Quotes About Concentration

The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration

getting the most out of your deep work habit requires training, and as clarified previously, this training must address two goals: improving your ability to concentrate intensely and overcoming your desire for distraction.

easy to identify the relevant lead measure: time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal.

Deep Work Helps You Quickly Learn Hard Things "Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converging rays of attention; let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea.

Identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours.

I'll choose my targets with care… then give them my rapt attention. In short, I'll live the focused life, because it's the best kind there is.

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

By reducing the need to make decisions about deep work moment by moment, I can preserve more mental energy for the deep thinking itself.

When it comes to deep work, in other words, consider the use of collaboration when appropriate, as it can push your results to a new level. At the same time, don't lionize this quest for interaction and positive randomness to the point where it crowds out the unbroken concentration ultimately required to wring something useful out of the swirl of ideas all around us.

I'll live the focused life, because it's the best kind there is.

Attention residue left by unresolved switches dampens your performance.

The dominant force is the psychology of committing so seriously to the task at hand.

four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration,

To put this more concretely: If every moment of potential boredom in your life—say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives—is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the "mental wrecks" in Nass's research, it's not ready for deep work—even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.

The connection between deep work and flow should be clear: Deep work is an activity well suited to generate a flow state (the phrases used by Csikszentmihalyi to describe what generates flow include notions of stretching your mind to its limits, concentrating, and losing yourself in an activity—all of which also describe deep work).

The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained.

there's one idea in particular that seems central to his method: the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches.

the difficulty of focus and the hours of practice necessary to strengthen your "mental muscle.

Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don't simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction

If every moment of potential boredom in your life—say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives—is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the "mental wrecks" in Nass's research, it's not ready for deep work—even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.

By contrast, if you're trying to learn a complex new skill (say, SQL database management) in a state of low concentration (perhaps you also have your Facebook feed open), you're firing too many circuits simultaneously and haphazardly to isolate the group of neurons you actually want to strengthen.

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

be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, it's incredibly valuable.

The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive. This