a business’s goal is to generate value, not to make sure its employees’ lives are as easy as possible.

Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.

a deep work habit requires you to treat your time with respect.

I would go so far as to argue that someone following this combination of comprehensive scheduling and a willingness to adapt or modify the plan as needed will likely experience more creative insights than someone who adopts a more traditionally “spontaneous” approach where the day is left open and unstructured. Without structure, it’s easy to allow

It’s a simple habit that forces you to continually take a moment throughout your day and ask: “What makes sense for me to do with the time that remains?” It’s the habit of asking that returns results, not your unyielding fidelity to the answer.

Schedule Every Minute of Your Day

For those familiar with the rigors of such activities, the limit expands to something like four hours, but rarely more.

Performance psychologists have extensively studied how much such efforts can be sustained by an individual in a given day.*

The shallow work that increasingly dominates the time and attention of knowledge workers is less vital than it often seems in the moment.