Quotes from Cal newport

Discipline #3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard

Treat shallow work with suspicion because its damage is often vastly underestimated and its importance vastly overestimated.

players sounds similar to Jordan Tice's approach to music: They're both focused on difficult activities, carefully chosen to stretch your abilities where they most need stretching and that provide immediate feedback.

Five years of reporting on attention have confirmed some home truths," Gallagher reports. "[Among them is the notion that] 'the idle mind is the devil's workshop'… when you lose focus, your mind tends to fix on what could be wrong with your life instead of what's right.

Mike Jackson leveraged the craftsman mindset to do whatever he did really well, thus ensuring that he came away from each experience with as much career capital as possible. He never had elaborate plans for his career. Instead, after each working experience, he would stick his head up to see who was interested in his newly expanded store of capital, and then jump at whatever opportunity seemed most promising.

recommend that you try to spend some time away from your phone most days. This time could take many forms, from a quick morning errand to a full evening out, depending on your comfort level.

The art of mission, we can conclude, asks us to suppress the most grandiose of our work instincts and instead adopt the patience

I follow a rule with my life that if something is scary, do it. I've lived everywhere in America, and for me, a big scary thing was living outside the country." After

The Innovators, Isaacson later

People play differently when they're keeping score," the 4DX authors explain.

method for building skills by ruthlessly stretching yourself beyond where you're comfortable.

First Facebook, then the iPhone: compulsive communicating and connecting—supported by mysterious, almost magical innovations in radio modulation and fiber-optic routing—swept our culture before anyone had the presence of mind to step back and re-ask Thoreau's fundamental question: To what end?

Entertainment-focused websites designed to capture and hold your attention for as long as possible...provide a cognitive crutch to ensure you eliminate any chance of boredom. Such behavior is dangerous, as it weakens your mind's general ability to resist distraction, making #deepwork difficult later when you really want to concentrate.

There are many ways to portray this change. I think the social critic Laurence Scott does so quite effectively when he describes the modern hyper-connected existence as one in which "a moment can feel strangely flat if it exists solely in itself.

To summarize, I've presented two different ways people think about their working life. The first is the craftsman mindset, which focuses on what you can offer the world. The second is the passion mindset, which instead focuses on what the world can offer you. The craftsman mindset offers clarity, while the passion mindset offers a swamp of ambiguous and unanswerable questions.

serious study, defining it formally as an "activity designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual's performance.

Managing computer systems might not generate the daily bliss that defined Thomas's old daydreams, but as he now recognized, nothing would. A fulfilling working life is a more subtle experience than his old fantasies had allowed.

personalized information arriving on an unpredictable intermittent schedule

There is, however, an important corollary to this idea: Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don't simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction. Much in the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, you'll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom.

E-mail inboxes, in theory, can distract you only when you choose to open them, whereas instant messenger systems are meant to be always active—magnifying the impact of interruption

attention residue.

Perhaps, as the final step in this optimization, you discover through trial and error that you're best able to absorb complex articles when you clip them throughout the week and then sit down to read through them all on Saturday morning on a tablet over coffee at a local café.

companies that profit from your attention have succeeded with a masterful marketing coup: convincing our culture that if you don't use their products you might miss out.

the individual's scoreboard should be a physical artifact in the workspace that displays the individual's current deep work hour count.