Quotes from Cal newport

your mind, as it was evolved to do, will attempt to avoid excess expenditure of energy when possible.

be sure to also give yourself a specific time frame to keep the session a discrete challenge and not an open-ended slog.

Men of genius themselves were great only by bringing all their power to bear on the point on which they had decided to show their full measure.

First, it allowed me to connect, at a visceral level, accumulated deep work hours and tangible results. Second, it helped calibrate my expectations for how many hours of deep work were needed per result. This reality (which was larger than I first assumed) helped spur me to squeeze more such hours into each week.

I call it digital minimalism, and it applies the belief that less can be more to our relationship with digital tools.

It was the glacial writing progress during this year that drove Chappell to embrace the rhythmic method. He made a rule that he would wake up and start working by five thirty every morning. He would then work until seven thirty, make breakfast, and go to work already done with his dissertation obligations for the day. Pleased by early progress, he soon pushed his wake-up time to four forty-five to squeeze out even more morning depth.

The Protocol Principle Designing rules that optimize when and how coordination occurs in the workplace is a pain in the short term but can result in significantly more productive operation in the long term.

Stuff accumulates in people's lives, in part, because when faced with a specific act of elimination it's easy to worry, "What if I need this one day?," and then use this worry as an excuse to keep the item in question sitting around.

If you value new connections & exposure to interesting ideas, he might argue, why not adopt the habit of attending an interesting talk or event every month, & forcing yourself to chat with at least three people while there?

Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your

When Grant is working for days in isolation on a paper, in other words, he's doing so at a higher level of effectiveness than the standard professor following a more distracted strategy in which the work is repeatedly interrupted by residue-slathering interruptions.

In response to Rose's trademark ambiguous grunt, Martin defended his advice: "If somebody's thinking, 'How can I be really good?' people are going to come to you.

you might institute a ban on any Internet use, or maintain a metric such as words produced per twenty-minute interval to keep your concentration honed. Without this structure, you'll have to mentally litigate again and again what you should and should not be doing during these sessions and keep trying to assess whether you're working sufficiently hard. These are unnecessary drains on your willpower reserves.

To Woolf, in other words, solitude is not a pleasant diversion, but instead a form of liberation from the cognitive oppression that results in its absence. [referencing Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own]

Your ritual needs to ensure your brain gets the support it needs to keep operating at a high level of depth. For example, the ritual might specify that you start with a cup of good coffee,

Thomas had followed his passion to the Zen Mountain Monastery, believing, as many do, that the key to happiness is identifying your true calling and then chasing after it with all the courage you can muster. But as Thomas experienced that late Sunday afternoon in the oak forest, this belief is frighteningly naïve.

It was tentativeness, not boldness, that transformed Pardis's general mission into a specific success.

To be clear, conversation-centric communication requires sacrifices. If you adopt this philosophy, you'll almost certainly reduce the number of people with whom you have an active relationship. Real conversation takes time, & the total number of people for which you can uphold this standard will be significantly less than the total number of people you can follow.

as revealed by whistleblowers and researchers like Tristan Harris, Sean Parker, Leah Pearlman, and Adam Alter, these technologies are in many cases specifically designed to trigger this addictive behavior. Compulsive use, in this context, is not the result of a character flaw, but instead the realization of a massively profitable business plan.

Expose yourself to ideas in hubs on a regular basis, but maintain a spoke in which to work deeply on what you encounter.

You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?

To work deeply is a big deal and should not be an activity undertaken lightly. Surrounding such efforts with a complicated (and perhaps, to the outside world, quite strange) ritual accepts this reality—providing your mind with the structure and commitment it needs to slip into the state of focus where you can begin to create things that matter.

Boasting is what a boy does, who has no real effect in the world. But craftsmanship must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one's failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.

Laura also connects efforts to be a "conscientious consumer" with issues relating to social justice, which also play a big role in the Mennonite Church.