Metadata
- Author: Cal Newport
- Full Title:: Deep Work
- Category:: đź“šBooks
- Finished date:: 2023-02-02
Highlights
the state of mental strain that accompanies deep work is also necessary to improve your abilities. (Location 61)
“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.” (Location 87)
Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work. (Location 107)
Our work culture’s shift toward the shallow (whether you think it’s philosophically good or bad) is exposing a massive economic and personal opportunity for the few who recognize the potential of resisting this trend and prioritizing depth—an (Location 123)
To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. (Location 183)
This task requires deep work. (Location 184)
On the other hand, if what you’re producing is mediocre, then you’re in trouble, as it’s too easy for your audience to find a better alternative online. (Location 187)
The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive. (Location 203)
In other words, those with the oracular ability to work with and tease valuable results out of increasingly complex machines will thrive. (Location 294)
If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are. (Location 391)
By focusing intensely on a specific skill, you’re forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire, again and again, in isolation. (Location 438)
success without depth is common at this elite level of management. (Location 550)
To ask a CEO to spend four hours thinking deeply about a single problem is a waste of what makes him or her valuable. (Location 554)
It’s better to hire three smart subordinates to think deeply about the problem and then bring their solutions to the executive for a final decision. (Location 555)
Generally speaking, as knowledge work makes more complex demands of the labor force, it becomes harder to measure the value of an individual’s efforts. (Location 655)
Knowledge workers, I’m arguing, are tending toward increasingly visible busyness because they lack a better way to demonstrate their value. (Location 759)
Our brains instead construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to. (Location 916)
“concentration so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems.”) (Location 943)
when you lose focus, your mind tends to fix on what could be wrong with your life instead of what’s right.” (Location 970)
When measured empirically, people were happier at work and less happy relaxing than they suspected. And as the ESM studies confirmed, the more such flow experiences that occur in a given week, the higher the subject’s life satisfaction. (Location 1001)
going deep is in itself very rewarding. (Location 1009)
In a post-Enlightenment world we have tasked ourselves to identify what’s meaningful and what’s not, an exercise that can seem arbitrary and induce a creeping nihilism. (Location 1032)
The task of a craftsman, they conclude, “is not to generate meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill of discerning the meanings that are already there.” This frees the craftsman of the nihilism of autonomous individualism, providing an ordered world of meaning. At the same time, this meaning seems safer than the sources cited in previous eras. The wheelwright, the authors imply, cannot easily use the inherent quality of a piece of pine to justify a despotic monarchy. (Location 1046)
the specifics of the work are irrelevant. The meaning uncovered by such efforts is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in craftsmanship—not the outcomes of their work. (Location 1082)
You don’t need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work. (Location 1083)
He imagines a process in which you spend ninety minutes inside, take a ninety-minute break, and repeat two or three times—at which point your brain will have achieved its limit of concentration for the day. (Location 1131)
A high-level manager, for example, might play a vital role in the functioning of a billion-dollar company, even if she cannot point to something discrete, like a completed novel, and say, “This is what I produced this year.” Therefore, the pool of individuals to whom the monastic philosophy applies is limited—and that’s okay. If you’re outside this pool, its radical simplicity shouldn’t evince too much envy. (Location 1244)
bimodal philosophy of deep work. This philosophy asks that you divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else. (Location 1265)
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. (Location 1271)
hub-and-spoke-style arrangement: Expose yourself to ideas in hubs on a regular basis, but maintain a spoke in which to work deeply on what you encounter. (Location 1562)
when it’s reasonable to leverage the whiteboard effect, do so. By working side by side with someone on a problem, you can push each other toward deeper levels of depth, and therefore toward the generation of more and more valuable output as compared to working alone. (Location 1587)
you should identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours. (Location 1620)
the problem with lag measures is that they come too late to change your behavior: “When you receive them, the performance that drove them is already in the past.” Lead measures, on the other hand, “measure the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures.” (Location 1633)
Keep a Compelling Scoreboard (Location 1644)
Any work you do fit into the night, therefore, won’t be the type of high-value activities that really advance your career; your efforts will instead likely be confined to low-value shallow tasks (executed at a slow, low-energy pace). By deferring evening work, in other words, you’re not missing out on much of importance. (Location 1786)
Shutdown rituals can become annoying, as they add an extra ten to fifteen minutes to the end of your workday (and sometimes even more), but they’re necessary for reaping the rewards of systematic idleness summarized previously. (Location 1829)
People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. (Location 1878)
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. (Location 2056)
There’s a lot of communication in my life that’s not enriching, it’s impoverishing.” (Location 2303)
proposal, that you both should and can make deliberate use of your time outside work, (Location 2519)
If you haven’t given yourself something to do in a given moment, they’ll always beckon as an appealing option. (Location 2539)
One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change—not rest, except in sleep. (Location 2553)
I am not asking Antonio a style question I could find searching Google for 10 minutes. (Location 2954)
This method closes this open loop as soon as it forms. (Location 3015)