“The longer you work, the less efficient you are,” said Bob Kustka, the founder of Fusion Factor, a productivity and time-management consulting firm in Norwell, Mass. He says workers are like athletes in that they are most efficient in concentrated bursts. Elite athletes “play a set of tennis, a down of football or an inning of baseball and have a pause in between,” he says. Working energy, like physical energy, “is best used in spurts where we work hard on a few focused activities and then take a brief respite,” he says.You said it, brother. We know just what you mean. We're like a golfer. We stroll around a lot, and now and then, we whack a ball, then we stroll some more.
And those respites look an awful lot like wasting time.Sigh. Yes.
Over the years I have come to see that the hours away from the writing are the time when the real work gets done. When a paragraph turns itself this way and that in a corner of my brain even while my fingers are buying books on Amazon.com. What appears to be wasted time is really jell time. This redefinition only makes me feel a little less guilty.Pliss to read Time Wasted? Perhaps It’s Well Spent by Lisa Belkin in the NYT.*
Via Nilanjana, on the phone.]
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