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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Cal Newport
Read between
July 10 - July 17, 2020
“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.”
Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.
Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.
Quotes
Gallagher’s writing emphasizes that the content of what we focus on matters.
Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow, by contrast, is mostly agnostic to the content of our attention.
Deep work is an activity well suited to generate a flow state
To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction.
All Things Shining,
Book to read
What happened between then and now? The short answer, the authors argue, is Descartes. From Descartes’s skepticism came the radical belief that the individual seeking certainty trumped a God or king bestowing truth.
The meaning uncovered by such efforts is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in craftsmanship—not the outcomes of their work.
the ancient Greek concept of eudaimonia (a state in which you’re achieving your full human potential),
The first room
“culture of healthy stress and peer pressure.”
As you leave the gallery, you next enter the salon.
The salon is designed to create a mood that “hovers between intense curiosity and argumentation.”
Beyond the salon you enter the library.
This room stores a permanent record of all work produced in the machine, as well as the books and other resources used in this previous work. There will be copiers and scanners for gathering and collecting the information you need for your project. Dewane describes the library as “the hard drive of the machine.”
The next room is the office space. It contains a standard conference room with a whiteboard a...
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“The of...
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“is for low-intensity activity.” To use our terminology, this is the space to complete the shallow eff...
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the final room of the machine, a collection of what Dewane calls “deep work chambers” (he adopted the term “deep work” from my articles on the topic).
“The purpose of the deep work chamber is to allow for total focus and uninterrupted work flow,”
a process in which you spend ninety minutes inside, take a ninety-minute break, and repeat two or three times—at which point your brain will have achieved its limit of concentration for the day.
New Process to experiment for better "flow"
Willpower
Book to read
You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.
The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.
On the other hand, if you’re inside this pool—someone whose contribution to the world is discrete, clear, and individualized*—then
Monastic Deep Work
the revolutionary psychologist and thinker Carl Jung.
Search and read about him to gain some perspective in life
Jung’s approach is what I call the bimodal philosophy of deep work.
This philosophy asks that you divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else.
people will usually respect your right to become inaccessible if these periods are well defined and well advertised, and outside these stretches, you’re once again easy to find.
chain method
rhythmic philosophy. This philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit. The goal, in other words, is to generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you’re going to go deep.
Another common way to implement the rhythmic philosophy is to replace the visual aid of the chain method with a set starting time that you use every day for deep work.
“[Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.”
Your ritual needs to specify a location for your deep work efforts.
specific time frame to keep the session a discrete challenge and not an open-ended slog.
Your ritual needs rules and processes to keep your efforts structured.
what you should and should not be doing during these sessions
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, or make sure you have access to enough food of the right type to maintain energy, or integrate light exercise such as walking to help keep the mind clear. (As Nietzsche said: “It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.”)
Make Grand Gestures
Don’t Work Alone
Lead measures, on the other hand, “measure the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures.”
measure: time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal.
unconscious thought theory (UTT)—an
an attempt to understand the different roles conscious and unconscious deliberation play in decision making. At a high level, this theory proposes that for decisions that require the application of strict rules, the conscious mind must be involved.
On the other hand, for decisions that involve large amounts of information and multiple vague, and perhaps even conflicting, constraints, your unconscious mind is well suited to tackle the issue. UTT hypothesizes that this is due to the fact that these regions of your brain have more neuronal bandwidth available, allowing them to move around more information and sift through more potential solutions than your conscious centers of thinking. Your conscious mind, according to this theory, is like a home computer on which you can run carefully written programs that return correct answers to
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Subjects were split into two groups. One group was asked to take a walk on a wooded path in an arboretum near the Ann Arbor, Michigan, campus where the study was conducted. The other group was sent on a walk through the bustling center of the city. Both groups were then given a concentration-sapping task called backward digit-span. The core finding of the study is that the nature group performed up to 20 percent better on the task. The nature advantage still held the next week when the researchers brought back the same subjects and switched the locations: It wasn’t the people who determined
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attention restoration theory (ART),
