Quotes About Focus

Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.

In Part 1, I quoted writer Winifred Gallagher saying, "I'll live the focused life, because it's the best kind there is." I agree. So does Bill Gates. And hopefully now that you've finished this book, you agree too.

Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

With these rough categorizations established, the strategy works as follows: Schedule in advance when you'll use the Internet, and then avoid it altogether outside these times. I suggest that you keep a notepad near your computer at work. On this pad, record the next time you're allowed to use the Internet. Until you arrive at that time, absolutely no network connectivity is allowed—no matter how tempting.

I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. Knuth

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)

decade: "The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." Csikszentmihalyi calls this mental state flow (a term he popularized with a 1990 book of the same title).

You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it's instead like a muscle that tires.

The sugar high of convenience is fleeting and the sting of missing out dulls rapidly, but the meaningful glow that comes from taking charge of what claims your time and attention is something that persists.

First, distraction remains a destroyer of depth.

Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that's exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands…. Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. That is what makes it "deliberate," as distinct from the mindless playing of scales or hitting of tennis balls that most people engage in.

If you're wearing headphones, or monitoring a text message chain, or, God forbid, narrating the stroll on Instagram—you're not really walking, and therefore you're not going to experience this practice's greatest benefits

High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)

Be disciple of depth in shallow world.

The best students understood the role intensity plays in productivity and therefore went out of their way to maximize their concentration—radically reducing the time required to prepare for tests or write papers, without diminishing the quality of their results.

the bimodal philosophy of deep work. This philosophy asks that you divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else. During the deep time, the bimodal worker will act monastically—seeking intense and uninterrupted concentration. During the shallow time, such focus is not prioritized.

to succeed with deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli. This doesn't mean that you have to eliminate distracting behaviors; it's sufficient that you instead eliminate the ability of such behaviors to hijack your attention. The simple strategy proposed here of scheduling Internet blocks goes a long way toward helping you regain this attention autonomy. Work

The key here isn't to avoid or even to reduce the total amount of time you spend engaging in distracting behavior, but is instead to give yourself plenty of opportunities throughout your evening to resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom.

There is a middle ground, and if you're interested in developing a deep work habit, you must fight to get there.

The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish." They elaborate that execution should be aimed at a small number of "wildly important goals." This

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

To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction. To learn, in other words, is an act of deep work.

The premise of this chapter is that by cultivating a high-quality leisure life first, it will become easier to minimize low-quality digital diversions later.