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Happy Thursday folks!

Here is my favorite passage of the week, two quotes and book of the week with two important lessons to ponder on:

Author Robin Sharma on learning to be silent:

The book of the week is Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport.

A timely and useful book. This book provides a road map for escaping overload and arriving instead at a more sustainable and timeless approach to pursuing meaningful accomplishment.

Slow Productivity is a philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner, based on the following three principles: Do fewer things. Work at a natural pace. Obsess over quality. In this book, Cal Newport harnesses the wisdom of the traditional knowledge workers to radically transform our modern jobs. Drawing from deep research on the habits and mindsets of a varied cast of storied thinkers, he lays out the key principles of “slow productivity,” a more sustainable alternative to the aimless overwhelm that defines our current moment.

Yet another important book by Cal Newport. I highly recommend this book to one and everyone if you are looking to improve your productivity and efficiency.

Here are two important lessons from the book:

Strive to reduce your obligations to the point where you can easily imagine accomplishing them with time to spare. Leverage this reduced load to more fully embrace and advance the small number of projects that matter most.

The advantage of doing fewer things, however, is about more than just increasing the raw number of hours dedicated to useful activity; the quality of these hours also increases. When you approach a project without the hurried need to tend many barely contained fires, your enjoy a more expansive sense of experimentation and possibility. Maybe you’re able to identify a clever new business strategy, devise an elegant algorithm, or come up with a bold advertising campaign that would have eluded you in a more fragmented state of attention.

Our brains work better when we’re not rushing. Doing fewer things makes us better at our jobs; not only psychologically, but also economically and creatively. Focusing intensely on a small number of tasks, waiting to finish each before bringing on something new, is objectively a much better way to use our brains to produce valuable output.

Apply limits at different scales of work, from your overarching missions to your ongoing projects, to your daily goals. There exists a myth that it’s hard to say no, whether to someone else or to your own ambition. The reality is that saying no isn’t so bad if you have hard evidence that it’s the only reasonable answer.

The software development company Basecamp is known for experiments with innovative management practices. One of Basecamp’s more striking policies is the consolidation of work into “cycles.”

Each such cycle lasts from six to eight weeks. During those weeks, teams focus on clear and urgent goals. Crucially, each cycle is then followed by a two-week “cooldown” period in which employees can recharge while fixing small issues and deciding that to tackle next. This strategy embraces the natural seasonality of human effort.

How to Not Know by Simone Stolzoff. A guide to dealing with uncertainty at a time when our lives have never felt less certain.

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. An intimate novel about the transformative power of the written word and the beauty of slowing down to reconnect with the people we love. Highly original, immersive storylines and characters. A wonderful read so far.