Deep Work Quotes

“to succeed with deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli. This doesn’t mean that you have to eliminate distracting behaviors; it’s sufficient that you instead eliminate the ability of such behaviors to hijack your attention. The simple strategy proposed here of scheduling Internet blocks goes a long way toward helping you regain this attention autonomy. Work”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The curmudgeons among us are vaguely uneasy about the attention people pay to their phones, and pine for the days of unhurried concentration, while the digital hipsters equate such nostalgia with Luddism and boredom, and believe that increased connection is the foundation for a utopian future.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“There is a middle ground, and if you’re interested in developing a deep work habit, you must fight to get there.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“decade: “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 who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals.”
― 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

“These sites are especially harmful after the workday is over, where the freedom in your schedule enables them to become central to your leisure time. If you’re waiting in line, or waiting for the plot to pick up in a TV show, or waiting to finish eating a meal, they provide a cognitive crutch to ensure you eliminate any chance of boredom. As I argued in Rule #2, however, such behavior is dangerous, as it weakens your mind’s general ability to resist distraction, making deep work difficult later when you really want to concentrate.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling. This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Beautiful code is short and concise, so if you were to give that code to another programmer they would say, “oh, that’s well written code.” It’s much like as if you were writing a poem.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Any pursuit—be it physical or cognitive—that supports high levels of skill can also generate a sense of sacredness.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Deep work is so important that we might consider it, to use the phrasing of business writer Eric Barker, “the superpower of the 21st century.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy 1. The ability to quickly master hard things. 2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed. Let’s”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Once you’re wired for distraction, you crave it.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

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

“The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts. Notice”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The use of network tools can be harmful. 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. This”
― 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. Your”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioral economics to family counseling, similarly suggest that the skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience. This”
― 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 current intellectual capacity.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“My author website doesn’t provide a personal e-mail address, and I didn’t own my first smartphone until 2012 (when my pregnant wife gave me an ultimatum—“you have to have a phone that works before our son is born”).”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“we should not be surprised that deep work struggles to compete against the shiny thrum of tweets, likes, tagged photos, walls, posts, and all the other behaviors that we’re now taught are necessary for no other reason than that they exist. Bad”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The Principle of Least Resistance, protected from scrutiny by the metric black hole, supports work cultures that save us from the short-term discomfort of concentration and planning, at the expense of long-term satisfaction and the production of real value.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“What’s the alternative to this state of affairs? Bennett suggests that his typical man see his sixteen free hours as a “day within a day,” explaining, “during those sixteen hours he is free; he is not a wage-earner; he is not preoccupied with monetary cares; he is just as good as a man with a private income.” Accordingly, the typical man should instead use this time as an aristocrat would: to perform rigorous self-improvement—a task that, according to Bennett, involves, primarily, reading great literature and poetry.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The Principle of Least Resistance, protected from scrutiny by the metric black hole, supports work cultures that save us from the short-term discomfort of concentration and planning, at the expense of long-term satisfaction and the production of real value. By doing so, this principle drives us toward shallow work in an economy that increasingly rewards depth.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Deep work is at a severe disadvantage in a technopoly because it builds on values like quality, craftsmanship, and mastery that are decidedly old-fashioned and nontechnological. Even worse, to support deep work often requires the rejection of much of what is new and high-tech.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“soon realize that network tools are not exceptional; they’re tools, no different from a blacksmith’s hammer or an artist’s brush, used by skilled laborers to do their jobs better (and occasionally to enhance their leisure). Throughout history, skilled laborers have applied sophistication and skepticism to their encounters with new tools and their decisions about whether to adopt them. There’s no reason why knowledge workers cannot do the same when it comes to the Internet—the”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“There’s also an uneasiness that surrounds any effort to produce the best things you’re capable of producing, as this forces you to confront the possibility that your best is not (yet) that good. It’s safer to comment on our culture than to step into the Rooseveltian ring and attempt to wrestle it into something better. But if you’re willing to sidestep these comforts and fears, and instead struggle to deploy your mind to its fullest capacity to create things that matter, then you’ll discover, as others have before you, that depth generates a life rich with productivity and meaning. In Part 1, I quoted writer Winifred Gallagher saying, “I’ll live the focused life, because it’s the best kind there is.” I agree. So does Bill Gates. And hopefully now that you’ve finished this book, you agree too.”
― 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. 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

“she was witness to a “grand unified theory” of the mind: Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioral economics to family counseling, similarly suggest that the 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

“Professorial E-mail Sorting: Do not reply to an e-mail message if any of the following applies: It’s ambiguous or otherwise makes it hard for you to generate a reasonable response. It’s not a question or proposal that interests you. Nothing really good would happen if you did respond and nothing really bad would happen if you didn’t.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World