Deep Work Quotes

“Another study found that people who claimed to work sixty to sixty-four hours per week were actually averaging more like forty-four hours per week, while those claiming to work more than seventy-five hours were actually working less than fifty-five.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“getting the most out of your deep work habit requires training, and as clarified previously, this training must address two goals: improving your ability to concentrate intensely and overcoming your desire for distraction.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Attention residue left by unresolved switches dampens your performance.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“By reducing the need to make decisions about deep work moment by moment, I can preserve more mental energy for the deep thinking itself.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The 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.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Your ability to concentrate is only as strong as your commitment to train it.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Entertainment-focused websites designed to capture and hold your attention for as long as possible...provide a cognitive crutch to ensure you eliminate any chance of boredom. Such behavior is dangerous, as it weakens your mind’s general ability to resist distraction, making #deepwork difficult later when you really want to concentrate.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Treat shallow work with suspicion because its damage is often vastly underestimated and its importance vastly overestimated.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“A good chief executive is essentially a hard-to-automate decision engine, not unlike IBM’s Jeopardy!-playing Watson system. They have built up a hard-won repository of experience and have honed and proved an instinct for their market. They’re then presented inputs throughout the day—in the form of e-mails, meetings, site visits, and the like—that they must process and act on. To ask a CEO to spend four hours thinking deeply about a single problem is a waste of what makes him or her valuable. It’s better to hire three smart subordinates to think deeply about the problem and then bring their solutions to the executive for a final decision.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Going from one meeting to the next, starting to work on one project and soon after having to transition to another is just part of life in organizations,” Leroy explains. The problem this research identifies with this work strategy is that when you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task. This residue gets especially thick if your work on Task A was unbounded and of low intensity before you switched, but even if you finish Task A before moving on, your attention remains divided for a while.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“(He typically divides the writing of a scholarly paper into three discrete tasks: analyzing the data, writing a full draft, and editing the draft into something publishable.)”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“una mente ociosa es el taller del diablo”... Cuando pierdes la concentración, tu mente tiende a fijarse en lo que no marcha bien en tu vida y a pasar por alto lo que sí está bien».14Desde una perspectiva neurológica, un día de trabajo que pasamos en función de lo superficial muy probablemente será un día agotador y perturbador, incluso si la mayoría de cosas superficiales que ocupan su atención parecen inofensivas o divertidas.”
― Cal Newport, Céntrate (Deep Work): Las cuatro reglas para el éxito en la era de la distracción

“As psychologists, Ericsson and the other researchers in his field are not interested in why deliberate practice works; they’re just identifying it as an effective behavior. In the intervening decades since Ericsson’s first major papers on the topic, however, neuroscientists have been exploring the physical mechanisms that drive people’s improvements on hard tasks. As the journalist Daniel Coyle surveys in his 2009 book, The Talent Code, these scientists increasingly believe the answer includes myelin—a layer of fatty tissue that grows around neurons, acting like an insulator that allows the cells to fire faster and cleaner. To understand the role of myelin in improvement, keep in mind that skills, be they intellectual or physical, eventually reduce down to brain circuits. This new science of performance argues that you get better at a skill as you develop more myelin around the relevant neurons, allowing the corresponding circuit to fire more effortlessly and effectively. To be great at something is to be well myelinated.

This understanding is important because it provides a neurological foundation for why deliberate practice works. By focusing intensely on a specific skill, you’re forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire, again and again, in isolation. This repetitive use of a specific circuit triggers cells called oligodendrocytes to begin wrapping layers of myelin around the neurons in the circuits—effectively cementing the skill. The reason, therefore, why it’s important to focus intensely on the task at hand while avoiding distraction is because this is the only way to isolate the relevant neural circuit enough to trigger useful myelination. By contrast, if you’re trying to learn a complex new skill (say, SQL database management) in a state of low concentration (perhaps you also have your Facebook feed open), you’re firing too many circuits simultaneously and haphazardly to isolate the group of neurons you actually want to strengthen.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“A good chief executive is essentially a hard-to-automate decision engine,”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“isolation until he completes the task at hand. My guess is that Adam Grant doesn’t work substantially more hours than the average professor at an elite research institution (generally speaking, this is a group prone to workaholism), but he still manages to produce more than just about anyone else in his field. I argue that his approach to batching helps explain this paradox. In particular, by consolidating his work into intense and uninterrupted pulses, he’s leveraging the following law of productivity: High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“there’s one idea in particular that seems central to his method: the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“When measured empirically, people were happier at work and less happy relaxing than they suspected.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“This disease wanted to monopolize my attention, but as much as possible, I would focus on my life instead.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The two core abilities just described depend on your ability to perform deep work. If”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill,”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“For an individual focused on deep work, the implication is that you should identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours. The general exhortation to “spend more time working deeply” doesn’t spark a lot of enthusiasm. To instead have a specific goal that would return tangible and substantial professional benefits will generate a steadier stream of enthusiasm.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Do not reply to an e-mail message if any of the following applies: • It’s ambiguous or otherwise makes it hard for you to generate a reasonable response. • It’s not a question or proposal that interests you. • Nothing really good would happen if you did respond and nothing really bad would happen if you didn’t.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Process-Centric Response to E-mail #3: “Thanks for getting back to me. I’m going to read this draft of the article and send you back an edited version annotated with comments on Friday (the 10th). In this version I send back, I’ll edit what I can do myself, and add comments to draw your attention to places where I think you’re better suited to make the improvement. At that point, you should have what you need to polish and submit the final draft, so I’ll leave you to do that—no need to reply to this message or to follow up with me after I return the edits—unless, of course, there’s an issue.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“You “like” my status update and I’ll “like” yours. This agreement gives everyone a simulacrum of importance without requiring much effort in return.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“For example, it might be the case that 80 percent of a business’s profits come from just 20 percent of its clients, 80 percent of a nation’s wealth is held by its richest 20 percent of citizens, or 80 percent of computer software crashes come from just 20 percent of the identified bugs.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“capture every task in a common list, and then review these tasks before making a plan for the next day.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“W dzisiejszym świecie biznesu praca głęboka powinna być priorytetem – ale nie jest. Pokazałem wyżej, skąd bierze się ten paradoks: (1)
praca głęboka jest trudna, a płytka łatwiejsza, (2) wobec braku jasnych celów w pracy umysłowej widoczna krzątanina towarzysząca
płytkiej pracy sama w sobie staje się celem, (3) wytworzyło się przekonanie, że jeśli jakieś zachowanie ma związek z internetem, to jest
dobre – niezależnie od wpływu na naszą zdolność tworzenia rzeczy wartościowych. Temu wszystkiemu sprzyja niemożność wymiernej oceny
wartości pracy głębokiej i kosztów jej lekceważenia.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (Marathi) - Sakhol Karya

“The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World