Deep Work Quotes

“The real rewards are reserved not for those who are comfortable using Facebook (a shallow task, easily replicated), but instead for those who are comfortable building the innovative distributed systems that run the service (a decidedly deep task, hard to replicate).”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“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

“To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“We have an information economy that’s dependent on complex systems that change rapidly.”
― 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. 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, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction. Larger efforts that would be well served by deep thinking, such as forming a new business strategy or writing an important grant application, get fragmented into distracted dashes that produce muted quality.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The reason knowledge workers are losing their familiarity with deep work is well established: network tools.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. [If I instead get interrupted a lot] what replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time… there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Just because you cannot avoid this tool altogether doesn’t mean you have to cede all authority over its role in your mental landscape”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“It’s natural, at first, to resist this idea, as it’s undoubtedly easier to continue to allow the twin forces of internal whim and external requests to drive your schedule. But you must overcome this distrust of structure if you want to approach your true potential as someone who creates things that matter.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“In other words, I not only allow spontaneity in my schedule; I encourage it. Joseph’s critique is driven by the mistaken idea that the goal of a schedule is to force your behavior into a rigid plan. This type of scheduling, however, isn’t about constraint—it’s instead about thoughtfulness. It’s a simple habit that forces you to continually take a moment throughout your day and ask: “What makes sense for me to do with the time that remains?” It’s the habit of asking that returns results, not your unyielding fidelity to the answer.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“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

“It’s as if our species has evolved into one that flourishes in depth and wallows in shallowness, becoming what we might call Homo sapiens deepensis.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“cultivating “concentration so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems.”)”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

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

“Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“A 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

“To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Men of genius themselves were great only by bringing all their power to bear on the point on which they had decided to show their full measure.”
― 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. You”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“skillful 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

“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. We can find evidence for this claim in the research of Clifford Nass, the late Stanford communications professor who was well known for his study of behavior in the digital age. Among other insights, Nass’s research revealed that constant attention switching online has a lasting negative effect on your brain. 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. At this point Flatow asks Nass whether the chronically distracted recognize this rewiring of their brain: The people we talk with continually said, “look, when I really have to concentrate, I turn off everything and I am laser-focused.” And unfortunately, they’ve developed habits of mind that make it impossible for them to be laser-focused. They’re suckers for irrelevancy. They just can’t keep on task. [emphasis mine] Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction, Nass discovered, it’s hard to shake the addiction even when you want to concentrate. To put this more concretely: If every moment of potential boredom in your life—say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives—is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the “mental wrecks” in Nass’s research, it’s not ready for deep work—even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.”
― 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.”
― 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”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Consider consultant Clay Herbert, who is an expert in running crowd-funding campaigns for technology start-ups: a specialty that attracts a lot of correspondents hoping to glean some helpful advice. As a Forbes.com article on sender filters reports, “At some point, the number of people reaching out exceeded [Herbert’s] capacity, so he created filters that put the onus on the person asking for help.” Though he started from a similar motivation as me, Herbert’s filters ended up taking a different form. To contact him, you must first consult an FAQ to make sure your question has not already been answered (which was the case for a lot of the messages Herbert was processing before his filters were in place). If you make it through this FAQ sieve, he then asks you to fill out a survey that allows him to further screen for connections that seem particularly relevant to his expertise. For those who make it past this step, Herbert enforces a small fee you must pay before communicating with him. This fee is not about making extra money, but is instead about selecting for individuals who are serious about receiving and acting on advice. Herbert’s filters still enable him to help people and encounter interesting opportunities. But at the same time, they have reduced his incoming communication to a level he can easily handle.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“In my experience, this analysis is spot-on. If you give your mind something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you’ll end the day more fulfilled, and begin the next one more relaxed, than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in semiconscious and unstructured Web surfing.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“These services aren’t necessarily, as advertised, the lifeblood of our modern connected world. They’re just products, developed by private companies, funded lavishly, marketed carefully, and designed ultimately to capture then sell your personal information and attention to advertisers. They can be fun, but in the scheme of your life and what you want to accomplish, they’re a lightweight whimsy, one unimportant distraction among many threatening to derail you from something deeper. Or maybe social media tools are at the core of your existence. You won’t know either way until you sample life without them.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“This concept upends the way most people think about their subjective experience
of life. We tend to place a lot of emphasis on our circumstances, assuming that what
happens to us (or fails to happen) determines how we feel. From this perspective, the
small-scale details of how you spend your day aren’t that important, because what
matters are the large-scale outcomes, such as whether or not you get a promotion or
move to that nicer apartment. According to Gallagher, decades of research contradict
this understanding. Our brains instead construct our worldview based on what we pay
attention to. If you focus on a cancer diagnosis, you and your life become unhappy and
dark, but if you focus instead on an evening martini, you and your life become more
pleasant—even though the circumstances in both scenarios are the same. As Gallagher
summarizes: “Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of
what you focus on.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“If you work in an environment where you can get an answer to a question or a specific piece of
information immediately when the need arises, this makes your life easier—at least, in
the moment. If you couldn’t count on this quick response time, you’d instead have to do
more advance planning for your work, be more organized, and be prepared to put
things aside for a while and turn your attention elsewhere while waiting for what you
requested. All of this would make the day to day of your working life harder (even if it
produced more satisfaction and a better outcome in the long term).”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner. This mind-set provides another explanation for the popularity of many depth-destroying behaviors. If you send and answer e-mails at all hours, if you schedule and attend meetings constantly, if you weigh in on instant message systems like Hall within seconds when someone poses a new question, or if you roam your open office bouncing ideas off all whom you encounter—all of these behaviors make you seem busy in a public manner.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World