Feineigle.com - Time-Management

2025-09-11

Tags: Motivation · Time-Management

The book begins by drawing a distinction between the relatively newer "knowledge work" and the age-old physical work and noticing that productivity is measured completely differently between these two realms. Forcing the knowledge working into the physical box tends to create an office environment where appearing to be busy - the frantic busyness of endless meetings and pseudo-productivity - is more important than actually producing meaningful work. The author proposes that we slow down, do fewer things, but do them to a higher quality while measuring our output over years and decades instead of days and weeks. This, I think, isn't actually anything new and is contained in the proverb of "Rome wasn't built in a day" and encapsulated in the fable of "The Tortoise and the Hare." The book is flanked with a pair of stories that describe the slow thoughtful meandering when John McPhee is lying on a picnic table grappling with how to write his next piece and a second story where McPhee is fully engaged in typing up, organizing, and arranging his notes as the words start to hit the pages - what he calls putting little drops of water (work) day-by-day into the bucket until 365 days later you have quite a lot of water.

The 12 Week Year

2025-07-31

Tags: Motivation · Time-Management

There isn't anything groundbreaking here and is little more than a way to focus on quarterly progress (their 12 week 'years') instead of annual progress. While nothing new, the system is good for keeping on track since you can reasonably plan 12 weeks whereas trying to plan 52 would be all but impossible. By having weekly and quarterly feedback of the (sub) goals you are striving to accomplish you get more and faster feedback. The authors make use of, but not as strictly, the time boxing or time blocking system I read about in Indistractable. Overall I think the 12 week year concept is little more than a gimmick, but the idea of shorter 'goal periods' that can produce feedback and be easier to forecast are solid strategies for accomplishing your goals.

Indistractable

2025-07-25

Tags: Motivation · Time-Management

The idea of timeboxing sounds very appealing to me and though I have tried to use it several times (and am trying again now), I always end up back in my basic monthly tasks I keep in a spreadsheet. Beyond timeboxing, the book has a lot of useful tips on identifying and understanding internal and external triggers that evoke some kind of emotion in you that ultimately leads to you getting distracted. Once you have a decent grasp of what your triggers are - and how you are likely avoiding pain instead of chasing pleasure - you can start to restructure your life to block out certain things at certain times. There is a lot of talk about technology and the author makes a solid case that it isn't the tech that is distracting us, it is the content delivered by said tech (and this has existed for generations - tv, radio, and even books were once blamed as distractions). Towards the end it feels a little repetitive, but in this part the author shows that the techniques learned can be reapplied to children in a bid to give them more agency, more motivation, and less distraction in their lives as well.

Home · Tags · Time-Management