Quotes About Focus

Though Grant's productivity depends on many factors, there's one idea in particular that seems central to his method: the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches. Grant performs this batching at multiple levels.

By working on a single hard task for a long time without switching, Grant minimizes the negative impact of attention residue from his other obligations, allowing him to maximize performance on this one task.

skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.

Even worse, by seeing messages that you cannot deal with at the moment (which is almost always the case), you'll be forced to turn back to the primary task with a secondary task left unfinished. The attention residue left by such unresolved switches dampens your performance.

the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done.

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) If you believe this formula, then Grant's habits make sense: By maximizing his intensity when he works, he maximizes the results he produces per unit of time spent working.

1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.

given week, the higher the subject's life satisfaction. Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging. There

Deep work is important, in other words, not because distraction is evil, but because it enabled Bill Gates to start a billion-dollar industry in less than a semester.

when you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn't immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task.

The second type of answers are more macro in that they focus less on the individuals and more on the type of work they represent

The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.

if you want to eliminate the addictive pull of entertainment sites on your time and attention, give your brain a quality alternative. Not only will this preserve your ability to resist distraction and concentrate, but you might even fulfill Arnold Bennett's ambitious goal of experiencing, perhaps for the first time, what it means to live, and not just exist. Rule

People experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor performance on that next task," and the more intense the residue, the worse the performance.

Where you'll work and for how long. You ritual needs to specify a location for your deep work efforts.

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.

in an age in which the digital attention economy is shoveling more and more clickbait toward us and fragmenting our focus into emotionally charged shards, the right response is to become more mindful in our media consumption:

I've invested significant effort to minimize the shallow in my life while making sure I get the most out of the time this frees up. I build my days around a core of carefully chosen deep work, with the shallow activities I absolutely cannot avoid batched into smaller bursts at the peripheries of my schedule. 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.

your world is the outcome of what you pay attention to,

How you'll support your work. Your ritual needs to ensure your brain gets the support it needs to keep operating at a high level of depth.

To leave the distracted masses to join the focused few, I'm arguing, is a transformative experience.

To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction. To

adopt the habit of pausing before action and asking, "What makes the most sense right now?

example, need to focus on doing serious journalism—diving into complicated