Let me explain what I mean by that.

Many of us are knowledge workers—that is, we use our brains to solve problems for a living. Doing good knowledge work requires deep concentration, which requires unbroken chunks of time—at least an hour, for most people. You don’t write a symphony five minutes at a time.

So far, so good, right? Here’s the problem: unbroken chunks of time have become scarce. Emails, texts, Slack messages, and a dozen other forms of incoming communication nudge us incessantly. Devoting 90 focused minutes to an important project, therefore, means we need to let these incoming messages pile up a bit.

They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.

— Carl W. Buehner

I recently traveled for work and stayed at a fancy-pants hotel.

I don’t know what kind of hotel you usually stay in, but I frequent establishments with continental breakfasts and self-serve waffle makers. This hotel did not have a self-serve waffle maker. It had old-school doormen, mahogany paneling, and marble floors. It was old and historic. The Beatles once stayed there!

How do you build a good career?

A lot of ink has been spilled on this subject by people far smarter than I, but when it comes to rules of thumb, I don’t think we can do much better than this idea from Peter Drucker:

The question is not, “How to be successful?” The question is, “How to be useful?”

In commercial aviation, accidents are very rare. Flying is, by far, the safest way to travel. But when a jetliner does crash, mechanical problems are usually not the culprit—human error is to blame. And not just one error, either.

There’s a concept in aviation called an error chain: a sequence of minor mistakes leading to a disaster. Not one big mistake, not two bad calls in a row, but several successive errors in judgment or execution. If any of them had been avoided, there would have been no crash.

By the mile it's a trial, but by the inch it's a cinch.

— Zig Ziglar

As we move through life, most of us develop a collection of personal productivity hacks—little tricks that help us get things done, even when we don’t feel like being productive.

Everyone’s list is different, but here are two tactics that should be in everyone’s back pocket:

1. Break projects down.
2. Focus on the task at hand.

Breaking large projects down into individual tasks is such an important fundamental concept that entire productivity systems have been built on it, and most procrastination stems from a failure to keep it in mind.