📚 Favorites And Reflection Questions

Join 📚 Favorites And Reflection Questions

A batch of the best highlights from what Todd's read, .

Burkeman ends the book with ten ideas to help you live life fully in the moment through meaningful choices: 1. **Fixed volume approach to productivity** - tough choices are inevitable: focus on making them mindfully and well. He recommends two lists: “Open” (everything on your plate) and “Closed” (a fixed number of entries - 10 at most - then only add new items if your list is under ten.) An “On Hold” list is OK too. In addition, set a fixed time boundary for daily work. 2. **Serialize** - focus on one project at a time or at least one work and one non-work project. Work until completion then move on to the next. 3. **Decide in advance what to fail at** - our time and energy is finite, so planning in advance what is OK to fail or be mediocre at allows you to reduce anxiety of trying to do everything. 4. **Focus on what you've completed**, not just what's left to complete versus starting each day fresh in productivity debt. Create a Done list and fill it out each day. Anything counts. 5. **Consolidate your caring** – society and media operates on enticing you to care about everything. Pick your battles and focus. 6. **Embrace boring and single purpose technology** – make your devices as boring as possible. Make it a tool vs a toy. 7. **Seek out novelty in the mundane** – life gets routinized and that is what makes time feel like it passes so quickly. Childhood is filled with novelty so it feels like it lasts forever. Pay more attention to each moment and plunge more deeply into each moment you have. Meditation helps, but also taking unplanned walks, new routes, photography, or bird watching, anything that draws more attention to what you are doing in the moment. 8. **Be a researcher in relationships** – when you are bored in a moment with someone else, turn to curiosity without any plan or goal. 9. **Cultivate instantaneous generosity** - act on the impulse to give money, send a nice message, give someone a call, or simply be nice to someone. Only generosity that counts is the one you do. Generous action also increases happiness. 10. **Practice doing nothing** – if you can't sit with doing nothing, you will feel like you need to fill every moment and make poor choices about your time. Resist the urge to manipulate your experience or people around you. Meditation can help.

Finitude and Productivity

Jason Dettbarn

Le Guin: We are learning to separate the stereotypes from the genuine archetype.

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

David Streitfeld

This is another example of concept creep. In just the last few years, the word “violence” has expanded on campus and in some radical political communities beyond campus to cover a multitude of nonviolent actions, including speech that this political faction claims will have a negative impact on members of protected identity groups. Outside of cultures of safetyism, the word “violence” refers to physical violence. The word is sometimes used metaphorically (as in “I violently disagree”), but few of us, including those who claim that speech is violence, have any difficulty understanding the statement “We should reduce incarceration for nonviolent offenses.” However, now that some students, professors, and activists are labeling their opponents’ words as violence, they give themselves permission to engage in ideologically motivated physical violence.

The Coddling of the American Mind

Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt

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A batch of the best highlights from what Todd's read, .

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