The single most important change you can make in your working habits is to switch to creative work first, reactive work second. This means blocking off a large chunk of time every day for creative work on your own priorities, with the phone and e-mail off.

sometimes it’s fun to take a boot camp approach, to work very intensely for a very short period of time.

In a world filled with distraction, attention is our competitive advantage. Look at each day as a challenge—and an opportunity—to keep your eye on the prize.

The Creative Pragmatist Approach: I define the meaningful end deliverables and then start to clarify the intermediate steps to create them. I look at how much time I have between now and my projected end date. By “time” I mean both number of weeks and number of hours during those weeks to move this project forward. Then I allocate my time budget to

the little things that suck away our potential to do

The second key finding is that our bodies follow what are known as ultradian rhythms—ninety-minute periods at the end of which we reach the limits of our capacity to work at the highest level.

importance of that element to the overall success of the project. Then, as I move through the process, I push myself to keep pace with the goals I’ve set, producing good enough work within the time I have to spend and giving myself permission to circle back if I still have additional hours at the end. This will ensure that I don’t over-invest in le

Start with the rhythm of your energy levels.

the alternative is to put themselves into the world as someone who knows what they are doing.