Saved by sari
The Startling Convexity of Expertise
Instead, people’s biggest bottleneck eventually becomes their ability to get leverage —i.e., to find and execute work that has a big impact-per-hour multiplier.
Ben Kuhn • Impact, agency, and taste
In a factory, pushing employees to work longer shifts might be directly more profitable. In knowledge work, by contrast, pushing employees into larger workloads can decrease both the quantity and quality of what they produce.
Cal Newport • Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout
Believe it or not, I tried to make this essay as short as I could. But its length at least means it acts as a filter. If you made it this far, you must be interested in doing great work. And if so you're already further along than you might realize, because the set of people willing to want to is small.
How to Do Great Work
Researcher John Pencavel from Stanford University says that if you start to define your productivity in physical terms, you can see that your ability to focus drastically diminishes after fifty-five hours a week.
Paul Jarvis • Company of One: Why Staying Small is the Next Big Thing for Business
Although doing great work takes less discipline than people think — because the way to do great work is to find something you like so much that you don't have to force yourself to do it — finding work you love does usually require discipline. Some people are lucky enough to know what they want to do when they're 12, and just glide along as if they ... See more
Paul Graham • How to Do What You Love
If you anchor to the old world where good work meant physical action, it’s hard to wrap your head around the idea that the most productive use of a knowledge-worker’s time could be sitting on a couch thinking.