Deep Work Quotes

“Another benefit of a sender filter is that it resets expectations. The most crucial line in my description is the following: “I’ll only respond to those proposals that are a good match for my schedule and interests.” This seems minor, but it makes a substantial difference in how my correspondents think about their messages to me. The default social convention surrounding e-mail is that unless you’re famous, if someone sends you something, you owe him or her a response. For most, therefore, an inbox full of messages generates a major sense of obligation. By instead resetting your correspondents’ expectations to the reality that you’ll probably not respond, the experience is transformed. The inbox is now a collection of opportunities that you can glance at when you have the free time—seeking out those that make sense for you to engage. But the pile of unread messages no longer generates a sense of obligation. You could, if you wanted to, ignore them all, and nothing bad would happen. Psychologically, this can be freeing.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Returning to my own example, it’s a similar commitment that enables me to succeed with fixed scheduling. I, too, am incredibly cautious about my use of the most dangerous word in one’s productivity vocabulary: “yes.” It takes a lot to convince me to agree to something that yields shallow work. If you ask for my involvement in university business that’s not absolutely necessary, I might respond with a defense I learned from the department chair who hired me: “Talk to me after tenure.” Another tactic that works well for me is to be clear in my refusal but ambiguous in my explanation for the refusal. The key is to avoid providing enough specificity about the excuse that the requester has the opportunity to defuse it. If, for example, I turn down a time-consuming speaking invitation with the excuse that I have other trips scheduled for around the same time, I don’t provide details—which might leave the requester the ability to suggest a way to fit his or her event into my existing obligations—but instead just say, “Sounds interesting, but I can’t make it due to schedule conflicts.” In turning down obligations, I also resist the urge to offer a consolation prize that ends up devouring almost as much of my schedule (e.g., “Sorry I can’t join your committee, but I’m happy to take a look at some of your proposals as they come together and offer my thoughts”). A clean break is best.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The second reason that a culture of connectivity makes life easier is that it creates an environment where it becomes acceptable to run your day out of your inbox—responding to the latest missive with alacrity while others pile up behind it, all the while feeling satisfyingly productive (more on this soon). If e-mail were to move to the periphery of your workday, you’d be required to deploy a more thoughtful approach to figuring out what you should be working on and for how long. This type of planning is hard. Consider, for example, David Allen’s Getting Things Done task-management methodology, which is a well-respected system for intelligently managing competing workplace obligations. This system proposes a fifteen-element flowchart for making a decision on what to do next! It’s significantly easier to simply chime in on the latest cc’d e-mail thread.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“recognize a truth embraced by the most productive and important personalities of generations past: A deep life is a good life.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“And in an ironic twist, Neal Stephenson, the acclaimed cyberpunk author who helped form our popular conception of the Internet age, is near impossible to reach electronically—his website offers no e-mail address and features an essay about why he is purposefully bad at using social media. Here’s how he once explained the omission: “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

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

“Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“For many, there’s a comfort in the artificial busyness of rapid e-mail messaging and social media posturing, while the deep life demands that you leave much of that behind. 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.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“This same trend holds for the growing number of fields where technology makes productive remote work possible—consulting, marketing, writing, design, and so on. Once the talent market is made universally accessible, those at the peak of the market thrive while the rest suffer.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“A shutdown habit, therefore, is not necessarily reducing the amount of time you’re engaged in productive work, but is instead diversifying the type of work you deploy.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Twitter is crack for media addicts.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“In Ericsson’s seminal 1993 paper on the topic, titled “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” he dedicates a section to reviewing what the research literature reveals about an individual’s capacity for cognitively demanding work. Ericsson notes that for a novice, somewhere around an hour a day of intense concentration seems to be a limit, while for experts this number can expand to as many as four hours—but rarely more.”
― 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. If you don’t cultivate this ability, you’re likely to fall behind as technology advances.”
― 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

“The “great and profound mistake which my typical man makes in regard to his day,” he elaborates, is that even though he doesn’t particularly enjoy his work (seeing it as something to “get through”), “he persists in looking upon those hours from ten to six as ‘the day,’ to which the ten hours preceding them and the six hours following them are nothing but a prologue and epilogue.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“You need your own philosophy for integrating deep work into your professional life.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The point of providing these details is to emphasize that intelligent machines are complicated and hard to master.* To join the group of those who can work well with these machines, therefore, requires that you hone your ability to master hard things. And because these technologies change rapidly, this process of mastering hard things never ends: You must be able to do it quickly, again and again.”
― 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.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“You must be on your guard for looping, as it can quickly subvert an entire productive meditation session. When you notice it, remark to yourself that you seem to be in a loop, then redirect your attention toward the next step.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Don’t Take Breaks from Distraction. Instead Take Breaks from Focus.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“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. To make matters worse for depth, there’s increasing evidence that this shift toward the shallow is not a choice that can be easily reversed. Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“There’s a gravity and sense of importance inherent in deep work—whether you’re Ric Furrer smithing a sword or a computer programmer optimizing an algorithm. Gallagher’s theory, therefore, predicts that if you spend enough time in this state, your mind will understand your world as rich in meaning and importance.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The respected New Yorker staff writer George Packer captured this fear well in an essay about why he does not tweet: “Twitter is crack for media addicts. It scares me, not because I’m morally superior to it, but because I don’t think I could handle it. I’m afraid I’d end up letting my son go hungry.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Sertillanges seems to have been ahead of his time, arguing in The Intellectual Life, “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.” Ericsson couldn’t have said it better.)”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Sertillanges argues that to advance your understanding of your field you must tackle the relevant topics systematically, allowing your “converging rays of attention” to uncover the truth latent in each. In other words, he teaches: To learn requires intense concentration.”
― 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. 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.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“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

“The 4 Disciplines of Execution,”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World