More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Our most precious asset—our time—is unguarded, just waiting to be stolen. If we don’t plan our days, someone else will.
We never achieve our values any more than finishing a painting would let us achieve being creative. A value is like a guiding star; it’s the fixed point we use to help us navigate our life choices.
The trouble is, we don’t make time for our values. We unintentionally spend too much time in one area of our lives at the expense of others. We get busy at work at the expense of living out our values with our family or friends.
If we chronically neglect our values, we become something we’re not proud of—our lives feel out of balance and diminished. Ironically, this ugly feeling makes us more likely to seek distractions to escape our dissatisfaction without actually solving the problem.
In order to live our values in each of these domains, we must reserve time in our schedules to do so. Only by setting aside specific time in our schedules for traction (the actions that draw us toward what we want in life) can we turn our backs on distraction. Without planning ahead, it’s impossible to tell the difference between traction and distraction.
It doesn’t so much matter what you do with your time; rather, success is measured by whether you did what you planned to do. It’s fine to watch a video, scroll social media, daydream, or take a nap, as long as that’s what you planned to do.
Ensuring employees have a forum to voice problems to company leadership helps Slack team members relieve the psychological strain Stansfeld and Candy found in toxic work environments.
how does a company as big as Slack make sure everyone has a place to feel heard? This is where the company’s own technology comes in handy. The group-chat tool facilitates the regular discussions needed to foster psychological safety while coming to consensus quickly.
Creating the kind of company where people feel comfortable raising concerns without the fear of getting fired takes work and vigilance.
Just as the human body requires three macronutrients (protein, carbohydrates, and fat) to run properly, Ryan and Deci proposed the human psyche needs three things to flourish: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. When the body is starved, it elicits hunger pangs; when the psyche is undernourished, it produces anxiety, restlessness, and other symptoms that something is missing.
