Quotes About Focus

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

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.

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.

Without this patient willingness to reject shiny new pursuits, you'll derail your efforts before you acquire the capital you need.

This focus on stretching your ability and receiving immediate feedback provides the core of a more universal principle—one that I increasingly came to believe provides the key to successfully acquiring career capital in almost any field.

There's a gravity and sense of importance inherent in deep work—whether you're Ric Furrer smithing a sword or a computer programmer optimizing an algorithm. Gallagher's theory, therefore, predicts that if you spend enough time in this state, your mind will understand your world as rich in meaning and importance.

After embracing minimalism, Dave reduced his persistent social media use down to only a single service, Instagram, which he felt offered significant benefits to his deep interest in art. In true minimalist fashion, however, Dave didn't settle for simply deciding to "use" Instagram; he instead thought hard about how best to integrate this tool into his life. [...] making the experience of checking his feed both fast & meaningful.

Humans are naturally biased toward activities that require less energy in the short term, even if it's more harmful in the long term—so we end up texting our sibling instead of calling them on the phone, or liking a picture of a friend's new baby instead of stopping by to visit.

If you're not focusing on becoming so good they can't ignore you, you're going to be left behind.

I keep a tally of the total number of hours I've spent that month in a state of deliberate practice.

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.

I want to spend time on what's important, instead of what's immediate,

Stop focusing on these little details," it told me. "Focus instead on becoming better.

The 4 Disciplines of Execution,

Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable.

You need your own philosophy for integrating deep work into your professional life.

Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted.

What, if anything, is active in the brain when someone is not trying to do a task? "It was an unusual question," notes Lieberman, but we should be glad they asked, because it led to a remarkable discovery: the team found that there's a particular set of regions in the brain that consistently activate when you're not attempting to do a cognitive task, and that just as consistently deactivate once you focus your attention on something specific.

to advance your understanding of your field you must tackle the relevant topics systematically, allowing your "converging rays of attention" to uncover the truth latent in each. In other words, he teaches: To learn requires intense concentration.

the big red Xs on the calendar.

philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.

Conclusion #2: Passion Takes Time

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