Deep Work Quotes

“jobs should be redesigned so that they resemble as closely as possible flow activities.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“I’ll choose my targets with care… then give them my rapt attention. In short, 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

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

“But part of what makes social media insidious is that the companies that profit from your attention have succeeded with a masterful marketing coup: convincing our culture that if you don’t use their products you might miss out.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance.” In other words, talent is not a commodity you can buy in bulk and combine to reach the needed levels: There’s a premium to being the best. Therefore, if you’re in a marketplace where the consumer has access to all performers, and everyone’s q value is clear, the consumer will choose the very best. Even if the talent advantage of the best is small compared to the next rung down on the skill ladder, the”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“It’s safer to comment on our culture than to step into the Rooseveltian ring and attempt to wrestle it into something better.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“A commitment to deep work is not a moral stance and it’s not a philosophical statement—it is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“the technologies underlying e-mail are transformative, but the current social conventions guiding how we apply this technology are underdeveloped.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“tactic that works well for me is to be clear in my refusal but ambiguous in my explanation for the refusal. The key is to avoid providing enough specificity about the excuse that the requester has the opportunity to defuse it.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Once you know where your activities fall on the deep-to-shallow scale, bias your time toward the former.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“I do all my work by hand and use tools that multiply my force without limiting my creativity or interaction with the material,”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Busyness as a Proxy for Productivity”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“These e-mails take the sender only a handful of seconds to write but can command many minutes (if not hours, in some cases) of time and attention from their recipients to work toward a coherent response. 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

“What’s the impact of our current e-mail habits on the bottom line?”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“If you don’t attempt to weigh pros against cons, but instead use any glimpse of some potential benefit as justification for unrestrained use of a tool, then you’re unwittingly crippling your ability to succeed in the world of knowledge work.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

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

“This study, it turns out, is one of many that validate attention restoration theory (ART), which claims that spending time in nature can improve your ability to concentrate.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

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

“To concentrate requires what ART calls directed attention. This resource is finite: If you exhaust it, you’ll struggle to concentrate. (For”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning—no after-dinner e-mail check, no mental replays of conversations, and no scheming about how you’ll handle an upcoming challenge; shut down work thinking completely.”
― 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, and are hard to replicate. Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity. We now know from decades of research in both psychology and neuroscience that the state of mental strain that accompanies deep work is also necessary to improve your abilities.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Two Core Abilities for Thriving
in the New Economy The ability to quickly master hard things. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“To leave the distracted masses to join the focused few, I’m arguing, is a transformative experience.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“By taking the time consumed by low-impact activities—like finding old friends on Facebook—and reinvesting in high-impact activities—like taking a good friend out to lunch—you end up more successful in your goal.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“When it comes to deep work, in other words, consider the use of collaboration when appropriate, as it can push your results to a new level. At the same time, don’t lionize this quest for interaction and positive randomness to the point where it crowds out the unbroken concentration ultimately required to wring something useful out of the swirl of ideas all around us.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“We can, therefore, still dismiss the depth-destroying open office concept without dismissing the innovation-producing theory of serendipitous creativity. The key is to maintain both in a 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

“This combination of soundproofed offices connected to large common areas yields a hub-and-spoke architecture of innovation in which both serendipitous encounter and isolated deep thinking are supported.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Bell Labs director Mervin Kelly guided the construction of a new home for the lab that would purposefully encourage interaction between its diverse mix of scientists and engineers. Kelly dismissed the standard university-style approach of housing different departments in different buildings, and instead connected the spaces into one contiguous structure joined by long hallways—some so long that when you stood at one end it would appear to converge to a vanishing point. As Bell Labs chronicler Jon Gertner notes about this design: “Traveling the hall’s length without encountering a number of acquaintances, problems, diversions and ideas was almost impossible. A physicist on his way to lunch in the cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.” This strategy, mixed with Kelly’s aggressive recruitment of some of the world’s best minds, yielded some of the most concentrated innovation in the history of modern civilization.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“In MIT lore, it’s generally believed that this haphazard combination of different disciplines, thrown together in a large reconfigurable building, led to chance encounters and a spirit of inventiveness that generated breakthroughs at a fast pace, innovating topics as diverse as Chomsky grammars, Loran navigational radars, and video games, all within the same productive postwar decades.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“it’s not just the change of environment or seeking of quiet that enables more depth. The dominant force is the psychology of committing so seriously to the task at hand. To put yourself in an exotic location to focus on a writing project, or to take a week off from work just to think, or to lock yourself in a hotel room until you complete an important invention: These gestures push your deep goal to a level of mental priority that helps unlock the needed mental resources.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World