Deep Work  ## Metadata - Author: [[Cal Newport]] | [[3. Resources/Authors/Cal Newport|Cal Newport]] - Full Title: Deep Work - Category: #books - Kindle: [Open in Kindle](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00X47ZVXM) - Document Tags: [[Productivity]] ## Document Notes ## Highlights - Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy 1. The ability to quickly master hard things. 2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed. ([Location 332](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=332)) - “Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converging rays of attention; let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea.” ([Location 376](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=376)) - By focusing intensely on a specific skill, you’re forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire, again and again, in isolation. This repetitive use of a specific circuit triggers cells called oligodendrocytes to begin wrapping layers of myelin around the neurons in the circuits—effectively cementing the skill. The reason, therefore, why it’s important to focus intensely on the task at hand while avoiding distraction is because this is the only way to isolate the relevant neural circuit enough to trigger useful myelination. ([Location 411](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=411)) - To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction. To learn, in other words, is an act of deep work. ([Location 419](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=419)) - Deep work is not the only skill valuable in our economy, and it’s possible to do well without fostering this ability, but the niches where this is advisable are increasingly rare. Unless you have strong evidence that distraction is important for your specific profession, you’re best served, for the reasons argued earlier in this chapter, by giving serious consideration to depth. ([Location 542](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=542)) - as knowledge work makes more complex demands of the labor force, it becomes harder to measure the value of an individual’s efforts. ([Location 615](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=615)) - 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](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=647)) - 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](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=713)) - 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. ([Location 725](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=725)) - 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: ([Location 825](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=825)) - Another issue muddying the connection between depth and meaning in knowledge work is the cacophony of voices attempting to convince knowledge workers to spend more time engaged in shallow activities. ([Location 829](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=829)) - a deep life is not just economically lucrative, but also a life well lived. ([Location 840](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=840)) - 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. ([Location 851](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=851)) - 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. ([Location 853](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=853)) - Our brains instead construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to. ([Location 856](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=856)) - “Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.” ([Location 859](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=859)) - 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 881](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=881)) - “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](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=929)) - To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction. ([Location 953](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=953)) - 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. ([Location 1090](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1090)) - 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](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1093)) - You need your own philosophy for integrating deep work into your professional life. (As argued in this rule’s introduction, attempting to schedule deep work in an ad hoc fashion is not an effective way to manage your limited willpower.) ([Location 1116](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1116)) - bimodal philosophy of deep work. This philosophy asks that you divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else. ([Location 1179](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1179)) - 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](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1183)) - 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](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1217)) - Where you’ll work and for how long. 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 ([Location 1314](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1314)) - How you’ll work once you start to work. 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. ([Location 1320](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1320)) - How you’ll support your work. 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. ([Location 1324](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1324)) - The 4 Disciplines of Execution explain, “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](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1505)) - 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. For example, if your goal is to increase customer satisfaction in your bakery, then the relevant lag measure is your customer satisfaction scores. As the 4DX authors explain, the problem with lag measures is that they come too late to change your behavior: “When you receive them, the performance that drove them is already in the past.” Lead measures, on the other hand, “measure the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures.” ([Location 1517](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1517)) - 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](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1523)) - 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. ([Location 1525](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1525)) - providing your conscious brain time to rest enables your unconscious mind to take a shift sorting through your most complex professional challenges. ([Location 1612](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1612)) - attention restoration theory (ART), which claims that spending time in nature can improve your ability to concentrate. ([Location 1621](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1621)) - Having a casual conversation with a friend, listening to music while making dinner, playing a game with your kids, going for a run—the types of activities that will fill your time in the evening if you enforce a work shutdown—play the same attention-restoring role as walking in nature. ([Location 1640](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1640)) - if you keep interrupting your evening to check and respond to e-mail, or put aside a few hours after dinner to catch up on an approaching deadline, you’re robbing your directed attention centers of the uninterrupted rest they need for restoration. ([Location 1642](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1642)) - you must first accept the commitment that once your workday shuts down, you cannot allow even the smallest incursion of professional concerns into your field of attention. ([Location 1666](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1666)) - Zeigarnik, describes the ability of incomplete tasks to dominate our attention. ([Location 1686](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1686)) - Once you’re wired for distraction, you crave it. Motivated by this reality, this strategy is designed to help you rewire your brain to a configuration better suited to staying on task. ([Location 1766](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1766)) - Schedule in advance when you’ll use the Internet, and then avoid it altogether outside these times. ([Location 1786](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1786)) - 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. ([Location 1859](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1859)) - 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. ([Location 1887](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1887)) - If you don’t attempt to weigh pros against cons, but instead use any glimpse of some potential benefit as justification for unrestrained use of a tool, then you’re unwittingly crippling your ability to succeed in the world of knowledge work. ([Location 2063](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2063)) - I propose that if you’re a knowledge worker—especially one interested in cultivating a deep work habit—you should treat your tool selection with the same level of care as other skilled workers, ([Location 2109](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2109)) - The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts. ([Location 2112](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2112)) - Apply the Law of the Vital Few to Your Internet Habits ([Location 2127](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2127)) - The first step of this strategy is to identify the main high-level goals in both your professional and your personal life. ([Location 2151](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2151)) - 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. ([Location 2158](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2158)) - The next step in this strategy is to consider the network tools you currently use. For each such tool, go through the key activities you identified and ask whether the use of the tool has a substantially positive impact, a substantially negative impact, or little impact on your regular and successful participation in the activity. Now comes the important decision: Keep using this tool only if you concluded that it has substantial positive impacts and that these outweigh the negative impacts. ([Location 2163](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2163)) - once you’ve hit your deep work limit in a given day, you’ll experience diminishing rewards if you try to cram in more. ([Location 2435](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2435)) - treat shallow work with suspicion because its damage is often vastly underestimated and its importance vastly overestimated. ([Location 2447](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2447)) - Schedule every minute of your day. ([Location 2468](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2468)) - 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. ([Location 2685](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2685)) ## Related by Author - [[3. Resources/Readwise/Books/Slow Productivity|Slow Productivity]] ## Related - [[3. Resources/Readwise/Podcasts/Ep. 257 Refusing Overwork|Ep. 257 Refusing Overwork]] - [[3. Resources/Readwise/Podcasts/Ep. 271 The Long Game|Ep. 271 The Long Game]] - [[3. Resources/Readwise/Podcasts/Ep. 271 — the Long Game|Ep. 271 — the Long Game]] - [[3. Resources/Readwise/Podcasts/Ep. 278 How to Think|Ep. 278 How to Think]] - [[3. Resources/Readwise/Podcasts/Ep. 335 On Morning Routines|Ep. 335 On Morning Routines]] - [[3. Resources/Readwise/Podcasts/Ep. 336 On Screens and Solitude|Ep. 336 On Screens and Solitude]] - [[3. Resources/Readwise/Podcasts/Ep. 337 Hacking Remote Work|Ep. 337 Hacking Remote Work]] - [[3. Resources/Readwise/Podcasts/Ep. 338 Why You’re Always Distracted|Ep. 338 Why You’re Always Distracted]] - [[3. 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