Quotes from Cal newport

In which I argue that control over what you do, and how you do it, is one of the most powerful traits you can acquire when creating work you love.

The Great Restructuring, unlike the postwar period, is a particularly good time to have access to capital.

As Gallagher summarizes: "Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.

more neuronal bandwidth available, allowing them to move around more information and sift through more potential solutions than your conscious centers of thinking

This behavior, of course, is adaptive. In Paleolithic times, it was important that you carefully managed your social standing with other members of your tribe because your survival depended on it. In the twenty-first century, however, new technologies have hijacked this deep drive to create profitable behavioral addictions.

Both intuition and a growing body of research underscore the reality that sharing a workspace with a large number of coworkers is incredibly distracting—creating an environment that thwarts attempts to think seriously. In a 2013 article summarizing recent research on this topic, Bloomberg Businessweek went so far as to call for an end to the "tyranny of the open-plan office." And yet, these open office designs are not embraced haphazardly.

I culled my list of friends down to just meaningful relationships.

that network tools are distracting us from work that requires unbroken concentration, while simultaneously degrading our capacity to remain focused.

Whatever we're hoping to see, it never quite meets that bar.

Finally, as detailed in the first part of these book, many of these tools are engineered to hijack our social instincts to create an addictive allure. When you spend multiple hours a day compulsively clicking & swiping, there's much less free time left for slower interactions. And because this compulsive use emits a patina of socialness, it can delude you into thinking that you're already serving your relationships well, making further action unnecessary.

regularly read and understand the cutting-edge results in my field.

The problem this research identifies with this work strategy is that when you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn't immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task.

The rapid rise of communication and collaboration technologies has transformed many other formerly local markets into a similarly universal bazaar. The small company looking for a computer programmer or public relations consultant now has access to an international marketplace of talent in the same way that the advent of the record store allowed the small-town music fan to bypass local musicians to buy albums from the world's best bands.

When you study the type of careers that make others remark, "That's the type of job I want," this trait almost always plays a central role. Once you understand this value of control, it changes the way you evaluate opportunities, leading you to consider a position's potential autonomy as being as important as its offered salary or the institution's reputation.

The goal of the machine," David explained, "is to create a setting where the users can get into a state of deep human flourishing—creating work that's at the absolute extent of their personal abilities." It is, in other words, a space designed for the sole purpose of enabling the deepest possible deep work. I was, as you might expect, intrigued.

Let's pull together the threads spun so far: Current economic thinking, as I've surveyed, argues that the unprecedented growth and impact of technology are creating a massive restructuring of our economy. In this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital.

interruption, even if short, delays the total time required to complete a task by a significant fraction.

providing your conscious brain time to rest enables your unconscious mind to take a shift sorting through your most complex professional challenges.

For each such tool, go through the key activities you identified and ask whether the use of the tool has a substantially positive impact, a substantially negative impact, or little impact on your regular and successful participation in the activity. Now comes the important decision: Keep using this tool only if you concluded that it has substantial positive impacts and that these outweigh the negative impacts.

Every week, I expose myself to something new about my field. I can read a paper, attend a talk, or schedule a meeting. To ensure that I really understand the new idea, I require myself to add a summary, in my own words, to my growing "research bible

the urge to bloviate).

consider the technology optional unless its temporary removal would harm or significantly disrupt the daily operation of your professional or personal life.

A commitment to deep work is not a moral stance and it's not a philosophical statement—it is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done.

when you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn't immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task. This residue gets especially thick if your work on Task A was unbounded and of low intensity before you switched, but even if you finish Task A before moving on, your attention remains divided for a while.