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recommend the habit of a weekly review in which you make a plan for the workweek ahead (see Rule #4). During my experiments with 4DX, I used a weekly review to look over my scoreboard to celebrate good weeks, help understand what led to bad weeks, and most important, figure out how to ensure a good score for the days ahead.
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Cal Newport |
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These stimuli "invoke attention modestly, allowing focused-attention mechanisms a chance to replenish." Put another way, when walking through nature, you're freed from having to direct your attention, as there are few challenges to navigate (like crowded street crossings), and experience enough interesting stimuli to keep your mind sufficiently occupied to avoid the need to actively aim your attention. This state allows your directed attent..
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Cal Newport |
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The first thing I do is take a final look at my e-mail inbox to ensure that there's nothing requiring an urgent response before the day ends. The next thing I do is transfer any new tasks that are on my mind or were scribbled down earlier in the day into my official task lists. (I use Google Docs for storing my task lists, as I like the ability to access them from any computer--but the technology here isn't really relevant.) Once I have the..
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Cal Newport |
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When you work, work hard. When you're done, be done. Your average e-mail response time might suffer some, but you'll more than make up for this with the sheer volume of truly important work produced during the day by your refreshed ability to dive deeper than your exhausted peers.
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Cal Newport |
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The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you're occupied physically but not mentally--walking, jogging, driving, showering--and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem. Depending on your profession, this problem might be outlining an article, writing a talk, making progress on a proof, or attempting to sharpen a business strategy. As in mindfulness meditation, you must continue to bring your ..
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Cal Newport |
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You must be on your guard for looping, as it can quickly subvert an entire productive meditation session. When you notice it, remark to yourself that you seem to be in a loop, then redirect your attention toward the next step.
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Cal Newport |
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Very few people work even 8 hours a day. You're lucky if you get a few good hours in between all the meetings, interruptions, web surfing, office politics, and personal business that permeate the typical workday.
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Cal Newport |
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suggest starting with a careful review of the relevant variables for solving the problem and then storing these values in your working memory. For example, if you're working on the outline for a book chapter, the relevant variables might be the main points you want to make in the chapter. If you're instead trying to solve a mathematics proof, these variables might be actual variables, or assumptions, or lemmas. Once the relevant variables a..
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Cal Newport |
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For those familiar with the rigors of such activities, the limit expands to something like four hours, but rarely more.
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Cal Newport |
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2012 McKinsey study found that the average knowledge worker now spends more than 60 percent of the workweek engaged in electronic communication and Internet searching, with close to 30 percent of a worker's time dedicated to reading and answering e-mail alone.
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Cal Newport |
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In an age of network tools, in other words, knowledge workers increasingly replace deep work with the shallow alternative--constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction. Larger efforts that would be well served by deep thinking, such as forming a new business strategy or writing an important grant application, get fragmented into distracted dashes that produce..
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Cal Newport |
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The rapid rise of communication and collaboration technologies has transformed many other formerly local markets into a similarly universal bazaar. The small company looking for a computer programmer or public relations consultant now has access to an international marketplace of talent in the same way that the advent of the record store allowed the small-town music fan to bypass local musicians to buy albums from the world's best bands.
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Cal Newport |
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This new science of performance argues that you get better at a skill as you develop more myelin around the relevant neurons, allowing the corresponding circuit to fire more effortlessly and effectively. To be great at something is to be well myelinated.
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Cal Newport |
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The subjects succeeded in resisting these particularly addictive distractions only around half the time.
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Cal Newport |
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If e-mail were to move to the periphery of your workday, you'd be required to deploy a more thoughtful approach to figuring out what you should be working on and for how long. This type of planning is hard. Consider, for example, David Allen's Getting Things Done task-management methodology, which is a well-respected system for intelligently managing competing workplace obligations.
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Cal Newport |
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The Minimalist Technology Screen To allow an optional technology back into your life at the end of the digital declutter, it must: Serve something you deeply value (offering some benefit is not enough). Be the best way to use technology to serve this value (if it's not, replace it with something better). Have a role in your life that is constrained with a standard operating procedure that specifies when and how you use it.
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Cal Newport |
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The premise of this chapter is that by cultivating a high-quality leisure life first, it will become easier to minimize low-quality digital diversions later.
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Cal Newport |
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The most common response to these complications is to suggest modest hacks and tips. Perhaps if you observe a digital Sabbath,
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Cal Newport |
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Once we view these personal technology processes through the perspective of diminishing returns, we'll gain the precise vocabulary we need to understand the validity of the second principle of minimalism, which states that optimizing how we use technology is just as important as how we choose what technologies to use in the first place.
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Cal Newport |
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Addiction is a condition in which a person engages in use of a substance or in a behavior for which the rewarding effects provide a compelling incentive to repeatedly pursue the behavior despite detrimental consequences.
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Cal Newport |
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suggests that you transform the way you think about the different flavors of one-click approval indicators that populate the social media universe. Instead of seeing these easy clicks as a fun way to nudge a friend, start treating them as poison to your attempts to cultivate a meaningful social life. Put simply, you should stop using them. Don't click "Like." Ever. And while you're at it, stop leaving comments on social media posts as well...
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Cal Newport |
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Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don't, you'll never find time for the life-changing big things.
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Cal Newport |
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Professional Goal: To craft well-written, narrative-driven stories that change the way people understand the world. Key Activities Supporting This Goal: * Research patiently and deeply. * Write carefully and with purpose.
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Cal Newport |
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Thoreau's new economics was developed in an industrial age, but his basic insights apply just as well to our current digital context.
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Cal Newport |
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Laura also connects efforts to be a "conscientious consumer" with issues relating to social justice, which also play a big role in the Mennonite Church."
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Cal Newport |
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The traits that define great work are bought with career capital, the theory argues; they don't come from matching your work to your innate passion.
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Cal Newport |
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Mike Jackson leveraged the craftsman mindset to do whatever he did really well, thus ensuring that he came away from each experience with as much career capital as possible. He never had elaborate plans for his career. Instead, after each working experience, he would stick his head up to see who was interested in his newly expanded store of capital,
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Cal Newport |
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In my work on this topic, I've become convinced that what you need instead is a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else.
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Cal Newport |
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when you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn't immediately follow--a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task. This residue gets especially thick if your work on Task A was unbounded and of low intensity before you switched, but even if you finish Task A before moving on, your attention remains divided for a while.
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Cal Newport |
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Thoreau's obsession with calculation helps us move past the vague subjective sense that there are trade-offs inherent in digital clutter, and forces us instead to confront it more precisely. He asks us to treat the minutes of our life as a concrete and valuable substance--arguably the most valuable substance we possess--and to always reckon with how much of this life we trade
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Cal Newport |
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Many of the participants in my mass declutter experiment, however, reported that these feelings of discomfort faded after a week or two. Brooke described this experience as follows: The first few days were surprisingly hard. My addictive habits were revealed in striking clarity. Moments of waiting in line, moments between activities, moments of boredom, moments I ached to check in on my favorite people, moments I wanted an escape, moments I..
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Cal Newport |
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As the author Max Brooks quipped in a 2017 TV appearance, "We need to reevaluate [our current relationship with] online information sort of the way we reevaluated free love in the 80s."
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Cal Newport |
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Lincoln's time alone with his thoughts played a crucial role in his ability to navigate a demanding wartime presidency. We can therefore say, with only mild hyperbole, that in a certain sense, solitude helped save the nation.
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Cal Newport |
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If your goal is to love what you do, I discovered, "follow you passion" can be bad advice. It's more important to become good at something rare and valuable, and then invest the career capital this generates into the type of traits that make a job great. The traits of control and mission are two good places to start."
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Cal Newport |
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The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.
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Cal Newport |
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The second reason is that the subversive decision to pursue FI at a young age, which typically leads to radical lifestyle decisions, self-selects for individuals who are unusually intentional about how they live their lives.
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Cal Newport |
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the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done.
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Cal Newport |
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The complex reality of the technologies that real companies leverage to get ahead emphasizes the absurdity of the now common idea that exposure to simplistic, consumer-facing products--especially in schools--somehow prepares people to succeed in a high-tech economy. Giving students iPads or allowing them to film homework assignments on YouTube prepares them for a high-tech economy about as much as playing with Hot Wheels would prepare them ..
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Cal Newport |
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It took them seven years, but their efforts culminated in the 2017 release of Lead Yourself First.
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Cal Newport |
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The two core abilities just described depend on your ability to perform deep work. If you haven't mastered this foundational skill, you'll struggle to learn hard things or produce at an elite level.
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Cal Newport |
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They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, who has no real effect in the world. But craftsmanship must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one's failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.
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Cal Newport |
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We eagerly signed up for what Silicon Valley was selling, but soon realized that in doing so we were accidently degrading our humanity.
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Cal Newport |
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intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.
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Cal Newport |
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An interesting experience shared by some participants was that they eagerly returned to their optional technologies only to learn they had lost their taste for them. Here, for example, is how Kate described this experience to me: The day the declutter was over, I raced back to Facebook, to my old blogs, to Discord, gleeful and ready to dive back in--and then, after about thirty minutes of aimless browsing, I kind of looked up and thought . ..
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Cal Newport |