Quotes from Cal newport

focused on difficult activities, carefully chosen to stretch your abilities where they most need stretching and that provide immediate feedback.

repeated interaction with this darkness can become a source of draining negativity—a steep price that many don't even realize they're paying to support their compulsive connectivity.

The striking thing with Thoreau is not the actual content of the argument. After all, sages in earliest Antiquity had already proclaimed their contempt for possessions ... What impresses is the form of the argument. For Thoreau's obsession with calculation runs deep ... He says: keep calculating, keep weighing. What exactly do I gain, or lose?

Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.

I feel like your problem is that you're trying to judge all things in the abstract before you do them. That's your tragic mistake.

The Intellectual Life, "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." Ericsson couldn't have said it better.)

What Giles discovered, I decided, is that a good mission-driven project must be remarkable in two different ways. First, it should be remarkable in the literal sense of compelling people to remark about it. To

Treasures was incremental. He didn't decide out of nowhere that he wanted to host a television show and then work backward to make that dream a reality. Instead, he worked forward from his original mission—to popularize archaeology—with a series of small, almost tentative steps.

You must be on your guard for looping, as it can quickly subvert an entire productive meditation session. When you notice it, remark to yourself that you seem to be in a loop, then redirect your attention toward the next step.

Knowledge work exchanges this clarity for ambiguity. It can be hard to define exactly what a given knowledge worker does and how it differs from another

Nobody ever takes note of [my advice], because it's not the answer they wanted to hear," Martin said. "What they want to hear is 'Here's how you get an agent, here's how you write a script,'… but I always say, 'Be so good they can't ignore you.' " In

A lack of time, therefore, isn't enough to explain why so many students feel overwhelmed. So what does explain this phenomenon? The answer, as it turns out, has much more to do with how we work than what we're trying to accomplish.

If you're a recent college graduate in an entry-level job, for example, you're much more likely to hear "go change the water cooler" than you are "go change the world.

answering machine tape, Kirk took another modest step by launching The Armchair Archaeologist project with no real vision of how it would prove useful, other than perhaps as fodder for his intro archaeology courses. This final little step, however, turned out to be a winner, leading directly to his own television show.

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,

When you use craft to leave the virtual world of the screen and instead begin to work in more complex ways with the physical world around you, you're living truer to your primal potential. Craft makes us human, and in doing so, it can provide deep satisfactions that are hard to replicate in other (dare I say) less hands-on activities.

Un estudio llevado a cabo en 2012 por McKinsey descubrió que un trabajador promedio del conocimiento dedica más del 60 % de sus horas laborales a la comunicación electrónica y a la búsqueda por internet. Cerca del 30 % del tiempo lo usa exclusivamente para leer y responder correos electrónicos.11

Very few people work even 8 hours a day. You're lucky if you get a few good hours in between all the meetings, interruptions, web surfing, office politics, and personal business that permeate the typical workday.

moment can feel strangely flat if it exists solely in itself.

I earlier quoted Winifred Gallagher, the converted disciple of depth, saying, "I'll live the focused life, because it's the best kind there is.

It's divided into five columns: plan, ready, blocked, work, and done.

No one ever changed the world, created a new industry, or amassed a fortune due to their fast email response time.

is that we have evidence that replacing your real-world relationships with social media use is detrimental to your well-being.

Inspired by these meetings, Franklin created a scheme in which the Junto members would contribute funds toward buying books that all members could use. This model soon grew beyond Franklin's Friday evening gatherings, leading him in 1731 to write the charter for the Library Company of Philadelphia, one of the first subscription libraries in America.