Be Too Busy to ‘Do Coffee’

The logistical simplicity of this system enables this executive to easily shift time-consuming, low-quality connections into higher-quality conversation. If you write him with a somewhat complicated question, he can reply, “I’d love to get into that. Call me at 5:30 any day you want.” Similarly, when I was visiting San Francisco a few years back an

At first, I’d say yes to everything — meetings are really valuable when you’re starting off. But I reached a point where I was letting myself get scheduled on six to eight hours of phone calls a day. And when I looked at them, I couldn’t identify what the positive outcomes were — and more importantly, I didn’t enjoy doing it.

The first suggestion is simple to implement: apply the heuristic of reducing whatever task list you come up with for a given day by somewhere between 25 and 50 percent. As mentioned, humans are wildly optimistic when we estimate how much time is needed to complete cognitive efforts. Blanket reduction rules, like cutting your initial task list by a

Eliminating distractions can help prevent unnecessary interruptions, but it’s entirely possible to waste energy mentally thrashing even if you have the entire day free. The best approach to avoid unnecessary cognitive switching is to group similar tasks together. For example, I find it difficult to make progress on creative tasks (like writing or s