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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Patrick King
Read between
January 6 - January 16, 2025
- Ignore everything else. As you’re doing the task in the moment, focus only on that task and ignore everything else.
N - No breaks. Within the time frame you’ve set for focusing on a task, make sure you refrain from taking breaks. Breaks are necessary to revive your energy levels and recharge your mental stamina, but they shouldn’t be taken willy-nilly. If you’ve planned your schedule effectively, you should already have scheduled breaks at appropriate times throughout the day, so any other breaks in the midst of ongoing workhours are unwarranted.
G - Give yourself a reward. Once you’re done with a task, reward yourself. Indulge in a favorite snack, treat yourself to a movie, or snuggle down to a good nap.
Temptation Bundling Temptation bundling is the final way to kill procrastination and increase productivity by combining present and future selves and their conflicting needs.
Conceived by behavioral scientist Katy Milkman at the University of Pennsylvania, temptation bundling is a way to blend both future and present self needs by making future rewards more immediate.
You give yourself instant gratification in the present while also achieving goals that benefit your future self in the long-term.
yourself (current and future), think about what that would require. Future self wants you to buckle down and take care of business so they are in a good position—or at least not suffering from your neglect. However, current self wants to engage in hedonism and enjoy the present moment.
Bundle a temptation (current pleasure) with an unpleasurable activity (something you would otherwise procrastinate and that your future self would be pleased to avoid), and you get the best of both worlds.
The Eisenhower Matrix A final way we can plan against procrastination is to understand what we should actually be doing at the current moment.
Many things will appear to be emergencies that should be handled as soon as humanly possible, and horrible consequences will follow if you don’t personally act. Almost all of these are false alarms and thus keep you from moving forward.
The mistake is thinking of “important” and “urgent” as synonymous and not realizing the huge gulf of difference between the two terms and how you should prioritize them. We spend far too much time on urgent tasks when we should be focusing on important tasks.
Important task: These contribute directly to our short-term or long-term goals.
They are absolutely imperative to our work, responsibilities, or lives. They cannot be skipped and should be prioritized.
They may not need to be done immediately and thus don’t appear to be important. This makes it easy to fall into the trap of ig...
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Urgent task: These simply demand immediacy and speed, and they usually come from other people. Of course, this naturally creates a reaction on your end that can make us forget what’s important.
They can overlap with an important task, but they can also just demand your immediate attention without deserving it. These are usually smaller and easier to complete, so often we turn to them out of procrastination, and it allows us to feel quasi-productive even though we’ve ignored what we really need to be doing. Many urgent tasks can be delayed, delegated, or flat-out ignored.
Typically, you’ll find that an important activity or project might not have that many urgent tasks connected with it. This tends to cause confusion of priorities.
method draws its name from one of the most famous American presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower. It’s called the Eisenhower matrix, and it will help you prioritize and identify what you really need to be juggling at the moment.
The template is a simple two-by-two grid divided between “important” goals and “urgent” tasks, as seen below.
Important tasks. The top row of the matrix represents the most important obligations or responsibilities one has in their life. These are things that require our most mindful and active attention.
Urgent: Do. Objects in the “do” quadrant are things that absolutely need to be done posthaste. They must be completed to stave off unfavorable outcomes or uncontrollable circumstances, and the sooner they’re done, the less work (and more relief) there will be in the future.
“Do” tasks typically revolve around deadlines:
They also include emergencies or activities that need to be completed to avert disaster.
Not urgent: Plan. Tasks that reside in the second quadrant need to be done at some point—but not necessarily now.
Schedule them after the fires are put out. Plan them for the near future, but not so imminent that it interferes with your truly urgent and important tasks.
“Plan” tasks are also key components of your medium- to long-range plans: when you’re planning a week or a month in advance, “plan” tasks should be put on your timetable.
The danger with these “not urgent” tasks is deprioritizing them too much. They’re important to keep normal operations afloat, and if they’re discarded or forgotten, they may well turn into emergency tasks in short order.
Not-important tasks. The bottom row of Eisenhower’s matrix represents tasks that aren’t that significant to you personally.
Urgent: Delegate. Perhaps the most befuddling square in this matrix is the “not-important but urgent” box. It perhaps makes the most sense in a work environment: these are tasks that might really need to be done, but it’s not vital for you to take care of them yourself, even if you could. If you did complete them yourself, they might impose on the “important” items that you absolutely have to do either now or later.
items in this box should be eliminated, preferably by being delegated to somebody else. When you’re working as the leader of a team, you should be able to find someone else to handle these tasks for you.
Not-important/urgent tasks can be identified by measuring how vital they are to what’s happening now.
These can very generally be described as interruptions: phone calls, emails, ongoing family situations, and so forth. During times of inactivity these all may be important to focus on, but at the moment they could distract or misdirect you from what you have to get accomplished toward your overall goals.
There really is no point or importance for you to be involved in this daily minutia, and thus, you must eliminate it from your schedule through delegation.
Not urgent: Eliminate. Finally, there are some activities and functions that are neither important nor time-sensitive to the priorities at hand.
“Tomorrow is often the busiest day of the week.” —Anonymous
One of the major strategies you can employ is to structure your day and schedule with the goal in mind of beating procrastination before it hits you.
There are a number of ways this can be done: (1) aim for no more “zero days,” (2) employ self-interrogation techniques, (3) write a schedule, and (4) limit your information consumption.
Aim for No More “Zero Days” A zero day is a day that you’ve let slip by without doing anything to achieve your goal.
In other words, see to it that every day you do something that’ll inch you closer to your goal.
Notice the phrase “inch you closer.” The idea of having no more zero days doesn’t mean you have to pack every single day with tasks that’ll break new ground or catapult you to immediate success.
So instead of seeing each day as either a 10 (task competed) or a 0 (no work done), replace the idea of needing a 10 to needing just a 1 (got something done). It doesn’t matter how small of a portion of a
task you managed to do for the day; it only matters that you at least got something done.
Employ Self-Interrogation Techniques
Second, try to answer, “What are my three biggest priorities today?” As in the first question, procrastination may just be the result of not knowing what to do because of the overwhelming number of tasks before you.
By asking yourself to define your main priorities, you get to narrow down your focus and address specific activities.
Write Down a Schedule How do you go about a typical workday? Do you arrive at the office with a clear idea about what you need to do, the resources you’ll need for it, and when you’re going to do it? Or do you simply freestyle through the day, picking up whatever task catches your eye or waiting for others to usher you into one activity after another?
Scheduling involves identifying a number of elements. First, identify the tasks that you need to do. Second, decide when you’re going to do each task. Assign a specific time frame (e.g., “from 8:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m.”) instead of using vague terms (e.g., “sometime in the morning”). Third, identify the tools and resources you’ll need for the task so that you can prepare them beforehand. Fourth, name the physical location where you’ll carry out each task.
Finally, draft a backup plan in case the task doesn’t get done in the scheduled slot. Write down all of these details on a piece of paper, then post it someplace you can always see it as a reminder of how your day is supposed to go.
Limit Information Consumption It happens all the time. You’re sitting down, trying to get in some reading, and by the time you look up, hours have passed. Losing track of time in this pursuit is great if you’re being productive, but reading is only productive when it adds actual value to our lives.
Consuming information is almost always seen as a net positive. It’s what we think underlies being educated and intelligent, and reading in particular is seen as superior to more passive forms of media consumption.
