Cristian

The term 'planning fallacy' was coined in 1977 and deals with how most of us are terrible at estimating how long a project will take. We are overly optimistic but terrible at predicting the future. If the project has a budget, we may underestimate that expense too.

The Sydney Opera House was commissioned in 1957 and had an expected completion date of 1963. The budget was 7 million Australian dollars. After the plan had been scaled back, it was completed in 1973 at the cost of $102 million.

It is okay to long for the weekend occasionally, like when it is Thursday and the week-long workload has been too much. But if one is dreading Monday on a Sunday evening, the work environment may be toxic.

The best jobs can exhaust us, but if the longing for the weekend is a regular feeling, we may need to find a new job profile that is not diminishing us.

Every choice has a price, but when we are motivated, it is easier to bear the inconvenience of action than the pain of remaining the same.

In other words, at some point,  it becomes more painful to not do the work than to actually do it.

• Transfer money to your savings account every time you receive a paycheck
• Choose all your outfits for your week on Sunday and hang them in the closet in order
• Subscribe to a weekly fresh delivery of organic vegetables and fruits to your home
• Standardize the typical daily meals you like the most, saving time in cooking and grocery shopping
• Prepare your sports bag every night and put it in your car. If you prefer running the morning, leave your running shoes near the bed
• Automate all electronic gadgets to go into sleep mode at a certain hour

Although it might feel natural to create your to-do list first thing in the morning, it's too late.
Writing the list at the end of the day allows you to leave work behind and transition into personal time. 

• Listening to music with lyrics is distracting for most people. It’s best to avoid it when working on tasks that require focus or the learning of new information.
• Listening to music with lyrics may help people working on repetitive or mundane tasks. 
• Classical or rock music allows people to identify numbers more quickly and accurately.
• Ambient noise, or ambient music, at about 70 decibels can be the best kind of music for work productivity. But increasing it over 85 decibels hurts creativity.
• Searching for the right artist can detract from workplace productivity but, once you know what works for you, music can become a tool for near-instant concentration.

Productivity became popular in the early 20th century as a way of optimising work in agriculture and manufacturing. A knowledge worker in the 21st century has very little in common with agricultural or manufacturing work.

Productivity made sense as a measurement metric when inputs and outputs were known, and the task was to optimise the relationship between them. However, knowledge work is about solving problems and being creative. To-do lists can't really improve the impact of our work.

• “Deep work”: using your skills to create something of value. It takes thought, energy, time and concentration.
• “Shallow work”: all the little administrative and logistical stuff: email, meetings, calls, expense reports, etc.

Shallow work stops you from getting fired — but deep work is what gets you promoted. 

One has to constantly prioritize their tasks and ask basic questions that filter out any ‘fluff’ work, seemingly urgent tasks which are not important and help us accomplish what is truly important.

Asking oneself the best investment of the limited time towards accomplishing something, and what high-impact task to leverage the best use of the time is crucial. One has to constantly evaluate the meaningfulness of the assignments.

Many of us want circumstances that are the perfect fit. Just like Goldilocks, we don't want it too hot or too cold. We want it just right.

It's hard to engage fully with tasks that are either too much or too little; too challenging or too simple. The mismatch can leave you bored. However, when you find yourself in the middle of the Goldilocks Zone, you get to a state of flow, where you are perfectly challenged and growing.