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LIMIT PROJECTS Missions require that you initiate “projects,” which is my term for any work-related initiative that cannot be completed in a single session. Some projects you complete once and then are done, such as updating the sales copy on a product website. Other projects are ongoing, meaning they unfold without any clear stopping point, such as answering support queries from clients. Projects create many of the concrete tasks that take up your time during the day. It follows that limiting them is critical to limiting your overall work volume.
Slow Productivity
Cal Newport
The president’s next venture in preparing public opinion for the proclamation resting in his desk was more successful. On August 19 the New York Tribune published an open letter to Lincoln by editor Horace Greeley titled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions.” Greeley chastised the president for “a mistaken deference to Rebel Slavery” and urged him to heed the prayers of twenty million loyal Northerners for the abolition of slavery. In an unusual public response, the commander in chief carefully explained: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union by not freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because it helps save the Union.” In closing Lincoln said that these statements represented “my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.”46 This presidential letter was a stroke of genius. To conservatives who insisted that preservation of the Union must be the sole purpose of the war, Lincoln said that such was his purpose. To radicals who wanted him to proclaim emancipation in order to save the Union, he hinted that he might do so. To everyone he made it clear that partial or even total emancipation might become necessary (as of course he thought it had) to accomplish the purpose on which they all agreed. The same intentional ambiguity characterized Lincoln’s interview on September 13 with a group of clergymen who presented him with a petition for emancipation. This event took place at a time of what John Hay described as “fearful anxiety” and “almost unbearable tension” for the commander in chief, who was preoccupied with military crises in Maryland and Kentucky. Lincoln agreed with the delegation that “slavery is the root of the rebellion” and that “emancipation would help us in Europe, and convince them that we are incited by something more than ambition…. And then unquestionably it would weaken the rebels by drawing off their laborers, which is of great importance.” On the other hand, with Confederate armies on the offensive, “what good would a proclamation of emancipation from me do?…I do not want to issue a document that the whole world will necessarily see must be inoperative…. Would my word free the slaves, when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the rebel states?”47
Tried by War
James M. McPherson
But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long, close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self: the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.
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