Quotes from Cal newport

To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction.

wherever they popped up. If my kids were taking a good nap, I'd grab my laptop and lock myself in the home office. If my wife wanted to visit her parents in nearby Annapolis on a weekend day, I'd take advantage of the extra child care to disappear to a quiet corner of their house to write.

Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy The ability to quickly master hard things. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

Arnold Bennett took up the cause of active leisure in his short but influential self-help guide, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day. In this book, Bennett notes that the average London middle-class white-collar worker putting in an eight-hour day is left with sixteen additional hours during which he is as free as any gentleman to pursue virtuous activity.

On the other hand, if you're inside this pool—someone whose contribution to the world is discrete, clear, and individualized*—then you should give this philosophy serious consideration, as it might be the deciding factor between an average career and one that will be remembered.

you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things.

management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.

The problem this research identifies with this work strategy is that when you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn't immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task. This residue gets especially thick if your work on Task A was unbounded and of low intensity before you switched, but even if you finish Task A before moving on, your attention remains divided for a while.

tend to map out when I'll work deeply during each week at the beginning of the week, and then refine these decisions, as needed, at the beginning of each day

You can visualize this shift by using Google's Ngram Viewer2. This tool allows you to search Google's vast corpus of digitized books to see how often selected phrases turn up in published writing over time.

Do fewer things. Do them better. Know why you're doing them

The second reason is that the subversive decision to pursue FI at a young age, which typically leads to radical lifestyle decisions, self-selects for individuals who are unusually intentional about how they live their lives.

Though Grant's productivity depends on many factors, there's one idea in particular that seems central to his method: the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches. Grant performs this batching at multiple levels.

It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant.

By working on a single hard task for a long time without switching, Grant minimizes the negative impact of attention residue from his other obligations, allowing him to maximize performance on this one task.

skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.

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.

the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done.

argue that his approach to batching helps explain this paradox. In particular, by consolidating his work into intense and uninterrupted pulses, he's leveraging the following law of productivity: High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus) If you believe this formula, then Grant's habits make sense: By maximizing his intensity when he works, he maximizes the results he produces per unit of time spent working.

Early in his visit he asked a senior monk, who had been living in a similar cabin for over fifteen years, if he ever got tired of walking the trail connecting the residences to the main building. "I'm only just starting to learn it," the monk replied mindfully.

What makes general-purpose computing powerful is that you don't need separate devices for separate uses, not that it allows you to do multiple things at the same time. The

1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.

You need to get good in order to get good things in your working life, and the craftsman mindset is focused on achieving exactly this goal.

The Law of Remarkability For a mission-driven project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two different ways. First, it must compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others. Second, it must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking.