Top Highlights

• 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?
• 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. This is the unfortunate and inescapable reality of most Americans today.
• I had discovered that making progress on my first book wasn’t so much about having the time to write. It was about being in the right state of mind to do the work at hand. I had discovered that today’s productivity isn’t so much about time management as it is about mind management.
• But there’s something we’re forgetting when we treat time as if it were money. Even Taylor knew this fundamental truth. It’s that any “production unit” has its limits. Exploit any resource enough, and you’ll eventually stop getting benefits.