I came across this quote by Adam Grant recently that resonated with me — Devi Parikh

"It might be an English-as-a-second-language thing, but “sustain” to me sounds a bit like “survive”. And that feels like a low bar to be shooting for; I optimize for thriving :)."

"I work on things I am intrinsically excited about -- things I can’t not work on! These can be questions I am curious about (what would happen if we had humans go through the same processing pipeline we put machines through?), activities I can’t wait to go back to (macrame, origami, generative art), outcomes I want to be a reality (a machine that you can ask questions to about images and it answers, a model that can generate fantastical depictions of creatures), projects I think would be fun to work on (e.g., semantic understanding of clipart scenes), etc."

"I minimize things that don’t bring me joy -- where I am not bringing any value and it is not bringing any value to me. I ruthlessly optimize for this. If I find myself in a meeting where I zone out and think “what am I doing here?”, that’s a trigger for me to take a very careful look at my involvement. Depending on what role I am playing in the effort, it could mean reconsidering the format or cadence of meetings or reconsidering my involvement altogether."

"Unless I see the need to be thoughtful about it, I try to get bureaucratic things done as quickly as possible to “get it over with”."

"I’ve also written about how I manage email. I apply the same zero-inbox strategy to all communication -- Chat messages and notifications at work, WhatsApp messages, Messenger messages, etc. It annoys me that Twitter and Instagram DMs don’t have an “archive” option :). This plays a big role in keeping communication channels “clean” and uncluttered."

"When a lot of pings are coming my way -- I pause to think whether they all need to be addressed right away. Can some wait till tomorrow? Can some things planned for tomorrow be done later in the week? I have found this to be highly effective in not feeling overwhelmed."