Quotes About Focus

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.

Busyness as a Proxy for Productivity

Don't Take Breaks from Distraction. Instead Take Breaks from Focus.

In an age of network tools, in other words, knowledge workers increasingly replace deep work with the shallow alternative—constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction.

Nobody ever takes note of [my advice], because it's not the answer they wanted to hear," Martin said. "What they want to hear is 'Here's how you get an agent, here's how you write a script,'… but I always say, 'Be so good they can't ignore you.

It follows that to embrace deep work in your own career, and to direct it toward cultivating your skill, is an effort that can transform a knowledge work job from a distracted, draining obligation into something satisfying—a portal to a world full of shining, wondrous things.

This is why the minimum unit of time for deep work in this philosophy tends to be at least one full day. To put aside a few hours in the morning, for example, is too short to count as a deep work stretch for an adherent of this approach.

As Gallagher summarizes: "Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.

that network tools are distracting us from work that requires unbroken concentration, while simultaneously degrading our capacity to remain focused.

The problem this research identifies with this work strategy is that 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.

interruption, even if short, delays the total time required to complete a task by a significant fraction.

A commitment to deep work is not a moral stance and it's not a philosophical statement—it is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done.

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. This residue gets especially thick if your work on Task A was unbounded and of low intensity before you switched, but even if you finish Task A before moving on, your attention remains divided for a while.

How you'll support your work.

execution should be aimed at a small number of "wildly important goals.

most out of your deep work sessions, build rituals of the same level of strictness and idiosyncrasy as the important thinkers mentioned previously.

Where you'll work and for how long.

he would spend two hours of undistracted writing time in his private office.

I'll call this output-centric approach to work the craftsman mindset. My

How you'll work once you start to work.

When I told Mark about Jordan, he agreed that an obsessive focus on the quality of what you produce is the rule in professional music. "It trumps your appearance, your equipment, your personality, and your connections," he explained. "Studio musicians have this adage: 'The tape doesn't lie.' Immediately after the recording comes the playback; your ability has no hiding place.

For example, you might institute a ban on any Internet use,

lead measures turn your attention to improving the behaviors you directly control in the near future that will then have a positive impact on your long-term goals.

Another issue muddying the connection between depth and meaning in knowledge work is the cacophony of voices attempting to convince knowledge workers to spend more time engaged in shallow activities.