Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

by Cal Newport

The Law of the Vital Few*: In many settings, 80 percent of a given effect is due to just 20 percent of the possible causes.

that the most important 20 percent or so of these activities provide the bulk of the benefit.

If you service low-impact activities, therefore, you’re taking away time you could be spending on higher-impact activities. It’s a zero-sum game.

by low-impact activities—like finding old friends on Facebook—and reinvesting in high-impact activities—like taking a good friend out to lunch—you end up more successful in your goal.

You should take this same care in deciding which tools you allow to claim your own limited time and attention.

By spending a month without these services, you can replace your fear that you might miss out—on events, on conversations, on shared cultural experience—with a dose of reality.

The reason why I ask you to not announce your thirty-day experiment is because for some people another part of the delusion that binds them to social media is the idea that people want to hear what you have to say,

for my current blog, Study Hacks,

scheme of your life and what you want to accomplish, they’re a lightweight whimsy, one unimportant distraction among many threatening to derail you from something deeper.

It’s crucial, therefore, that you figure out in advance what you’re going to do with your evenings and weekends before they begin.

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.

relaxed, than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in semiconscious and unstructured Web surfing.

To summarize, if you want to eliminate the addictive pull of entertainment sites on your time and attention, give your brain a quality alternative.

Schedule Every Minute of Your Day

We spend much of our day on autopilot—not giving much thought to what we’re doing with our time. This is a problem.

suggestion: At the beginning of each workday, turn to a new page of lined paper in a notebook you dedicate to this purpose. Down the left-hand side of the page, mark every other line with an hour of the day, covering the full set of hours you typically work. Now comes the important part: Divide the hours of your workday into blocks and assign activities to the blocks. For example, you might block off nine a.m. to eleven a.m. for writing a client’s press release. To do so, actually draw a box that covers the lines corresponding to these hours, then write “press release” inside the box. Not every block need be dedicated to a work task. There might be time blocks for lunch or relaxation breaks.

Your goal is not to stick to a given schedule at all costs; it’s instead to maintain, at all times, a thoughtful say in what you’re doing with your time going forward—even if these decisions are reworked again and again as the day unfolds.

almost definitely you’re going to underestimate at first how much time you require for most things.

In other words, I not only allow spontaneity in my schedule; I encourage it.

deep work habit requires you to treat your time with respect.

Decide in advance what you’re going to do with every minute of your workday.

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?

Once you know where your activities fall on the deep-to-shallow scale, bias your time toward the former. When we reconsider our case studies, for example, we see that the first task is something that you would want to prioritize as a good use of time,

Finish Your Work by Five Thirty

Fixed-schedule productivity, in other words, is a meta-habit that’s simple to adopt

If you have to choose just one behavior that reorients your focus toward the deep, this one should be high on your list of possibilities.

Become Hard to Reach

You have more control over your electronic communication than you might at first assume.

Tip #1: Make People Who Send You E-mail Do More Work

I call this approach a sender filter, as I’m asking my correspondents

The most crucial line in my description is the following: “I’ll only respond to those proposals that are a good match for my schedule and interests.”

obligation. You could, if you wanted to, ignore them all, and nothing bad would happen. Psychologically, this can be freeing.

Tip #2: Do More Work When You Send or Reply to E-mails

What is the project represented by this message, and what is the most efficient

replace a quick response with one that takes the time to describe the process you identified, points out the current step, and emphasizes the step that comes next. I

Tip #3: Don’t Respond