1: “So tell me this,” the young executive asked, “Is Panera almost as good as Donatos?”

“Is he joking?” Panera Bread CEO Ron Shaich thought to himself.

It was the early 2000s. Ron was sitting in an executive boardroom at McDonald’s headquarters outside Chicago. Ten years earlier, he had purchased the St. Louis Bread Company and renamed it Panera.

On the other side of the table were members of McDonald’s … continue reading

1: Researchers at Harvard and MIT analyzed the moods and behaviors of 28,000 smartphone users.

What did they learn?

“When people felt down,” Rachel Barr writes in How to Make Your Brain Your Best Friend, “they tended to seek out activities that promised instant gratification, like watching TV or drinking wine.”

When the participants were in a good mood, however, “they leaned toward more productive activities,” Rachel notes, “that … continue reading

1: We stare at the screen.

“Slowly and painstakingly formulating half a sentence, reading it over, deeming it to be inadequate, deleting it, staring at the screen some more, then trying again,” Oliver Burkeman writes in Meditations for Mortals.

The writing coach Stephen Lloyd Webber once noted that it’s ironic that we call this activity “writing,” since much of our time is spent not writing, not deleting what we’ve … continue reading

1: The goal? To be more productive and less stressed.

Google productivity expert  Laura Mae Martin believes there is one simple thing we must do.

Make a list of every open loop we currently have in our brains.  

Personal. Professional. Projects. Deadlines. Ideas. To-Dos of all types and flavors.

“If we do only one thing from this entire chapter, it should be this,” Laura writes in her book Uptime: A … continue reading

1: So how exactly do we define productivity?

Google productivity expert Laura Mae Martin tells us in her book Uptime that productivity is comprised of three distinct elements:

Step #1: Defining clearly what we want to do,

Step #2: Setting aside the (right) time and place to do it, and

Step #3: Executing well within the designated time.

Productivity, Laura believes, is closely aligned with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi‘s concept of … continue reading