#Things to consider

  1. Don’t use the internet to entertain yourself. See your 16 free hours in a day as a “day-within-a-day.” During those hours you are free. Use those hours to perform rigorous self-improvement. The quality of leisure time has degraded. Put more thought into your leisure time.
  2. Neal Stephenson once explained his omission: “If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. If I instead get interrupted a lot what replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time, there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons.”
  3. Carl Jung spent two hours writing undisturbed every morning. Then he spent the afternoon meditating and taking long walks in the countryside.
  4. To remain valuable in our economy today, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things.
  5. Use process-centric responses to email. In crafting your email response to someone’s request, take a minute or two to think through a process that gets you from the current state to a desired outcome with a minimum of messages required.