Hwtbemreprutive_byAarnSwartz(怎样提高效率亚伦斯沃茨).doc

HOWTO: Be more productive Aaron Swartz “With all the time you spend watching TV,” he tells me，“you could have written a novel by now.” It’s hard to disagree with the sentiment — writing a novel is undoubtedly a better use of time than watching TV — but what about the hidden assumption? Such comments imply that time is “fungible” 一 that time spent watching TV can just as easily be spent writing a novel. And sadly, that’s just not the case. Time has various levels of quality. If I’m walking to the subway station and I’ve forgotten my notebook，then if s pretty hard for me to write more than a couple paragraphs. And it’s tough to focus when you keep getting interrupted. There’s also a mental component: sometimes I feel happy and motivated and ready to work on something，but other times I feel so sad and tired I can only watch TV. If you want to be more productive then，you have to recognize this fact and deal with it. First，you have to make the best of each kind of time. And second, you have to try to make your time higher-quality. Spend time efficiently Choose good problems Life is short (or so I’m told) so why waste it doing something dumb? It’s easy to start working on something because it’s convenient，but you should always be questioning yourself about it. Is there something more important you can work on? Why don’t you do that instead? Such questions are hard to face up to (eventually，if you follow this rule，you’ll have to ask yourself why you’re not working on the most important problem in the world) but each little step makes you more productive. This isn’t to say that all your time should be spent on the most important problem in the world. Mine certainly isn’t (after all，I’m writing this essay). But it’s definitely the standard against which I measure my life. Have a bunch of them Another common myth is that you’ll get more done if you pick one problem and focus on it exclusively. I find this is hardly ever true. Just this moment for example，I’m trying to fix my