Deep Work Quotes

“You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. 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.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

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

“Knowledge workers, I’m arguing, are tending toward increasingly visible busyness because they lack a better way to demonstrate their value.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“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

“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

“To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction. To learn, in other words, is an act of deep work.”
― 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.” This”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Once you’ve identified these goals, list for each the two or three most important activities that help you satisfy the goal. These activities should be specific enough to allow you to clearly picture doing them. On the other hand, they should be general enough”
― 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 marking 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

“To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction. A”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Stanford psychologist 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

“The shallow work that increasingly dominates the time and attention of knowledge workers is less vital than it often seems in the moment.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.” In”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The best students understood the role intensity plays in productivity and therefore went out of their way to maximize their concentration—radically reducing the time required to prepare for tests or write papers, without diminishing the quality of their results.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“In this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital. To”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“When we step back from these individual observations, we see a clear argument form: To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. Put another way, the type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work. If you’re not comfortable going deep for extended periods of time, it’ll be difficult to get your performance to the peak levels of quality and quantity increasingly necessary to thrive professionally. Unless your talent and skills absolutely dwarf those of your competition, the deep workers among them will outproduce you. What”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The key here isn’t to avoid or even to reduce the total amount of time you spend engaging in distracting behavior, but is instead to give yourself plenty of opportunities throughout your evening to resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom.”
― 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. This is a broad category that captures communication services like e-mail and SMS, social media networks like Twitter and Facebook, and the shiny tangle of infotainment sites like BuzzFeed and Reddit. In aggregate, the rise of these tools, combined with ubiquitous access to them through smartphones and networked office computers, has fragmented most knowledge workers’ attention into slivers.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“People play differently when they’re keeping score,” the 4DX authors explain. They then elaborate that when attempting to drive your team’s engagement toward your organization’s wildly important goal, it’s important that they have a public place to record and track their lead measures. This scoreboard creates a sense of competition that drives them to focus on these measures, even when other demands vie for their attention. It also provides a reinforcing source of motivation. Once the team notices their success with a lead measure, they become invested in perpetuating this performance.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“In particular, interrogative e-mails like these generate an initial instinct to dash off the quickest possible response that will clear the message—temporarily—out of your inbox. A quick response will, in the short term, provide you with some minor relief because you’re bouncing the responsibility implied by the message off your court and back onto the sender’s. This relief, however, is short-lived, as this responsibility will continue to bounce back again and again, continually sapping your time and attention. I suggest, therefore, that the right strategy when faced with a question of this type is to pause a moment before replying and take the time to answer the following key prompt: What is the project represented by this message, and what is the most efficient (in terms of messages generated) process for bringing this project to a successful conclusion? Once you’ve answered this question for yourself, replace a quick response with one that takes the time to describe the process you identified, points out the current step, and emphasizes the step that comes next. I call this the process-centric approach to e-mail, and it’s designed to minimize both the number of e-mails you receive and the amount of mental clutter they generate.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“We have now seen two strands of thought—one about the increasing scarcity of deep work and the other about its increasing value—which we can combine into the idea that provides the foundation for everything that follows in this book: The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The second reason that deep work is valuable is because the impacts of the digital network revolution cut both ways. If you can create something useful, its reachable audience (e.g., employers or customers) is essentially limitless—which greatly magnifies your reward. On the other hand, if what you’re producing is mediocre, then you’re in trouble, as it’s too easy for your audience to find a better alternative online. Whether you’re a computer programmer, writer, marketer, consultant, or entrepreneur, your situation has become similar to Jung trying to outwit Freud, or Jason Benn trying to hold his own in a hot start-up: To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of producing—a task that requires depth.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Your work is craft, and if you hone your ability and apply it with respect and care, then like the skilled wheelwright you can generate meaning in the daily efforts of your professional life.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally—walking, jogging, driving, showering—and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem. Depending on your profession, this problem might be outlining an article, writing a talk, making progress on a proof, or attempting to sharpen a business strategy. As in mindfulness meditation, you must continue to bring your attention back to the problem at hand when it wanders or stalls.”
― 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”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“the bimodal philosophy of deep work. This philosophy asks that you divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else. During the deep time, the bimodal worker will act monastically—seeking intense and uninterrupted concentration. During the shallow time, such focus is not prioritized.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“the monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling. This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations. Practitioners of the monastic philosophy tend to have a well-defined and highly valued professional goal that they’re pursuing, and the bulk of their professional success comes from doing this one thing exceptionally well.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

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

“In all of these examples, 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