Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

I call these Kairos rituals. These small acts help you open a magic window for something you want to direct all your resources toward,

Stress isn’t always bad for us. In fact, a certain degree of stress—known as eustress, which means “good stress” in Greek—can boost performance.

Sequential focus isn’t the same as time-blocking, where you segment your day in advance with predefined tasks. Rather, sequential focus leans into the ebb and flow of your cognitive capacity, prompting you to evaluate constantly: Given my current attention and working memory, what is the most sensible task to undertake right now?

How can you manage these cognitive bottlenecks? The key is to use sequential focus—doing one thing at a time—by accepting that you can’t maintain equal effort across all the essential aspects of your life, deciding moment to moment what your priority is (your family, work, or yourself) and giving that your undivided attention.

He uses green for activities that generate energy, yellow for neutral activities, and red for draining ones.

Keeping track of your energy levels is an easy way to start managing your physical resources better.

mindful productivity is centered around managing your physical, cognitive, and emotional resources—the ingredients that give rise to Kairos moments.

To live in Kairos time, we need to shift the focus from what we do with our time to how we experience each moment—what you might call mindful productivity.

a second word for time: Kairos. Kairos expresses the quality, not the quantity, of time. It recognizes that each moment is unique, with a unique purpose, rather than a fixed unit to be mechanically allocated.