Make Grand Gestures
“As I was finishing Deathly Hallows there came a day”: from the transcript of Rowling’s 2010 interview with Oprah Winfrey on Harry Potter’s Page: http://www.harrypotterspage.com/2010/10/03/transcript-of-oprah-interview-with-j-k-rowling/.
Details regarding J.K. Rowling working at the Balmoral Hotel: Johnson, Simon. “Harry Potter Fans Pay ￡1,000 a Night to Stay in Hotel Room Where JK Rowling Finished Series.” Telegraph, July 20, 2008. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/2437835/HarryPotter-fans-pay-1000-a-night-to-stay-in-hotel-room-where-JK-Rowling-finished-series.html.
For more on Bill Gates’s Think Weeks: Guth, Robert A. “In Secret Hideaway, Bill Gates Ponders Microsoft’s Future.” Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2005. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB111196625830690477?mg=reno64-wsj.
“It’s really about two and a half months”: from the following author interview: Birnbaum, Robert. “Alan Lightman.” Identity Theory, November 16, 2000. http://www.identitytheory.com/alan-lightman/.
Michael Pollan’s book about building a writing cabin: Pollan, Michael. A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder. New York: Random House, 1997.
For more on William Shockley’s scramble to invent the junction transistor: “Shockley Invents the Junction Transistor.” PBS. http://www.pbs.org/transistor/background1/events/junctinv.html.
“‘Ohh! Shiny!’ DNA”: from a blog post by Shankman: “Where’s Your Home?” Peter Shankman’s website, July 2, 2014, http://shankman.com/where-s-your-home/.
“The trip cost $4,000”: from an interview with Shankman: Machan, Dyan. “Why Some Entrepreneurs Call ADHD a Superpower.” MarketWatch, July 12, 2011. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/entrepreneurs-superpower-for-some-its-adhd-1310052627559.
Don’t Work Alone
The July 2013 Bloomberg Businessweek article by Venessa Wong titled “Ending the Tyranny of the Open-Plan Office”: http://www.bloomberg.com/articles/2013-07-01/ending-the-tyranny-of-the-open-plan-office. This article has more background on the damage of open office spaces on worker productivity.
The twenty-eight hundred workers cited in regard to Facebook’s open office size was taken from the following March 2014 Daily Mail article: Prigg, Mark. “Now That’s an Open Plan Office.” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2584738/Now-THATS-open-plan-office-New-pictures-reveal-Facebooks-hacker-campus-house-10-000-workers-ONE-room.html.
“facilitate communication and idea flow”: Konnikova, Maria. “The Open-Office Trap.” The New Yorker, January 7, 2014. http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-trap.
“Open plan is pretty spectacular”: Stevenson, Seth. “The Boss with No Office.” Slate, May 4, 2014. http://www.slate.com/articles/business/psychology_of_management/2014/05/open_plan_offices_the_new_trend_in_workplace_design.1.html.
“We encourage people to stay out in the open”: Savitz, Eric. “Jack Dorsey: Leadership Secrets of Twitter and Square.” Forbes, October 17, 2012. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2012/10/17/jack-dorsey-the-leadership-secrets-of-twitter-and-square/3/.
The New Yorker quotes about Building 20, as well as general background and lists of inventions, come from the following 2012 New Yorker article, combined to a lesser degree with the author’s firsthand experience with such lore while at MIT: Lehrer, Jonah. “Groupthink.” The New Yorker, January 30, 2012. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/01/30/groupthink.
“Traveling the hall’s length” and the information on Mervin Kelly and his goals for Bell Labs’s Murray Hill campus: Gertner, Jon. “True Innovation.” New York Times, February 25, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/innovation-and-the-bell-labs-miracle.html.
A nice summary history of the invention of the transistor can be found in “Transistorized!” at PBS’s website: http://www.pbs.org/transistor/album1/. A more detailed history can be found in Chapter 7 of Walter Isaacson’s 2014 book, The Innovators. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Execute Like a Business
“How do I do this?”: from pages xix–xx of McChesney, Chris, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling. The 4 Disciplines of Execution. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004.
Clayton Christensen also talks more about his experience with Andy Grove in a July–August 2010 Harvard Business Review article, “How Will You Measure Your Life?” that he later expanded into a book of the same name: http://hbr.org/2010/07/how-will-you-measure-your-life/ar/1.
“The more you try to do”: from page 10 of McChesney, Covey, and Huling, The 4 Disciplines of Execution.
“If you want to win the war for attention”: Brooks, David. “The Art of Focus.” New York Times, June 3, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/opinion/brooks-the-art-of-focus.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=2.
“When you receive them”: from page 12 of McChesney, Covey, and Huling, The 4 Disciplines of Execution.
“People play differently when they’re keeping score”: Ibid., 12.
“a rhythm of regular and frequent meetings” and “execution really happens”: Ibid., 13.
Be Lazy
“I am not busy” and “Idleness is not just a vacation”: Kreider, Tim. “The Busy Trap.” New York Times, June 30, 2013. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-trap/.
Much (though not all) of the research cited to support the value of downtime was first brought to my attention through a detailed Scientific American article on the subject: Jabr, Ferris. “Why Your Brain Needs More Downtime.” Scientific American, October 15, 2013. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mental-downtime/.
“The scientific literature has emphasized”: from the abstract of Dijksterhuis, Ap, Maarten W. Bos, Loran F. Nordgren, and Rick B. van Baaren, “On Making the Right Choice: The Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect.” Science 311.5763 (2006): 1005–1007.
The attention restoration theory study described in the text: Berman, Marc G., John Jonides, and Stephen Kaplan. “The Cognitive Benefits of Interacting with Nature.” Psychological Science 19.12 (2008): 1207–1212.
I called this study “frequently cited” based on the more than four hundred citations identified by Google Scholar as of November 2014.
An online article where Berman talks about this study and ART more generally (the source of my Berman quotes): Berman, Marc. “Berman on the Brain: How to Boost Your Focus.” Huffington Post, February 2, 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/marc-berman/attention-restoration-theory-nature_b_1242261.html.
Kaplan, Rachel, and Stephen Kaplan. The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Ericsson, K.A., R.T. Krampe, and C. Tesch-R?mer. “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance.” Psychological Review 100.3 (1993): 363–406.
“Committing to a specific plan for a goal”: from Masicampo, E.J., and Roy F. Baumeister. “Consider It Done! Plan Making Can Eliminate the Cognitive Effects of Unfulfilled Goals.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 101.4 (2011): 667.
Rule #2
My estimate of “hundreds of thousands” of daily Talmud studiers comes from an article by Shmuel Rosner, “A Page a Day,” New York Times, August 1, 2012 (http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/01/considering-seven-and-a-half-years-of-daily-talmud-study/), as well as my personal correspondence with Adam Marlin.
“So we have scales that allow us to divide” and “The people we talk with continually said”: Clifford Nass’s May 10, 2013, interview with Ira Flatow, on NPR’s Talk of the Nation: Science Friday show. Audio and transcript are available online: “The Myth of Multitasking.” http://www.npr.org/2013/05/10/182861382/the-myth-of-multitasking. In a tragic twist, Nass died unexpectedly just six months after this interview.
Don’t Take Breaks from Distraction. Instead Take Breaks from Focus.