Deep Work Quotes

“some general questions that any effective ritual must address: Where you'll work and for how long.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“this approach, in which you fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule, the journalist philosophy.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“the rhythmic philosophy. This philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit. The goal, in other words, is to generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you’re going to go deep.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“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

“Deep Work Helps You Produce at an Elite Level”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“what deliberate practice actually requires. Its core components are usually identified as follows: (1) your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you’re trying to improve or an idea you’re trying to master; (2) you receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it’s most productive.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Do what Thoreau did, which is learn to have a little disconnectedness within the connected world—don’t run away.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained. This idea might sound obvious once it’s pointed out, but it represents a departure from how most people understand such matters. In my experience, it’s common to treat undistracted concentration as a habit like flossing—something that you know how to do and know is good for you, but that you’ve been neglecting due to a lack of motivation. This mind-set is appealing because it implies you can transform your working life from distracted to focused overnight if you can simply muster enough motivation.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Deep work should be a priority in today’s business climate. But it’s not. I’ve just summarized various explanations for this paradox. Among them are the realities that deep work is hard and shallow work is easier, that in the absence of clear goals for your job, the visible busyness that surrounds shallow work becomes self-preserving, and that our culture has developed a belief that if a behavior relates to “the Internet,” then it’s good—regardless of its impact on our ability to produce valuable things.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Here’s Kreider’s explanation: 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

“the individual’s scoreboard should be a physical artifact in the workspace that displays the individual’s current deep work hour count.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“People play differently when they’re keeping score,” the 4DX authors explain.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Discipline #3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Discipline #2: Act on the Lead Measures”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Discipline #1: Focus on the Wildly Important”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Christensen wrote for a book titled The 4 Disciplines of Execution, which built on extensive consulting case studies to describe four “disciplines” (abbreviated, 4DX) for helping companies successfully implement high-level strategies. What struck me as I read was that this gap between what and how was relevant to my personal quest to spend more time working deeply.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Second, even when you retreat to a spoke to think deeply, when it’s reasonable to leverage the whiteboard effect, do so.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The professors at MIT—some of the most innovative technologists in the world—wanted nothing to do with an open-office-style workspace. They instead demanded the ability to close themselves off. 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

“The theory of serendipitous creativity, in other words, seems well justified by the historical record. The transistor, we can argue with some confidence, probably required Bell Labs and its ability to put solid-state physicists, quantum theorists, and world-class experimentalists in one building where they could serendipitously encounter one another and learn from their varied expertise. This was an invention unlikely to come from a lone scientist thinking deeply in the academic equivalent of Carl Jung’s stone tower.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Both intuition and a growing body of research underscore the reality that sharing a workspace with a large number of coworkers is incredibly distracting—creating an environment that thwarts attempts to think seriously. In a 2013 article summarizing recent research on this topic, Bloomberg Businessweek went so far as to call for an end to the “tyranny of the open-plan office.” And yet, these open office designs are not embraced haphazardly.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“It’s worth taking the time to untangle, however, because properly leveraging collaboration can increase the quality of deep work in your professional life. It’s helpful to start our discussion of this topic by taking a step back to consider what at first seems to be an unresolvable conflict.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Sometimes to go deep, you must first go big.”
― 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. Sometimes to go deep, you must first go big.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Shankman did something unconventional. He booked a round-trip business-class ticket to Tokyo. He wrote during the whole flight to Japan, drank an espresso in the business class lounge once he arrived in Japan, then turned around and flew back, once again writing the whole way—arriving back in the States only thirty hours after he first left with a completed manuscript now in hand. “The trip cost $4,000 and was worth every penny,” he explained.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The MIT physicist and award-winning novelist Alan Lightman also leverages grand gestures. In his case, he retreats each summer to a “tiny island” in Maine to think deeply and recharge. At least as of 2000, when he described this gesture in an interview, the island not only lacked Internet, but didn’t even have phone service. As he then justified: “It’s really about two and a half months that I’ll feel like I can recover some silence in my life… which is so hard to find.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“when paying more than $1,000 a day to write the chapter in a suite of an old hotel down the street from a Hogwarts-style castle, mustering the energy to begin and sustain this work is easier than if you were instead in a distracting home office.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“By leveraging a radical change to your normal environment, coupled perhaps with a significant investment of effort or money, all dedicated toward supporting a deep work task, you increase the perceived importance of the task. This boost in importance reduces your mind’s instinct to procrastinate and delivers an injection of motivation and energy.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“To work deeply is a big deal and should not be an activity undertaken lightly.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“To maximize your success, you need to support your efforts to go deep. At the same time, this support needs to be systematized so that you don’t waste mental energy figuring out what you need in the moment.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World