Deep Work Quotes

“If every moment of potential boredom in your life—say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives—is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the “mental wrecks” in Nass’s research, it’s not ready for deep work—even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand… they’re pretty much mental wrecks.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“the difficulty of focus and the hours of practice necessary to strengthen your “mental muscle.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Shutdown complete”). This final step sounds cheesy, but it provides a simple cue to your mind that it’s safe to release work-related thoughts”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“providing your conscious brain time to rest enables your unconscious mind to take a shift sorting through your most complex professional challenges.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“more neuronal bandwidth available, allowing them to move around more information and sift through more potential solutions than your conscious centers of thinking”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“hub-and-spoke-style arrangement: Expose yourself to ideas in hubs on a regular basis, but maintain a spoke in which to work deeply on what you encounter.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“your world is the outcome of what you pay attention to, so consider for a moment the type of mental world constructed when you dedicate significant time to deep endeavors. There’s a gravity and sense of importance inherent in deep work—whether you’re Ric Furrer smithing a sword or a computer programmer optimizing an algorithm. Gallagher’s theory, therefore, predicts that if you spend enough time in this state, your mind will understand your world as rich in meaning and importance.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“your world is the outcome of what you pay attention to, so consider for a moment the type of mental world constructed when you dedicate significant time to deep endeavors.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The dominant force is the psychology of committing so seriously to the task at hand.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“By leveraging a radical change to your normal environment, coupled perhaps with a significant investment of effort or money, all dedicated toward supporting a deep work task, you increase the perceived importance of the task.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“organizing the raw materials of your work to minimize energy-dissipating friction”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

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

“tend to map out when I’ll work deeply during each week at the beginning of the week, and then refine these decisions, as needed, at the beginning of each day”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“wherever they popped up. If my kids were taking a good nap, I’d grab my laptop and lock myself in the home office. If my wife wanted to visit her parents in nearby Annapolis on a weekend day, I’d take advantage of the extra child care to disappear to a quiet corner of their house to write.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“the big red Xs on the calendar.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Jung, for example, needed his clinical practice to pay the bills and the Zurich coffeehouse scene to stimulate his thinking.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“People fight desires all day long.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy,”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“an age of ubiquitous and addictive click-bait.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“If you couldn’t count on this quick response time you’d instead have to do more advance planning for your work, be more organized, and be prepared to put things aside for a while and turn your attention elsewhere while waiting for what you requested. All of this would make the day to day of your working life harder (even if it produced more satisfaction and a better outcome in the long term). The rise of professional instant messaging, mentioned earlier in this chapter, can be seen as this mind-set pushed toward an extreme.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“By working on a single hard task for a long time without switching, Grant minimizes the negative impact of attention residue from his other obligations, allowing him to maximize performance on this one task.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

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

“skills, be they intellectual or physical, eventually reduce down to brain circuits.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“(1) your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you’re trying to improve or an idea you’re trying to master; (2) you receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it’s most productive.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“we argue that the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“to advance your understanding of your field you must tackle the relevant topics systematically, allowing your “converging rays of attention” to uncover the truth latent in each. In other words, he teaches: To learn requires intense concentration.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converging rays of attention; let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World