I recommend capturing as many categories of regular tasks as possible into an increasingly elaborate autopilot schedule:

Once you get used to accomplishing a specific type of task at the same times on the same days, the overhead required for their execution plummets. A key refinement to support this task-centric version of autopilot scheduling is to leverage rituals and locations. If you can connect a regularly recurring task block to a specific location, perhaps

Slow productivity requires that you free yourself from the constraints of the small so that you can invest more meaningfully in the big. This is a messy, detail-oriented conflict, largely fought on the battleground of old-fashioned productivity tactics and systems. But it’s a battle that must be fought if you hope to, as Benjamin Franklin lauded,

Small tasks, in sufficient quantity, can act like productivity termites, destabilizing the whole foundation of what you’re trying to build. It’s worth going to great lengths to tame them.

What makes Benjamin Franklin’s colonial midlife crisis notable to a modern audience is his general belief that taming the impact of small details in your professional life opens up space to pursue bigger goals.

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 likely also have meetings to attend, emails to answer, and administrative nonsense to subdue (we’ll talk more

approach is that you’re dealing with the reality of your time, not a gut feeling about how busy you are at the moment. You don’t have to continue pre-scheduling your projects in this manner indefinitely. After you’ve executed this strategy for a while, you’ll develop an instinct for roughly how many commitments you can maintain at any point without

To gain this credibility, I recommend, at first, when considering a new project, you estimate how much time it will require and then go find that time and schedule it on your calendar. Block off the hours as you would for a meeting. If you’re unable to find enough blank spaces in your schedule in the near future to easily fit the work, then you

This leaves us with a more nuanced option for limiting projects: appeal to the hard but unimpeachable reality of your actual available time. If someone asks you to do something, and you appeal to some vague sense of busyness to get out of it, you’re unlikely to consistently succeed. “We’re all busy,” they might reply, “but I really need you to do