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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 70021fd | Grant also batches his attention on a smaller time scale. Within a semester dedicated to research, he alternates between periods where his door is open to students and colleagues, and periods where he isolates himself to focus completely and without distraction on a single research task. (He typically divides the writing of a scholarly paper into three discrete tasks: analyzing the data, writing a full draft, and editing the draft into some.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 2a46826 | Leroy introduced an effect she called attention residue. In the introduction to this paper, she noted that other researchers have studied the effect of multitasking--trying to accomplish multiple tasks simultaneously--on performance, but that in the modern knowledge work office, once you got to a high enough level, it was more common to find people working on multiple projects sequentially: "Going from one meeting to the next, starting to w.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 05931bc | When Grant is working for days in isolation on a paper, in other words, he's doing so at a higher level of effectiveness than the standard professor following a more distracted strategy in which the work is repeatedly interrupted by residue-slathering interruptions. | Cal Newport | ||
| bd69e2b | you might institute a ban on any Internet use, or maintain a metric such as words produced per twenty-minute interval to keep your concentration honed. Without this structure, you'll have to mentally litigate again and again what you should and should not be doing during these sessions and keep trying to assess whether you're working sufficiently hard. These are unnecessary drains on your willpower reserves. | Cal Newport | ||
| 2961ec2 | 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, | Cal Newport | ||
| 232d6ec | Rowling's decision to check into a luxurious hotel suite near Edinburgh Castle is an example of a curious but effective strategy in the world of deep work: the grand gesture. The concept is simple: 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 import.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 034e46a | I call this approach, in which you fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule, 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 | ||
| 343a003 | In the final accounting, the journalistic philosophy of deep work scheduling remains difficult to pull off. But if you're confident in the value of what you're trying to produce, and practiced in the skill of going deep (a skill we will continue to develop in the strategies that follow), it can be a surprisingly robust way to squeeze out large amounts of depth from an otherwise demanding schedule. | Cal Newport | ||
| 1b37ba5 | When long-term convicts were first released they often experienced a form of agoraphobia--a fear of open spaces. The prison counselors had a special name for this type of agoraphobia when they attributed it to convicts--the fear of life. Freedom gave a man choices and choices could be terrifying. Every choice was a potential failure. | Robert Crais | ||
| e468478 | It was sometime after this realization that Shankman signed a book contract that gave him only two weeks to finish the entire manuscript. Meeting this deadline would require incredible concentration. To achieve this state, Shankman did something unconventional. He booked a round-trip business-class ticket to Tokyo. He wrote during the whole flight to Japan, drank an espresso in the business class lounge once he arrived in Japan, then turned.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 8299ddf | But this doesn't matter, as the specifics of the work are irrelevant. The meaning uncovered by such efforts is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in craftsmanship--not the outcomes of their work. Put another way, a wooden wheel is not noble, but its shaping can be. The same applies to knowledge work. You don't need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work. | Cal Newport | ||
| 5002918 | Sertillanges seems to have been ahead of his time, arguing in The Intellectual Life, "Men of genius themselves were great only by bringing all their power to bear on the point on which they had decided to show their full measure." -- | Cal Newport | ||
| 27fc0a4 | At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning--no after-dinner e-mail check, no mental replays of conversations, and no scheming about how you'll handle an upcoming challenge; shut down work thinking completely. | Cal Newport | ||
| 8e15b5d | 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 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 | ||
| 32058c1 | unconscious thought theory (UTT)--an attempt to understand the different roles conscious and unconscious deliberation play in decision making. | Cal Newport | ||
| 56ef0f3 | It might seem harmless to take a quick glance at your inbox every ten minutes or so. Indeed, many justify this behavior as better than the old practice of leaving an inbox open on the screen at all times (a straw-man habit that few follow anymore). But Leroy teaches us that this is not in fact much of an improvement. That quick check introduces a new target for your attention. Even worse, by seeing messages that you cannot deal with at the .. | Cal Newport | ||
| 42ff401 | Craftsmen like Furrer tackle professional challenges that are simple to define but difficult to execute--a useful imbalance when seeking purpose. Knowledge work exchanges this clarity for ambiguity. It can be hard to define exactly what a given knowledge worker does and how it differs from another: On our worst days, it can seem that all knowledge work boils down to the same exhausting roil of e-mails and PowerPoint, | Cal Newport | ||
| 1a57745 | From Descartes's skepticism came the radical belief that the individual seeking certainty trumped a God or king bestowing truth. The resulting Enlightenment, of course, led to the concept of human rights and freed many from oppression. But as Dreyfus and Kelly emphasize, for all its good in the political arena, in the domain of the metaphysical this thinking stripped the world of the order and sacredness essential to creating meaning. In a .. | Cal Newport | ||
| ce4dcdc | Craftsmanship, Dreyfus and Kelly argue in their book's conclusion, provides a key to reopening a sense of sacredness in a responsible manner. | Cal Newport | ||
| c06e34f | There's nothing intrinsic about the manual trades when it comes to generating this particular source of meaning. Any pursuit--be it physical or cognitive--that supports high levels of skill can also generate a sense of sacredness. | Cal Newport | ||
| c61d5dc | 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 | ||
| ab9ecca | The line went dead as I checked the mirror. The blue Dodge was back, but didn't stay long. It appeared twice more, never closer than three or four cars, and I never picked out the cars that replaced it. I wouldn't have known the Dodge was following me if they hadn't jumped the red. Jumping the red had cost them. I passed UCLA and the National Cemetery in Westwood, and reached Brentwood when Pike texted. HERE Pike, saying he was ready. 12OUT.. | Robert Crais | ||
| 5e32ab6 | It's here that 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.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 68f46cd | 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. Th.. | Cal Newport | ||
| a27b4cd | It follows that to embrace deep work in your own career, and to direct it toward cultivating your skill, is an effort that can transform a knowledge work job from a distracted, draining obligation into something satisfying--a portal to a world full of shining, wondrous things. | Cal Newport | ||
| 4e86fdb | The Great Restructuring, unlike the postwar period, is a particularly good time to have access to capital. | Cal Newport | ||
| 4b6f2ef | Thoreau establishes early in Walden: "The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." | Cal Newport | ||
| 3928567 | This study, it turns out, is one of many that validate attention restoration theory (ART), which claims that spending time in nature can improve your ability to concentrate. | Cal Newport | ||
| 3ac1920 | The Great Restructuring, unlike the postwar period, is a particularly good time to have access to capital. To understand why, first recall that bargaining theory, a key component in standard economic thinking, argues that when money is made through the combination of capital investment and labor, the rewards are returned, roughly speaking, proportional to the input. As digital technology reduces the need for labor in many industries, the pr.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 4b0d03d | Let's pull together the threads spun so far: Current economic thinking, as I've surveyed, argues that the unprecedented growth and impact of technology are creating a massive restructuring of our economy. In this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital. | Cal Newport | ||
| 2057044 | 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| 17c96df | You need your own philosophy for integrating deep work into your professional life. | Cal Newport | ||
| 4b19fc7 | You must be careful to choose a philosophy that fits your specific circumstances, as a mismatch here can derail your deep work habit before it has a chance to solidify. | Cal Newport | ||
| 6f1dc28 | Knuth deploys what I call the monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling. This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations. Practitioners of the monastic philosophy tend to have a well-defined and highly valued professional goal that they're pursuing, and the bulk of their professional success comes from doing this one thing exceptionally well. | Cal Newport | ||
| 0570a1d | Stephenson wrote an essay titled "Why I Am a Bad Correspondent." At the core of his explanation for his inaccessibility is the following decision: The productivity equation is a non-linear one, in other words. This accounts for why I am a bad correspondent and why I very rarely accept speaking engagements. If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. But as those ch.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 52a6af7 | The "great and profound mistake which my typical man makes in regard to his day," he elaborates, is that even though he doesn't particularly enjoy his work (seeing it as something to "get through"), "he persists in looking upon those hours from ten to six as 'the day,' to which the ten hours preceding them and the six hours following them are nothing but a prologue and epilogue." -- | Cal Newport | ||
| d10893a | Pike was silent for a moment, then simply hung up. To expect more was to be disappointed. Everett's | Robert Crais | ||
| f185ab7 | I opened the material I had about Amy Breslyn and studied her picture again. She didn't look like a person who would embezzle four hundred sixty thousand dollars, but people can fool you. She looked like a sad version of someone's marshmallow aunt: a kindly woman, slightly out-of-date, who wore sensible shoes and minded her own business. I | Robert Crais | ||
| 0782133 | Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate. Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity. We now know from decades of research in both psychology and neuroscience that the state of mental strain that accompanies.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 929dcef | We could, of course, eliminate this anachronistic commitment to busyness if we could easily demonstrate its negative impact on the bottom line, but the metric black hole enters the scene at this point and prevents such clarity. | Cal Newport | ||
| fec98f8 | Jung retreated to Bollingen, not to escape his professional life, but instead to advance it. | Cal Newport | ||
| a5184ae | the 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 | ||
| 659ef1c | the late communication theorist and New York University professor Neil Postman. Writing in the early 1990s, as the personal computer revolution first accelerated, 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 instea.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 6dfa958 | We can, therefore, still dismiss the depth-destroying open office concept without dismissing the innovation-producing theory of serendipitous creativity. The key is to maintain both in a hub-and-spoke-style arrangement: Expose yourself to ideas in hubs on a regular basis, but maintain a spoke in which to work deeply on what you encounter. | Cal Newport |