Negative Utility

You need a book, a pen, and time. More tools give you negative utility. They won’t make the work go faster. But they will consume as much time as you are willing to waste.

Productivity Advice

Do the work.

That’s all the productivity advice you need, and the only useful productivity advice you’re ever going to get.

You can direct your attention to a million optimizations— email, meetings, notes, calendar, time tracking, goals, to-do lists, time estimates, prioritization frameworks, quantified self sensors, analytics, apps, documents, journaling.

But don’t. Ignore all this, and do the work. When you do the work, everything else optimizes itself.

Also see: Good over perfect.

Reference

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