It's most useful to think about not jobs but tasks. And within any given job, there are lots of different tasks. If you're a radiologist maybe reading the images machines can be able to do that better, maybe making the broader diagnosis and communicating it to the patients.
As an astronaut, you have a very defined set of tasks to do. Those tasks may require you to work 60, 70 or 80 hours a week.
The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and starting on the first one.
There are two synergistic approaches for increasing productivity that are inversions of each other:
1. Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20).
2. Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson's Law).
The best solution is to use both together: Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines.
You must always remain master of the situation and do what you please. No school tasks, ah, no! no tasks!
In corporations, the penalty for repeated failure on known tasks is being reassigned to other tasks or asked to leave the company.
People are happiest when they're the most productive. People enjoy tasks, especially creative tasks, when the tasks are in the optimal-challenge zone: not too hard and not too easy. To some extent, that has always been true. But it becomes even more true as work becomes more about brains and creativity.
The ruler should employ person in tasks according to their abilities because Knowers ( or the means ) and efficient employees make impossible tasks also possible.
Lists help us manage the chaos of our lives—to impose order, if only for a moment. Writing a list clears the mind. … Once everything is written down, it’s easier to see which tasks are important and in what order to tackle them. Tasks that seem overwhelming look easier when reduced to mere lines on paper.
My idea here is that, inasmuch as certain cognitive tasks and principles are tied to nature's laws, these tasks and principles are indifferent to language, culture, gender, or the particular mode of information that is provided.
Since functional brain imaging first emerged, we have learned that there aren't very many brain regions uniquely responsible for specific tasks; most complex tasks engage many if not all of the brain's major networks. So it is fairly hard to make general psychological inferences just from brain data.
I do believe that there are some universal cognitive tasks that are deep and profound - indeed, so deep and profound that it is worthwhile to understand them in order to design our displays in accord with those tasks.
Knowledge is the source of Wealth. Applied to tasks we already know, it becomes Productivity. Applied to tasks that are new, it becomes Innovation.
If humans are not required to earn a living to be provided survival needs, many are going to want very much to be productive, but not at those tasks they did not choose to do but were forced to accept in order to earn money. Instead, humans will spontaneously take upon themselves those tasks that world society really needs to have done.
My dear sisters, do not pray for tasks equal to your abilities, but pray for abilities equal to your tasks. Then the performance of your tasks will be no miracle, but you will be the miracle.
When you make a to-do list, you should also make a to-not-do list. Warren Buffet was asked about the secret to success, and he said that it was saying no to almost everything. Some of those little tasks won't matter as long as you get the big tasks done.