“Work that doesn’t advance you toward the life you want is still wasted time.”
“He would have trouble fully engaging in conversations with team members who came to see him because he would be thinking of the other problems he still needed to address. He would be wondering when the conversations would end, so that he could get back to those problems, hoping he would be able to deal with those problems before his family expected him home around 5:30 P.M. Now he doesn’t show up at work until he’s solved them. **Having been proactive in the morning, he is “free to be reactive” at the office. “It gives me clarity through the day,” he says. “I can walk slowly through the halls. I can high-five more people. I can feel fine when I’m interrupted.”** Because the truth is, when you’re in management, those interruptions are your job.”
People in the top 20 percent of ^^**time-perception scores**^^ spent a higher proportion of their time on things that are known mood boosters—exercise, reflective activities, and interacting with friends and family—as opposed to people in the bottom 20 percent of time-perception scores, who spent more time online and watching TV.(Location 1612) Memory is all we have
**If something important has to happen, it has to happen first.** This same philosophy can be applied to the week as well.
When you are combining creative, speculative work with professional activities, if you wait until the end of the day or the end of the week to make art, there may not be time left over. But if you carve out time on Monday morning for such work—as Katherine Reynolds Lewis did with her pitching—it will get done.
The question wasn’t if I would run, it was when I would run.
**As I study prolific people who seem relaxed and yet get so much done, I see that this is often their secret: small things done repeatedly add up.** You do not have to work around the clock. You simply put one metaphorical foot in front of the other, achieve your small goal, then do it again.
^^**People do change, but only because they decide they want to change, not because someone else has spent enough time worrying about it. **^^Parenting in particular is one long lesson in letting go of expectations.
I suspect one reason that meal-kit delivery services have achieved such popularity in the past few years is that they took a pedestrian task (getting dinner on the table) and turned it into an adventurous activity couples could do together. The appetite to deepen time is there; it’s simply a matter of putting thought into time that would otherwise slip by. (Location 2323)
Thinking through your days and weeks before you’re in them increases the chances that this time is spent on meaningful and enjoyable things. Picture a “realistic ideal day.” Within the parameters of your current responsibilities, what would a realistic ideal day look like? How about a realistic ideal week? On Friday afternoons, look at the week ahead. Make yourself a three-category priority list: career, relationships, self. Which two or three items should go in each category? Look at the upcoming week. Where can these things go? Create daily intentions. If you did nothing else today, what three accomplishments would make you feel like you got a lot done?
**Note**: Good guidelines for a journal
What good habits do you want to build? How low would you have to lower your expectations to feel no resistance to doing that habit daily? For example, someone wanting to exercise might decide to do ten minutes per day. Someone wanting to write a novel might commit to writing two hundred words per day. (Location 2780)