Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

by Cal Newport

always keep your self-imposed deadlines right at the edge of feasibility.

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.

participate in at least two or three such sessions in a typical week.

it takes advantage of periods that would otherwise be wasted (such as walking the dog or commuting to work),

Who says that this time is wasted? I actually find walking my dog productive in that it helps me relax and refocus on what is important in life. It also allows me time to be mindful.

learn a standard but quite impressive skill in the repertoire of most mental athletes: the ability to memorize a shuffled deck of cards.

accepting that the threshold for allowing a site regular access to your time and attention (not to mention personal data) should be much more stringent,

reject the state of distracted hyperconnectedness

I’m not trying to denigrate the benefits identified previously—there’s

Sounds like you are.

Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.

identify the main high-level goals in both your professional and your personal life.

keep the list limited to what’s most important and to keep the descriptions suitably high-level.

list for each the two or three most important activities that help you satisfy the goal.

consider the network tools you currently use.

go through the key activities you identified and ask whether the use of the tool has a substantially positive impact, a substantially negative impact, or little impact

Keep using this tool only if you concluded that it has substantial positive impacts and that these outweigh the negative impacts.

it’s the top two or three such activities—the number that this strategy asks you to focus on—that make most of the difference in whether or not you succeed with the goal.

ban yourself from using them for thirty days

Just stop using them, cold turkey.

Would the last thirty days have been notably better if I had been able to use this service? Did people care that I wasn’t using this service?

another part of the delusion that binds them to social media is the idea that people want to hear what you have to say

By dropping off these services without notice you can test the reality of your status as a content producer.

in the 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.

you both should and can make deliberate use of your time outside work,

dedicate some advance thinking to the question of how you want to spend your “day within a day.”

figure out in advance what you’re going to do with your evenings and weekends

give your brain a quality alternative.

taming shallow work’s footprint in your schedule, not eliminating it.

most adept deep thinker cannot spend more than four of these hours in a state of true depth.

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

Schedule every minute of your day.

maintain, at all times, a thoughtful say in what you’re doing with your time going forward—even

treat your time with respect.

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?

If our hypothetical college graduate requires many months of training to replicate a task, then this indicates that the task leverages hard-won expertise. As argued earlier, tasks that leverage your expertise tend to be deep tasks

Make People Who Send You E-mail Do More Work

Do More Work When You Send or Reply to E-mails

process you identified, points out the current step, and emphasizes the step that comes next.

“Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen.