Quotes About Work

Managing computer systems might not generate the daily bliss that defined Thomas's old daydreams, but as he now recognized, nothing would. A fulfilling working life is a more subtle experience than his old fantasies had allowed.

attention residue.

organizing the raw materials of your work to minimize energy-dissipating friction

Irónicamente, es más fácil disfrutar el trabajo que el tiempo libre, porque —como ocurre en las actividades donde hay estado de flujo— el trabajo implica metas, reglas y retos. Todo ello contribuye a que uno se involucre en el trabajo, se concentre en él y se deje llevar. El tiempo libre, en cambio, es desestructurado y se requiere un mayor esfuerzo para darle una forma que nos produzca satisfacción.18

una mente ociosa es el taller del diablo"... Cuando pierdes la concentración, tu mente tiende a fijarse en lo que no marcha bien en tu vida y a pasar por alto lo que sí está bien».14Desde una perspectiva neurológica, un día de trabajo que pasamos en función de lo superficial muy probablemente será un día agotador y perturbador, incluso si la mayoría de cosas superficiales que ocupan su atención parecen inofensivas o divertidas.

The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration

even though we're not capable of spending a full day in a state of blissful depth, this reality shouldn't reduce the urgency of reducing shallow work, as the typical knowledge workday is more easily fragmented than many suspect.

as we shift to an information economy, more and more of our population are knowledge workers, and deep work is becoming a key currency—even if most haven't yet recognized this reality.

The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that's the hardest phase,

I love what I do for a living. I'm also confident that as I continue my commitment to the ideas discovered in my quest, this love will only deepen. Thomas feels the same way about his work. So do most of the people I profiled in the book. I

By reducing the need to make decisions about deep work moment by moment, I can preserve more mental energy for the deep thinking itself.

If you service low-impact activities, therefore, you're taking away time you could be spending on higher-impact activities.

We can, therefore, still dismiss the depth-destroying open office concept without dismissing the innovation-producing theory of serendipitous creativity. The key is to maintain both in a hub-and-spoke-style arrangement: Expose yourself to ideas in hubs on a regular basis, but maintain a spoke in which to work deeply on what you encounter.

These arguments roughly follow a trajectory from the conceptually narrow to broad: starting with a neurological perspective, moving to the psychological, and ending with the philosophical. I'll show that regardless of the angle from which you attack the issue of depth and knowledge work, it's clear that by embracing depth over shallowness you can tap the same veins of meaning that drive craftsmen like Ric Furrer.

four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration,

As Johnson explained to me, it takes time to figure out how best to structure the crazy inputs and interaction that surround most work processes. He's diligent in making sure that everyone keeps prioritizing this. "You need time away from inputs to figure out how best to systematize those inputs," he explained.

jobs should be redesigned so that they resemble as closely as possible flow activities.

He approached the task of finding good projects for his mission with the mindset of a marketer, systematically studying books on the subject to help identify why some ideas catch on while others fall flat. His marketing-centric approach is useful for anyone looking to wield mission as part of their quest for work they love. Purple

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

People who multitask all the time can't filter out irrelevancy. They can't manage a working memory. They're chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand… they're pretty much mental wrecks.

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.

In Wrzesniewski's research, the happiest, most passionate employees are not those who followed their passion into a position, but instead those who have been around long enough to become good at what they do.

The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that's the hardest phase," he says.

When it comes to creating work you love, following your passion is not particularly useful advice.