Deep Work Quotes

“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

“Discipline #4: Create a Cadence of Accountability”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“In a New York Times column on the topic, David Brooks summarizes this reality more bluntly: “[Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“I earlier quoted Winifred Gallagher, the converted disciple of depth, saying, “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

“Microsoft CEO Bill Gates famously conducted “Think Weeks” twice a year, during which he would isolate himself (often in a lakeside cottage) to do nothing but read and think big thoughts.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“the answer to the question will be somewhere in the 30 to 50 percent range (there’s a psychological distaste surrounding the idea of spending the majority of”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“What percentage of my time should be spent on shallow work? This strategy suggests that you ask it.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“those familiar with the rigors of such activities, the limit expands to something like four hours, but rarely more.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“And as Jason Fried discovered, if you not only eliminate shallow work, but also replace this recovered time with more of the deep alternative, not only will the business continue to function; it can become more successful.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“In other words, this strategy suggests that when it comes to your relaxation, don’t default to whatever catches your attention at the moment, but instead dedicate some advance thinking to the question of how you want to spend your “day within a day.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Here’s Nass summarizing these findings in a 2010 interview with NPR’s Ira Flatow: So we have scales that allow us to divide up people into people who multitask all the time and people who rarely do, and the differences are remarkable. 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

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

“There is a popular notion that artists work from inspiration—that there is some strike or bolt or bubbling up of creative mojo from who knows where… but I hope [my work] makes clear that waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan. In fact, perhaps the single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration. In”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“With this in mind, the six strategies that follow can be understood as an arsenal of routines and rituals designed with the science of limited willpower in mind to maximize the amount of deep work you consistently accomplish in your schedule.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“...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. I’m comfortable being bored, and this can be a surprisingly rewarding skill...”
― 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. 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

“To summarize, if you want to eliminate the addictive pull of entertainment sites on your time and attention, give your brain a quality alternative.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Deep Work Helps You Quickly
Learn Hard Things”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“If you want to become a superstar, mastering the relevant skills is necessary, but not sufficient”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The rapid rise of communication and collaboration technologies has transformed many other formerly local markets into a similarly universal bazaar. The”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“In an age of network tools, in other words, knowledge workers increasingly replace deep work with the shallow alternative—constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers,”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“the average knowledge worker now spends more than 60 percent of the workweek engaged in electronic communication and Internet searching, with close to 30 percent of a worker’s time dedicated to reading and answering e-mail alone.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Jung was not shy about taking time off.” Deep work, though a burden to prioritize, was crucial for his goal of changing the world.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

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

“The growing necessity of deep work is new. In an industrial economy, there was a small skilled labor and professional class for which deep work was crucial, but most workers could do just fine without ever cultivating an ability to concentrate without distraction. They were paid to crank widgets—and not much about their job would change in the decades they kept it. But as we shift to an information economy, more and more of our population are knowledge workers, and deep work is becoming a key currency—even if most haven’t yet recognized this reality.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“interruption, even if short, delays the total time required to complete a task by a significant fraction.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“some decisions are better left to your unconscious mind to untangle.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

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

“Laura Carstensen, to name one such example, used an fMRI scanner to study the brain behavior of subjects presented with both positive and negative imagery. She found that for young people, their amygdala (a center of emotion) fired with activity at both types of imagery. When she instead scanned the elderly, the amygdala fired only for the positive images. Carstensen hypothesizes that the elderly subjects had trained the prefrontal cortex to inhibit the amygdala in the presence of negative stimuli. These elderly subjects were not happier because their life circumstances were better than those of the young subjects; they were instead happier because they had rewired their brains to ignore the negative and savor the positive. By skillfully managing their attention, they improved their world without changing anything concrete about it.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World