Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

by Cal Newport

Deep work, though a burden to prioritize, was crucial for his goal of changing the world.

I’m comfortable being bored, and this can be a surprisingly rewarding skill—especially

it takes time to ease into a state of concentration)

In fact, perhaps the single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration.

“[Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.”

Discipline #1: Focus on the Wildly Important

“The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.”

Discipline #2: Act on the Lead Measures

In other words, lead measures turn your attention to improving the behaviors you directly control in the near future that will then have a positive impact on your long-term goals.

Discipline #3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard

Discipline #4: Create a Cadence of Accountability

A shutdown habit, therefore, is not necessarily reducing the amount of time you’re engaged in productive work, but is instead diversifying the type of work you deploy.

Only the confidence that you’re done with work until the next day can convince your brain to downshift to the level where it can begin to recharge for the next day to follow.

(to end my own ritual, I say, “Shutdown complete”).

Fortunately, we don’t need to complete a task to get it off our minds.

“Committing to a specific plan for a goal may therefore not only facilitate attainment of the goal but may also free cognitive resources for other pursuits.”

To simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life,

To summarize, to succeed with deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli.

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.

As in mindfulness meditation, you must continue to bring your attention back to the problem at hand when it wanders or stalls.

The Any-Benefit Approach to Network Tool Selection: You’re justified in using a network tool if you can identify any possible benefit to its use, or anything you might possibly miss out on if you don’t use it.

In order to transform what he described as a “difficult undertaking” into something less onerous, he called it a “packing party,” explaining: “Everything’s more exciting when it’s a party, right?”

Once the packing was done, Nicodemus then spent the next week going through his normal routine. If he needed something that was packed, he would unpack it and put it back where it used to go. At the end of the week, he noticed that the vast majority of his stuff remained untouched in its boxes. So he got rid of it.

One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change—not rest, except in sleep.

“How can we afford to put our business on hold for a month to ‘mess around’ with new ideas?” Fried asked rhetorically. “How can we afford not to?”

“What makes sense for me to do with the time that remains?”

It’s the habit of asking that returns results, not your unyielding fidelity to the answer.

How long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task?

tasks that leverage your expertise tend to be deep tasks and they can therefore provide a double benefit: They return more value per time spent, and they stretch your abilities, leading to improvement.

Ask Your Boss for a Shallow Work Budget

What percentage of my time should be spent on shallow work?

Finish Your Work by Five Thirty