Quotes from Cal newport

While email use certainly saves people time and effort in communicating," the authors of the 2016 study conclude, "it also comes at a cost." Their recommendation? "[We] suggest that organizations make a concerted effort to cut down on email traffic.

As I argued, when you delegate productivity decisions to the individual, it's not surprising that you end up stuck with a simple, flexible, lowest common denominator–style workflow like the hyperactive hive mind.

Hardness scares off the daydreamers and the timid, leaving more opportunity for those like us who are willing to take the time to carefully work out the best path forward and then confidently take action.

the second force that encourages behavioral addiction: the drive for social approval. As Adam Alter writes: "We're social beings who can't ever completely ignore what other people think of us."18 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.

constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction.

While the ability to rapidly communicate using digital messages is useful, the frequent disruptions created by this behavior also make it hard to focus, which has a bigger impact on our ability to produce valuable output than we may have realized.

The respected New Yorker staff writer George Packer captured this fear well in an essay about why he does not tweet: "Twitter is crack for media addicts. It scares me, not because I'm morally superior to it, but because I don't think I could handle it. I'm afraid I'd end up letting my son go hungry.

As email spread through the professional world in the 1980s and 1990s it introduced something novel: low-friction communication at scale. With this new tool, the cost in terms of time and social capital to communicate with anyone related to your job plummeted from significant to almost nothing. As the writer Chris Anderson notes in his 2009 book, Free, the dynamics of reducing a cost to zero can be "deeply mysterious,

Leisure Lesson #3: Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions.

One study estimates that by 2019 the average worker was sending and receiving 126 business emails per day, which works out to about one message every four minutes.2 A software company called RescueTime recently measured this behavior directly using time-tracking software and calculated that its users were checking email or instant messenger tools like Slack once every six minutes on average.3 A

Working right trumps finding the right work. He didn't need to have a perfect job to find occupational happiness—he needed instead a better approach to the work already available to him. I

A workflow centered around ongoing conversation fueled by unstructured and unscheduled messages delivered through digital communication tools like email and instant messenger services. The hyperactive hive mind workflow has become ubiquitous in the knowledge sector.

Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.

By accepting an assistant position he threw himself into the center of the action, where he could find out how things actually work.

None of these students was interested in achieving solely for achieving's sake; rather, they had a natural hunger for intellectual challenge and a flair for transforming their personal interests into exciting projects

A shutdown habit, therefore, is not necessarily reducing the amount of time you're engaged in productive work, but is instead diversifying the type of work you deploy.

I'm usually facing someone who wants to send twenty-nine emails to fix a problem." His solution is simpler: "Go talk to them.

Compulsive use, in this context, is not the result of a character flaw, but instead the realization of a massively profitable business

As Harris argues, these companies didn't invest the massive resources necessary to perfect this auto-tagging feature because it was somehow crucial to their social network's usefulness. They instead made this investment so they could significantly increase the amount of addictive nuggets of social approval that their apps could deliver to their users.

By working backward from their deep values to their technology choices, digital minimalists transform these innovations from a source of distraction into tools to support a life well lived. By doing so, they break the spell that has made so many people feel like they're losing control to their screens.

For many, the core question of "is this the best way to use technology to support this value?" leads them to carefully optimize services that most people fiddle with mindlessly.

Compulsive use, in this context, is not the result of a character flaw, but instead the realization of a massively profitable business plan.

Is Silicon Valley programming apps or are they programming people?" Cooper asks. "They are programming people,

If you slacked off your attention for even a moment, you could stall the entire line—forcing workers into an unnatural combination of boredom and constant attentiveness.