Quotes from Cal newport

A physicist on his way to lunch in the cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.

Biology, like any high-stakes academic field, is demanding. Because of this it has a reputation for turning young professors into curmudgeons who adopt a masochistic brand of workaholism, in which relaxation becomes a sign of failure and the accomplishments of peers become tragedies.

How you'll support your work. Your ritual needs to ensure your brain gets the support it needs to keep operating at a high level of depth.

The research driving Rule #2 taught me that these plateaus are dangerous because they cut off your supply of career capital and therefore cripple your ability to keep actively shaping your working life. As my quest continued, therefore, it became clear that I needed to introduce some practical strategies into my own working life that would force me to once again make deliberate practice a regular companion in my daily routine.

To leave the distracted masses to join the focused few, I'm arguing, is a transformative experience.

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

This philosophy cleverly dovetails with the general objective of the liberal humanism project to offer individuals more freedom, making it seem vaguely illiberal to avoid a popular social media

adopt the habit of pausing before action and asking, "What makes the most sense right now?

We could, of course, eliminate this anachronistic commitment to busyness if we could easily demonstrate its negative impact on the bottom line, but the metric black hole enters the scene at this point and prevents such clarity.

example, need to focus on doing serious journalism—diving into complicated

Christensen wrote for a book titled The 4 Disciplines of Execution, which built on extensive consulting case studies to describe four "disciplines" (abbreviated, 4DX) for helping companies successfully implement high-level strategies. What struck me as I read was that this gap between what and how was relevant to my personal quest to spend more time working deeply.

If your schedule is disrupted, you should, at the next available moment, take a few minutes to create a revised schedule for the time that remains in the day. You can turn to a new page. You can erase and redraw blocks. Or do as I do: Cross out the blocks for the remainder of the day and create new blocks to the right of the old ones on the page (I draw my blocks skinny so I have room for several revisions).

When she leveraged her value to obtain a thirty-hour schedule at her first job, for example, her employer couldn't say no (she was saving them too much money), but they didn't like it. It took nerve on Lulu's part to push through that demand.

Neither Wozniak nor Jobs left their regular jobs: This was strictly a low-risk venture meant for their free time.

the practice of giving of your time and attention, without expectation of something in return, as a key strategy in professional advancement.

First, how do you inject free time into your schedule without simply quitting everything and looking like a slacker? Second, how do you effectively "explore" in this free time without having it degenerate into a morass of TV watching and Web surfing?

capture every task in a common list, and then review these tasks before making a plan for the next day.

an age of ubiquitous and addictive click-bait.

To ask a CEO to spend four hours thinking deeply about a single problem is a waste of what makes him or her valuable. 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.

in many cases these addictive properties of new technologies are not accidents, but instead carefully engineered design features.

He typically divides the writing of a scholarly paper into three discrete tasks: analyzing the data, writing a full draft, and editing the draft into something publishable.)

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.

These interviews emphasize an important point: Compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion.

Your goal is not to stick to a given schedule at all costs; it's instead to maintain, at all times, a thoughtful say in what you're doing with your time going forward—even if these decisions are reworked again and again as the day unfolds.