Deep Work Quotes

“even though we’re not capable of spending a full day in a state of blissful depth, this reality shouldn’t reduce the urgency of reducing shallow work, as the typical knowledge workday is more easily fragmented than many suspect.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“He began with a clear baseline—in his case, that soil health is of fundamental importance to his professional success—and then built off this foundation toward a final call on whether to use a particular tool.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“it ignores all the negatives that come along with the tools in question.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

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

“to actively try to work through these decisions will lead to a worse outcome than loading up the relevant information and then moving on to something else while letting the subconscious layers of your mind mull things over.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The idea that you can ever reach a point where all your obligations are handled is a fantasy.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“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

“the problem with lag measures is that they come too late to change your behavior:”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Lead measures, on the other hand, “measure the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“execution should be aimed at a small number of “wildly important goals.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

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

“Consider this quote from the coding prodigy Santiago Gonzalez describing his work to an interviewer: Beautiful code is short and concise, so if you were to give that code to another programmer they would say, “oh, that’s well written code.” It’s much like as if you were writing a poem.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“A physicist on his way to lunch in the cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Tim Ferriss once wrote: “Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“build your working life around the experience of flow”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“eudaimonia (a state in which you’re achieving your full human potential),”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“A workday driven by the shallow, from a neurological perspective, is likely to be a draining and upsetting day, even if most of the shallow things that capture your attention seem harmless or fun.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“given week, the higher the subject’s life satisfaction. Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging. There”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“toward distracting behavior, because in an Internet-centric technopoly such behavior is not up for discussion.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“extracting value from information is an activity that’s often at odds with busyness, not supported by it.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Knowledge workers, I’m arguing, are tending toward increasingly visible busyness because they lack a better way to demonstrate their value. Let’s give this tendency a name. Busyness as Proxy for Productivity:”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“We should not, therefore, expect the bottom-line impact of depth-destroying behaviors to be easily detected.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“although our current embrace of distraction is a real phenomenon, it’s built on an unstable foundation and can be easily dismissed once you decide”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“novelist Jonathan Franzen wrote a piece for the Guardian calling Twitter a “coercive development” in the literary world,”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“the urge to bloviate).”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“A little more care in crafting the message by the sender could reduce the overall time spent by all parties by a significant fraction.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets… it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World