Reminders for myself

“It’s possible to make an organization more efficient without making it better. That’s what happens when you drive out slack. It’s also possible to make an organization a little less efficient and improve it enormously. In order to do that, you need to reintroduce enough slack to allow the organization to breathe, reinvent itself, and make

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When Benjamin Franklin drew up his daily schedule, balancing work, reflection, and leisure, it fit the life of a man with autonomy over his time and a household to support him. When modern knowledge workers try to replicate the same philosophy, they find themselves interrupted by meetings, messages, and the unpredictable and unforgiving demands of... See more

Every day of our life, as we meditate, we engage in the exercise of inhabiting the house of God—of Yud-heh-vuv-heh, of being in the present tense, of absolute becoming, past, present, and future—until we have saturated the present moment of our life with consciousness. Then cosi revaiyah, this consciousness spills over from the act of meditation

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The 3/3/3 technique is basically a closed list. And in Four Thousand Weeks I outlined another closed-list approach to managing your workflow: first, make one big “open list” of everything that’s on your plate, even if it’s 500 items long; then make a second, closed list, with (say) ten slots on it. Feed ten items from the open list over to the... See more

We should see these old, archaic, religious observances, rites and rituals not as rarified, pre-technological, discrete phenomena but as behaviours that legitimately held important sway for people and cultures for thousands of years. We’ve somehow taken the various schticks out of spiritual practices and upended them into modern-day conveniences,... See more