Deep Work Quotes

“2012 McKinsey study found that 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

“Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it’s instead like a muscle that tires. This is why the subjects in the Hofmann and Baumeister study had such a hard time fighting desires—over time these distractions drained their finite pool of willpower until they could no longer resist. The same will happen to you, regardless of your intentions—unless, that is, you’re smart about your habits.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The idle mind is the devil’s workshop”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The implication of these findings is clear. In work (and especially knowledge work), to increase the time you spend in a state of depth is to leverage the complex machinery of the human brain in a way that for several different neurological reasons maximizes the meaning and satisfaction you’ll associate with your working life.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“In a 2009 paper, titled, intriguingly, “Why Is It So Hard to Do My Work?,” Leroy introduced an effect she called attention residue. In the introduction to this paper, she noted that other researchers have studied the effect of multitasking—trying to accomplish multiple tasks simultaneously—on performance, but that in the modern knowledge work office, once you got to a high enough level, it was more common to find people working on multiple projects sequentially”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“As the journalist Daniel Coyle surveys in his 2009 book, The Talent Code, these scientists increasingly believe the answer includes myelin—a layer of fatty tissue that grows around neurons, acting like an insulator that allows the cells to fire faster and cleaner. To understand the role of myelin in improvement, keep in mind that skills, be they intellectual or physical, eventually reduce down to brain circuits. This new science of performance argues that you get better at a skill as you develop more myelin around the relevant neurons, allowing the corresponding circuit to fire more effortlessly and effectively. To be great at something is to be well myelinated.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“other technologies like data visualization, analytics, high speed communications, and rapid prototyping have augmented the contributions of more abstract and data-driven reasoning, increasing the values of these jobs.” In other words, those with the oracular ability to work with and tease valuable results out of increasingly complex machines will thrive.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“In a seminal 1981 paper, the economist Sherwin Rosen worked out the mathematics behind these “winner-take-all” markets. One of his key insights was to explicitly model talent—labeled, innocuously, with the variable q in his formulas—as a factor with “imperfect substitution,” which Rosen explains as follows: “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.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“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 superstars still win the bulk of the market. In the 1980s, when Rosen studied this”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Let’s begin with the first ability. To start, we must remember that we’ve been spoiled by the intuitive and drop-dead-simple user experience of many consumer-facing technologies, like Twitter and the iPhone. These examples, however, are consumer products, not serious tools: Most of the intelligent machines driving the Great Restructuring are significantly more complex to understand and master.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“He called such a culture a technopoly, and he didn’t mince words in warning against it. “Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World,” he argued in his 1993 book on the topic. “It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Ric Furrer is a master craftsman whose work requires him to spend most of his day in a state of depth—even a small slip in concentration can ruin dozens of hours of effort. He’s also someone who clearly finds great meaning in his profession. This connection between deep work and a good life is familiar and widely accepted when considering the world of craftsmen. “The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy,” explains Matthew Crawford. And we believe him.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“To do real good physics work, you do need absolute solid lengths of time … it needs a lot of concentration … if you have a job administrating anything, you don’t have the time. So I have invented another myth for myself: that I’m irresponsible. I’m actively irresponsible. I tell everyone I don’t do anything. If anyone asks me to be on a committee for admissions, “no,” I tell them: I’m irresponsible. Feynman was adamant in avoiding administrative duties because he knew they would only decrease his ability to do the one thing that mattered most in his professional life: “to do real good physics work.” Feynman, we can assume, was probably bad at responding to e-mails and would likely switch universities if you had tried to move him into an open office or demand that he tweet. Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“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

“Databases of this type are interrogated in a language called SQL. You send them commands like the one shown here to interact with their stored information. Understanding how to manipulate these databases is subtle. The example command, for example, creates a “view”: a virtual database table that pulls together data from multiple existing tables, and that can then be addressed by the SQL commands like a standard table. When to create views and how to do so well is a tricky question, one of many that you must understand and master to tease reasonable results out of real-world databases.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“this ritual should ensure that every incomplete task, goal, 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. The process should be an algorithm: a series of steps you always conduct, one after another. When you’re done, have a set phrase you say that indicates completion (to end my own ritual, I say, “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 for the rest of the day.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“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

“The 4DX framework is based on the fundamental premise that execution is more difficult than strategizing.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“There is, however, an important corollary to this idea: Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction. Much in the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, you’ll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Indeed, if you study the lives of other influential figures from both distant and recent history, you’ll find that a commitment to deep work is a common theme.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“What? You say that full energy given to those sixteen hours will lessen the value of the business eight? Not so. On the contrary, it will assuredly increase the value of the business eight. One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change—not rest, except in sleep.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“To be great at something is to be well myelinated.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“he would spend two hours of undistracted writing time in his private office.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The complex reality of the technologies that real companies leverage to get ahead emphasizes the absurdity of the now common idea that exposure to simplistic, consumer-facing products—especially in schools—somehow prepares people to succeed in a high-tech economy. Giving students iPads or allowing them to film homework assignments on YouTube prepares them for a high-tech economy about as much as playing with Hot Wheels would prepare them to thrive as auto mechanics.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“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

“the whiteboard effect. For some types of problems, working with someone else at the proverbial shared whiteboard can push you deeper than if you were working alone. The presence of the other party waiting for your next insight—be it someone physically in the same room or collaborating with you virtually—can short-circuit the natural instinct to avoid depth.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“How you'll support your work. Your ritual needs to ensure your brain gets the support it needs to keep operating at a high level of depth.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“How you'll work once you start to work. Your ritual needs rules and processes to keep your efforts structured.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Where you'll work and for how long. You ritual needs to specify a location for your deep work efforts.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World