How to Do Great Work

We all face a daily resource challenge: the limit of our time (24 hours a day), as well as limits to the amount of energy we can tap into due to the other demands in our lives.

Realistically a person can only dedicate a few hours a day into great work. This is because great work requires focus, time, and a lot of brain power.

I define "great work" as anything that I can look back on that I do not want to immediately throw away into the trash.

Overtime, I've begun to realize that great work is almost always reliant on rest. This seems counterintuitive because we are taught by society that in order to get ahead we should we working 10-12 hours a day, but that doesn't seem to work when you're required to do higher-level thinking.

What I have learned through my experience is that you’ll go much further cultivating and capitalizing on those small windows where good work is actually done.

And how do you make those windows bigger? It’s a variety of things, but I keep returning to the idea of learning how to rest effectively.

If this is sounding ridiculously obvious, it is, but we also live in a world that seems to discourage rest. And there lies the problem — it is one thing to know this on a theoretical level and another to know how to do it and actually do it.