Quotes from Cal newport

given week, the higher the subject's life satisfaction. Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging. There

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.

Do what Thoreau did, which is learn to have a little disconnectedness within the connected world—don't run away.

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

For example, it might be the case that 80 percent of a business's profits come from just 20 percent of its clients, 80 percent of a nation's wealth is held by its richest 20 percent of citizens, or 80 percent of computer software crashes come from just 20 percent of the identified bugs.

Deep work is important, in other words, not because distraction is evil, but because it enabled Bill Gates to start a billion-dollar industry in less than a semester.

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.

The second type of answers are more macro in that they focus less on the individuals and more on the type of work they represent

The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.

if you want to eliminate the addictive pull of entertainment sites on your time and attention, give your brain a quality alternative. Not only will this preserve your ability to resist distraction and concentrate, but you might even fulfill Arnold Bennett's ambitious goal of experiencing, perhaps for the first time, what it means to live, and not just exist. Rule

People experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor performance on that next task," and the more intense the residue, the worse the performance.

eudaimonia (a state in which you're achieving your full human potential),

Over a hundred years earlier, Thoreau demonstrated similar concern, famously writing in Walden that "we are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

Where you'll work and for how long. You ritual needs to specify a location for your deep work efforts.

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.

By the early 2000s, however, if you stood on that same street corner, white earbuds would be near ubiquitous. The iPod succeeded not just by selling lots of units, but also by changing the culture surrounding portable music. It became common, especially among younger generations, to allow your iPod to provide a musical backdrop to your entire day—putting the earbuds in as you walk out the door and taking them off only when you couldn't avoid having to talk to another human.

in an age in which the digital attention economy is shoveling more and more clickbait toward us and fragmenting our focus into emotionally charged shards, the right response is to become more mindful in our media consumption:

I've invested significant effort to minimize the shallow in my life while making sure I get the most out of the time this frees up. I build my days around a core of carefully chosen deep work, with the shallow activities I absolutely cannot avoid batched into smaller bursts at the peripheries of my schedule. Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.

The Second Control Trap The point at which you have acquired enough career capital to get meaningful control over your working life is exactly the point when you've become valuable enough to your current employer that they will try to prevent you from making the change. On

How you'll work once you start to work. Your ritual needs rules and processes to keep your efforts structured.

In other words, those with the oracular ability to work with and tease valuable results out of increasingly complex machines will thrive.

To summarize, big trends in business today actively decrease people's ability to perform deep work, even though the benefits promised by these trends (e.g., increased serendipity, faster responses to requests, and more exposure) are arguably dwarfed by the benefits that flow from a commitment to deep work (e.g., the ability to learn hard things fast and produce at an elite level).

Ultimately, the success or failure of the projects pursued in this middle level helps me evolve the research mission maintained by the top level. In other words, the system as a whole is a closed feedback loop—constantly evolving toward a clearer and better supported vision for my work. Final

your world is the outcome of what you pay attention to,