Johanna

Whenever possible (and it’s almost always possible), have someone do a day or two of work with you before you hire her; you can do this at night or on the weekends.

Thus, I will assert again that a meeting is nothing less than the medium through which managerial work is performed. That means we should not be fighting their very existence, but rather using the time spent in them as efficiently as possible.

“I think the idea of air taxis is kind of bullshit,” Carlo Ratti, an architect and urban theorist who serves as director of the Senseable City Lab at MIT, told me. “Technology can change many things, but it cannot change physics. Helicopters are loud and expensive and, for most forms of transportation, inconvenient.” As near-silent electric and... See more

I am willing to take as much time as needed between projects to find my next thing. But I always want it to be a project that, if successful, will make the rest of my career look like a footnote.

For starters, we can stop viewing our work as our lives and learn to distinguish the two or intertwine them. We can plan specific pursuits for our spare time, rather than flitting it away. We can take stock of how much free time we actually have and where it is going. Then, we can structure those hours and minutes to ensure they are used for... See more

I don’t care when our employees come to work or what their schedules are. I don’t care where in the world they live (provided they have a great Internet connection). I don’t care how they do the work. I’m not going to micromanage. If you’ve really hired the best, they should be able to prove it with output and show their work.

There are four key steps to the Feynman Technique:1. Choose a concept you want to learn about2. Explain it to a 12 year old3. Reflect, Refine, and Simplify4. Organize and Review