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Kindle Notes & Highlights
The timing of these three events is not a coincidence.
The rising volume of the kingdom of noise is making us less productive and significantly more anxious.
The data is becoming clearer and clearer: smartphones—the devices responsible for much, if not most, of the noise in our lives today—are robbing us of silence and making us more anxious at work and home.
We are literally making ourselves anxious by welcoming all this noise into our lives.
I think Paul is telling us that part of the solution to our anxiety is found in what we’re choosing to think about—the noise and information we are inviting into our minds.
Most news is not true, noble, right, pure, lovely, or admirable. It’s just noise.
When we read and study God’s Word, we hear his voice, but it takes silence and reflection to listen to his voice and connect his Word to our lives.
But as I hope you’re beginning to see, lonely places aren’t places of weakness. They are places of great strength.
We have to take some responsibility for our lack of silence because, if we’re honest, most of us are afraid of what we’ll hear if the noise ever stops.
We must observe God’s good boundaries for how much information we can process.”
By all means, please try to convince your friends to join you in a “low information diet.”39 But most of them won’t make that choice.
The beauty of these products is that there is a clear beginning and end.
As we’ve seen, boredom doesn’t come naturally for us in the twenty-first century, so we have to intentionally develop the skill of being bored.
He said, “You have to get to a place where you’re writing what you actually think to God and giving yourself space to actually be quiet.”
Just sit and meditate on what you just read, allowing the Spirit to connect the dots from the Word to your heart.
Now that you’ve dissented from the kingdom of noise, you finally have the mental space to decide what matters most.
We must clarify what we’re saying yes to so we can say no to nonessential things along the way.
To redeem your time in the model of your Redeemer, you must develop the habit of identifying what matters most on your to-do list at any given point in time.
Basement: Posteriorities (What must you avoid at all costs to accomplish your quarterly goals?)*
But in reality, defining your mission isn’t in the arena of things you decide….Your mission is discovered, not chosen.”
You didn’t create yourself, so there is no way you can tell yourself what you were created for!
The mission of your life is to glorify God. Period. Full stop. Highlight that. Write it down. That’s your why—your North Star.
Although our mission in life is discovered, our callings are chosen.
But in his great grace, our heavenly Father has given us a tremendous amount of freedom to choose exactly how we will contribute to that mission.
God’s sovereignty gives us the courage to simply make a choice.
Believer, you are free to choose the callings you think you can fulfill most exceptionally well for the glory of God and the good of others.
But at some point, you’ve just got to make a choice, because kingdom work is getting done and you want the blessing of being part of it.
Setting bigger goals will help recruit the world’s best talent to your cause.
What do you sense the Lord leading you to desire over the next few years or decades of your life?
“Part of Your World” in The Little Mermaid is the greatest “I want” song of all time.
There are two components: an objective (the O in OKR) and a set of corresponding key results (the KRs).
Key results are how you will know if you have accomplished your objective.
No matter what, these things get no attention from you until you’ve succeeded with your top 5.”
The problem is that I’ve committed to doing too many things at once.
I need my posteriorities to be out of sight in order for them to be out of mind.
For the first time in his career, Lewis was experiencing regular opportunities for deep work.
Concentration. Focus. Depth. Those are the secrets to being wildly productive.
Depth: the ability to focus intensely on one important thing at a time
And I would argue that focus is increasingly valuable precisely because it is increasingly rare.
Shallow work includes email, administrative tasks, and most meetings.
But most shallow work is not important. At all. So why do we do so much of it? Because shallow work is much easier than deep work.
Shallow work makes us look and feel productive without having to make any significant effort.
A savior complex is a powerful motivator to stay addicted to the things that distract us from depth.
In study after study, the scientific community continues to prove that multitasking is a myth. So why do we still do it? Why do we still believe it’s possible?
Has anyone ever dropped through the roof above your desk while you were working? If not, you’re not more distracted than Jesus was.
He continued teaching. In that moment, he was called to work, and he remained fully focused and present with the task at hand.
Do you know what happened when I stopped checking text messages with every new ping and confined my responses to a few times a day? Nothing.
But again, this perception is not always reality.
The expectation I communicate to my team is that every message should be responded to within one business day.
My point? Although many things look urgent, almost nothing is.
