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Outside of these deep sessions, Grant remained famously open and accessible. In some sense, he had to be: His 2013 bestseller, Give and Take, promotes the practice of giving of your time and attention, without expectation of something in return, as a key strategy in professional advancement.
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Cal Newport |
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study by Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow. In this study, a group of management consultants were asked to disconnect for a full day each workweek. The consultants were afraid the client would rebel. It turned out that the client didn't care. As Jung, Grant, and Perlow's subjects discovered, people will usually respect your right to become inaccessible if these periods are well defined and well advertised, and outside these st..
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Cal Newport |
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Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman explaining in an interview one of his less orthodox productivity strategies: To do real good physics work, you do need absolute solid lengths of time... it needs a lot of concentration... if you have a job administrating anything, you don't have the time. So I have invented another myth for myself: that I'm irresponsible. I'm actively irresponsible. I tell everyone I don't do anything. If anyone..
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Cal Newport |
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Postman argued that our society was sliding into a troubling relationship with technology. We were, he noted, no longer discussing the trade-offs surrounding new technologies, balancing the new efficiencies against the new problems introduced. If it's high-tech, we began to instead assume, then it's good. Case closed.
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Cal Newport |
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The alternative, to not embrace all things Internet, is, as Postman would say, "invisible and therefore irrelevant."
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Cal Newport |
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Deep work is at a severe disadvantage in a technopoly because it builds on values like quality, craftsmanship, and mastery that are decidedly old-fashioned and nontechnological. Even worse, to support deep work often requires the rejection of much of what is new and high-tech. Deep work is exiled in favor of more distracting high-tech behaviors, like the professional use of social media, not because the former is empirically inferior to the..
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Cal Newport |
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This chain method (as some now call it) soon became a hit among writers and fitness enthusiasts--communities that thrive on the ability to do hard things consistently. For our purposes, it provides a specific example of a general approach to integrating depth into your life: the rhythmic philosophy. This philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit. The goal..
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Cal Newport |
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For a mission-driven project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two different ways. First, it must compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others. Second, it must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking.
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Cal Newport |
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ae63192
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The professors at MIT--some of the most innovative technologists in the world--wanted nothing to do with an open-office-style workspace. They instead demanded the ability to close themselves off. This combination of soundproofed offices connected to large common areas yields a hub-and-spoke architecture of innovation in which both serendipitous encounter and isolated deep thinking are supported.
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Cal Newport |
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To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction.
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Cal Newport |
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The fault of the courage culture, therefore, is not its underlying message that courage is good, but its severe underestimation of the complexity involved in deploying this boldness in a useful way.
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Cal Newport |
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If you're struggling to raise money for an idea, or are thinking that you will support your idea with unrelated work, then you need to rethink the idea.
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Cal Newport |
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what deliberate practice actually requires. Its core components are usually identified as follows: (1) your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you're trying to improve or an idea you're trying to master; (2) you receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it's most productive. The first component is of particular importance to our discussion, as it emphasizes that deliberate practice ..
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Cal Newport |
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Within the overall structure of a project there is always room for individuality and craftsmanship... One hundred years from now, our engineering may seem as archaic as the techniques used by medieval cathedral builders seem to today's civil engineers, while our craftsmanship will still be honored.
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Cal Newport |
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2e2e19a
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Second, even when you retreat to a spoke to think deeply, when it's reasonable to leverage the whiteboard effect, do so.
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Cal Newport |
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b6b3a92
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I follow a rule with my life that if something is scary, do it. I've lived everywhere in America, and for me, a big scary thing was living outside the country.
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Cal Newport |
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Open offices, for example, might create more opportunities for collaboration,* but they do so at the cost of "massive distraction," to quote the results of experiments conducted for a British TV special titled The Secret Life of Office Buildings. "If you are just getting into some work and a phone goes off in the background, it ruins what you are concentrating on," said the neuroscientist who ran the experiments for the show. "Even though y..
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Cal Newport |
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the individual's scoreboard should be a physical artifact in the workspace that displays the individual's current deep work hour count.
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Cal Newport |
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Here's Kreider's explanation: Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets... it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.
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Cal Newport |
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6eb6f00
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Deep work should be a priority in today's business climate. But it's not. I've just summarized various explanations for this paradox. Among them are the realities that deep work is hard and shallow work is easier, that in the absence of clear goals for your job, the visible busyness that surrounds shallow work becomes self-preserving, and that our culture has developed a belief that if a behavior relates to "the Internet," then it's good--r..
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Cal Newport |
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In other words, I not only allow spontaneity in my schedule; I encourage it. Joseph's critique is driven by the mistaken idea that the goal of a schedule is to force your behavior into a rigid plan. This type of scheduling, however, isn't about constraint--it's instead about thoughtfulness. It's a simple habit that forces you to continually take a moment throughout your day and ask: "What makes sense for me to do with the time that remains?..
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Cal Newport |
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It's natural, at first, to resist this idea, as it's undoubtedly easier to continue to allow the twin forces of internal whim and external requests to drive your schedule. But you must overcome this distrust of structure if you want to approach your true potential as someone who creates things that matter.
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Cal Newport |
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So we have scales that allow us to divide up people into people who multitask all the time and people who rarely do, and the differences are remarkable. People who multitask all the time can't filter out irrelevancy. They can't manage a working memory. They're chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand... they're pretty much mental wrecks.
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Cal Newport |
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Just because you cannot avoid this tool altogether doesn't mean you have to cede all authority over its role in your mental landscape
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Cal Newport |
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4e5723c
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Deep work should be a priority in today's business climate. But it's not. I've just summarized various explanations for this paradox. Among them are the realities that deep work is hard and shallow work is easier, that in the absence of clear goals for your job, the visible busyness that surrounds shallow work becomes self-preserving, and that our culture has developed a belief that if a behavior relates to "the Internet," then it's good--r..
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Cal Newport |
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92f3613
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The purpose of the deep work chamber is to allow for total focus and uninterrupted work flow," Dewane explains. He imagines a process in which you spend ninety minutes inside, take a ninety-minute break, and repeat two or three times--at which point your brain will have achieved its limit of concentration for the day."
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Cal Newport |
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31d02b0
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There's no one correct deep work ritual--the right fit depends on both the person and the type of project pursued.
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Cal Newport |
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when you do have enough capital to successfully make a shift toward more control. It's at this point that you're most likely to encounter resistance from others in your life, as more control usually benefits only you.
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Cal Newport |
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2f2093b
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Your ritual needs to ensure your brain gets the support it needs to keep operating at a high level of depth. For example, the ritual might specify that you start with a cup of good coffee, or make sure you have access to enough food of the right type to maintain energy, or integrate light exercise such as walking to help keep the mind clear.
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Cal Newport |
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8ec66cc
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Consider a 2012 study, led by psychologists Wilhelm Hofmann and Roy Baumeister, that outfitted 205 adults with beepers that activated at randomly selected times (this is the experience sampling method discussed in Part 1). When the beeper sounded, the subject was asked to pause for a moment to reflect on desires that he or she was currently feeling or had felt in the last thirty minutes, and then answer a set of questions about these desire..
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Cal Newport |
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I have this principle about money that overrides my other life rules," he said. "Do what people are willing to pay for."
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Cal Newport |
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e97ac4e
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some might respond that their knowledge work job cannot possibly become such a source of meaning because their job's subject is much too mundane. But this is flawed thinking that our consideration of traditional craftsmanship can help correct. In our current culture, we place a lot of emphasis on job description. Our obsession with the advice to "follow your passion" (the subject of my last book), for example, is motivated by the (flawed) i..
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Cal Newport |
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The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration. If you suddenly decide, for example, in the middle of a distracted afternoon spent Web browsing, to switch your attention to a cognitively demanding task, you'll draw heavily from your ..
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Cal Newport |
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attempting to schedule deep work in an ad hoc fashion is not an effective way to manage your limited willpower.)
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Cal Newport |
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Christensen wrote for a book titled The 4 Disciplines of Execution, which built on extensive consulting case studies to describe four "disciplines" (abbreviated, 4DX) for helping companies successfully implement high-level strategies. What struck me as I read was that this gap between what and how was relevant to my personal quest to spend more time working deeply."
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Cal Newport |
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7638e58
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If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. [If I instead get interrupted a lot] what replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time... there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons.
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Cal Newport |
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f4b48ba
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The reason knowledge workers are losing their familiarity with deep work is well established: network tools.
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Cal Newport |
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0a0c1ae
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The respected New Yorker staff writer George Packer captured this fear well in an essay about why he does not tweet: "Twitter is crack for media addicts. It scares me, not because I'm morally superior to it, but because I don't think I could handle it. I'm afraid I'd end up letting my son go hungry."
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Cal Newport |
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832d220
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Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate. 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..
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Cal Newport |
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b7c508c
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Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.
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Cal Newport |
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92828ce
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To have a mission is to have a unifying focus for your career.
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Cal Newport |
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if the subject dedicates enough time to such endeavors to reach maximum cognitive intensity--the state in which real breakthroughs occur. This is why the minimum unit of time for deep work in this philosophy tends to be at least one full day.
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Cal Newport |
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f693ee0
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Kirk's path to American Treasures was incremental. He didn't decide out of nowhere that he wanted to host a television show and then work backward to make that dream a reality. Instead, he worked forward from his original mission--to popularize archaeology--with a series of small, almost tentative steps.
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Cal Newport |
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25fc48d
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The important thing about little bets is that they're bite-sized. You try one. It takes a few months at most. It either succeeds or fails, but either way you get important feedback to guide your next steps. This approach stands in contrast to the idea of choosing a bold plan and making one big bet on its success.
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Cal Newport |