You're welcome. Sorry for being self-referential, but we really did put our best productivity advice in the book -- Chapter 3: Spend Your Time Wisely. Here are the "Key Takeaways" from that chapter (there is a little section at the end of each).
* Choose activities to work on based on their relevance to your north star.
* Focus your time on just one of these truly important activities at a time (no multitasking!),
making it the top idea on your mind.
* Select between options based on opportunity cost models.
* Use the Pareto principle to find the 80/20 in any activity and increase your leverage at every turn.
* Recognize when you’ve hit diminishing returns and avoid negative returns.
* Use commitment and the default effect to avoid present bias, and periodic evaluations to avoid loss aversion and the sunk-cost fallacy.
* Look for shortcuts via existing design patterns, tools, or clever algorithms. Consider
whether you can reframe the problem.
This to me has been perhaps one of the most useful tool when I'm struggling with something. The fable of NASA's space pen [0] is good marker to invoke this.
How would you tackle multiple priorities/north stars? What if I want to be the best parent I can be and save enough for retirement? I can't put off being a parent until I have enough to retire on, nor can I wait to start saving for retirement until after I'm "done" being a parent.
> I wish I had learned many of these years earlier. In fact, the proximate cause for posting this was so I could more effectively answer the question I frequently get from people I work with: “what should I learn next?” If you’re trying to be generally effective, my best advice is to start with the things on this list. [1]
I have a feeling that this book is _the_ advice. It's literally in the subtitle: "Upgrade Your Reasoning and Make Better Decisions with Mental Models". I imagine mental models have a lot to do with managing and balancing one's life.
yegg|6 years ago
* Choose activities to work on based on their relevance to your north star.
* Focus your time on just one of these truly important activities at a time (no multitasking!), making it the top idea on your mind.
* Select between options based on opportunity cost models.
* Use the Pareto principle to find the 80/20 in any activity and increase your leverage at every turn.
* Recognize when you’ve hit diminishing returns and avoid negative returns.
* Use commitment and the default effect to avoid present bias, and periodic evaluations to avoid loss aversion and the sunk-cost fallacy.
* Look for shortcuts via existing design patterns, tools, or clever algorithms. Consider whether you can reframe the problem.
myth_buster|6 years ago
This to me has been perhaps one of the most useful tool when I'm struggling with something. The fable of NASA's space pen [0] is good marker to invoke this.
[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-write-stuff/
greymalik|6 years ago
ducttape12|6 years ago
melicerte|6 years ago
[1] https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-use... by @yegg, the link he shared in his comment.
ptttr|6 years ago