Highlights first synced by [[Readwise]] [[November 1st, 2020]]

• Taylor noticed that if he tried to fill all of his workers’ time with efficient movement, he didn’t get what he expected. If he wanted to get a full day out of a worker who was moving chunks of iron in the yard, Taylor needed not only to prescribe movement to that worker – Taylor also needed to prescribe rest to that worker. (Location 215)
• Taylor had to leave some time empty to truly get optimal output from his workers. (Location 218)
• “the point of diminishing returns.” (Location 219)
• the point of negative returns. (Location 223)
• “think weeks” (Location 280)
• “the first task of a writer is to create enough space and time for writing to emerge.” (Location 284)
• The first false assumption time management makes is that time management treats time as a commodity. (Location 296)
• “Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them.” (Location 325)
• The next time you set out to be productive, ask yourself, What work am I in the mood to do right now? Then, ask yourself, What do I need to do that fits that mood? (Location 353)
• To get into flow, you need to go with the flow. (Location 358)
• ask yourself, What mood would be most conducive to doing this work? Then, ask yourself, When was the last time I felt that way? Finally, see if you can replicate the conditions that put you in that mood. (Location 359)
• If you want to kill creativity: Get five hours of sleep a night, fight traffic for two hours a day, and start each day with a piping hot thermos of a psychoactive drug. (Location 425)
• Four hours creative work a day is about the limit. —G. H. Hardy (Location 439)
• Writing has become the “big rock” around which I’m building everything else in my life. I’ve cleared away all my possessions, and I’ve cleared away as many responsibilities as I can. (Location 461)
• Additionally, time is not fungible. If you went to the Golden Gate Bridge and made a one-inch slice straight through the halfway point of the bridge, you wouldn’t just lose an inch. You’d also lose a bridge. (Location 589)
• That two-thirty feeling is actually a crossover of two different biological systems: the circadian system, and the “sleep debt” system. All day, the circadian system is climbing upward, making you more alert. (This alertness will drop sharply at bedtime.) Meanwhile, the sleep debt system is creeping downward, sapping your energy. (Location 599)
• Intuitively, it seems that to do good work, we need to be alert. If we’re driving a forklift or performing surgery, this is true. But creative work is different. The more alert we are, the less prone we are to doing the divergent thinking necessary to have great insights. (Location 621)
• This slight spaciness first thing in the morning is not a problem to be fixed – in fact, it’s a creative gift. Instead of trying to make it go away, you can harness it for your best ideas. (Location 645)
• I’m choosing to write first thing in the morning. No coffee, no breakfast, just straight to writing. (Location 646)
• My desk is surrounded on three sides by white walls. I used to keep a messy desk, but there’s something powerful about this new desk’s clean stark surface, surrounded by clean stark walls. This desk is so small, there’s not even room for it to become cluttered. I know research shows that big, open spaces are good for creative thinking – not tiny desks in white-walled coves (more on that in Chapter 4). But somehow, it works. I’m still groggy enough in my morning writing sessions that I’m having good ideas, yet each time I look up to daydream, there’s no window to stare out of. There’s just a blank white wall. (Location 659)
• The First Hour Rule is simply this: Spend the first hour of your day working on your most important project, and your most important project, only. (Location 673)
• If you start your day working on the most important thing, there’s less of a chance for other things to get in the way. So don’t check email, don’t check social media – just get right to the most important thing. Make it a rule, and it will be easy. (Location 682)
  • Note: But what if the most important task isnt a creative one? Maybe keep distractions at bay for another hour after youve activated the prefrontal cortex?
• The First Hour Rule helps you start off your day with a win. You feel better the rest of the day when you’ve already done your most important work. (Location 685)
• As I started off this experiment, it was difficult for the first couple weeks to follow the First Hour Rule. (Location 689)
• most people’s cognitive peak is in the late morning, a couple hours after waking up. So, you can use the First Hour Rule for a session of divergent thinking, and follow it up with some convergent thinking. (Location 701)
• Each morning, I spend the first hour of my day drafting a blog post. I then spend the next half hour editing and publishing that blog post. This helps me follow up divergent thinking with convergent thinking. (Location 703)
• I do occasionally find myself involuntarily sleep deprived due to jet lag or a massively-delayed flight. When this happens, I do try to take advantage of the opportunity. (Location 711)
• “When sleep deprived, the kind of creativity that would be most productive would be idea generation rather than the kind of detailed analytic work that requires sharpness and alertness.” (Location 714)
• clock-time, and event-time. Some cultures operate on clock-time. They do things according to what time it is. Lunch is at this time, this meeting is at this other time, another meeting is at this other time. Cultures that don’t work on clock-time tend to operate on event-time. Lunch is when you’re hungry. This meeting is after lunch. The meeting isn’t over until we meet our objective. If by then we’re not hungry for dinner, we’ll also have the other meeting. (Location 753)
• The first stage is Preparation. During Preparation, you’re learning everything you can about the problem. (Location 951)
• The second stage is Incubation. (Location 954)
• Incubation happens any time you aren’t actively working on the problem. (Location 955)
• The third stage is Illumination. Illumination is the “aha” moment – the moment neuroscientists would call insight. (Location 956)
• Verification is when you evaluate the idea you arrived at during the Illumination stage. (Location 960)
• Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and Verification. (Location 963)
• Furthermore, I knew that the things I wrote the next morning wouldn’t be ready for print. There would be awkward sentence structures, unnecessary explanations, or things I’d need to look up one last time. (Location 969)
• Don’t push too hard on creative blocks. Instead, soften them through Preparation. Why? The answer lies in the limitations of the human mind. When we come up with a creative idea, we connect seemingly unrelated concepts. But to find connections that work, we need to try many different combinations. When we try to power through a difficult problem all at once, we limit the number of combinations we can try. We don’t find a solution, we get frustrated, and we burn out. (Location 1005)