Quotes: Productivity
by mitchel · 26 things on Twos
- Siri doesn’t have to get it perfect. You just need a breadcrumb to retrieve the idea later. - Colter Reed
- Freeing up mental energy for creative energy. - Anne-Laure LeCunff (Ness Labs)
- Josh Duffney writes in, “Note-taking became a full-time job, so I stopped”: My biggest mistake wasn’t taking so many notes, but not leaving enough room for my own creative process to mold the workflow. It’s not about taking notes on everything but taking better notes, organizing them in a way that makes sense, AND in a way that improves your thinking, learning, writing, etc…
- The goal is not to take notes; the goal is to think effectively. — Andy Matuschak
- Using Friction as a friend. - Tiago Forte (Tiago shared with Anne-Laure when talking about her taking slow notes from physical books, the idea that it acts as a filtering system if she wants to capture all the ideas from the books to Roam tool.)
- The more apps, the more gaps. - Ryder (Bullet Journal)
- “The things that matter most should never beat the mercy of the things that matter least.” - Goethe
- “Talk doesn’t cook rice.” - Chinese Proverb
- “Simplify, simplify, simplify.” - Henry David Thoreau
- “The beginning is half of every action.” - Greek Proverb
- “Someday is not a day of the week.” — Janet Daily
- "There’s no such thing as organizing for organization’s sake. Any system that you want to use to organize your time or your information, whether it’s digital or tactile, has to be designed around each person’s unique goals and their natural working style.” - Julie Morgenstern
- "Paper is to write things down that we need to remember. Our brains are used to think." - Albert Einstein
- "Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them." - David Allen
- “The way to get started is to quit talking and start doing.” - Walt Disney
- Mind Like Water: A mental and emotional state in which your head is clear, able to create and respond freely, unencumbered with distractions and split focus.
David Allen
- “When do you plan the day? When you have finished the day.” - Jim Rowan
- “Everything not saved will be lost.” - Nintendo “Quit Screen” message
- Jerry Seinfeld on comedy writing: "You have to have an end time to your writing session. If you're going to sit down at a desk with a problem and do nothing else, you got to get a reward for that—and the reward is the alarm goes off and you're done. You get up, and walk away."
- “If you get too wrapped up in all of the stuff coming at you, you lose your ability to respond appropriately and effectively,” said David Allen.
- The System: GTD is about building a system to take care of your tasks and close the loops, what Wired called a “flow chart for stuff.”
"I don't care what you write it on, you can write it on your arm," Allen said to CNN. "But I guarantee that if you write it down and you keep it someplace where you won't lose it and you look at it sooner than later you're going to feel better than if you don't, and you'll be more productive and use less energy."
- You can’t call something a distraction unless you know what it is distracting you from. - Nir Eyal
- It’s not that I advocate for no note-taking. I just strongly believe in keeping it as elementary as possible, such that the note-taking itself doesn’t become the thrust of the endeavor. Leonardo da Vinci kept all of his notes in one big book. If he liked something he put it down. This is known as a commonplace book, and it is about how detailed your note-taking system should be unless you plan on thinking more elaborately than Leonardo da Vinci. Taping a bunch of cryptic phrases to the walls is also acceptable, or keeping a shoebox full of striking phrases on a jumble of papers, as Eminem did. - Sacha
- My own note-taking “system” is extremely minimal and stupid. It consists of roughly 2,000 completely unorganized entries in my iPhone notes app, stretching back thirteen years. These could be, among other things: an interesting fact I learned, an idea for an essay, something funny one of my friends said, a dream I had, a shopping list from 2011, or a weird name I made up.… These notes are not organized in any way. Everything from earlier than, say, the past six months is effectively lost to history, except in the rare occasions where I randomly scroll through the entire list for inspiration or out of boredom. - Max Nussenbaum
- From the beginning of flight school, pilots are trained that their memory and judgement are unreliable and lives depend on recognizing that fact.
- If information is dense and pages long for every new thing, it will become unmanageable and non-useful.