Deep Work Quotes

“Though Crawford was speaking specifically to the plight of the knowledge work middle manager, the “bewildering psychic landscape” he references applies to many positions in this sector. As Crawford describes in his 2009 ode to the trades, Shop Class as Soulcraft, he quit his job as a Washington, D.C., think tank director to open a motorcycle repair shop exactly to escape this bewilderment. The feeling of taking a broken machine, struggling with it, then eventually enjoying a tangible indication that he had succeeded (the bike driving out of the shop under its own power) provides a concrete sense of accomplishment he struggled to replicate when his day revolved vaguely around reports and communications strategies.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The journalist Mason Currey, who spent half a decade cataloging the habits of famous thinkers and writers (and from whom I learned the previous two examples), summarized this tendency toward systematization as follows: There is a popular notion that artists work from inspiration—that there is some strike or bolt or bubbling up of creative mojo from who knows where … but I hope [my work] makes clear that waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan. In fact, perhaps the single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration. In a New York Times column on the topic, David Brooks summarizes this reality more bluntly: “[Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converging rays of attention; let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea.” This advice comes from Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges, a Dominican friar and professor of moral philosophy, who during the early part of the twentieth century penned a slim but influential volume titled The Intellectual Life. Sertillanges wrote the book as a guide to “the development and deepening of the mind” for those called to make a living in the world of ideas.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“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. But this understanding ignores the difficulty of focus and the hours of practice necessary to strengthen your “mental muscle.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

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

“remain nonresponsive to the pinprick onslaught of small obligations that seem harmless in isolation but aggregate to serious injury to his deep work habit.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Most people easily accept the idea that you have a right to control your own incoming communication, as they would like to enjoy the same right. More important, people appreciate clarity. Most are okay to not receive a response if they don't expect one.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Adam Grant produces at an elite level. When I met Grant in 2013, he was the youngest professor to be awarded tenure at the Wharton School of Business at Penn.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“There is a popular notion that artists work from inspiration—that there is some strike or bolt or bubbling up of creative mojo from who knows where… but I hope [my work] makes clear that waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan. In fact, perhaps the single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“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

“Benn is a smart guy. He graduated from an elite college (the University of Virginia) with a degree in economics, and like many in his situation he had ambitions for his career. It didn’t take him long to realize that these ambitions would be thwarted so long as his main professional skills could be captured in an Excel macro. He decided, therefore, he needed to increase his value to the world. After a period of research, Benn reached a conclusion: He would, he declared to his family, quit his job as a human spreadsheet and become a computer programmer. As is often the case with such grand plans, however, there was a hitch: Jason Benn had no idea how to write code. As a computer scientist I can confirm an obvious point: Programming computers is hard. Most new developers dedicate a four-year college education to learning the ropes before their first job—and even then, competition for the best spots is fierce. Jason Benn didn’t have this time. After his Excel epiphany, he quit his job at the financial firm and moved home to prepare for his next step. His parents were happy he had a plan, but they weren’t happy about the idea that this return home might be long-term. Benn needed to learn a hard skill, and needed to do so fast.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The deep work paid off. Benn quickly landed a job as a developer at a San Francisco tech start-up with $25 million in venture funding and its pick of employees. When Benn quit his job as a financial consultant, only half a year earlier, he was making $40,000 a year. His new job as a computer developer paid $100,000—an amount that can continue to grow, essentially without limit in the Silicon Valley market, along with his skill level.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The myopia of your peers and employers uncovers a great personal advantage.”
― 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.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“a good process-centric message immediately “closes the loop” with respect to the project at hand. When a project is initiated by an e-mail that you send or receive, it squats in your mental landscape—becoming something that’s “on your plate” in the sense that it has been brought to your attention and eventually needs to be addressed.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“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. To better explain this process and why it works consider the following process-centric responses to the sample e-mails from earlier: Process-Centric Response to E-mail #1: “I’d love to grab coffee. Let’s meet at the Starbucks on campus. Below I listed two days next week when I’m free. For each day, I listed three times. If any of those day and time combinations work for you, let me know. I’ll consider your reply confirmation for the meeting. If none of those date and time combinations work, give me a call at the number below and we’ll hash out a time that works. Looking forward to it.” Process-Centric Response to E-mail #2: “I agree that we should return to this problem. Here’s what I suggest… “Sometime in the next week e-mail me everything you remember about our discussion on the problem. Once I receive that message, I’ll start a shared directory for the project and add to it a document that summarizes what you sent me, combined with my own memory of our past discussion. In the document, I’ll highlight the two or three most promising next steps. “We can then take a crack at those next steps for a few weeks and check back in. I suggest we schedule a phone call for a month from now for this purpose. Below I listed some dates and times when I’m available for a call. When you respond with your notes, indicate the date and time combination that works best for you and we’ll consider that reply confirmation for the call. I look forward to digging into this problem.” Process-Centric”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Tip #2: Do More Work When You Send or Reply to E-mails Consider the following standard e-mails: E-mail #1: “It was great to meet you last week. I’d love to follow up on some of those issues we discussed. Do you want to grab coffee?” E-mail #2: “We should get back to the research problem we discussed during my last visit. Remind me where we are with that?” E-mail #3: “I took a stab at that article we discussed. It’s attached. Thoughts?” These three examples should be familiar to most knowledge workers, as they’re representative of many of the messages that fill their inboxes. They’re also potential productivity land mines: How you respond to them will have a significant impact on how much time and attention the resulting conversation ultimately consumes. 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?”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

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

“Faced with these numbers, and the economic reality they clarify (it’s incredibly wasteful, for example, to pay a highly trained professional to send e-mail messages and attend meetings for thirty hours a week), a boss will be led to the natural conclusion that you need to say no to some things and to streamline others—even if this makes life less convenient for the boss, or for you, or for your coworkers. Because, of course, in the end, a business’s goal is to generate value, not to make sure its employees’ lives are as easy as possible.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“where given work tasks fall on the shallow-to-deep scale. To do so, it asks that you evaluate activities by asking a simple (but surprisingly illuminating) question: How long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task?”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Decide in advance what you’re going to do with every minute of your workday. 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

“The second tactic that helps is the use of overflow conditional blocks. If you’re not sure how long a given activity might take, block off the expected time, then follow this with an additional block that has a split purpose. If you need more time for the preceding activity, use this additional block to keep working on it. If you finish the activity on time, however, have an alternate use already assigned for the extra block (for example, some nonurgent tasks). This allows unpredictability in your day without requiring you to keep changing your schedule on paper.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“This means, for example, that instead of having a unique small box for each small task on your plate for the day—respond to boss’s e-mail, submit reimbursement form, ask Carl about report—you can batch similar things into more generic task blocks. You might find it useful, in this case, to draw a line from a task block to the open right-hand side of the page where you can list out the full set of small tasks you plan to accomplish in that block. When you’re done scheduling your day, every minute should be part of a block. You have, in effect, given every minute of your workday a job. Now as you go through your day, use this schedule to guide you.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The law of the vital few, however, reminds us that the most important 20 percent or so of these activities provide the bulk of the benefit. Assuming that you could probably list somewhere between ten and fifteen distinct and potentially beneficial activities for each of your life goals, this law says that it’s the top two or three such activities—the number that this strategy asks you to focus on—that make most of the difference in whether or not you succeed with the goal.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“When faced with a hard problem, your mind, as it was evolved to do, will attempt to avoid excess expenditure of energy when possible. One way it might attempt to sidestep this expenditure is by avoiding diving deeper into the problem by instead looping over and over again on what you already know about it.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Roosevelt dashes leverage artificial deadlines to help you systematically increase the level you can regularly achieve—providing, in some sense, interval training for the attention centers of your brain.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

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

“The shutdown ritual described earlier leverages this tactic to battle the Zeigarnik effect. While it doesn’t force you to explicitly identify a plan for every single task in your task list (a burdensome requirement), it does force you to capture every task in a common list, and then review these tasks before making a plan for the next day. This ritual ensures that no task will be forgotten: Each will be reviewed daily and tackled when the time is appropriate. Your mind, in other words, is released from its duty to keep track of these obligations”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World