Deep Work Quotes

“This effect, which is named for the experimental work of the early-twentieth-century psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, describes the ability of incomplete tasks to dominate our attention. It tells us that if you simply stop whatever you are doing at five p.m. and declare, “I’m done with work until tomorrow,” you’ll likely struggle to keep your mind clear of professional issues, as the many obligations left unresolved in your mind will, as in Bluma Zeigarnik’s experiments, keep battling for your attention throughout the evening (a battle that they’ll often win).”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“In more detail, this ritual should ensure that every incomplete task, goal, or project has been reviewed and that for each you have confirmed that either (1) you have a plan you trust for its completion, or (2) it’s captured in a place where it will be revisited when the time is right. The process should be an algorithm: a series of steps you always conduct, one after another. When you’re done, have a set phrase you say that indicates completion (to end my own ritual, I say, “Shutdown complete”). This final step sounds cheesy, but it provides a simple cue to your mind that it’s safe to release work-related thoughts for the rest of the day.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“This includes, crucially, checking e-mail, as well as browsing work-related websites. In both cases, even a brief intrusion of work can generate a self-reinforcing stream of distraction that impedes the shutdown advantages described earlier for a long time to follow (most people are familiar, for example, with the experience of glancing at an alarming e-mail on a Saturday morning and then having its implications haunt your thoughts for the rest of the weekend).”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Reason #3: The Work That Evening Downtime
Replaces Is Usually Not That Important”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Having a casual conversation with a friend, listening to music while making dinner, playing a game with your kids, going for a run—the types of activities that will fill your time in the evening if you enforce a work shutdown—play the same attention-restoring role as walking in nature.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Reason #2: Downtime Helps Recharge the
Energy Needed to Work Deeply”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“UTT hypothesizes that this is due to the fact that these regions of your brain have more neuronal bandwidth available, allowing them to move around more information and sift through more potential solutions than your conscious centers of thinking. Your conscious mind, according to this theory, is like a home computer on which you can run carefully written programs that return correct answers to limited problems, whereas your unconscious mind is like Google’s vast data centers, in which statistical algorithms sift through terabytes of unstructured information, teasing out surprising useful solutions to difficult questions.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Observations from experiments such as this one led Dijksterhuis and his collaborators to introduce unconscious thought theory (UTT)—an attempt to understand the different roles conscious and unconscious deliberation play in decision making. At a high level, this theory proposes that for decisions that require the application of strict rules, the conscious mind must be involved. For example, if you need to do a math calculation, only your conscious mind is able to follow the precise arithmetic rules needed for correctness. On the other hand, for decisions that involve large amounts of information and multiple vague, and perhaps even conflicting, constraints, your unconscious mind is well suited to tackle the issue.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Reason #1: Downtime Aids Insights”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Discipline #4: Create a Cadence
of Accountability”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“First, it allowed me to connect, at a visceral level, accumulated deep work hours and tangible results. Second, it helped calibrate my expectations for how many hours of deep work were needed per result. This reality (which was larger than I first assumed) helped spur me to squeeze more such hours into each week.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“In the preceding discipline, I argued that for an individual focused on deep work, hours spent working deeply should be the lead measure. It follows, therefore, that the individual’s scoreboard should be a physical artifact in the workspace that displays the individual’s current deep work hour count.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“As the authors of 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.” This simplicity will help focus an organization’s energy to a sufficient intensity to ignite real results”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Expose yourself to ideas in hubs on a regular basis, but maintain a spoke in which to work deeply on what you encounter.”
― 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. 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

“This is why the minimum unit of time for deep work in this philosophy tends to be at least one full day. To put aside a few hours in the morning, for example, is too short to count as a deep work stretch for an adherent of this approach.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“(This issue is so important to Stephenson that he went on to explore its implications—positive and negative—in his 2008 science fiction epic, Anathem, which considers a world where an intellectual elite live in monastic orders, isolated from the distracted masses and technology, thinking deep thoughts.)”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“And as the ESM studies confirmed, the more such flow experiences that occur in a given week, the higher the subject’s life satisfaction. Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Among many breakthroughs, Csikszentmihalyi’s work with ESM helped validate a theory he had been developing over the preceding 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.” Csikszentmihalyi calls this mental state flow (a term he popularized with a 1990 book of the same title). At the time, this finding pushed back against conventional wisdom. Most people assumed (and still do) that relaxation makes them happy. We want to work less and spend more time in the hammock. But the results from Csikszentmihalyi’s ESM studies reveal that most people have this wrong:”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Her curiosity piqued, Gallagher set out to better understand the role that attention—that is, what we choose to focus on and what we choose to ignore—plays in defining the quality of our life. After five years of science reporting, she came away convinced that she was witness to a “grand unified theory” of the mind:”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The rise of professional instant messaging, mentioned earlier in this chapter, can be seen as this mind-set pushed toward an extreme. If receiving an e-mail reply within an hour makes your day easier, then getting an answer via instant message in under a minute would improve this gain by an order of magnitude.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“My objective is to convince you that although our current embrace of distraction is a real phenomenon, it’s built on an unstable foundation and can be easily dismissed once you decide to cultivate a deep work ethic.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“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

“The idea that network tools are pushing our work from the deep toward the shallow is not new. The Shallows was just the first in a series of recent books to examine the Internet’s effect on our brains and work habits. These subsequent titles include William Powers’s Hamlet’s BlackBerry, John Freeman’s The Tyranny of E-mail, and Alex Soojung-Kin Pang’s The Distraction Addiction—all of which agree, more or less, that network tools are distracting us from work that requires unbroken concentration, while simultaneously degrading our capacity to remain focused.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“what we choose to focus on and what we choose to ignore—plays in defining the quality of our life”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Tener claridad sobre lo importante equivale a tener claridad sobre lo que no es importante.”
― Cal Newport, Céntrate (Deep Work): Las cuatro reglas para el éxito en la era de la distracción

“craftsman approach to tool selection stands in opposition to the any-benefit approach. Whereas the any-benefit mind-set identifies any potential positive impact as justification for using a tool, the craftsman variant requires that these positive impacts affect factors at the core of what’s important to you and that they outweigh the negatives. Even though the craftsman approach rejects the simplicity of the any-benefit approach, it doesn’t ignore the benefits that currently drive people to network tools, or make any advance proclamations about what’s “good” or “bad” technology: It simply asks that you give any particular network tool the same type of measured, nuanced accounting that tools in other trades have been subjected to throughout the history of skilled labor.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“I propose that if you’re a knowledge worker—especially one interested in cultivating a deep work habit—you should treat your tool selection with the same level of care as other skilled workers, such as farmers. Following is my attempt to generalize this assessment strategy. I call it the craftsman approach to tool selection, a name that emphasizes that tools are ultimately aids to the larger goals of one’s craft. 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

“We found that one of the biggest differences between memory athletes and the rest of us is in a cognitive ability that’s not a direct measure of memory at all but of attention,” explained Roediger in a New York Times blog post (emphasis mine). 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

“tasks that leverage your expertise tend to be deep tasks and they can therefore provide a double benefit: They return more value per time spent, and they stretch your abilities, leading to improvement.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World