How are Sprints different from just dividing a goal into phases? Unlike phases, which are not ends in themselves, Sprints are independent, self-contained projects—thus the outcome is, let’s hope, a source of satisfaction, information, and motivation to keep going (or, as happened with my stop-motion animation project, a helpful cue to let this particular goal go).
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Minnesota professor Sophie Leroy, PhD, calls this “attention residue.” She writes that “people need to stop thinking about one task in order to fully transition their attention and perform well on another. Yet, results indicate it is difficult for people to transition their attention away from an unfinished task and their subsequent task performance suffers.”
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In other words, the more thinly you slice your attention and time, the less focused you become. The less focused you become, the less progress you make. This is why you may feel like you’re not getting a lot done even though you’re “super busy

The mightiest tree sprouts from a vulnerable seed. The seed of passion is curiosity. The seed of perseverance is patience. By

How do we uncover what “shines forth”? Just as we all have a built-in mechanism for seeing, we also have a built-in mechanism for sensing the luminous things that call to us: our curiosity.
Our curiosity is the exciting electricity we feel in the presence of potential. It sparks our imagination and wonder, drawing us out of ourselves and into the world.

In the bad old days, when we spent most of our time, you know, trying not to die, pleasure was limited and practical. Nowadays it’s a commodity, marketed as a substitute for happiness, and it’s on demand.
Thanks

As we race toward our goals, we learn new things, and our circumstances change. By the time we arrive at the finish line, we’re simply different people. The best we can do is guess what will make us happy. So we place blind bets, gambling away our money, our time, and our sanity in the pursuit of happiness. It seems the harder we try to be happy, the more elusive happiness becomes.

We can begin to untangle this conundrum by accepting a simple truth: None of us can know with any true certainty what will make us happy. In fact, it turns out that we’re pretty lousy at guessing how something will make us feel,

Success often feels surprisingly empty.

In his beautiful commencement speech “This Is Water,” at Kenyon College, author David Foster Wallace talked about the day-to-day and how “the so-called ‘real world’ will not discourage you from operating on your own default settings, because the so-called ‘real world’ of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self.”
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He’s talking about how, if we’re not careful, we can start to go on autopilot, which can greatly diminish our experience of the world.

Migration is designed to add the friction you need to slow down, step back, and consider the things you task yourself with. On the surface it’s an automatic filtering mechanism, designed to leverage
your limited patience. If something is not worth the few seconds it takes to rewrite it, then chances are it’s really not important. In addition, handwriting triggers our critical thinking, helping us draw new connections between thoughts. As you migrate each item, you give yourself a chance to identify unconventional relationships or opportunities by holding each item under the microscope of your attention.