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A batch of the best highlights from what Todd's read, .
Success is the sum of small efforts repeated day in and day out.
Triggers
Marshall Goldsmith, Mark Reiter
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
The critical issue, then, for both the religious and the spiritual alike, is this:
Can your enchantment judge, criticize, and unsettle you?
Can your enchantment point out your selfishness and self-indulgence?
Can your enchantment, be it burning sage for your spell or singing “God Bless America” in your pew, hold a mirror up to your hypocrisy?
Can your enchantment weigh your nation or political party on the scales and find it wanting?
Does your enchantment create sacrificial obligations and duties in your life that you cannot avoid or ignore?
Does your enchantment call you to extend grace to people you’d prefer to hate?
Does your enchantment bust up your cozy self-satisfaction and dogmatic self-righteousness?
Hunting Magic Eels
Richard Beck
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
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