Quotes About Concentration

The ability in question is called "attentional control," and it measures the subjects' ability to maintain their focus on essential information.

Their rituals minimized the friction in this transition to depth, allowing them to go deep more easily and stay in the state longer.

In the preceding discipline, I argued that for an individual focused on deep work, hours spent working deeply should be the lead measure. It follows, therefore, that the individual's scoreboard should be a physical artifact in the workspace that displays the individual's current deep work hour count.

forcing you to resist distraction and return your attention repeatedly to a well-defined problem, it helps strengthen your distraction-resisting muscles,

This study, it turns out, is one of many that validate attention restoration theory (ART), which claims that spending time in nature can improve your ability to concentrate.

Men of genius themselves were great only by bringing all their power to bear on the point on which they had decided to show their full measure.

Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your

When Grant is working for days in isolation on a paper, in other words, he's doing so at a higher level of effectiveness than the standard professor following a more distracted strategy in which the work is repeatedly interrupted by residue-slathering interruptions.

you might institute a ban on any Internet use, or maintain a metric such as words produced per twenty-minute interval to keep your concentration honed. Without this structure, you'll have to mentally litigate again and again what you should and should not be doing during these sessions and keep trying to assess whether you're working sufficiently hard. These are unnecessary drains on your willpower reserves.

The Intellectual Life, "Men of genius themselves were great only by bringing all their power to bear on the point on which they had decided to show their full measure." Ericsson couldn't have said it better.)

The pseudo-worker looks and feels like someone who is working hard—he or she spends a long time in the library and is not afraid to push on late into the night—but, because of a lack of focus and concentration, doesn't actually accomplish much.

For those familiar with the rigors of such activities, the limit expands to something like four hours, but rarely more.

After running my tough experiment [with cancer]… I have a plan for living the rest of my life," Gallagher concludes in her book. "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." We'd be wise to follow her lead.

The purpose of the deep work chamber is to allow for total focus and uninterrupted work flow," Dewane explains. He imagines a process in which you spend ninety minutes inside, take a ninety-minute break, and repeat two or three times—at which point your brain will have achieved its limit of concentration for the day.

cultivating "concentration so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems.")

attention restoration theory (ART), which claims that spending time in nature can improve your ability to concentrate.

We should not, therefore, expect the bottom-line impact of depth-destroying behaviors to be easily detected.

build your working life around the experience of flow

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.

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).

flow activities.

To summarize, to succeed with deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli.

There's no one correct deep work ritual—the right fit depends on both the person and the type of project pursued.

your world is the outcome of what you pay attention to, so consider for a moment the type of mental world constructed when you dedicate significant time to deep endeavors.