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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f4673c1 | Just because you cannot avoid this tool altogether doesn't mean you have to cede all authority over its role in your mental landscape | Cal Newport | ||
| 4e5723c | 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.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 92f3613 | 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." | Cal Newport | ||
| 31d02b0 | There's no one correct deep work ritual--the right fit depends on both the person and the type of project pursued. | Cal Newport | ||
| 989d501 | 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| 2f2093b | 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| 8ec66cc | 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.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 4ca7a36 | I have this principle about money that overrides my other life rules," he said. "Do what people are willing to pay for." | Cal Newport | ||
| e97ac4e | 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.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 9b421af | 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 .. | Cal Newport | ||
| d53939b | attempting to schedule deep work in an ad hoc fashion is not an effective way to manage your limited willpower.) | Cal Newport | ||
| 39ebc8b | 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." | Cal Newport | ||
| 7638e58 | 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| f4b48ba | The reason knowledge workers are losing their familiarity with deep work is well established: network tools. | Cal Newport | ||
| 0a0c1ae | 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." | Cal Newport | ||
| 832d220 | 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.. | Cal Newport | ||
| b7c508c | Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work. | Cal Newport | ||
| 92828ce | To have a mission is to have a unifying focus for your career. | Cal Newport | ||
| a9dbdc9 | 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| f693ee0 | 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| 25fc48d | 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| e58ce8c | Studious of ease and fond of humble things. | Ambrose Philips | ||
| ca52642 | It was tentativeness, not boldness, that transformed Pardis's general mission into a specific success. | Cal Newport | ||
| 9aafd11 | Little Bets, and it was written by a former venture capitalist named Peter Sims. | Cal Newport | ||
| b4d5d05 | the journalist philosophy. This name is a nod to the fact that journalists, like Walter Isaacson, are trained to shift into a writing mode on a moment's notice, as is required by the deadline-driven nature of their profession. | Cal Newport | ||
| 2eafc64 | David Brooks summarizes this reality more bluntly: "[Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants." | Cal Newport | ||
| cf84483 | Junior faculty members used to come up to me and say, 'Wow, you got tenure early; what's your secret?' I said, 'It's pretty simple, call me any Friday night in my office at ten o'clock and I'll tell you. | Cal Newport | ||
| 7fd3fc5 | The key question will be: are you good at working with intelligent machines or not? | Cal Newport | ||
| 0141d45 | Money is a neutral indicator of value. By aiming to make money, you're aiming to be valuable. | money success value | Cal Newport | |
| 14ff9e9 | Though Grant's productivity depends on many factors, there's one idea in particular that seems central to his method: the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches. Grant performs this batching at multiple levels. | Cal Newport | ||
| 3b5b791 | you visit Knuth's website at Stanford with the intention of finding his e-mail address, you'll instead discover the following note: I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be o.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 0ad5856 | 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| 6e40b61 | People experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor performance on that next task," and the more intense the residue, the worse the performance." | Cal Newport | ||
| f1948ee | To ask a CEO to spend four hours thinking deeply about a single problem is a waste of what makes him or her valuable. It's better to hire three smart subordinates to think deeply about the problem and then bring their solutions to the executive for a final decision. | Cal Newport | ||
| 139a1bf | Stephenson summarizes his communication policy as follows: Persons who wish to interfere with my concentration are politely requested not to do so, and warned that I don't answer e-mail... lest [my communication policy's] key message get lost in the verbiage, I will put it here succinctly: All of my time and attention are spoken for--several times over. Please do not ask for them. To further justify this policy, Stephenson wrote an essay ti.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 78a80a4 | E-mail inboxes, in theory, can distract you only when you choose to open them, whereas instant messenger systems are meant to be always active--magnifying the impact of interruption | Cal Newport | ||
| 6ecd67f | As Cochran recalls in a blog post he wrote about his experiment for the Harvard Business Review, these simple statistics got him thinking about the rest of his company. Just how much time were employees of Atlantic Media spending moving around information instead of focusing on the specialized tasks they were hired to perform? Determined to answer this question, Cochran gathered company-wide statistics on e-mails sent per day and the averag.. | Cal Newport | ||
| da1f0a4 | The Principle of Least Resistance: In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment. | Cal Newport | ||
| d88f818 | In 2013, for example, Yahoo's new CEO Marissa Mayer banned employees from working at home. She made this decision after checking the server logs for the virtual private network that Yahoo employees use to remotely log in to company servers. Mayer was upset because the employees working from home didn't sign in enough throughout the day. She was, in some sense, punishing her employees for not spending more time checking e-mail (one of the pr.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 41c9735 | Knowledge work is not an assembly line, and extracting value from information is an activity that's often at odds with busyness, not supported by it. | Cal Newport | ||
| 4a1e038 | If you want to observe the power of control up close in the workplace, look toward companies embracing a radical new philosophy called Results-Only Work Environment (or, ROWE, for short). In a ROWE company, all that matters is your results. When you show up to work and when you leave, when you take vacations, and how often you check e-mail are all irrelevant. They leave it to the employee to figure out whatever works best for getting the im.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 60fc228 | We no longer see Internet tools as products released by for-profit companies, funded by investors hoping to make a return, and run by twentysomethings who are often making things up as they go along. We're instead quick to idolize these digital doodads as a signifier of progress and a harbinger of a (dare I say, brave) new world. | Cal Newport | ||
| 9db5fae | When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, ask yourself whether people are willing to pay you for it. If so, continue. If not, move on. | Cal Newport | ||
| 3727248 | By leveraging a radical change to your normal environment, coupled perhaps with a significant investment of effort or money, all dedicated toward supporting a deep work task, you increase the perceived importance of the task. This boost in importance reduces your mind's instinct to procrastinate and delivers an injection of motivation and energy. | Cal Newport |