Quotes from Cal newport

You need to get good in order to get good things in your working life.

conscious mind is able to follow the precise arithmetic rules needed for correctness. On the other hand, for decisions that involve large amounts of information and multiple vague, and perhaps even conflicting, constraints, your unconscious mind is well suited to tackle the issue.

To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you're capable of producing—a task that requires depth.

Bluma Zeigarnik, describes the ability of incomplete tasks to dominate our attention.

in 90 percent of your daily life, the presence of a cell phone either doesn't matter or makes things only slightly more convenient. They're useful, but it's hyperbolic to believe its ubiquitous presence is vital.

I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my "real" life again at last.21 That is what is strange—that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone …

Increasingly, they dictate how we behave and how we feel, and somehow coerce us to use them more than we think is healthy, often at the expense of other activities we find more valuable.

Identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours.

In MIT lore, it's generally believed that this haphazard combination of different disciplines, thrown together in a large reconfigurable building, led to chance encounters and a spirit of inventiveness that generated breakthroughs at a fast pace, innovating topics as diverse as Chomsky grammars, Loran navigational radars, and video games, all within the same productive postwar decades.

I'll choose my targets with care… then give them my rapt attention. In short, I'll live the focused life, because it's the best kind there is.

friendships are lightweight—given that they're based on sending short messages back and forth over a computer network.

I love what I do for a living. I'm also confident that as I continue my commitment to the ideas discovered in my quest, this love will only deepen. Thomas feels the same way about his work. So do most of the people I profiled in the book. I

this feeling of losing control

Most knowledge workers, however, as I argued earlier in this introduction, have lost their ability to perform deep work.

He called such a culture a technopoly, and he didn't mince words in warning against it. "Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World," he argued in his 1993 book on the topic. "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.

intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.

So next time you start to question whether you're missing out on some dream job waiting for you to muster the courage to pursue it, conjure up a pair of images. First, recall passion-obsessed Thomas, heartbroken and sobbing on the forest floor. Then replace this with the image of the smiling, confident, value-focused man who ten years later joined me for coffee—the version of Thomas who looked at me at one point in our conversation and remarked, without irony, "Life is good.

By reducing the need to make decisions about deep work moment by moment, I can preserve more mental energy for the deep thinking itself.

If you service low-impact activities, therefore, you're taking away time you could be spending on higher-impact activities.

This disease wanted to monopolize my attention, but as much as possible, I would focus on my life instead.

Autonomy: the feeling that you have control over your day, and that your actions are important Competence: the feeling that you are good at what you do Relatedness: the feeling of connection to other people

This combination of soundproofed offices connected to large common areas yields a hub-and-spoke architecture of innovation in which both serendipitous encounter and isolated deep thinking are supported.

We can, therefore, still dismiss the depth-destroying open office concept without dismissing the innovation-producing theory of serendipitous creativity. The key is to maintain both in a hub-and-spoke-style arrangement: Expose yourself to ideas in hubs on a regular basis, but maintain a spoke in which to work deeply on what you encounter.

These arguments roughly follow a trajectory from the conceptually narrow to broad: starting with a neurological perspective, moving to the psychological, and ending with the philosophical. I'll show that regardless of the angle from which you attack the issue of depth and knowledge work, it's clear that by embracing depth over shallowness you can tap the same veins of meaning that drive craftsmen like Ric Furrer.