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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| c4c7e7c | On the other hand, if you're inside this pool--someone whose contribution to the world is discrete, clear, and individualized*--then you should give this philosophy serious consideration, as it might be the deciding factor between an average career and one that will be remembered. | Cal Newport | ||
| 101bf8b | conscious mind is able to follow the precise arithmetic rules needed for correctness. On the other hand, for decisions that involve large amounts of information and multiple vague, and perhaps even conflicting, constraints, your unconscious mind is well suited to tackle the issue. | Cal Newport | ||
| 1b7dddf | more detail, this ritual should ensure that every incomplete task, goal, or project has been reviewed and that for each you have confirmed that either (1) you have a plan you trust for its completion, or (2) it's captured in a place where it will be revisited when the time is right. The process should be an algorithm: a series of steps you always conduct, one after another. When you're done, have a set phrase you say that indicates completi.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 1ccc352 | I know why you didn't get the money. I was wondering how much sixteen million dollars weighs." "I can tell you exactly. Bank gets hit, they tell us how many of each denomination was lost. Tally that up, you know how many bills; you have four hundred fifty-four bills in a pound, doesn't matter what denominations--just do the math. This particular sixteen million weighs eleven hundred forty-two pounds." Holman" | Robert Crais | ||
| 9598416 | 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 asks me to be on a committee for admissions, "no," I tell them: I'm irresponsible. Feynman was adamant in avoiding admin.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 99bce05 | particular, identify a deep task (that is, something that requires deep work to complete) that's high on your priority list. Estimate how long you'd normally put aside for an obligation of this type, then give yourself a hard deadline that drastically reduces this time. If possible, commit publicly to the deadline--for example, by telling the person expecting the finished project when they should expect it. If this isn't possible (or if it .. | Cal Newport | ||
| 4131030 | this finding pushed back against conventional wisdom. Most people assumed (and still do) that relaxation makes them happy. We want to work less and spend more time in the hammock. But the results from Csikszentmihalyi's ESM studies reveal that most people have this wrong: Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage.. | Cal Newport | ||
| f4b438f | Ric Furrer is a master craftsman whose work requires him to spend most of his day in a state of depth--even a small slip in concentration can ruin dozens of hours of effort. He's also someone who clearly finds great meaning in his profession. This connection between deep work and a good life is familiar and widely accepted when considering the world of craftsmen. "The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manu.. | Cal Newport | ||
| f9c9e16 | The idle mind is the devil's workshop | Cal Newport | ||
| c3f3b39 | All the people I ever admired and respected led balanced lives--studying hard, partying hard, as well as being involved in activities and getting a decent amount of sleep each night. I really think this is the only logically defensible way of doing things." Chris, a straight-A college student" | Cal Newport | ||
| ead3c89 | The implication of these findings is clear. In work (and especially knowledge work), to increase the time you spend in a state of depth is to leverage the complex machinery of the human brain in a way that for several different neurological reasons maximizes the meaning and satisfaction you'll associate with your working life. | Cal Newport | ||
| d2d78c2 | Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it's instead like a muscle that tires. This is why the subjects in the Hofmann and Baumeister study had such a hard time fighting desires--over time these distractions drained their finite pool of willpower until they could no longer resist. The same will happen to you, regardless of your intentions--unless, that is, you're smart about you.. | Cal Newport | ||
| ed68d0b | Let's begin with the first ability. To start, we must remember that we've been spoiled by the intuitive and drop-dead-simple user experience of many consumer-facing technologies, like Twitter and the iPhone. These examples, however, are consumer products, not serious tools: Most of the intelligent machines driving the Great Restructuring are significantly more complex to understand and master. | Cal Newport | ||
| abe212d | Therefore, if you're in a marketplace where the consumer has access to all performers, and everyone's q value is clear, the consumer will choose the very best. Even if the talent advantage of the best is small compared to the next rung down on the skill ladder, the superstars still win the bulk of the market. In the 1980s, when Rosen studied this | Cal Newport | ||
| 2e81787 | There is, however, a lesser-known piece to this story. As Christensen recalls, Grove asked him during a break in this meeting, "How do I do this?" Christensen responded with a discussion of business strategy, explaining how Grove could set up a new business unit and so on. Grove cut him off with a gruff reply: "You are such a naive academic. I asked you how to do it, and you told me what I should do. I know what I need to do. I just don't k.. | Cal Newport | ||
| f0183c0 | In a seminal 1981 paper, the economist Sherwin Rosen worked out the mathematics behind these "winner-take-all" markets. One of his key insights was to explicitly model talent--labeled, innocuously, with the variable q in his formulas--as a factor with "imperfect substitution," which Rosen explains as follows: "Hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance." In other words, talent is not a commo.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 401b04f | other technologies like data visualization, analytics, high speed communications, and rapid prototyping have augmented the contributions of more abstract and data-driven reasoning, increasing the values of these jobs." In other words, those with the oracular ability to work with and tease valuable results out of increasingly complex machines will thrive." | Cal Newport | ||
| a4e9845 | As the journalist Daniel Coyle surveys in his 2009 book, The Talent Code, these scientists increasingly believe the answer includes myelin--a layer of fatty tissue that grows around neurons, acting like an insulator that allows the cells to fire faster and cleaner. To understand the role of myelin in improvement, keep in mind that skills, be they intellectual or physical, eventually reduce down to brain circuits. This new science of perform.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 318fc0f | 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, in other words, is to generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you're going to go deep. The chain method is a good example of the rhythmic philosophy of deep work scheduling because it combines a simple scheduling he.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 08e873b | Their rituals minimized the friction in this transition to depth, allowing them to go deep more easily and stay in the state longer. If they had instead waited for inspiration to strike before settling in to serious work, their accomplishments would likely have been greatly reduced. | Cal Newport | ||
| 48abd4c | Hardness scares off the daydreamers and the timid, leaving more opportunity for those like us who are willing to take the time to carefully work out the best path forward and then confidently take action. | Cal Newport | ||
| 53e13d5 | whiteboard effect. For some types of problems, working with someone else at the proverbial shared whiteboard can push you deeper than if you were working alone. The presence of the other party waiting for your next insight--be it someone physically in the same room or collaborating with you virtually--can short-circuit the natural instinct to avoid depth. | Cal Newport | ||
| b99e8d6 | easy to identify the relevant lead measure: time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal. | Cal Newport | ||
| 6fd6501 | 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| dddb889 | 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.. | Cal Newport | ||
| bc64cf0 | 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.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 94dadae | 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| 607c72d | 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 .. | Cal Newport | ||
| 7190dcd | 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| 125fee9 | 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| b0d614e | 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.. | Cal Newport | ||
| fdaff33 | For those familiar with the rigors of such activities, the limit expands to something like four hours, but rarely more. | Cal Newport | ||
| f0ea9c1 | 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| df5d53c | 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.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 6891e9d | 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| 85d4f4d | 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| 99bed62 | The subjects succeeded in resisting these particularly addictive distractions only around half the time. | Cal Newport | ||
| 329fd07 | 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| 1f37339 | 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| 87ec511 | 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| 431cd6e | The most common response to these complications is to suggest modest hacks and tips. Perhaps if you observe a digital Sabbath, | Cal Newport | ||
| 4e1f61e | 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| 776719c | 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| 101c9eb | 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... | Cal Newport |