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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 98c850a | In my experience, the key to sustained success with this philosophy is accepting that it's not really about technology, but is instead more about the quality of your life. The more you experiment with the ideas and practices on the preceding pages, the more you'll come to realize that digital minimalism is much more than a set of rules, it's about cultivating a life worth living in our current age of alluring devices. | Cal Newport | ||
| d6bd2eb | 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| ffc1433 | An endless bombardment of news and gossip and images has rendered us manic information addicts. It broke me. It might break you, too. | Cal Newport | ||
| 7bb83ba | The things that make a great job great...are rare and valuable. If you want them in your working life, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return In other words, you need to be good at something before you can expect to get a good job. | job passion skills success value | Cal Newport | |
| b942681 | Pushing past what is comfortable, however is only one part of the deliberate-practice story; the other part is embracing honest feedback -- even if it destroys what you thought was good. | Cal Newport | ||
| cadc2b3 | If you want a great job, you need something of great value to offer in return. | job success value | Cal Newport | |
| d8d3cb0 | It was time for Morse to make his first major demonstration of his invention. All he needed was an inaugural message. Based on a suggestion from the daughter of the patent commissioner who had supported Morse's innovation, he tapped a well-known phrase from the end of the book of Numbers: WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT? As Winchester notes, these words, when considered in isolation, "formed a simple declarative exclamation, a statement of Samuel Mor.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 899a871 | In an open marketplace for attention, darker emotions attract more eyeballs than positive and constructive thoughts. | Cal Newport | ||
| 3d53b40 | The sugar high of convenience is fleeting and the sting of missing out dulls rapidly, but the meaningful glow that comes from taking charge of what claims your time and attention is something that persists. | Cal Newport | ||
| b73a550 | Maher looked into the camera and said: The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they're friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they're just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children. Because, let's face it, checking your "likes" is the new smoking." | Cal Newport | ||
| 5eb4118 | Turning her attention to the workplace, Turkle finds young employees who retreat to email because the thought of an unstructured conversation terrifies them, and unnecessary office tensions that fester when communication shifts from nuanced conversation to ambiguous connection. | Cal Newport | ||
| 1bd2512 | To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction. To learn, in other words, is an act of deep work. | Cal Newport | ||
| ac12970 | The problem this research identifies with this work strategy is that 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.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 0137242 | To summarize, big trends in business today actively decrease people's ability to perform deep work, even though the benefits promised by these trends (e.g., increased serendipity, faster responses to requests, and more exposure) are arguably dwarfed by the benefits that flow from a commitment to deep work (e.g., the ability to learn hard things fast and produce at an elite level). | Cal Newport | ||
| daee7bf | Generally speaking, as knowledge work makes more complex demands of the labor force, it becomes harder to measure the value of an individual's efforts. | Cal Newport | ||
| 1838cdc | A similar reality creates problems for many knowledge workers. They want to prove that they're productive members of the team and are earning their keep, but they're not entirely clear what this goal constitutes. | Cal Newport | ||
| 59b0e18 | If you service low-impact activities, therefore, you're taking away time you could be spending on higher-impact activities. | Cal Newport | ||
| 062ad85 | We added new technologies to the periphery of our experience for minor reasons, then woke one morning to discover that they had colonized the core of our daily life. | Cal Newport | ||
| 4589843 | the cumulative cost of the noncrucial things we clutter our lives with can far outweigh the small benefits each individual piece of clutter promises. | Cal Newport | ||
| e30fd8b | Part of what makes this philosophy so effective is that the very act of being selective about your tools will bring you satisfaction, typically much more than what is lost from the tools you decide to avoid. | Cal Newport | ||
| 933d0cd | Their rituals minimized the friction in this transition to depth, allowing them to go deep more easily and stay in the state longer. | Cal Newport | ||
| d558277 | Your ritual needs to specify a location for your deep work efforts. | Cal Newport | ||
| 01bf77e | be sure to also give yourself a specific time frame to keep the session a discrete challenge and not an open-ended slog. | Cal Newport | ||
| 6e0c9e9 | It was the glacial writing progress during this year that drove Chappell to embrace the rhythmic method. He made a rule that he would wake up and start working by five thirty every morning. He would then work until seven thirty, make breakfast, and go to work already done with his dissertation obligations for the day. Pleased by early progress, he soon pushed his wake-up time to four forty-five to squeeze out even more morning depth. | Cal Newport | ||
| 3144524 | The stag in limpid currents with surpriseSees crystal branches on his forehead rise. | Ambrose Philips | ||
| cb12974 | To Woolf, in other words, solitude is not a pleasant diversion, but instead a form of liberation from the cognitive oppression that results in its absence. [referencing Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own] | Cal Newport | ||
| f278bb4 | To work deeply is a big deal and should not be an activity undertaken lightly. Surrounding such efforts with a complicated (and perhaps, to the outside world, quite strange) ritual accepts this reality--providing your mind with the structure and commitment it needs to slip into the state of focus where you can begin to create things that matter. | Cal Newport | ||
| e06583e | When you use craft to leave the virtual world of the screen and instead begin to work in more complex ways with the physical world around you, you're living truer to your primal potential. Craft makes us human, and in doing so, it can provide deep satisfactions that are hard to replicate in other (dare I say) less hands-on activities. | Cal Newport | ||
| 6d286b8 | The rhythmic philosophy provides an interesting contrast to the bimodal philosophy. It perhaps fails to achieve the most intense levels of deep thinking sought in the daylong concentration sessions favored by the bimodalist. The trade-off, however, is that this approach works better with the reality of human nature. By supporting deep work with rock-solid routines that make sure a little bit gets done on a regular basis, the rhythmic schedu.. | Cal Newport | ||
| c76d30e | For many, however, it's not just self-control issues that bias them toward the rhythmic philosophy, but also the reality that some jobs don't allow you to disappear for days at a time when the need to go deep arises. (For a lot of bosses, the standard is that you're free to focus as hard as you want... so long as the boss's e-mails are still answered promptly.) This is likely the biggest reason why the rhythmic philosophy is one of the most.. | Cal Newport | ||
| b6fdbe7 | Bill Gates, for example, was famous during his time as Microsoft CEO for taking Think Weeks during which he would leave behind his normal work and family obligations to retreat to a cabin with a stack of papers and books. His goal was to think deeply, without distraction, about the big issues relevant to his company. It was during one of these weeks, for example, that he famously came to the conclusion that the Internet was going to be a ma.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 62b804e | A foundational theme in digital minimalism is that new technology, when used with care and intention, creates a better life than either Luddism or mindless adoption. | Cal Newport | ||
| 1339c35 | 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 | ||
| 0a433c4 | To leave the distracted masses to join the focused few, I'm arguing, is a transformative experience. | Cal Newport | ||
| 51a0b32 | it's not just the change of environment or seeking of quiet that enables more depth. The dominant force is the psychology of committing so seriously to the task at hand. To put yourself in an exotic location to focus on a writing project, or to take a week off from work just to think, or to lock yourself in a hotel room until you complete an important invention: These gestures push your deep goal to a level of mental priority that helps unl.. | Cal Newport | ||
| d67048c | In MIT lore, it's generally believed that this haphazard combination of different disciplines, thrown together in a large reconfigurable building, led to chance encounters and a spirit of inventiveness that generated breakthroughs at a fast pace, innovating topics as diverse as Chomsky grammars, Loran navigational radars, and video games, all within the same productive postwar decades. | Cal Newport | ||
| cce0173 | Bell Labs director Mervin Kelly guided the construction of a new home for the lab that would purposefully encourage interaction between its diverse mix of scientists and engineers. Kelly dismissed the standard university-style approach of housing different departments in different buildings, and instead connected the spaces into one contiguous structure joined by long hallways--some so long that when you stood at one end it would appear to .. | Cal Newport | ||
| f92cf70 | 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| e13d818 | By focusing intensely on a specific skill, you're forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire, again and again, in isolation. This repetitive use of a specific circuit triggers cells called oligodendrocytes to begin wrapping layers of myelin around the neurons in the circuits--effectively cementing the skill. The reason, therefore, why it's important to focus intensely on the task at hand while avoiding distraction is because this is the .. | Cal Newport | ||
| b5df3a3 | By contrast, if you're trying to learn a complex new skill (say, SQL database management) in a state of low concentration (perhaps you also have your Facebook feed open), you're firing too many circuits simultaneously and haphazardly to isolate the group of neurons you actually want to strengthen. | Cal Newport | ||
| ae06aa0 | Timely blossom, Infant fair,Fondling of a happy pair. | Ambrose Philips | ||
| 7ee2ea5 | The journalist Mason Currey, who spent half a decade cataloging the habits of famous thinkers and writers (and from whom I learned the previous two examples), summarized this tendency toward systematization as follows: There is a popular notion that artists work from inspiration--that there is some strike or bolt or bubbling up of creative mojo from who knows where... but I hope [my work] makes clear that waiting for inspiration to strike i.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 39f7d07 | This strategy suggests the following: To make the most out of your deep work sessions, build rituals of the same level of strictness and idiosyncrasy as the important thinkers mentioned previously. There's a good reason for this mimicry. Great minds like Caro and Darwin didn't deploy rituals to be weird; they did so because success in their work depended on their ability to go deep, again and again | Cal Newport | ||
| e2fd1d6 | 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. Within the year, he stacks his teaching into the fall semester, during which he can turn all of his attention to teaching well and being available to his students. (This method seems to wo.. | Cal Newport |