"busy".........................

 

Let me put it another way: busyness is bullshit.  We're all "busy."  We all have things to do every day. Obligations and responsibilities.  We all have to eat, sleep, pay the bills.  What does that have to do with putting in the work to reach your vision?  If it matters to you, make the time.

-Arnold Schwarzenegger, Be Useful:  Seven Tools for Life

tipping point.....................

 In knowledge work, when you agree to a new commitment, be it a minor task or a large project, it brings with it a certain amount of ongoing administrative overhead: back and forth email threads need to gather information, for example, or meetings scheduled to synchronize your collaborators.  This overhead tax activates as soon as you take on a new responsibility. . . . As your workload increases, however, the overhead tax you're paying will eventually pass a tipping point, beyond which logistical efforts will devour so much of your schedule that you cannot complete old tasks fast enough to keep up with the new.

-Cal Newport, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

breathing room and respect.......

 

Slow productivity emphatically rejects the performative rewards of unwavering urgency.  There will always be more work to do.  You should give your efforts the breathing room and respect required to make them part of a life well lived, not an obstacle to it.

-Cal Newport, Slow Productivity; The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

toward.................................

 The key to productivity is doing more of what matters and less of what doesn't. When you concentrate your mental and physical energy in one direction, you have the most impact. . . .

Being busy and being productive are not the same thing. Running around in circles is busy. Going toward your destination is productive. It's easy to be busy. It's hard to be productive.

-from our friends at Farnum Street

A one-day workweek...................

 Busyness is not the engine of production. It can, in many cases, instead be the obstacle to accomplishing your best work.

-Cal Newport, from here

About that 80/20 thing.................

     When everything feels urgent and important, everything seems equal.  We become active and busy, but this doesn't actually move us any closer to success.  Activity is often unrelated to productivity, and busyness rarely takes care of business. . . . In other words, in the world of success, things aren't equal.  A small amount of causes creates most of the results.  Just the right input creates most of the output.  Selected effort creates almost all of the rewards.  Pareto points us in a very clear direction:  the majority of what you want will come from the minority of what you do.  Extraordinary results are disproportionately created by fewer actions than most realize.

-Gary Keller, The One Thing:  The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results

Beware of busyness......................

What are the chances that the busiest person you know is actually the most productive?  We tend to associate busyness with goodness and believe that spending many hours at work should be rewarded.
     Instead, evaluate what you are doing, why you are doing it, and where accomplishing it will take you.  If you don't have a good answer, then stop.

-Ryan Holiday, from today's entry in The Daily Stoic

Seven.......................

....................................................."Dangers of  Busy":

        5.   Reptile Brain takes over and we become reactive rather than 
              proactive. The latter anticipates problems; the former 
              accumulates them.