Quotes About Concentration

The two core abilities just described depend on your ability to perform deep work. If

To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction.

the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches.

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

Do fewer things. Do them better. Know why you're doing them

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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,

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

Discipline #1: Focus on the Wildly Important

Entertainment-focused websites designed to capture and hold your attention for as long as possible...provide a cognitive crutch to ensure you eliminate any chance of boredom. Such behavior is dangerous, as it weakens your mind's general ability to resist distraction, making #deepwork difficult later when you really want to concentrate.

There is, however, an important corollary to this idea: Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don't simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction. Much in the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, you'll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom.

attention residue.

The reason knowledge workers are losing their familiarity with deep work is well established: network tools.

Rule #1 taught you how to integrate deep work into your schedule and support it with routines and rituals designed to help you consistently reach the current limit of your concentration ability.

Irónicamente, es más fácil disfrutar el trabajo que el tiempo libre, porque —como ocurre en las actividades donde hay estado de flujo— el trabajo implica metas, reglas y retos. Todo ello contribuye a que uno se involucre en el trabajo, se concentre en él y se deje llevar. El tiempo libre, en cambio, es desestructurado y se requiere un mayor esfuerzo para darle una forma que nos produzca satisfacción.18

una mente ociosa es el taller del diablo"... Cuando pierdes la concentración, tu mente tiende a fijarse en lo que no marcha bien en tu vida y a pasar por alto lo que sí está bien».14Desde una perspectiva neurológica, un día de trabajo que pasamos en función de lo superficial muy probablemente será un día agotador y perturbador, incluso si la mayoría de cosas superficiales que ocupan su atención parecen inofensivas o divertidas.