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Málokdy se dívám na telestěny a málokdy chodím na závody nebo do zábavních parků. Proto mám asi spoustu času na bláznivé myšlenky.

Clarity gets to the point, mystery gives us hope.

Cities are not time capsules.

No one should have to ask permission to take responsibility.

Most organizations invest more in rooting out underperformers than in cultivating pervasive achievement.

Nominating some executives “high-potentials” may be no more than a self-fulfilling prophecy. Give these individuals special attention, training, and support and of course they do well. But it’s worth considering the message conveyed to the rest: you don’t have potential.

Never mind who’s gifted, who’s talented. Expect great things and you are more likely to get them.

Great ideas don’t come from offices but from life.

Seeking to tear down the mental walls that constrain thinking and collaboration has inspired most companies to tear down office walls. Seventy percent of US companies now use open-plan offices and hot desking in the hope that these free-form physical structures will provoke free-form thinking. This architectural determinism isn’t entirely convincing—there’s plenty of evidence that people find open workspaces noisy, distracting, and impersonal. Walking through several such workspaces recently, I couldn’t help but notice how hard everyone was working to simulate privacy. Plugged into headphones, surrounded by stacks of books and temporary dividers, defensiveness was more evident than openness.

Taking a half hour walk can prove wildly more productive than staying late at work.

To be truly productive, therefore, means to take time for quiet, focused work but also to find time to let your mind wander.

Quiet time would be a designated part of the day in which engineers could work alone, confident that they would not be interrupted—because everyone else would be doing quiet work, too. The rest of the day would be available for “everything else.” Quiet time was set three days a week, from morning until noon. The engineers loved it. Some reported that their productivity had increased by as much as 65 percent.

Working eleven or more hours a day had at least doubled the risk of depression. Those working fifty-five hours a week or more began, in midlife, to suffer cognitive loss. Their performance was poorer when tested for vocabulary, reasoning, information processing, problem solving, creativity, and reaction times. Such mild cognitive impairment also predicted earlier dementia and death.

It is common for a person experiencing fatigue to be more rigid in thinking, have greater difficulty responding to changing or abnormal circumstances, and take longer to reason correctly. Tired and overwhelmed, we want problems to go away—we don’t care how—because we lack the capacity to analyze or solve them.

Working through the night is heroic; long hours are interpreted as commitment. When companies fail or big deals don’t deliver (mergers and acquisitions have a failure rate of 40 to 80 percent), nobody stops to consider that exhausted brains might be the culprits.

Productivity isn’t linear. We can work well for forty hours a week but no more than that. After forty hours we get tired and make mistakes—so we need extra time to clear up the mess we’ve made.

The more attention we try to pay to everything, the less discerning we become. But when we focus, we get better at concentrating—and remembering what we did. We feel less exhausted. So monotasking—focusing on one task at a time—isn’t only more efficient; it also leaves us better able to use the knowledge we have gained.