Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

by Cal Newport

I build my days around a core of carefully chosen deep work, with the shallow activities I absolutely cannot avoid batched into smaller bursts at the peripheries of my schedule. Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.

Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy The ability to quickly master hard things. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.

systematically develop your personal ability to go deep—and by doing so, reap great rewards.

skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.

your world is the outcome of what you pay attention to,

The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” Csikszentmihalyi calls this mental state flow

Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.

a source of meaning sited outside the individual.

You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.

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

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets … it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.

Notice that this craftsman approach to tool selection stands in opposition to the any-benefit approach. Whereas the any-benefit mind-set identifies any potential positive impact as justification for using a tool, the craftsman variant requires that these positive impacts affect factors at the core of what’s important to you and that they outweigh the negatives.

If you give your mind something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you’ll end the day more fulfilled, and begin the next one more relaxed,