to deal with the ones you choose, when you choose. Most productive.

Meetings handled well reduce email. Email handled well reduces meetings.

We instead find ourselves in distracting open offices where inboxes cannot be neglected and meetings are incessant — a setting where colleagues would rather you respond quickly to their latest e-mail than produce the best possible results.

Build a reputation that makes other people do deals through you.

You must develop one all-important ability — being able to enlist the help of other people. You have to reach a state where others want to help you. This includes giving credit...which will come back to you a hundredfold. Your reputation stems from what people say when you’re not present.

email, that ingenious twentieth-century invention whereby any random person on the planet can pester you, at any time they like, and at almost no cost to themselves, by means of a digital window that sits inches from your nose, or in your pocket, throughout your working day, and often on weekends, too. The "input" side of this arrangement — the number of emails that you could, in principle, receive — is essentially infinite. But the "output" side — the number of messages you'll have time to read properly, reply to, or just make a considered decision to delete — is strictly finite.

The second reason that a culture of connectivity makes life easier is that it creates an environment where it becomes acceptable to run your day out of your inbox — responding to the latest missive with alacrity while others pile up behind it, all the while feeling satisfyingly productive (more on this soon). If e-mail were to move to the periphery of your workday, you’d be required to deploy a more thoughtful approach to figuring out what you should be working on and for how long. This type of planning is hard. Consider, for example, David Allen’s Getting Things Done task-management methodology, which is a well-respected system for intelligently managing competing workplace obligations. This system proposes a fifteen-element flowchart for making a decision on what to do next! It’s significantly easier to simply chime in on the latest cc’d e-mail thread.

This is actually a good thing, because you want attention only after you’re doing really good work.

The way to attract good luck is to be reliable in a valuable area.

The more you repeatedly deliver value, the more people seek you out for that value.

Your reputation is a magnet. Once you become known for something, relevant opportunities come to you with no extra work.

If you take care of your character, your reputation will take care of itself.