Quotes About Knowledge

Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner. This

Knowledge workers, I'm arguing, are tending toward increasingly visible busyness because they lack a better way to demonstrate their value.

In this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital. To

Be disciple of depth in shallow world.

The shallow work that increasingly dominates the time and attention of knowledge workers is less vital than it often seems in the moment.

In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.

A workflow centered around ongoing conversation fueled by unstructured and unscheduled messages delivered through digital communication tools like email and instant messenger services. The hyperactive hive mind workflow has become ubiquitous in the knowledge sector.

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.

In a 2009 paper, titled, intriguingly, "Why Is It So Hard to Do My Work?," Leroy introduced an effect she called attention residue. In the introduction to this paper, she noted that other researchers have studied the effect of multitasking—trying to accomplish multiple tasks simultaneously—on performance, but that in the modern knowledge work office, once you got to a high enough level, it was more common to find people working on multiple projects sequentially

Throughout history, skilled laborers have applied sophistication and skepticism to their encounters with new tools and their decisions about whether to adopt them. There's no reason why knowledge workers cannot do the same when it comes to the Internet—the fact that the skilled labor here now involves digital bits doesn't change this reality.

you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things.

You can visualize this shift by using Google's Ngram Viewer2. This tool allows you to search Google's vast corpus of digitized books to see how often selected phrases turn up in published writing over time.

Generally speaking, as knowledge work makes more complex demands of the labor force, it becomes harder to measure the value of an individual's efforts.

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.

Most knowledge workers, however, as I argued earlier in this introduction, have lost their ability to perform deep work.

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.

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.

Many people incorrectly believe that coming up with a mission is the easy part (it's something that just happens in a moment of inspiration) and that what's hard is mustering the courage to pursue it. Rule #4 argued the opposite. It said that real missions—those that you can build a career around—require that you build up extensive amounts of expertise before they can be identified.

Knowledge work exchanges this clarity for ambiguity. It can be hard to define exactly what a given knowledge worker does and how it differs from another

Un estudio llevado a cabo en 2012 por McKinsey descubrió que un trabajador promedio del conocimiento dedica más del 60 % de sus horas laborales a la comunicación electrónica y a la búsqueda por internet. Cerca del 30 % del tiempo lo usa exclusivamente para leer y responder correos electrónicos.11

Let's assume you're a knowledge worker, which is a field without a clear training philosophy. If you can figure out how to integrate deliberate practice into your own life, you have the possibility of blowing past your peers in your value, as you'll likely be alone in your dedication to systematically getting better.

Craftsmen like Furrer tackle professional challenges that are simple to define but difficult to execute—a useful imbalance when seeking purpose. Knowledge work exchanges this clarity for ambiguity. It can be hard to define exactly what a given knowledge worker does and how it differs from another: On our worst days, it can seem that all knowledge work boils down to the same exhausting roil of e-mails and PowerPoint,

Drukheid als Alibi voor Productiviteit: Bij afwezigheid van duidelijke maatstaven voor de productiviteit en de waarde in hun werk keren veel kenniswerkers terug naar een industrieel ijkpunt voor productiviteit: veel dingen heel zichtbaar doen.