Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

by Cal Newport

I’m comfortable being bored, and this can be a surprisingly rewarding skill—especially on a lazy D.C. summer night listening to a Nationals game slowly unfold on the radio.

As Brynjolfsson and McAfee point out, postwar Europe was an example of a bad time to be sitting on a pile of cash, as the combination of rapid inflation and aggressive taxation wiped out old fortunes with surprising speed (what we might call the “Downton Abbey Effect”). The Great Restructuring, unlike the postwar period, is a particularly good time to have access to capital.

(the phrases used by Csikszentmihalyi to describe what generates flow include notions of stretching your mind to its limits, concentrating, and losing yourself in an activity—all of which also describe deep work).

attempting to schedule deep work in an ad hoc fashion is not an effective way to manage your limited willpower.) But

When you’re done, have a set phrase you say that indicates completion (to end my own ritual, I say, “Shutdown complete”).

The people we talk with continually said, “look, when I really have to concentrate, I turn off everything and I am laser-focused.” And unfortunately, they’ve developed habits of mind that make it impossible for them to be laser-focused. They’re suckers for irrelevancy. They just can’t keep on task. [emphasis mine]

Distraction of this type, in many ways, is the obvious enemy to defeat in developing a productive meditation habit. A subtler, but equally effective adversary, is looping.

don’t doubt the existence of these friends, but we can assume that these friendships are lightweight—given that they’re based on sending short messages back and forth over a computer network. There’s nothing wrong with such lightweight friendships, but they’re unlikely to be at the center of this user’s social life.

False

The Any-Benefit Approach to Network Tool Selection: You’re justified in using a network tool if you can identify any possible benefit to its use, or anything you might possibly miss out on if you don’t use it. The problem with this approach, of course, is that it ignores all the negatives that come along with the tools in question.