Quotes About Concentration

We now know from decades of research in both psychology and neuroscience that the state of mental strain that accompanies deep work is also necessary to improve your abilities.

I am not asking Antonio a style question I could find searching Google for 10 minutes.

To maximize your success, you need to support your efforts to go deep. At the same time, this support needs to be systematized so that you don't waste mental energy figuring out what you need in the moment.

To work deeply is a big deal and should not be an activity undertaken lightly.

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.

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

Sometimes to go deep, you must first go big.

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.

Both intuition and a growing body of research underscore the reality that sharing a workspace with a large number of coworkers is incredibly distracting—creating an environment that thwarts attempts to think seriously. In a 2013 article summarizing recent research on this topic, Bloomberg Businessweek went so far as to call for an end to the "tyranny of the open-plan office." And yet, these open office designs are not embraced haphazardly.

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.

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

To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction.

To concentrate requires what ART calls directed attention. This resource is finite: If you exhaust it, you'll struggle to concentrate. (For

The Law of the Vital Few*: In many settings, 80 percent of a given effect is due to just 20 percent of the possible causes.

although our current embrace of distraction is a real phenomenon, it's built on an unstable foundation and can be easily dismissed once you decide

deliberate practice cannot exist alongside distraction,

Deep Work Helps You Produce at an Elite Level

law of productivity: High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)

The Art of Focus,