Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

by Cal Newport

High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)

The consultants were afraid the client would rebel. It turned out that the client didn’t care. As Jung, Grant, and Perlow’s subjects discovered, 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.

(For a lot of bosses, the standard is that you’re free to focus as hard as you want … so long as the boss’s e-mails are still answered promptly.)

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

(most people are familiar, for example, with the experience of glancing at an alarming e-mail on a Saturday morning and then having its implications haunt your thoughts for the rest of the weekend).

Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction. Much in the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, you’ll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom.

Stop playing mobile games when bored!

constant attention switching online has a lasting negative effect on your brain.

It’s instead the constant switching from low-stimuli/high-value activities to high-stimuli/low-value activities, at the slightest hint of boredom or cognitive challenge, that teaches your mind to never tolerate an absence of novelty.

This quintessential shallow activity is particularly insidious in its grip on most knowledge workers’ attention, as it delivers a steady stream of distractions addressed specifically to you.

Email.

In his book The Innovators, Isaacson later summarized Gates’s unique tendency toward depth as follows: “The one trait that differentiated [Gates from Allen] was focus. Allen’s mind would flit between many ideas and passions, but Gates was a serial obsessor.”

The Innovators, Walter Issacson

A commitment to deep work is not a moral stance and it’s not a philosophical statement—it is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done.