Quotes from Cal newport

without these accountability tools, I tended to procrastinate on this work, turning my attention to more urgent but less important matters.

Once you break free from this mind-set, however, and begin seeing new technologies simply as tools that you can deploy selectively, you're able to fully embrace the second principle of minimalism and start furiously optimizing—enabling you to reap the advantages of vaulting up the return curve. 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.

Declaring freedom from your smartphone is probably the most serious step you can take toward embracing the attention resistance. This follows because smartphones are the preferred Trojan horse of the digital attention economy.

The subjects succeeded in resisting these particularly addictive distractions only around half the time.

If you service low-impact activities, therefore, you're taking away time you could be spending on higher-impact activities. It's a zero-sum game. And because your time returns substantially more rewards when invested in high-impact activities than when invested in low-impact activities, the more of it you shift to the latter, the lower your overall benefit.

Jordan had a name for the worries about what his friends are doing with their lives and whether his accomplishments compare favorably: "the cloud of external distractions.

A foundational theme in digital minimalism is that new technology, when used with care and intention, creates a better life than either Luddism or mindless adoption.

A temporary detox is a much weaker resolution than trying to permanently change your life, and therefore much easier for your mind to subvert when the going gets tough.

Das Slow Media Manifest." The English translation reads: "The Slow Media Manifesto.

extracting value from information is an activity that's often at odds with busyness, not supported by it.

How am I going to use this technology going forward to maximize its value and minimize its harms?

This is why it's not uncommon to see a company fire unproductive clients. If 80 percent of their profits come from 20 percent of their clients, then they make more money by redirecting the energy from low-revenue clients to better service the small number of lucrative contracts—each hour spent on the latter returns more revenue than each hour spent on the former.

consider the common practice of setting up regularly occurring meetings for projects. These meetings tend to pile up and fracture schedules to the point where sustained focus during the day becomes impossible. Why do they persist? They're easier.

regardless of how you feel about your job right now, adopting the craftsman mindset will be the foundation on which you'll build a compelling career.

It's instead quite natural once you recognize that the power of a general-purpose computer is in the total number of things it enables the user to do, not the total number of things it enables the user to do simultaneously.

The Enlightenment's metaphysical embrace of the autonomous individual leads not just to a boring life," Dreyfus and Kelly worry; "it leads almost inevitably to a nearly unlivable one.

After thirty days of this self-imposed network isolation, ask yourself the following two questions about each of the services you temporarily quit: Would the last thirty days have been notably better if I had been able to use this service? Did people care that I wasn't using this service?

Day's innovation was to realize that his readers could become his product and the advertisers his customers. His goal became to sell as many minutes of his readers' attention as possible to the advertisers.

We require a philosophy that puts our aspirations and values once again in charge of our daily experience, all the while dethroning primal whims...

Gallagher'in veciz bir ?ekilde özetledi?i gibi: Kim oldu?unuz, ne dü?ündü?ünüz, ne hissetti?iniz, ne yapt???n?z, neyi sevdi?iniz odakland???n?z ?eylerin toplam?d?r.

Bugün sürdürmekte oldu?umuz dijital hayatlar? kendimiz seçmedik. Daha ziyade, bir avuç teknoloji yat?r?mc?s?n?n ç?karlar?na hizmet etmek üzere ?irketlerin toplant? odalar?nda tasarlanm?? bir ya?am tarz? bu.

craftsman mindset is the foundation for creating work you love.

As the MIT philosopher Kieran Setiya expands in his modern interpretation of the Ethics, if your life consists only of actions whose "worth depends on the existence of problems, difficulties, needs, which these activities aim to solve," you're vulnerable to the existential despair that blooms in response to the inevitable question, Is this all there is to life?

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