Quotes from Cal newport

getting the most out of your deep work habit requires training, and as clarified previously, this training must address two goals: improving your ability to concentrate intensely and overcoming your desire for distraction.

even though we're not capable of spending a full day in a state of blissful depth, this reality shouldn't reduce the urgency of reducing shallow work, as the typical knowledge workday is more easily fragmented than many suspect.

Finding useful new technologies is just the first step to improving your life. The real benefits come once you start experimenting with how best to use them.

A workday driven by the shallow, from a neurological perspective, is likely to be a draining and upsetting day, even if most of the shallow things that capture your attention seem harmless or fun.

The Principle of Least Resistance: In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment.

the people I knew who signed up for thefacebook.com were almost certainly spending significantly more time playing Snood (a Tetris-style puzzle game that was inexplicably popular)

easy to identify the relevant lead measure: time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal.

a confidence that comes out," Martin explained. "I think it's something the audience smells.

In another study, which I found during my own research, giving autonomy to middle school teachers in a struggling school district not only increased the rate at which the teachers were promoted, but also, to the surprise of the researchers, reversed the downward performance trend of their students.2

It's natural, at first, to resist this idea, as it's undoubtedly easier to continue to allow the twin forces of internal whim and external requests to drive your schedule. But you must overcome this distrust of structure if you want to approach your true potential as someone who creates things that matter.

as we shift to an information economy, more and more of our population are knowledge workers, and deep work is becoming a key currency—even if most haven't yet recognized this reality.

if the subject dedicates enough time to such endeavors to reach maximum cognitive intensity—the state in which real breakthroughs occur. This is why the minimum unit of time for deep work in this philosophy tends to be at least one full day.

One of his key insights was to explicitly model talent—labeled, innocuously, with the variable q in his formulas—as a factor with "imperfect substitution," which Rosen explains as follows: "Hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance." In other words, talent is not a commodity you can buy in bulk and combine to reach the needed levels: There's a premium to being the best.

The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that's the hardest phase,

In addition, the more unusual or creative your system, the better. This will reduce tedium, inject some novelty into the process, and lead to the establishment of stronger mental connections.

Deep Work Helps You Quickly Learn Hard Things "Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converging rays of attention; let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea.

recommend the habit of a weekly review in which you make a plan for the workweek ahead (see Rule #4). During my experiments with 4DX, I used a weekly review to look over my scoreboard to celebrate good weeks, help understand what led to bad weeks, and most important, figure out how to ensure a good score for the days ahead.

it's not just the change of environment or seeking of quiet that enables more depth. The dominant force is the psychology of committing so seriously to the task at hand. To put yourself in an exotic location to focus on a writing project, or to take a week off from work just to think, or to lock yourself in a hotel room until you complete an important invention: These gestures push your deep goal to a level of mental priority that helps unlock the needed mental resources.

third option: accepting that these tools are not inherently evil, and that some of them might be quite vital to your success and happiness, but at the same time also accepting that the threshold for allowing a site regular access to your time and attention (not to mention personal data) should be much more stringent, and that most people should therefore be using many fewer such tools.

1. The ability to quickly master hard things. 2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

The key to the antinetworking approach is to impress without imploring. The goal is that one day the contact, who has grown fond of you and is impressed by you and your integrity, will notify you that he or she knows of a job opening, and will be willing to recommend you if you are interested.

Outside of these deep sessions, Grant remained famously open and accessible. In some sense, he had to be: His 2013 bestseller, Give and Take, promotes the practice of giving of your time and attention, without expectation of something in return, as a key strategy in professional advancement.

The real rewards are reserved not for those who are comfortable using Facebook (a shallow task, easily replicated), but instead for those who are comfortable building the innovative distributed systems that run the service (a decidedly deep task, hard to replicate).

So we have scales that allow us to divide up people into people who multitask all the time and people who rarely do, and the differences are remarkable. People who multitask all the time can't filter out irrelevancy. They can't manage a working memory. They're chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand… they're pretty much mental wrecks.