What's Exhausting You Isn't Work — It's Your Work Method

I picked this off the shelf because I'd been feeling "busier yet less productive" for a few years. When I tried to take stock of what I'd accomplished, the output wasn't proportional to the effort and hours. Reading this book felt like a full-course meal — the author consolidates a wide range of practical workplace concepts into one volume, and the whole time I was thinking about how to improve my own efficiency and reclaim time outside of work.

Book link

Managing Time and Staying Organized

The author organizes 47 concepts around the themes of mindset, planning, execution, time management, organization, efficiency, relationships, and self-improvement. Here are the parts I found most useful:

• Break the habit of being late — arrive 15 minutes early for everything. Give yourself a little slack.
• Rebuild your relationship with time to address procrastination. Possible causes:
  1. Avoidance stemming from low self-confidence
  2. Perfectionism — not wanting to start before conditions are right
  3. Making excuses for yourself
  4. Overconfidence leading to inaccurate time estimates
• How to overcome procrastination:
  • Goals should be quantifiable. "Exercise more" is not a goal; "exercise twice a week for at least one hour" is.
  • The first step toward any goal should be completable in 15 minutes — lowers the psychological resistance.
  • Compress 8 hours of work into 4, and use the remaining time for research and self-learning.
  • Use time outside work well:
    1. Working more than 50 hours a week, hourly productivity tends to drop sharply
    2. Invest in other areas — develop interests and potential
  • Track time; don't trust your memory
  • Review slow-moving items regularly:
    1. Diagnose the reason: "not enough time," "kept getting interrupted," "slow progress"
    2. Identify the cause: "too difficult," "poor execution / procrastination," "wrong method"
    3. Record which parts took the most time
  • Work on reducing time to completion and improving concentration
• Keep your mind, life, and workspace clear
  • Organize thoughts and ideas — don't leave them in your head, write them down
  • Regularly tidy your bag and desk
    1. Declutter not for the sake of tidiness but for your own comfort
    2. Reduce time spent looking for things
  • Minimize concentration drains

Planning Ahead

💡 How to improve work efficiency

• Know what to do and what not to do

• When overwhelmed by small tasks, prioritize by importance and urgency

• Most people spend 80% of their energy on urgent things; it should be on the 20% that are important

• Don't engage with, participate in, or get drawn into minor things that don't matter — concentrate time and energy on what matters most

• Maintain patience for long-term plans — results rarely show up at the beginning

• Having a plan and not executing it is worse than having no plan. Too many plans create a kind of blind excitement; over time you become someone who only plans and never executes.

• Respect your own plans and complete them within the time you set.

• Record to-dos and review results — especially on items that didn't go well.

• Cut unimportant items; focus limited time and energy on the most critical goal. "Unwilling" and "unimportant" are two different things. Review the things you're "unwilling" to do — they're often things everyone avoids, which means doing them well may open up opportunities.

Execution

💡 Always do the most important thing first — the best antidote to procrastination.

Understand what must be done, what yields the greatest return, and what brings the greatest satisfaction. Something that meets all three is top priority.

Analyze the 20% of factors that drive 80% of work outcomes. Analyze the 20% of holdings that drive 80% of portfolio returns.

• Before work: the first task is to plan your day and list priorities

  • Review yesterday's items
  • Confirm long-, medium-, and short-term goals
  • Limit the number of to-dos: based on difficulty, cap at three
  • Prioritize by:
    1. Important + Urgent → aligns with goals or brings satisfaction; do it unconditionally
    2. Important + Non-urgent → clarify whether it's truly important to you; complete with self-discipline
    3. Non-important + Urgent → learn to say no
  • For uncertain or newly added tasks, first confirm importance and urgency:
    1. Can this be done more simply?
    2. Can it be combined with something else or delegated?
    3. Can it be canceled?
  • After completing each item, review the full list and reassess remaining time — does the order need adjusting?

• During work
  💡 Use the Pomodoro Technique: 25 minutes of focused work, 3–5 minute break. Track how many Pomodoros each task takes. The goal is to improve focus and concentration, build productive work blocks, and reduce interruptions or context-switching.

• After work: analyze what you did today; add it to your daily report

  • Mistakes are inevitable; repeatedly making the same ones is an attitude problem, not an ability problem
  • Add unfinished items to tomorrow's plan and actually complete them
  • Don't overestimate yourself; plans never survive contact with reality perfectly

Three things I started changing

When I read "having a plan and not executing it is worse than no plan," I recognized myself — I set a lot of goals every month but follow through poorly. This book made me act.

First, I cut my daily to-do list from 10+ items to a maximum of 3. It was hard at first — I kept feeling like I should be doing more in a day. But I found that when I focused on the 3 most important things, I actually finished them, and the small stuff got handled naturally.

Second, I started using the Pomodoro timer. Before, I relied on willpower and got constantly interrupted by Slack and email — work became fragmented. Now I focus on one thing per Pomodoro and only reply to messages during breaks. The difference is significant: four hours of focused work often produces more than a chaotic eight-hour day.

Finally, I started writing a real daily review. Ten minutes before the end of each day to reflect on what got done and what didn't. Gradually I noticed myself repeating the same mistakes less and less.

I've been using Obsidian to track daily tasks and stock notes. What I see as the main differences from Notion and handwriting:

1. Privacy: unlike Notion, Obsidian doesn't auto-sync to the cloud — it stays local. That makes me more comfortable being honest in my notes.
2. Auto-generated mind maps: linking keywords creates connections. I started using it just to make a cool graph, but I found it lets me see at a glance how daily journal entries relate to custom keywords — like how many times a stock appears in my research, or quickly tracing notes back to buy records.
3. Bullet journaling: where a paper journal means constant crossing out, digital bullet journaling is clean and efficient for tracking tasks.
4. Sticky note-style overviews: with the right setup you can instantly see what's on your current task list.

Mindset, Emotions & Relationships

• Accept both the good and the bad that work brings you

  • You can't only enjoy the pleasant parts and refuse to bear the pressure — or complain that what you're doing has no meaning.
  • Everyone gets tasks they're unwilling to do or bad at. The more you avoid them, the more that avoidance shows up across your work — gradually turning you into someone who always has a reason to be lazy.

• Don't casually judge or complain about others

  People tend to see only the surface of others' achievements, not the effort behind them.

  This is something I have to keep working on. I don't directly criticize others, but I easily apply my own productivity standards to colleagues and clients. Their work is their work — I should stay focused on my own.

• Emotional management

  When facing a problem, don't fixate on the bad thing itself — try looking at it from a different angle.

  1. Develop empathy — consider situations from others' perspectives
  2. Notice your emotions as they arise → redirect attention to cool down; find an appropriate outlet
  3. Accept reality and move through the low periods

• Stay focused on your goals

  Deciding what not to do is just as important as deciding what to do. Practice impulse control and delayed gratification.

Areas for Self-Improvement

• Reporting skills: master professional communication upward

  1. Report promptly and honestly, then course-correct quickly. Always confirm scope to avoid taking on unnecessary responsibility — but don't just try to read minds and create confusion.
  2. Keep reports concise. First ask the right question, then present not just the problem but multiple viable solutions (most feasible, most bold, most likely to fail).
  3. Keep writing daily and weekly reports.

• Sky-Rain-Umbrella framework (problem-solving structure)

  • Sky = facts: identify the problem / the pain point
  • Rain = observation: identify the strategy or solution
  • Umbrella = decision: act on it

• Work attitude Long meetings aren't always inefficient — sometimes the problem is that you're not trying to make them efficient.

  1. Speak up boldly: don't just sit there like a student waiting for class to end
  2. Volunteer for harder tasks: initiative is contagious
  3. Work just as hard when the boss isn't watching: how you handle that is a measure of your own growth