obsessing over quality often demands that you slow down, as the focus required to get better is simply not compatible with busyness.

PRINCIPLE #2: WORK AT A NATURAL PACE Don’t rush your most important work. Allow it instead to unfold along a sustainable timeline, with variations in intensity, in settings conducive to brilliance.

We often believe those we work with care only about getting results as fast as possible. But this isn’t true. Often what they really want is the ability to hand something off and not have to worry about whether or not it will be accomplished. If they trust you, they’ll give you latitude to finish things on your own terms. Relief, in other words,

Consider, for example, a more palatable version of my New Yorker suggestion that I call the reverse task list. It works as follows: Create a public task list for each of the major categories of tasks you tackle in your job. You can use a shared document for this purpose. (If you’re feeling more advanced, a shared Trello board is perhaps even

LIMIT DAILY GOALS We’ve arrived at the smallest scale of work that we’ll consider for our limiting strategies: the projects you decide to make progress on during the current day. My recommendation here is simple: work on at most one project per day. To clarify, I don’t intend for this single daily project to be your only work for the day. You’ll

There exists a myth that it’s hard to say no, whether to someone else or to your own ambition. The reality is that saying no isn’t so bad if you have hard evidence that it’s the only reasonable answer.

If you’re unable to find enough blank spaces in your schedule in the near future to easily fit the work, then you don’t have enough time for it. Either decline the project, or cancel something else to make room. The power of this approach is that you’re dealing with the reality of your time, not a gut feeling about how busy you are at the moment.

When you say, “I don’t see any really significant swaths of open time to work on something like this for at least three weeks, and in the meantime, I have five other projects competing for my schedule,” it’s hard for someone to rebut you, unless they’re willing to challenge your calculations, or demand that you expand your working hours to

A plan to simply become too unpleasant to be bothered, it seems, isn’t sustainable. There are only so many times you can offer an unqualified no without either losing your job or being sidelined as an unreliable curmudgeon.