Deep Work Quotes

“Put another way, trying to squeeze a little more work out of your evenings might reduce your effectiveness the next day enough that you end up getting less done than if you had instead respected a shutdown.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The authors of this study, led by the Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis, set out to prove that some decisions are better left to your unconscious mind to untangle. In other words, to actively try to work through these decisions will lead to a worse outcome than loading up the relevant information and then moving on to something else while letting the subconscious layers of your mind mull things over.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

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

“Every day that he writes jokes he crosses out the date on the calendar with a big red X. “After a few days you’ll have a chain,” Seinfeld said. “Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.” This chain method (as some now call it) soon became a hit among writers and fitness enthusiasts—communities that thrive on the ability to do hard things consistently. For our purposes, it provides a specific example of a general approach to integrating depth into your life: the rhythmic philosophy. This philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit. The goal, in other words, is to generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you’re going to go deep. The chain method is a good example of the rhythmic philosophy of deep work scheduling because it combines a simple scheduling heuristic (do the work every day), with an easy way to remind yourself to do the work: the big red Xs on the calendar.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“We instead find ourselves in distracting open offices where inboxes cannot be neglected and meetings are incessant—a setting where colleagues would rather you respond quickly to their latest e-mail than produce the best possible results. As a reader of this book, in other words, you’re a disciple of depth in a shallow world.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Among them are the realities that deep work is hard and shallow work is easier, that in the absence of clear goals for your job, the visible busyness that surrounds shallow work becomes self-preserving, and that our culture has developed a belief that if a behavior relates to “the Internet,” then it’s good—regardless of its impact on our ability to produce valuable things.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“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. If you’re using busyness as a proxy for productivity, then these behaviors can seem crucial for convincing yourself and others that you’re doing your job well.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Also consider the frustratingly common practice of forwarding an e-mail to one or more colleagues, labeled with a short open-ended interrogative, such as: “Thoughts?” These e-mails take the sender only a handful of seconds to write but can command many minutes (if not hours, in some cases) of time and attention from their recipients to work toward a coherent response. A little more care in crafting the message by the sender could reduce the overall time spent by all parties by a significant fraction. So why are these easily avoidable and time-sucking e-mails so common? From the sender’s perspective, they’re easier. It’s a way to clear something out of their inbox—at least, temporarily—with a minimum amount of energy invested.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“To name another example, consider the common practice of setting up regularly occurring meetings for projects. These meetings tend to pile up and fracture schedules to the point where sustained focus during the day becomes impossible. Why do they persist? They’re easier. For many, these standing meetings become a simple (but blunt) form of personal organization. Instead of trying to manage their time and obligations themselves, they let the impending meeting each week force them to take some action on a given project and more generally provide a highly visible simulacrum of progress.”
― 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.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Even though you are not aware at the time, the brain responds to distractions.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“the attention residue concept is still telling because it implies that the common habit of working in a state of semi-distraction is potentially devastating to your performance. It might seem harmless to take a quick glance at your inbox every ten minutes or so. Indeed, many justify this behavior as better than the old practice of leaving an inbox open on the screen at all times (a straw-man habit that few follow anymore). But Leroy teaches us that this is not in fact much of an improvement. That quick check introduces a new target for your attention. Even worse, by seeing messages that you cannot deal with at the moment (which is almost always the case), you’ll be forced to turn back to the primary task with a secondary task left unfinished. The attention residue left by such unresolved switches dampens your performance.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“This understanding is important because it provides a neurological foundation for why deliberate practice works. By focusing intensely on a specific skill, you’re forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire, again and again, in isolation. This repetitive use of a specific circuit triggers cells called oligodendrocytes to begin wrapping layers of myelin around the neurons in the circuits—effectively cementing the skill. The reason, therefore, why it’s important to focus intensely on the task at hand while avoiding distraction is because this is the only way to isolate the relevant neural circuit enough to trigger useful myelination.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” admitted journalist Nicholas Carr, in an oft-cited 2008 Atlantic article. “[And] I’m not the only one.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

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

“To learn requires intense concentration.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“We deny that these differences [between expert performers and normal adults] are immutable … Instead, we argue that the 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

“En primer lugar, la distracción sigue siendo un factor nocivo para la profundidad. Por lo tanto, el modelo de la estructura en forma de estrella debe considerarse con cuidado. Separa tu búsqueda de encuentros propicios para la serendipia de tus esfuerzos para pensar de manera profunda una vez que hayas obtenido la inspiración que buscabas. Debes tratar de optimizar cada esfuerzo por separado, en lugar de mezclarlos y entorpecer ambas metas.”
― Cal Newport, Céntrate (Deep Work): Las cuatro reglas para el éxito en la era de la distracción

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

“After thirty days of this self-imposed network isolation, ask yourself the following two questions about each of the services you temporarily quit: Would the last thirty days have been notably better if I had been able to use this service? Did people care that I wasn’t using this service?”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“This is why it’s not uncommon to see a company fire unproductive clients. If 80 percent of their profits come from 20 percent of their clients, then they make more money by redirecting the energy from low-revenue clients to better service the small number of lucrative contracts—each hour spent on the latter returns more revenue than each hour spent on the former.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“If you service low-impact activities, therefore, you’re taking away time you could be spending on higher-impact activities. It’s a zero-sum game. And because your time returns substantially more rewards when invested in high-impact activities than when invested in low-impact activities, the more of it you shift to the latter, the lower your overall benefit.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“For each such tool, go through the key activities you identified and ask whether the use of the tool has a substantially positive impact, a substantially negative impact, or little impact on your regular and successful participation in the activity. Now comes the important decision: Keep using this tool only if you concluded that it has substantial positive impacts and that these outweigh the negative impacts.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“regularly read and understand the cutting-edge results in my field.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The ability in question is called “attentional control,” and it measures the subjects’ ability to maintain their focus on essential information.”
― 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.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

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

“Point #2: Regardless of how you schedule your Internet
blocks, you must keep the time outside these blocks
absolutely free from Internet use.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The idea motivating this strategy is that the use of a distracting service does not, by itself, reduce your brain’s ability to focus. It’s instead the constant switching from low-stimuli/high-value activities to high-stimuli/low-value activities, at the slightest hint of boredom or cognitive challenge, that teaches your mind to never tolerate an absence of novelty. This constant switching can be understood analogously as weakening the mental muscles responsible for organizing the many sources vying for your attention.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“I propose an alternative to the Internet Sabbath. Instead of scheduling the occasional break from distraction so you can focus, you should instead schedule the occasional break from focus to give in to distraction”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World