# Deep Work ## Metadata * Author: [Cal Newport](https://www.amazon.comundefined) * ASIN: B00X47ZVXM * ISBN: 1455586692 * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00X47ZVXM * [Kindle link](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM) ## Highlights 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. — location: [439](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=439) ^ref-604 --- (He typically divides the writing of a scholarly paper into three discrete tasks: analyzing the data, writing a full draft, and editing the draft into something publishable.) — location: [446](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=446) ^ref-39709 --- High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus) — location: [454](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=454) ^ref-65074 --- 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. 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. — location: [469](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=469) ^ref-22398 --- 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. — location: [487](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=487) ^ref-56891 --- To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. Put another way, the type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work. — location: [490](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=490) ^ref-63345 --- Dorsey reports, for example, that he ends the average day with thirty to forty sets of meeting notes that he reviews and filters at night. In the small spaces between all these meetings, he believes in serendipitous availability. “I do a lot of my work at stand-up tables, which anyone can come up to,” Dorsey said. “I get to hear all these conversations around the company.” — location: [501](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=501) ^ref-47675 --- To ask a CEO to spend four hours thinking deeply about a single problem is a waste of what makes him or her valuable. It’s better to hire three smart subordinates to think deeply about the problem and then bring their solutions to the executive for a final decision. — location: [521](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=521) ^ref-48203 --- the Scrum project management methodology, which replaces a lot of this ad hoc messaging with regular, highly structured, and ruthlessly efficient status meetings (often held standing up to minimize the urge to bloviate). This approach frees up more managerial time for thinking deeply about the problems their teams are tackling, often improving the overall value of what they produce. — location: [539](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=539) ^ref-17268 --- I mention these three business trends because they highlight a paradox. In the last chapter, I argued that deep work is more valuable than ever before in our shifting economy. If this is true, however, you would expect to see this skill promoted not just by ambitious individuals but also by organizations hoping to get the most out of their employees. As the examples provided emphasize, this is not happening. Many other ideas are being prioritized as more important than deep work in the business world, including, as we just encountered, serendipitous collaboration, rapid communication, and an active presence on social media. — location: [566](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=566) ^ref-11687 --- big trends in business today actively decrease people’s ability to perform deep work, even though the benefits promised by these trends (e.g., increased serendipity, faster responses to requests, and more exposure) are arguably dwarfed by the benefits that flow from a commitment to deep work (e.g., the ability to learn hard things fast and produce at an elite level). — location: [588](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=588) ^ref-50346 --- Generally speaking, as knowledge work makes more complex demands of the labor force, it becomes harder to measure the value of an individual’s efforts. The French economist Thomas Piketty made this point explicit in his study of the extreme growth of executive salaries. The enabling assumption driving his argument is that “it is objectively difficult to measure individual contributions to a firm’s output.” — location: [615](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=615) ^ref-27058 --- Why do so many follow the lead of the Boston Consulting Group and foster a culture of connectivity even though it’s likely, as Perlow found in her study, that it hurts employees’ well-being and productivity, and probably doesn’t help the bottom line? — location: [645](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=645) ^ref-12981 --- The Principle of Least Resistance: In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment. — location: [647](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=647) ^ref-36288 --- If you work in an environment where you can get an answer to a question or a specific piece of information immediately when the need arises, this makes your life easier—at least, in the moment. If you couldn’t count on this quick response time you’d instead have to do more advance planning for your work, be more organized, and be prepared to put things aside for a while and turn your attention elsewhere while waiting for what you requested. All of this would make the day to day of your working life harder (even if it produced more satisfaction and a better outcome in the long term). — location: [650](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=650) ^ref-49490 --- The second reason that a culture of connectivity makes life easier is that it creates an environment where it becomes acceptable to run your day out of your inbox—responding to the latest missive with alacrity while others pile up behind it, all the while feeling satisfyingly productive (more on this soon). — location: [657](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=657) ^ref-2112 --- This type of planning is hard. Consider, for example, David Allen’s Getting Things Done task-management methodology, which is a well-respected system for intelligently managing competing workplace obligations. This system proposes a fifteen-element flowchart for making a decision on what to do next! It’s significantly easier to simply chime in on the latest cc’d e-mail thread. — location: [660](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=660) ^ref-710 --- To name another example, consider the common practice of setting up regularly occurring meetings for projects. These meetings tend to pile up and fracture schedules to the point where sustained focus during the day becomes impossible. Why do they persist? They’re easier. For many, these standing meetings become a simple (but blunt) form of personal organization. Instead of trying to manage their time and obligations themselves, they let the impending meeting each week force them to take some action on a given project and more generally provide a highly visible simulacrum of progress. — location: [665](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=665) ^ref-50894 --- The Principle of Least Resistance, protected from scrutiny by the metric black hole, supports work cultures that save us from the short-term discomfort of concentration and planning, at the expense of long-term satisfaction and the production of real value. By doing so, this principle drives us toward shallow work in an economy that increasingly rewards depth. — location: [674](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=674) ^ref-62287 --- Busyness as a Proxy for Productivity — location: [679](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=679) ^ref-9758 --- 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. — location: [693](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=693) ^ref-19545 --- A similar reality creates problems for many knowledge workers. They want to prove that they’re productive members of the team and are earning their keep, but they’re not entirely clear what this goal constitutes. They have no rising h-index or rack of repaired motorcycles to point to as evidence of their worth. To overcome this gap, many seem to be turning back to the last time when productivity was more universally observable: the industrial age. — location: [704](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=704) ^ref-61832 --- Knowledge workers, I’m arguing, are tending toward increasingly visible busyness because they lack a better way to demonstrate their value. — location: [712](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=712) ^ref-38129 --- Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner. — location: [713](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=713) ^ref-12691 --- This mind-set provides another explanation for the popularity of many depth-destroying behaviors. If you send and answer e-mails at all hours, if you schedule and attend meetings constantly, if you weigh in on instant message systems like Hall within seconds when someone poses a new question, or if you roam your open office bouncing ideas off all whom you encounter—all of these behaviors make you seem busy in a public manner. — location: [716](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=716) ^ref-13754 --- She was, in some sense, punishing her employees for not spending more time checking e-mail (one of the primary reasons to log in to the servers). “If you’re not visibly busy,” she signaled, “I’ll assume you’re not productive.” — location: [723](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=723) ^ref-27357 --- Postman argued that our society was sliding into a troubling relationship with technology. We were, he noted, no longer discussing the trade-offs surrounding new technologies, balancing the new efficiencies against the new problems introduced. If it’s high-tech, we began to instead assume, then it’s good. Case closed. — location: [748](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=748) ^ref-48210 --- “Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself — location: [751](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=751) ^ref-52605 --- “It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant.” — location: [752](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=752) ^ref-43633 --- The alternative, to not embrace all things Internet, is, as Postman would say, “invisible and therefore irrelevant.” This invisibility explains the uproar, mentioned earlier, that arose when Jonathan Franzen dared suggest that novelists shouldn’t tweet. It riled people not because they’re well versed in book marketing and disagreed with Franzen’s conclusion, but because it surprised them that anyone serious would suggest the irrelevance of social media. In an Internet-centric technopoly such a statement is the equivalent of a flag burning—desecration, not debate. — location: [766](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=766) ^ref-65445 --- Deep work should be a priority in today’s business climate. But it’s not. I’ve just summarized various explanations for this paradox. Among them are the realities that deep work is hard and shallow work is easier, that in the absence of clear goals for your job, the visible busyness that surrounds shallow work becomes self-preserving, and that our culture has developed a belief that if a behavior relates to “the Internet,” then it’s good—regardless of its impact on our ability to produce valuable things. All of these trends are enabled by the difficulty of directly measuring the value of depth or the cost of ignoring it. — location: [784](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=784) ^ref-51702 --- But when we shift our attention to knowledge work this connection is muddied. Part of the issue is clarity. Craftsmen like Furrer tackle professional challenges that are simple to define but difficult to execute—a useful imbalance when seeking purpose. Knowledge work exchanges this clarity for ambiguity. It can be hard to define exactly what a given knowledge worker does and how it differs from another: On our worst days, it can seem that all knowledge work boils down to the same exhausting roil of e-mails and PowerPoint, with only the charts used in the slides differentiating one career from another. Furrer himself identifies this blandness when he writes: “The world of information superhighways and cyber space has left me rather cold and disenchanted.” — location: [824](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=824) ^ref-1375 --- by embracing depth over shallowness you can tap the same veins of meaning that drive craftsmen — location: [838](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=838) ^ref-52780 --- a deep life is not just economically lucrative, but also a life well lived. — location: [840](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=840) ^ref-53560 --- 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. According to Gallagher, decades of research contradict this understanding. Our brains instead construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to. — location: [853](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=853) ^ref-37548 --- “Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.” — location: [859](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=859) ^ref-20998 --- 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. — location: [876](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=876) ^ref-34950 --- (The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whom we’ll learn more about in the next section, explicitly identifies this advantage when he emphasizes the advantage of cultivating “concentration so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems.”) — location: [880](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=880) ^ref-484 --- ‘the idle mind is the devil’s workshop’… when you lose focus, your mind tends to fix on what could be wrong with your life instead of what’s right.” A workday driven by the shallow, from a neurological perspective, is likely to be a draining and upsetting day, even if most of the shallow things that capture your attention seem harmless or fun. — location: [906](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=906) ^ref-39014 --- “The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” Csikszentmihalyi calls this mental state flow — location: [929](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=929) ^ref-42204 --- Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed. — location: [933](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=933) ^ref-37886 --- Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging. — location: [937](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=937) ^ref-20052 --- 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). — location: [944](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=944) ^ref-46989 --- To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction. — location: [953](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=953) ^ref-53594 --- In a post-Enlightenment world we have tasked ourselves to identify what’s meaningful and what’s not, an exercise that can seem arbitrary and induce a creeping nihilism. “The Enlightenment’s metaphysical embrace of the autonomous individual leads not just to a boring life,” Dreyfus and Kelly worry; “it leads almost inevitably to a nearly unlivable one.” — location: [964](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=964) ^ref-5203 --- the craftsman has stumbled onto something crucial in a post-Enlightenment world: a source of meaning sited outside the individual. — location: [974](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=974) ^ref-57808 --- As Dreyfus and Kelly explain, such sacredness is common to craftsmanship. The task of a craftsman, they conclude, “is not to generate meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill of discerning the meanings that are already there.” This frees the craftsman of the nihilism of autonomous individualism, providing an ordered world of meaning. — location: [977](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=977) ^ref-50140 --- Santiago Gonzalez describing his work to an interviewer: Beautiful code is short and concise, so if you were to give that code to another programmer they would say, “oh, that’s well written code.” It’s much like as if you were writing a poem. — location: [989](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=989) ^ref-21521 --- The Pragmatic Programmer, a well-regarded book in the computer programming field, makes this connection between code and old-style craftsmanship more directly by quoting the medieval quarry worker’s creed in its preface: “We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals.” The book then elaborates that computer programmers must see their work in the same way: Within the overall structure of a project there is always room for individuality and craftsmanship… One hundred years from now, our engineering may seem as archaic as the techniques used by medieval cathedral builders seem to today’s civil engineers, while our craftsmanship will still be honored. — location: [993](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=993) ^ref-22955 --- A similar potential for craftsmanship can be found in most skilled jobs in the information economy. Whether you’re a writer, marketer, consultant, or lawyer: Your work is craft, and if you hone your ability and apply it with respect and care, then like the skilled wheelwright you can generate meaning in the daily efforts of your professional life. — location: [1000](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1000) ^ref-23171 --- Our obsession with the advice to “follow your passion” (the subject of my last book), for example, is motivated by the (flawed) idea that what matters most for your career satisfaction is the specifics of the job you choose. — location: [1004](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1004) ^ref-26134 --- The meaning uncovered by such efforts is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in craftsmanship—not the outcomes of their work. Put another way, a wooden wheel is not noble, but its shaping can be. The same applies to knowledge work. You don’t need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work. — location: [1009](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1009) ^ref-1375 --- deep work is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy at the same time that it also is becoming increasingly rare (for somewhat arbitrary reasons). This represents a classic market mismatch: If you cultivate this skill, you’ll thrive professionally. — location: [1018](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1018) ^ref-4787 --- “I’ll live the focused life, because it’s the best kind there is.” — location: [1027](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1027) ^ref-45879 --- Rule #1 Work Deeply — location: [1032](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1032) ^ref-26296 --- 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. — location: [1072](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1072) ^ref-25534 --- The five most common desires these subjects fought include, not surprisingly, eating, sleeping, and sex. But the top five list also included desires for “taking a break from [hard] work… checking e-mail and social networking sites, surfing the web, listening to music, or watching television.” The lure of the Internet and television proved especially strong: The subjects succeeded in resisting these particularly addictive distractions only around half the time. — location: [1080](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1080) ^ref-44196 --- 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. — location: [1090](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1090) ^ref-4322 --- 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. — location: [1093](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1093) ^ref-24757 --- Decide on Your Depth Philosophy — location: [1106](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1106) ^ref-41977 --- Knuth deploys a form of monasticism that prioritizes deep work by trying to eliminate or minimize all other types of work. Chappell, by contrast, deploys a rhythmic strategy in which he works for the same hours (five to seven thirty a.m.) every weekday morning, without exception, before beginning a workday punctuated by standard distractions. — location: [1111](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1111) ^ref-60186 --- The Monastic Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling — location: [1121](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1121) ^ref-33564 --- Knuth deploys what I call the monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling. This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations. Practitioners of the monastic philosophy tend to have a well-defined and highly valued professional goal that they’re pursuing, and the bulk of their professional success comes from doing this one thing exceptionally well. It’s this clarity that helps them eliminate the thicket of shallow concerns that tend to trip up those whose value proposition in the working world is more varied. — location: [1133](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1133) ^ref-27697 --- If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. But as those chunks get separated and fragmented, my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly. — location: [1150](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1150) ^ref-38493 --- Therefore, the pool of individuals to whom the monastic philosophy applies is limited—and that’s okay. If you’re outside this pool, its radical simplicity shouldn’t evince too much envy. On the other hand, if you’re inside this pool—someone whose contribution to the world is discrete, clear, and individualized*—then you should give this philosophy serious consideration, as it might be the deciding factor between an average career and one that will be remembered. — location: [1160](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1160) ^ref-63142 --- The Bimodal Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling — location: [1164](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1164) ^ref-52373 --- In recalling this story I want to emphasize something important: Jung did not deploy a monastic approach to deep work. Donald Knuth and Neal Stephenson, our examples from earlier, attempted to completely eliminate distraction and shallowness from their professional lives. Jung, by contrast, sought this elimination only during the periods he spent at his retreat. The rest of Jung’s time was spent in Zurich, where his life was anything but monastic: — location: [1170](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1170) ^ref-4050 --- During the deep time, the bimodal worker will act monastically—seeking intense and uninterrupted concentration. During the shallow time, such focus is not prioritized. This division of time between deep and open can happen on multiple scales. For example, on the scale of a week, you might dedicate a four-day weekend to depth and the rest to open time. Similarly, on the scale of a year, you might dedicate one season to contain most of your deep stretches (as many academics do over the summer or while on sabbatical). — location: [1180](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1180) ^ref-56459 --- The bimodal philosophy believes that deep work can produce extreme productivity, but only if the subject dedicates enough time to such endeavors to reach maximum cognitive intensity—the state in which real breakthroughs occur. 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. — location: [1183](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1183) ^ref-52154 --- On the scale of the academic year, he stacked his courses into one semester, so that he could focus the other on deep work. During these deep semesters he then applied the bimodal approach on the weekly scale. He would, perhaps once or twice a month, take a period of two to four days to become completely monastic. — location: [1192](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1192) ^ref-30986 --- Give and Take, promotes the practice of giving of your time and attention, without expectation of something in return, as a key strategy in professional advancement. — location: [1196](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1196) ^ref-38785 --- Those who deploy the bimodal philosophy of deep work admire the productivity of the monastics but also respect the value they receive from the shallow behaviors in their working lives. — location: [1197](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1197) ^ref-23859 --- The Rhythmic Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling — location: [1205](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1205) ^ref-14886 --- He keeps a calendar on his wall. Every day that he writes jokes he crosses out the date on the calendar with a big red X. “After a few days you’ll have a chain,” Seinfeld said. “Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.” — location: [1211](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1211) ^ref-3200 --- The goal, in other words, is to generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you’re going to go deep. The chain method is a good example of the rhythmic philosophy of deep work scheduling because it combines a simple scheduling heuristic (do the work every day), with an easy way to remind yourself to do the work: the big red Xs on the calendar. — location: [1217](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1217) ^ref-2274 --- In much the same way that maintaining visual indicators of your work progress can reduce the barrier to entry for going deep, eliminating even the simplest scheduling decisions, such as when during the day to do the work, also reduces this barrier. — location: [1221](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1221) ^ref-49589 --- By supporting deep work with rock-solid routines that make sure a little bit gets done on a regular basis, the rhythmic scheduler will often log a larger total number of deep hours per year. — location: [1240](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1240) ^ref-7166 --- The decision between rhythmic and bimodal can come down to your self-control in such scheduling matters. If you’re Carl Jung and are engaged in an intellectual dogfight with Sigmund Freud’s supporters, you’ll likely have no trouble recognizing the importance of finding time to focus on your ideas. On the other hand, if you’re writing a dissertation with no one pressuring you to get it done, the habitual nature of the rhythmic philosophy might be necessary to maintain progress. — location: [1241](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1241) ^ref-24929 --- The Journalistic Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling — location: [1249](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1249) ^ref-47574 --- I call this approach, in which you fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule, the journalist philosophy. This name is a nod to the fact that journalists, like Walter Isaacson, are trained to shift into a writing mode on a moment’s notice, as is required by the deadline-driven nature of their profession. — location: [1268](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1268) ^ref-12280 --- As I established in the opening to this rule, the ability to rapidly switch your mind from shallow to deep mode doesn’t come naturally. Without practice, such switches can seriously deplete your finite willpower reserves. This habit also requires a sense of confidence in your abilities—a conviction that what you’re doing is important and will succeed. — location: [1271](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1271) ^ref-59086 --- Isaacson, for example, likely had an easier time switching to writing mode than, say, a first-time novelist, because Isaacson had worked himself up to become a respected writer by this point. He knew he had the capacity to write an epic biography and understood it to be a key task in his professional advancement. — location: [1274](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1274) ^ref-12674 --- In other words, I’m not monastic in my deep work (though I do find myself occasionally jealous of my fellow computer scientist Donald Knuth’s unapologetic disconnection), I don’t deploy multiday depth binges like the bimodalists, and though I am intrigued by the rhythmic philosophy, my schedule has a way of thwarting attempts to enforce a daily habit. Instead, in an ode to Isaacson, I face each week as it arrives and do my best to squeeze out as much depth as possible. — location: [1277](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1277) ^ref-41212 --- By reducing the need to make decisions about deep work moment by moment, I can preserve more mental energy for the deep thinking itself. — location: [1287](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1287) ^ref-27387 --- But if you’re confident in the value of what you’re trying to produce, and practiced in the skill of going deep (a skill we will continue to develop in the strategies that follow), it can be a surprisingly robust way to squeeze out large amounts of depth from an otherwise demanding schedule. — location: [1289](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1289) ^ref-45429 --- Ritualize — location: [1291](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1291) ^ref-28892 --- An often-overlooked observation about those who use their minds to create valuable things is that they’re rarely haphazard in their work habits. — location: [1291](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1291) ^ref-32975 --- “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,” — location: [1293](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1293) ^ref-19770 --- Charles Darwin had a similarly strict structure for his working life during the period when he was perfecting On the Origin of Species. As his son Francis later remembered, he would rise promptly at seven to take a short walk. He would then eat breakfast alone and retire to his study from eight to nine thirty. The next hour was dedicated to reading his letters from the day before, after which he would return to his study from ten thirty until noon. After this session, he would mull over challenging ideas while walking on a proscribed route that started at his greenhouse and then circled a path on his property. He would walk until satisfied with his thinking then declare his workday done. — location: [1295](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1295) ^ref-19492 --- There is a popular notion that artists work from inspiration—that there is some strike or bolt or bubbling up of creative mojo from who knows where… but I hope [my work] makes clear that waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan. — location: [1302](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1302) ^ref-32288 --- “[Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.” — location: [1306](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1306) ^ref-64452 --- Great minds like Caro and Darwin didn’t deploy rituals to be weird; they did so because success in their work depended on their ability to go deep, again and again—there’s — location: [1309](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1309) ^ref-19800 --- Their rituals minimized the friction in this transition to depth, allowing them to go deep more easily and stay in the state longer. If they had instead waited for inspiration to strike before settling in to serious work, their accomplishments would likely have been greatly reduced. — location: [1311](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1311) ^ref-61309 --- Where you’ll work and for how long. — location: [1314](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1314) ^ref-18306 --- 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. — location: [1317](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1317) ^ref-62247 --- be sure to also give yourself a specific time frame to keep the session a discrete challenge and not an open-ended slog. — location: [1319](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1319) ^ref-17057 --- How you’ll work once you start to work. — location: [1320](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1320) ^ref-6197 --- 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. — location: [1322](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1322) ^ref-40786 --- How you’ll support your work. — location: [1324](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1324) ^ref-3047 --- Nietzsche said: “It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.”) — location: [1327](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1327) ^ref-44277 --- 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. — location: [1328](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1328) ^ref-34238 --- Surrounding such efforts with a complicated (and perhaps, to the outside world, quite strange) ritual accepts this reality—providing your mind with the structure and commitment it needs to slip into the state of focus where you can begin to create things that matter. — location: [1333](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1333) ^ref-12353 --- Make Grand Gestures — location: [1335](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1335) ^ref-36195 --- The concept is simple: By leveraging a radical change to your normal environment, coupled perhaps with a significant investment of effort or money, all dedicated toward supporting a deep work task, you increase the perceived importance of the task. This boost in importance reduces your mind’s instinct to procrastinate and delivers an injection of motivation and energy. — location: [1347](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1347) ^ref-56395 --- These outbuildings aren’t strictly necessary for these writers, who need only a laptop and a flat surface to put it on to ply their trade. But it’s not the amenities of the cabins that generate their value; it’s instead the grand gesture represented in the design and building of the cabin for the sole purpose of enabling better writing. — location: [1364](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1364) ^ref-15729 --- 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. Sometimes to go deep, you must first go big. — location: [1382](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1382) ^ref-9714 --- Don’t Work Alone — location: [1385](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1385) ^ref-21961 --- This decision between promoting concentration and promoting serendipity seems to indicate that deep work (an individual endeavor) is incompatible with generating creative insights (a collaborative endeavor). This conclusion, however, is flawed. It’s based, I argue, on an incomplete understanding of the theory of serendipitous creativity. — location: [1403](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1403) ^ref-59587 --- The theory of serendipitous creativity, in other words, seems well justified by the historical record. The transistor, we can argue with some confidence, probably required Bell Labs and its ability to put solid-state physicists, quantum theorists, and world-class experimentalists in one building where they could serendipitously encounter one another and learn from their varied expertise. This was an invention unlikely to come from a lone scientist thinking deeply in the academic equivalent of Carl Jung’s stone tower. — location: [1433](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1433) ^ref-25763 --- This combination of soundproofed offices connected to large common areas yields a hub-and-spoke architecture of innovation in which both serendipitous encounter and isolated deep thinking are supported. It’s a setup that straddles a spectrum where on one extreme we find the solo thinker, isolated from inspiration but free from distraction, and on the other extreme, we find the fully collaborative thinker in an open office, flush with inspiration but struggling to support the deep thinking needed to build on it.* — location: [1445](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1445) ^ref-9568 --- The key is to maintain both in a hub-and-spoke-style arrangement: Expose yourself to ideas in hubs on a regular basis, but maintain a spoke in which to work deeply on what you encounter. — location: [1454](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1454) ^ref-51434 --- This back-and-forth represents a collaborative form of deep work (common in academic circles) that leverages what I call the whiteboard effect. For some types of problems, working with someone else at the proverbial shared whiteboard can push you deeper than if you were working alone. The presence of the other party waiting for your next insight—be it someone physically in the same room or collaborating with you virtually—can short-circuit the natural instinct to avoid depth. — location: [1467](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1467) ^ref-45539 --- The success of Building 20 and Bell Labs indicates that isolation is not required for productive deep work. Indeed, their example indicates that for many types of work—especially when pursuing innovation—collaborative deep work can yield better results. — location: [1471](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1471) ^ref-7714 --- Separate your pursuit of serendipitous encounters from your efforts to think deeply and build on these inspirations. You should try to optimize each effort separately, as opposed to mixing them together into a sludge that impedes both goals. — location: [1475](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1475) ^ref-31742 --- By working side by side with someone on a problem, you can push each other toward deeper levels of depth, and therefore toward the generation of more and more valuable output as compared to working alone. — location: [1478](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1478) ^ref-22018 --- Execute Like a Business — location: [1482](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1482) ^ref-9933 --- With this in mind, I’ve summarized in the following sections the four disciplines of the 4DX framework, and for each I describe how I adapted it to the specific concerns of developing a deep work habit. Discipline #1: Focus on the Wildly Important — location: [1502](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1502) ^ref-38525 --- “The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.” They elaborate that execution should be aimed at a small number of “wildly important goals.” — location: [1505](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1505) ^ref-32407 --- 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. — location: [1508](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1508) ^ref-12369 --- “If you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to say ‘no’ to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say ‘yes’ to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else.” — location: [1511](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1511) ^ref-3729 --- Discipline #2: Act on the Lead Measures — location: [1516](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1516) ^ref-42449 --- In 4DX, 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. — location: [1517](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1517) ^ref-53683 --- “When you receive them, the performance that drove them is already in the past.” — location: [1520](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1520) ^ref-57239 --- 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. — location: [1521](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1521) ^ref-7701 --- 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. — location: [1523](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1523) ^ref-31058 --- lead measure: time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal. — location: [1525](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1525) ^ref-33895 --- I used to focus on lag measures, such as papers published per year. These measures, however, lacked influence on my day-to-day behavior because there was nothing I could do in the short term that could immediately generate a noticeable change to this long-term metric. — location: [1526](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1526) ^ref-27171 --- Discipline #3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard “People play differently when they’re keeping score,” the 4DX authors explain. — location: [1530](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1530) ^ref-9452 --- Once the team notices their success with a lead measure, they become invested in perpetuating this performance. — location: [1534](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1534) ^ref-44671 --- I kept track of the hours spent in deep work that week with a simple tally of tick marks in that week’s row. To maximize the motivation generated by this scoreboard, whenever I reached an important milestone in an academic paper (e.g., solving a key proof), I would circle the tally mark corresponding to the hour where I finished the result. — location: [1539](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1539) ^ref-39966 --- Discipline #4: Create a Cadence of Accountability The 4DX authors elaborate that the final step to help maintain a focus on lead measures is to put in place “a rhythm of regular and frequent meetings of any team that owns a wildly important goal.” — location: [1545](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1545) ^ref-47933 --- recommend the habit of a weekly review in which you make a plan for the workweek ahead (see Rule #4). — location: [1551](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1551) ^ref-45189 --- 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. — location: [1553](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1553) ^ref-63674 --- The 4DX framework is based on the fundamental premise that execution is more difficult than strategizing. — location: [1555](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1555) ^ref-48741 --- In retrospect, it was not so much the intensity of my deep work periods that increased, but instead their regularity. Whereas I used to cluster my deep thinking near paper submission deadlines, the 4DX habit kept my mind concentrated throughout the full year. — location: [1562](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1562) ^ref-22765 --- Be Lazy — location: [1566](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1566) ^ref-62889 --- Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets… it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. — location: [1577](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1577) ^ref-15714 --- You could, for example, use Kreider’s approach of retreating from the world of shallow tasks altogether by hiding out in an “undisclosed location,” but this isn’t practical for most people. Instead, I want to suggest a more applicable but still quite powerful heuristic: At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning—no — location: [1584](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1584) ^ref-38800 --- Tim Kreider’s personal endorsement, but it’s worth taking the time to also understand the science behind the value of downtime. A closer examination of this literature reveals the following three possible explanations for this value. Reason #1: Downtime Aids Insights — location: [1590](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1590) ^ref-29984 --- Observations from experiments such as this one led Dijksterhuis and his collaborators to introduce unconscious thought theory (UTT)—an attempt to understand the different roles conscious and unconscious deliberation play in decision making. At a high level, this theory proposes that for decisions that require the application of strict rules, the conscious mind must be involved. For example, if you need to do a math calculation, only your conscious mind is able to follow the precise arithmetic rules needed for correctness. On the other hand, for decisions that involve large amounts of information and multiple vague, and perhaps even conflicting, constraints, your unconscious mind is well suited to tackle the issue. — location: [1602](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1602) ^ref-26664 --- Your conscious mind, according to this theory, is like a home computer on which you can run carefully written programs that return correct answers to limited problems, whereas your unconscious mind is like Google’s vast data centers, in which statistical algorithms sift through terabytes of unstructured information, teasing out surprising useful solutions to difficult questions. — location: [1609](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1609) ^ref-13453 --- Reason #2: Downtime Helps Recharge the Energy Needed to Work Deeply — location: [1614](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1614) ^ref-54412 --- It wasn’t the people who determined performance, but whether or not they got a chance to prepare by walking through the woods. 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. — location: [1620](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1620) ^ref-25223 --- To concentrate requires what ART calls directed attention. This resource is finite: If you exhaust it, you’ll struggle to concentrate. (For our purposes, we can think of this resource as the same thing as Baumeister’s limited willpower reserves we discussed in the introduction to this rule.* — location: [1624](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1624) ^ref-23578 --- Put another way, when walking through nature, you’re freed from having to direct your attention, as there are few challenges to navigate (like crowded street crossings), and experience enough interesting stimuli to keep your mind sufficiently occupied to avoid the need to actively aim your attention. This state allows your directed attention resources time to replenish. — location: [1631](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1631) ^ref-62236 --- Even if these work dashes consume only a small amount of time, they prevent you from reaching the levels of deeper relaxation in which attention restoration can occur. — location: [1644](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1644) ^ref-15420 --- Reason #3: The Work That Evening Downtime Replaces Is Usually Not That Important — location: [1648](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1648) ^ref-39383 --- deliberate practice is the systematic stretching of your ability for a given skill. It is the activity required to get better at something. Deep work and deliberate practice, as I’ve argued, overlap substantially. — location: [1650](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1650) ^ref-57269 --- The implication of these results is that your capacity for deep work in a given day is limited. If you’re careful about your schedule (using, for example, the type of productivity strategies described in Rule #4), you should hit your daily deep work capacity during your workday. — location: [1659](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1659) ^ref-7735 --- this ritual should ensure that every incomplete task, goal, or project has been reviewed and that for each you have confirmed that either (1) you have a plan you trust for its completion, or (2) it’s captured in a place where it will be revisited when the time is right. The process should be an algorithm: a series of steps you always conduct, one after another. — location: [1672](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1672) ^ref-12745 --- Zeigarnik effect — location: [1693](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1693) ^ref-48727 --- “Committing to a specific plan for a goal may therefore not only facilitate attainment of the goal but may also free cognitive resources for other pursuits.” — location: [1695](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1695) ^ref-45283 --- 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. — location: [1705](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1705) ^ref-42041 --- The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained. This idea might sound obvious once it’s pointed out, but it represents a departure from how most people understand such matters. In my experience, it’s common to treat undistracted concentration as a habit like flossing—something that you know how to do and know is good for you, but that you’ve been neglecting due to a lack of motivation. — location: [1734](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1734) ^ref-2128 --- 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. — location: [1740](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1740) ^ref-967 --- People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted. — location: [1747](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1747) ^ref-44295 --- Rule #2 will help you significantly improve this limit. The strategies that follow are motivated by the key idea that 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. — location: [1759](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1759) ^ref-4711 --- Don’t Take Breaks from Distraction. Instead Take Breaks from Focus. — location: [1764](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1764) ^ref-29844 --- Once you’re wired for distraction, you crave it. — location: [1766](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1766) ^ref-40818 --- 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. — location: [1780](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1780) ^ref-22824 --- The idea motivating this strategy is that the use of a distracting service does not, by itself, reduce your brain’s ability to focus. It’s instead the constant switching from low-stimuli/high-value activities to high-stimuli/low-value activities, at the slightest hint of boredom or cognitive challenge, that teaches your mind to never tolerate an absence of novelty. — location: [1788](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1788) ^ref-15850 --- Point #1: This strategy works even if your job requires lots of Internet use and/or prompt e-mail replies. — location: [1797](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1797) ^ref-6367 --- The total number or duration of your Internet blocks doesn’t matter nearly as much as making sure that the integrity of your offline blocks remains intact. — location: [1800](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1800) ^ref-22204 --- Point #2: Regardless of how you schedule your Internet blocks, you must keep the time outside these blocks absolutely free from Internet use. — location: [1806](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1806) ^ref-63573 --- If this is infeasible—perhaps you need to get the current offline activity done promptly—then the correct response is to change your schedule so that your next Internet block begins sooner. The key in making this change, however, is to not schedule the next Internet block to occur immediately. Instead, enforce at least a five-minute gap between the current moment and the next time you can go online. This gap is minor, so it won’t excessively impede your progress, but from a behavioralist perspective, it’s substantial because it separates the sensation of wanting to go online from the reward of actually doing so. — location: [1816](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1816) ^ref-7896 --- Point #3: Scheduling Internet use at home as well as at work can further improve your concentration training. — location: [1820](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1820) ^ref-1364 --- The key here isn’t to avoid or even to reduce the total amount of time you spend engaging in distracting behavior, but is instead to give yourself plenty of opportunities throughout your evening to resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom. — location: [1828](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1828) ^ref-54523 --- To summarize, to succeed with deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli. This doesn’t mean that you have to eliminate distracting behaviors; it’s sufficient that you instead eliminate the ability of such behaviors to hijack your attention. The simple strategy proposed here of scheduling Internet blocks goes a long way toward helping you regain this attention autonomy. — location: [1834](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1834) ^ref-45028 --- 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. — location: [1865](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1865) ^ref-17596 --- Roosevelt dashes leverage artificial deadlines to help you systematically increase the level you can regularly achieve—providing, in some sense, interval training for the attention centers of your brain. An additional benefit is that these dashes are incompatible with distraction (there’s no way you can give in to distraction and still make your deadlines). — location: [1870](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1870) ^ref-10135 --- Meditate Productively — location: [1877](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1877) ^ref-12447 --- The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally—walking, jogging, driving, showering—and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem. Depending on your profession, this problem might be outlining an article, writing a talk, making progress on a proof, or attempting to sharpen a business strategy. As in mindfulness meditation, you must continue to bring your attention back to the problem at hand when it wanders or stalls. — location: [1887](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1887) ^ref-49498 --- In my experience, productive meditation builds on both of the key ideas introduced at the beginning of this rule. By forcing you to resist distraction and return your attention repeatedly to a well-defined problem, it helps strengthen your distraction-resisting muscles, and by forcing you to push your focus deeper and deeper on a single problem, it sharpens your concentration. — location: [1899](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1899) ^ref-64918 --- Suggestion #1: Be Wary of Distractions and Looping — location: [1906](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1906) ^ref-51817 --- When faced with a hard problem, your mind, as it was evolved to do, will attempt to avoid excess expenditure of energy when possible. One way it might attempt to sidestep this expenditure is by avoiding diving deeper into the problem by instead looping over and over again on what you already know about it. — location: [1912](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1912) ^ref-56799 --- Suggestion #2: Structure Your Deep Thinking — location: [1917](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1917) ^ref-61761 --- In my experience, it helps to have some structure for this deep thinking process. I suggest starting with a careful review of the relevant variables for solving the problem and then storing these values in your working memory. — location: [1919](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1919) ^ref-11106 --- With the relevant variables stored and the next-step question identified, you now have a specific target for your attention. — location: [1925](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1925) ^ref-31624 --- This cycle of reviewing and storing variables, identifying and tackling the next-step question, then consolidating your gains is like an intense workout routine for your concentration ability. It will help you get more out of your productive meditation sessions and accelerate the pace at which you improve your ability to go deep. — location: [1928](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1928) ^ref-60207 --- A side effect of memory training, in other words, is an improvement in your general ability to concentrate. This ability can then be fruitfully applied to any task demanding deep work. — location: [1949](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1949) ^ref-27345 --- The first thing White emphasizes is that professional memory athletes never attempt rote memorization, that is, where you simply look at information again and again, repeating it in your head. This approach to retention, though popular among burned-out students, misunderstands how our brains work. — location: [1956](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1956) ^ref-37129 --- We’re not wired to quickly internalize abstract information. We are, however, really good at remembering scenes. — location: [1958](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1958) ^ref-56966 --- Any structured thought process that requires unwavering attention can have a similar effect—be it studying the Talmud, like Adam Marlin from Rule #2’s introduction, or practicing productive meditation, or trying to learn the guitar part of a song by ear (a past favorite of mine). If card memorization seems weird to you, in other words, then choose a replacement that makes similar cognitive requirements. The key to this strategy is not the specifics, but instead the motivating idea that your ability to concentrate is only as strong as your commitment to train it. — location: [1992](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1992) ^ref-44183 --- The goal of this strategy, therefore, is to offer some structure to this thought process—a way to reduce some of the complexity of deciding which tools really matter to you. The first step of this strategy is to identify the main high-level goals in both your professional and your personal life. If you have a family, for example, then your personal goals might involve parenting well and running an organized household. In the professional sphere, the details of these goals depend on what you do for a living. — location: [2149](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2149) ^ref-33925 --- While your goals will likely differ, the key is to keep the list limited to what’s most important and to keep the descriptions suitably high-level. (If your goal includes a specific target—“to reach a million dollars in sales” or “to publish a half dozen papers in a single year”—then it’s too specific for our purposes here.) When you’re done you should have a small number of goals for both the personal and professional areas of your life. — location: [2155](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2155) ^ref-8931 --- Once you’ve identified these goals, list for each the two or three most important activities that help you satisfy the goal. These activities should be specific enough to allow you to clearly picture doing them. On the other hand, they should be general enough that they’re not tied to a onetime outcome. For example, “do better research” is too general (what does it look like to be “doing better research”?), while “finish paper on broadcast lower bounds in time for upcoming conference submission” is too specific (it’s a onetime outcome). A good activity in this context would be something like: “regularly read and understand the cutting-edge results in my field.” — location: [2158](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2158) ^ref-49618 --- Professional Goal: To craft well-written, narrative-driven stories that change the way people understand the world.   Key Activities Supporting This Goal: • Research patiently and deeply. • Write carefully and with purpose. — location: [2168](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2168) ^ref-48317 --- Personal Goal: To maintain close and rewarding friendships with a group of people who are important to me.   Key Activities Supporting This Goal: 1. Regularly take the time for meaningful connection with those who are most important to me (e.g., a long talk, a meal, joint activity). 2. Give of myself to those who are most important to me (e.g., making nontrivial sacrifices that improve their lives). — location: [2196](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2196) ^ref-20825 --- 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. For example, it might be the case that 80 percent of a business’s profits come from just 20 percent of its clients, 80 percent of a nation’s wealth is held by its richest 20 percent of citizens, or 80 percent of computer software crashes come from just 20 percent of the identified bugs. There’s a formal mathematical underpinning to this phenomenon (an 80/20 split is roughly what you would expect when describing a power law distribution over impact—a type of distribution that shows up often when measuring quantities in the real world), but it’s probably most useful when applied heuristically as a reminder that, in many cases, contributions to an outcome are not evenly distributed. — location: [2223](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2223) ^ref-28802 --- By taking the time consumed by low-impact activities—like finding old friends on Facebook—and reinvesting in high-impact activities—like taking a good friend out to lunch—you end up more successful in your goal. To abandon a network tool using this logic, therefore, is not to miss out on its potential small benefits, but is instead to get more out of the activities you already know to yield large benefits. — location: [2244](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2244) ^ref-26857 --- Put more thought into your leisure time. In other words, this strategy suggests that 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.” — location: [2358](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2358) ^ref-48660 --- 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. — location: [2361](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2361) ^ref-40000 --- What? You say that full energy given to those sixteen hours will lessen the value of the business eight? Not so. On the contrary, it will assuredly increase the value of the business eight. One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change—not rest, except in sleep. — location: [2372](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2372) ^ref-30770 --- To summarize, 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. — location: [2378](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2378) ^ref-11490 --- Rule #4 Drain the Shallows — location: [2382](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2382) ^ref-22868 --- In other words, the reduction in the 37signals workweek disproportionately eliminated shallow as compared to deep work, and because the latter was left largely untouched, the important stuff continued to get done. The shallow stuff that can seem so urgent in the moment turned out to be unexpectedly dispensable. — location: [2402](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2402) ^ref-23629 --- The shallow work that increasingly dominates the time and attention of knowledge workers is less vital than it often seems in the moment. For most businesses, if you eliminated significant amounts of this shallowness, their bottom line would likely remain unaffected. And as Jason Fried discovered, if you not only eliminate shallow work, but also replace this recovered time with more of the deep alternative, not only will the business continue to function; it can become more successful. — location: [2420](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2420) ^ref-40333 --- Put another way, even though we’re not capable of spending a full day in a state of blissful depth, this reality shouldn’t reduce the urgency of reducing shallow work, as the typical knowledge workday is more easily fragmented than many suspect. — location: [2445](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2445) ^ref-63729 --- Schedule Every Minute of Your Day — location: [2450](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2450) ^ref-13976 --- We spend much of our day on autopilot—not giving much thought to what we’re doing with our time. This is a problem. It’s difficult to prevent the trivial from creeping into every corner of your schedule if you don’t face, without flinching, your current balance between deep and shallow work, and then adopt the habit of pausing before action and asking, “What makes the most sense right now?” — location: [2463](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2463) ^ref-36182 --- If your schedule is disrupted, you should, at the next available moment, take a few minutes to create a revised schedule for the time that remains in the day. — location: [2483](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2483) ^ref-26985 --- On some days, you might rewrite your schedule half a dozen times. Don’t despair if this happens. Your goal is not to stick to a given schedule at all costs; it’s instead to maintain, at all times, a thoughtful say in what you’re doing with your time going forward—even if these decisions are reworked again and again as the day unfolds. — location: [2486](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2486) ^ref-56309 --- In other words, I not only allow spontaneity in my schedule; I encourage it. Joseph’s critique is driven by the mistaken idea that the goal of a schedule is to force your behavior into a rigid plan. This type of scheduling, however, isn’t about constraint—it’s instead about thoughtfulness. It’s a simple habit that forces you to continually take a moment throughout your day and ask: “What makes sense for me to do with the time that remains?” It’s the habit of asking that returns results, not your unyielding fidelity to the answer. — location: [2511](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2511) ^ref-24129 --- Quantify the Depth of Every Activity — location: [2527](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2527) ^ref-29409 --- Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate. — location: [2531](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2531) ^ref-1808 --- How long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task? — location: [2542](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2542) ^ref-21497 --- Ask Your Boss for a Shallow Work Budget — location: [2576](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2576) ^ref-33683 --- The tools from earlier in this rule, however, allow you to make this impact explicit. You can now confidently say to your boss, “This is the exact percentage of my time spent last week on shallow work,” and force him or her to give explicit approval for that ratio. Faced with these numbers, and the economic reality they clarify (it’s incredibly wasteful, for example, to pay a highly trained professional to send e-mail messages and attend meetings for thirty hours a week), a boss will be led to the natural conclusion that you need to say no to some things and to streamline others—even if this makes life less convenient for the boss, or for you, or for your coworkers. — location: [2598](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2598) ^ref-3587 --- Finish Your Work by Five Thirty — location: [2618](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2618) ^ref-60647 --- I call this commitment fixed-schedule productivity, as I fix the firm goal of not working past a certain time, then work backward to find productivity strategies that allow me to satisfy this declaration. — location: [2622](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2622) ^ref-44514 --- To summarize these observations, Nagpal and I can both succeed in academia without Tom-style overload due to two reasons. First, we’re asymmetric in the culling forced by our fixed-schedule commitment. By ruthlessly reducing the shallow while preserving the deep, this strategy frees up our time without diminishing the amount of new value we generate. Indeed, I would go so far as to argue that 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. — location: [2670](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2670) ^ref-30590 --- Become Hard to Reach — location: [2691](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2691) ^ref-36439 --- Tip #1: Make People Who Send You E-mail Do More Work — location: [2700](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2700) ^ref-53795 --- Another benefit of a sender filter is that it resets expectations. The most crucial line in my description is the following: “I’ll only respond to those proposals that are a good match for my schedule and interests.” This seems minor, but it makes a substantial difference in how my correspondents think about their messages to me. The default social convention surrounding e-mail is that unless you’re famous, if someone sends you something, you owe him or her a response. For most, therefore, an inbox full of messages generates a major sense of obligation. — location: [2717](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2717) ^ref-505 --- Tip #2: Do More Work When You Send or Reply to E-mails — location: [2758](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2758) ^ref-2280 --- pause a moment before replying and take the time to answer the following key prompt: What is the project represented by this message, and what is the most efficient (in terms of messages generated) process for bringing this project to a successful conclusion? Once you’ve answered this question for yourself, replace a quick response with one that takes the time to describe the process you identified, points out the current step, and emphasizes the step that comes next. I call this the process-centric approach to e-mail, and it’s designed to minimize both the number of e-mails you receive and the amount of mental clutter they generate. — location: [2770](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2770) ^ref-51938 --- Tip #3: Don’t Respond — location: [2815](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2815) ^ref-16880 --- Over time, I learned the philosophy driving this behavior: When it comes to e-mail, they believed, it’s the sender’s responsibility to convince the receiver that a reply is worthwhile. If you didn’t make a convincing case and sufficiently minimize the effort required by the professor to respond, you didn’t get a response. — location: [2818](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2818) ^ref-57842 ---