Good+advice

From [|John Tierney], NY Times science reporter, when he announced that he was giving up his Tierney Lab blog:

"When I was working on [|a column last year about the science of concentration], I got some advice from Winifred Gallagher, the author of [|“Rapt”]: At the start of your workday, ignore all short-term distractions (e-mail, blogs, etc) and devote 90 solid minutes to your most important project."

One way to think of this is as follows: someone looking in from the outside will conclude that whatever you give 90 minutes of attention to at the beginning of your workday is the thing that matters most to you. Do you want that person to draw that conclusion? If not, you're spending 90 minutes on the wrong things at the beginning of your day.