55 Motivational Quotes from Deep Work by Cal Newport
Deep Work by Cal Newport teaches you how you can increase your productivity.Everyone needs to read this book in the present day world filled with so many tempting distractions. social media addicts,internet addicts,people concerned about their productivity can greatly benefit from this book.
Here are the quotes I like:
''Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of
distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their
limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to
replicate.''
''Shallow Work: Non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks,
often performed while distracted.These efforts tend to not create much new
value in the world and are easy to replicate.''
''To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of
producing—a task that requires depth. ''
''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.''
''When Carl Jung wanted to
revolutionize the field of psychiatry, he built a retreat in the woods. Jung’s
Bollingen Tower became a place where he could maintain his ability to think
deeply and then apply the skill to produce work of such stunning originality
that it changed the world.''
''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.''
''If you can’t learn, you can’t
thrive…If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented
you are…The two core abilities just described depend on your ability to
perform deep work. If you haven’t mastered this foundational skill, you’ll
struggle to learn hard things or produce at an elite level.''
This brings us to the question of
what deliberate practice actually requires. Its core components are usually
identified as follows: (1) your attention is focused tightly on a specific
skill you’re trying to improve or an idea you’re trying to master; (2) you
receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention
exactly where it’s most productive. The first component is of particular importance
to our discussion, as it emphasizes that deliberate practice cannot exist
alongside distraction, and that it instead requires uninterrupted concentration.
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.''
''The best students understood the
role intensity plays in productivity and therefore went out of their way to
maximize their concentration—radically reducing the time required to prepare
for tests or write papers, without diminishing the quality of their results.''
''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. 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.''
''The common habit of working in a state of semi-distraction is
potentially devastating to your performance. It might seem harmless to take a
quick glance at your inbox every ten minutes or so.Indeed, many justify this
behavior as better than the old practice of leaving an inbox open on the
screen at all times (a straw-man habit that few follow anymore). But Leroy
teaches us that this is not in fact much of an improvement.That quick check
introduces a new target for your attention. Even worse, by seeing messages that
you cannot deal with at the moment (which is almost always the case), you’ll be
forced to turn back to the primary task with a secondary task left unfinished.
The attention residue left by such unresolved switches dampens your
performance.''
''The type of work that
optimizes your performance is deep work. If you’re not comfortable going
deep for extended periods of time, it’ll be difficult to get your performance
to the peak levels of quality and quantity increasingly necessary to thrive
professionally. Unless your talent and skills absolutely dwarf those of your
competition, the deep workers among them will out-produce you.''
''why cultures of connectivity
persist, the answer, according to our principle, is because it’s easier.''
''Feynman was adamant in avoiding
administrative duties because he knew they would only decrease his ability to
do the one thing that mattered most in his professional life: ‘to do real good
physics work.’ Feynman, we can assume, was probably bad at responding to
e-mails and would likely switch universities if you had tried to move him into
an open office or demand that he tweet. Clarity about what matters provides
clarity about what does not.''
''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…. For example, Adam Grant, the academic… who
became the youngest full professor at Wharton by repeatedly shutting himself
off from the outside world to concentrate on writing. Such behavior is the
opposite of being publicly busy. If Grant worked for Yahoo, Marissa Mayer might
have fired him. But this deep strategy turned out to produce a massive amount
of value.''
''Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology
to education, behavioral economics to family counseling, similarly suggest that
the skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and
the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.''
''We tend to place a lot of
emphasis on our circumstances, assuming that what happens to us (or
fails to happen) determines how we feel. From this perspective, the small-scale
details of how you spend your day aren’t that important, because what matters
are the large-scale outcomes, such as whether or not you get a promotion or
move to that nicer apartment…. decades of research contradict this
understanding. Our brains instead
construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to.[Suppose you
are a cancer patient] If you focus on a cancer diagnosis, you and your life
become unhappy and dark, but if you focus instead on an evening martini, you
and your life become more pleasant—even though the circumstances in both
scenarios are the same.''
''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. There’s a
gravity and sense of importance inherent in deep work—whether you’re Ric Furrer
smithing a sword or a computer programmer optimizing an algorithm. Gallagher’s
theory, therefore, predicts that if you spend enough time in this state, your
mind will understand your world as rich in meaning and importance.''
''Many knowledge workers spend most
of their working day interacting with these types of shallow concerns. Even
when they’re required to complete something more involved, the habit of
frequently checking inboxes ensures that these issues remain at the forefront
of their attention. Gallagher teaches us that this is a foolhardy way to go
about your day, as it ensures that your mind will construct an understanding of
your working life that’s dominated by stress, irritation, frustration, and
triviality. The world represented by your inbox, in other words, isn’t a
pleasant world to inhabit.''
''Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something
challenging.''
''Unfortunately, when it comes to
replacing distraction with focus, matters are not so simple. To understand why
this is true let’s take a closer look at one of the main obstacles to going
deep: the urge to turn your attention toward something more superficial. Most
people recognize that this urge can complicate efforts to concentrate on hard
things, but most underestimate its regularity and strength.''
''Your will, in other words, is not
a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it’s
instead like a muscle that tires. This is why the subjects in the Hofmann and
Baumeister study had such a hard time fighting desires—over time these
distractions drained their finite pool of willpower until they could no longer
resist. The same will happen to you, regardless of your intentions—unless, that
is, you’re smart about your habits.''
''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. If you suddenly decide, for
example, in the middle of a distracted afternoon spent Web browsing, to switch
your attention to a cognitively demanding task, you’ll draw heavily from your
finite willpower to wrest your attention away from the online shininess. Such
attempts will therefore frequently fail. On the other hand, if you deployed
smart routines and rituals—perhaps a set time and quiet location used for your
deep tasks each afternoon—you’d require much less willpower to start and keep
going. In the long run, you’d therefore succeed with these deep efforts far
more often.''
''People will usually respect your right to become inaccessible if these
periods are well defined and well advertised, and outside these stretches,
you’re once again easy to find.''
''An often-overlooked observation
about those who use their minds to create valuable things is that they’re
rarely haphazard in their work habits. Consider the Pulitzer Prize–winning
biographer Robert Caro. As revealed in a 2009 magazine profile, ‘every inch of
[Caro’s] New York office is governed by rules.’ Where he places his books, how
he stacks his notebooks, what he puts on his wall, even what he wears to the
office: Everything is specified by a routine that has varied little over Caro’s
long career. ‘I trained myself to be organized,’ he explained.''
''Your ritual needs to specify a location for your deep work efforts.
This location can be as simple as your normal office with the door shut and
desk cleaned off (a colleague of mine likes to put a hotel-style ‘do not
disturb’ sign on his office door when he’s tackling something difficult). If
it’s possible to identify a location used only for depth—for instance, a
conference room or quiet library—the positive effect can be even greater. (If
you work in an open office plan, this need to find a deep work retreat becomes
particularly important.) Regardless of where you work, be sure to also give
yourself a specific time frame to keep the session a discrete challenge and not
an open-ended slog.''
''Your ritual needs rules and processes to keep your efforts structured. For
example, 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.''
''Your ritual needs to ensure your brain gets the support it needs to
keep operating at a high level of depth. For example,the ritual might specify
that you start with a cup of good coffee, or make sure you have access to
enough food of the right type to maintain energy, or integrate light exercise
such as walking to help keep the mind clear. (As Nietzsche said:’It is only
ideas gained from walking that have any worth.’) This support might also
include environmental factors, such as organizing the raw materials of your work
to minimize energy-dissipating friction (as we saw with Caro’s example).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.''
''It’s not just the change of
environment or seeking of quiet that enables more depth. The dominant force is
the psychology of committing so seriously to the task at hand. To put yourself
in an exotic location to focus on a writing project, or to take a week off from
work just to think, or to lock yourself in a hotel room until you complete an
important invention: These gestures push your deep goal to a level of mental
priority that helps unlock the needed mental resources.''
''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.''
''Discipline #1:
Focus on the Wildly Important
For an individual focused on deep
work, the implication is that you should identify a small number of ambitious
outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours. The general exhortation to ‘spend
more time working deeply’ doesn’t spark a lot of enthusiasm. To instead have a
specific goal that would return tangible and substantial professional benefits
will generate a steadier stream of enthusiasm.''
''Discipline #2:
Act on the Lead Measures
Once you’ve identified a wildly
important goal, you need to measure your success….there are two types of
metrics for this purpose: lag measures and lead measures. Lag
measures describe the thing you’re ultimately trying to improve For example, if
your goal is to increase customer satisfaction in your bakery, then the
relevant lag measure is your customer satisfaction scores.….Lead measures, on
the other hand, ‘measure the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag
measures.’ In the bakery example, a good lead measure might be
the number of customers who receive free samples. This is a number you can directly
increase by giving out more samples. As you increase this number, your lag
measures will likely eventually improve as well. In other words, lead measures
turn your attention to improving the behaviors you directly control in the near
future that will then have a positive impact on your long-term goals.For an
individual focused on deep work, it’s easy to identify the relevant lead measure:
time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important
goal.''
''Discipline #3:
Keep a Compelling Scoreboard
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.''
''Discipline #4:
Create a Cadence of Accountability
For an individual focused on his
or her own deep work habit, there’s likely no team to meet with, but this
doesn’t exempt you from the need for regular accountability. I… recommend the habit of a weekly review in
which you make a plan for the workweek ahead . During my experiments with 4DX,
I used a weekly review to look over my scoreboard to celebrate good weeks, help
understand what led to bad weeks, and most important, figure out how to ensure
a good score for the days ahead. This led me to adjust my schedule to meet the
needs of my lead measure —enabling significantly more deep work than if I had
avoided such reviews altogether.''
''why a shutdown will be
profitable to your ability to produce valuable output
Reason #1:
Downtime Aids Insights
Reason #2:
Downtime Helps Recharge the Energy Needed to Work Deeply.
Reason #3: The
Work That Evening Downtime Replaces Is Usually Not That Important.''
''Decades of work from multiple
different subfields within psychology all point toward the conclusion that
regularly resting your brain improves the quality of your deep work. When you work, work hard. When you’re done,
be done.''
''If you eat healthy just one
day a week,you’re unlikely to lose weight, as the majority of your time is
still spent gorging.Similarly, if you spend just one day a week resisting
distraction, you’re unlikely to diminish your brain’s craving for these
stimuli, as most of your time is still spent giving in to it.I propose an
alternative to the Internet Sabbath. Instead of scheduling the occasional break
from distraction so you can focus, you should instead schedule the occasional
break from focus to give in to distraction. To make this suggestion more concrete,
let’s make the simplifying assumption that Internet use is synonymous with
seeking distracting stimuli. (You can, of course, use the Internet in a way
that’s focused and deep, but for a distraction addict, this is a difficult
task.) Similarly, let’s consider working in the absence of
the Internet to be synonymous with more focused work. (You can, of course, find
ways to be distracted without a network connection, but these tend to be easier
to resist.)With these rough categorizations established, the strategy works as
follows:Schedule in advance when you’ll
use the Internet, and then avoid it altogether outside these times. I suggest
that you keep a notepad near your computer at work. On this pad, record the
next time you’re allowed to use the Internet. Until you arrive at that time,
absolutely no network connectivity is allowed—no matter how tempting.''
''If you find yourself glued to a smartphone or laptop throughout your
evenings and weekends, then it’s likely that your behavior outside of work is
undoing many of your attempts during the workday to rewire your brain (which
makes little distinction between the two settings). In this case, I would
suggest that you maintain the strategy of scheduling Internet use even after
the workday is over.''
''Identify a deep task (that is,
something that requires deep work to complete) that’s high on your priority
list. Estimate how long you’d normally put aside for an obligation of this
type, then give yourself a hard deadline that drastically reduces this time. If
possible, commit publicly to the deadline—for example, by telling the person
expecting the finished project when they should expect it. If this isn’t
possible (or if it puts your job in jeopardy), then motivate yourself by
setting a countdown timer on your phone and propping it up where you can’t
avoid seeing it as you work.At this point, there should be only one possible
way to get the deep task done in time: working with great intensity—no e-mail
breaks, no daydreaming, no Facebook browsing, no repeated trips to the coffee
machine. Like Roosevelt at Harvard, attack the task with every free neuron
until it gives way under your unwavering barrage of concentration.Try this
experiment no more than once a week at first—giving your brain practice with
intensity, but also giving it (and your stress levels) time to rest in between.
Once you feel confident in your ability to trade concentration for completion
time, increase the frequency of these Roosevelt dashes. Remember,however, to
always keep your self-imposed deadlines right at the edge of feasibility. You
should be able to consistently beat the buzzer (or at least be close), but to
do so should require teeth-gritting concentration.''
''This strategy asks that you
perform the equivalent of a packing party on the social media services that you
currently use. Instead of ‘packing,’ however, you’ll instead ban yourself from
using them for thirty days. All of them: Facebook, Instagram, Google+,
Twitter, Snapchat, Vine—or whatever other services have risen to popularity
since I first wrote these words. Don’t formally deactivate these services, and
(this is important) don’t mention online that you’ll be signing off: Just stop
using them, cold turkey. If someone reaches out to you by other means and asks
why your activity on a particular service has fallen off, you can explain, but
don’t go out of your way to tell people.After thirty days of this self-imposed
network isolation, ask yourself the following two questions about each of the
services you temporarily quit:
1. Would the last thirty days have
been notably better if I had been able to use this service?
2. Did people care that I wasn’t
using this service?
If your answer is ‘no’ to both
questions, quit the service permanently. If your answer was a clear ‘yes,’ then
return to using the service. If your answers are qualified or ambiguous, it’s
up to you whether you return to the service, though I would encourage you to
lean toward quitting. (You can always rejoin later.)''
''These services aren’t necessarily, as advertised, the lifeblood of our
modern connected world. They’re just products, developed by private companies,
funded lavishly, marketed carefully, and designed ultimately to capture then
sell your personal information and attention to advertisers. They can be fun,
but in the scheme of your life and what you want to accomplish, they’re a
lightweight whimsy, one unimportant distraction among many threatening to
derail you from something deeper. Or maybe social media tools are at the
core of your existence. You won’t know either way until you sample life without
them.''
''When it comes to your relaxation, don’t default to whatever catches
your attention at the moment, but instead dedicate some advance thinking to the
question of how you want to spend your ‘day within a day.’Addictive
websites…[the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Business Insider, and Reddit] thrive in a vacuum: If you haven’t given
yourself something to do in a given moment, they’ll always beckon as an
appealing option. If you instead fill this free time with something of more
quality, their grip on your attention will loosen. It’s crucial, therefore,
that you figure out in advance what you’re going to do with your evenings and
weekends before they begin. Structured hobbies provide good fodder for these
hours, as they generate specific actions with specific goals to fill your time.
A set program of reading, à la Bennett, where you spend regular time each night
making progress on a series of deliberately chosen books, is also a good
option, as is, of course, exercise or the enjoyment of good (in-person) company.''
''If you give your mind something meaningful to do throughout all your
waking hours, you’ll end the day more fulfilled, and begin the next one more
relaxed, than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in
semiconscious and unstructured Web surfing.''
''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.''
''Very few people work even 8 hours a day. You’re lucky if you get a few good
hours in between all the meetings, interruptions, web surfing, office politics,
and personal business that permeate the typical workday.Fewer official working
hours helps squeeze the fat out of the typical workweek. Once everyone has less time to get their stuff done, they respect that
time even more. People become stingy with their time and that’s a good thing.
They don’t waste it on things that just don’t matter. When you have fewer hours
you usually spend them more wisely.''
''Treat shallow work with suspicion because its damage is often vastly
underestimated and its importance vastly overestimated. This type of work is
inevitable, but you must keep it confined to a point where it doesn’t impede
your ability to take full advantage of the deeper efforts that ultimately
determine your impact. The strategies that follow will help you act on this
reality.
Schedule Every Minute of Your Day
Quantify the Depth of Every
Activity
Ask Your Boss for a Shallow Work
Budget
Finish Your Work by Five Thirty
Become Hard to Reach''
''Decide in advance what you’re going to do with every minute of your
workday. It’s natural, at first, to resist this idea, as it’s undoubtedly
easier to continue to allow the twin forces of internal whim and external
requests to drive your schedule. But you must overcome this distrust of
structure if you want to approach your true potential as someone who creates
things that matter.''
''Once you know where your
activities fall on the deep-to-shallow scale, bias your time toward the former.
When we reconsider our case studies, for example, we see that the first task is
something that you would want to prioritize as a good use of time, while the
second and third are activities of a type that should be minimized—they might
feel productive, but their return on (time) investment is measly.''
''The reduction in shallow frees up
more energy for the deep alternative, allowing us to produce more than
if we had defaulted to a more typical crowded schedule. Second, the limits to
our time necessitate more careful thinking about our organizational habits,
also leading to more value produced as compared to longer but less organized
schedules.''
''Fixed-schedule productivity, in
other words, is a meta-habit that’s simple to adopt but broad in its
impact. If you have to choose just one behavior that reorients your focus
toward the deep, this one should be high on your list of possibilities. If
you’re still not sure, however, about the idea that artificial limits on your
workday can make you more successful, I urge you to once again turn your
attention to the career of fixed-schedule advocate Radhika Nagpal.''
''There are two common tropes
bandied around when people discuss solutions to e-mail overload. One says that
sending e-mails generates more emails,while the other says that wrestling with
ambiguous or irrelevant e-mails is a major source of inbox-related stress. The
approach suggested here responds aggressively to both issues—you send fewer
e-mails and ignore those that aren’t easy to process—and by doing so will
significantly weaken the grip your inbox maintains over your time and
attention.''
''Deep work is important, in other
words, not because distraction is evil, but because it enabled Bill Gates to
start a billiondollar industry in less than a semester.''
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