Quotes About Work

I argue that his approach to batching helps explain this paradox. In particular, by consolidating his work into intense and uninterrupted pulses, he's leveraging the following law of productivity: High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)

When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, seek evidence of whether people are willing to pay for it. If you find this evidence, continue. If not, move on.

A better strategy for shifting other's expectations about your work is to consistently deliver what you promise instead of consistently explaining how you're working.

If you want a great job, you need something of great value to offer in return.

The shallow work that increasingly dominates the time and attention of knowledge workers is less vital than it often seems in the moment.

To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction. A

First, when you focus only on what your work offers you, it makes you hyperaware of what you don't like about it, leading to chronic unhappiness.

Deep work is at a severe disadvantage in a technopoly because it builds on values like quality, craftsmanship, and mastery that are decidedly old-fashioned and nontechnological. Even worse, to support deep work often requires the rejection of much of what is new and high-tech.

If a young Steve Jobs had taken his own advice and decided to only pursue work he loved, we would probably find him today as one of the Los Altos Zen Center's most popular teachers.

Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.

If you spend too much time focusing on whether or not you've found your true calling, the question will be rendered moot when you find yourself out of work.

Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity.

The "great and profound mistake which my typical man makes in regard to his day," he elaborates, is that even though he doesn't particularly enjoy his work (seeing it as something to "get through"), "he persists in looking upon those hours from ten to six as 'the day,' to which the ten hours preceding them and the six hours following them are nothing but a prologue and epilogue.

A job...is a way to pay the bills, a career is a path towards increasingly better work, and a calling is work that's an important part of your life and a vital part of your identity.

the craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you. This mindset is how most people approach their working lives.

a better objective for support units would be the following: to effectively fulfill their administrative duties with as small an impact as possible on the specialists' main work obligations. If taken seriously this metric might mean a given support unit needs to make its own work less efficient to better serve the organization.

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.

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

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.

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.

The things that make a great job great...are rare and valuable. If you want them in your working life, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return In other words, you need to be good at something before you can expect to get a good job.

The passion hypothesis is not just wrong, it's also dangerous. Telling someone to "follow their passion" is not just an act of innocent optimism, but potentially the foundation for a career riddled with confusion and angst.

The title of this book, A World Without Email, turns out to be just an approachable shorthand for the more accurate portrayal of my vision: A World Without the Hyperactive Hive Mind Workflow.