Deep Work Quotes

“the lack of distraction in my life tones down that background hum of nervous mental energy that seems to increasingly pervade people’s daily lives.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

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

“example, need to focus on doing serious journalism—diving into complicated”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Stuff accumulates in people’s lives, in part, because when faced with a specific act of elimination it’s easy to worry, “What if I need this one day?,” and then use this worry as an excuse to keep the item in question sitting around.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“if you want to eliminate the addictive pull of entertainment sites on your time and attention, give your brain a quality alternative. Not only will this preserve your ability to resist distraction and concentrate, but you might even fulfill Arnold Bennett’s ambitious goal of experiencing, perhaps for the first time, what it means to live, and not just exist. Rule”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“I’ve invested significant effort to minimize the shallow in my life while making sure I get the most out of the time this frees up. I build my days around a core of carefully chosen deep work, with the shallow activities I absolutely cannot avoid batched into smaller bursts at the peripheries of my schedule. Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“the practice of giving of your time and attention, without expectation of something in return, as a key strategy in professional advancement.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“the common habit of working in a state of semi-distraction is potentially devastating to your performance. It might seem harmless to take a quick glance at your inbox every ten minutes or so. Indeed, many justify this behavior as better than the old practice of leaving an inbox open on the screen at all times (a straw-man habit that few follow anymore). But Leroy teaches us that this is not in fact much of an improvement. That quick check introduces a new target for your attention. Even worse, by seeing messages that you cannot deal with at the moment (which is almost always the case), you’ll be forced to turn back to the primary task with a secondary task left unfinished. The attention residue left by such unresolved switches dampens your performance.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“the very best students often studied less than the group of students right below them on the GPA rankings. One of the explanations for this phenomenon turned out to be the formula detailed earlier: The best students understood the role intensity plays in productivity and therefore went out of their way to maximize their concentration—radically reducing the time required to prepare for tests or write papers, without diminishing the quality of their results.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“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

“During these periods, which can last up to three or four days, he’ll often put an out-of-office auto-responder on his e-mail so correspondents will know not to expect a response. “It sometimes confuses my colleagues,” he told me. “They say, ‘You’re not out of office, I see you in your office right now!’” But to Grant, it’s important to enforce strict isolation until he completes the task at hand.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“friendships are lightweight—given that they’re based on sending short messages back and forth over a computer network.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“third option: accepting that these tools are not inherently evil, and that some of them might be quite vital to your success and happiness, but at the same time also 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, and that most people should therefore be using many fewer such tools.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

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

“Even when they’re required to complete something more involved, the habit of frequently checking inboxes ensures that these issues remain at the forefront of their attention. Gallagher teaches us that this is a foolhardy way to go about your day, as it ensures that your mind will construct an understanding of your working life that’s dominated by stress, irritation, frustration, and triviality. The world represented by your inbox, in other words, isn’t a pleasant world to inhabit.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Fixed-schedule productivity, in other words, is a meta-habit that’s simple to adopt but broad in its impact.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

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

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

“Bluma Zeigarnik, describes the ability of incomplete tasks to dominate our attention.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“A now voluminous line of inquiry, initiated in a series of pioneering papers also written by Roy Baumeister, has established the following important (and at the time, unexpected) truth about willpower: You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“After a week, the researchers had gathered more than 7,500 samples. Here’s the short version of what they found: People fight desires all day long. As Baumeister summarized in his subsequent book, Willpower (co-authored with the science writer John Tierney): “Desire turned out to be the norm, not the exception.” The five most common desires these subjects fought include, not surprisingly, eating, sleeping, and sex. But the top five list also included desires for “taking a break from [hard] work… checking e-mail and social networking sites, surfing the web, listening to music, or watching television.” The lure of the Internet and television proved especially strong:”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Rule #1 taught you how to integrate deep work into your schedule and support it with routines and rituals designed to help you consistently reach the current limit of your concentration ability.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“or project has been reviewed and that for each you have confirmed that either (1) you have a plan you trust for its completion, or (2) it’s captured in a place where it will be revisited when the time is right.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Walking through nature, by contrast, exposes you to what lead author Marc Berman calls “inherently fascinating stimuli,” using sunsets as an example. These stimuli “invoke attention modestly, allowing focused-attention mechanisms a chance to replenish.” Put another way, when walking through nature, you’re freed from having to direct your attention, as there are few challenges to navigate (like crowded street crossings), and experience enough interesting stimuli to keep your mind sufficiently occupied to avoid the need to actively aim your attention. This state allows your directed attention resources time to replenish. After fifty minutes of such replenishment, the subjects enjoyed a boost in their concentration.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Discipline #2: Act on the Lead Measures Once you’ve identified a wildly important goal, you need to measure your success. In 4DX, there are two types of metrics for this purpose: lag measures and lead measures. Lag measures describe the thing you’re ultimately trying to improve. For example, if your goal is to increase customer satisfaction in your bakery, then the relevant lag measure is your customer satisfaction scores. As the 4DX authors explain, the problem with lag measures is that they come too late to change your behavior: “When you receive them, the performance that drove them is already in the past.” Lead measures, on the other hand, “measure the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures.” In the bakery example, a good lead measure might be the number of customers who receive free samples. This is a number you can directly increase by giving out more samples. As you increase this number, your lag measures will likely eventually improve as well. In other words, lead measures turn your attention to improving the behaviors you directly control in the near future that will then have a positive impact on your long-term goals.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Discipline #1: Focus on the Wildly Important As the authors of The 4 Disciplines of Execution explain, “The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.” They elaborate that execution should be aimed at a small number of “wildly important goals.” This simplicity will help focus an organization’s energy to a sufficient intensity to ignite real results. 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. In a 2014 column titled “The Art of Focus,” David Brooks endorsed this approach of letting ambitious goals drive focused behavior, explaining: “If you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to say ‘no’ to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say ‘yes’ to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“I’ll live the focused life, because it’s the best kind there is.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World