Deep Work

Focus ruthlessly on your most important goals. Exclude work that does not add meaning to your life and resist the temptation to justify distractions.

Every time you allow yourself to get distracted, such as checking your mobile phone, you weaken your ability to focus and do deep work.

The key is to develop your ability to focus more intensely and at the same time, resist distractions. You can train it like a muscle.

Evaluate your habits and actions with the aim of structuring your time to protect your attention and allow time to do the deep work.

The ability to do deep work allows you to feel a sense of meaning and being ‘in flow’.

Deep Work allows people to master complex topics fast. Some of the best ideas and meaningful progress come from deep work.

Deep Work is focused and uninterrupted work. Distractions and conflicting demands hinder deep work.

Think like artists but work like accountants.

The Work / Life Balance Must Be Scheduled

Rewiring Your Brain for Focus

The journalistic approach: Using unexpected free time in your day for deep work.

The rhythmic approach: Getting into the habit of doing deep work for 60 or 90mins.

The biomodal approach: Setting clearly defined work time boundaries I.e. the 9-5

The monastic approach: Eliminating all sources of distraction; working in isolation.

Multi-Tasking Does Not Make You More Productive

To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction

Do not reply to an e-mail message if any of the following applies: It’s ambiguous or otherwise makes it hard for you to generate a reasonable response; It’s not a question or proposal that interests you; Nothing really good would happen if you did respond and nothing really bad would happen if you didn’t.

Our technologies are racing ahead but many of our skills and organizations are lagging behind.

The key question will be: are you good at working with intelligent machines or not?

Knowledge workers are tending toward increasingly visible busyness because they lack a better way to demonstrate their value.

Deep work is at a severe disadvantage in a technopoly because it builds on values like quality, craftsmanship, and mastery that are decidedly old-fashioned and nontechnological.

If you believe in the value of depth, this reality spells bad news for businesses in general, as it’s leading them to miss out on potentially massive increases in their value production.

People play differently when they’re keeping score.

If you can’t learn, you can’t thrive.

If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.

To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction.

Once you’re wired for distraction, you crave it.

If every moment of potential boredom in your life...is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired.

The use of a distracting service does not, by itself, reduce your brain’s ability to focus.

Deep work requires levels of concentration well beyond where most knowledge workers are comfortable.

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

Your mind... can quickly retain lots of detailed information—if it’s stored in the right way.

When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done.

The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained.

The craftsman variant requires that these positive impacts affect factors at the core of what’s important to you and that they outweigh the negatives.

The point of the 4-day work week is about doing less work... it’s about four normalish 8-hour days.

Decide in advance what you’re going to do with every minute of your workday.

The Damoclean cap on the workday enforced by fixed-schedule productivity has a way of keeping my organization efforts sharp.

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.

By ruthlessly reducing the shallow while preserving the deep, this strategy frees up our time without diminishing the amount of new value we generate.

Fixed-schedule productivity, in other words, is a meta-habit that’s simple to adopt but broad in its impact.

The task of a craftsman is not to generate meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill of discerning the meanings that are already there.

True productivity should be measured by the value and impact of one's work, not by the sheer volume of tasks completed.

What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.

All of my time and attention are spoken for—several times over. Please do not ask for them.

The productivity equation is a non-linear one... If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels.

Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. Your only job next is to not break the chain.

Who’s to say that I can’t be that prolific? Why not me?

It’s important that they have a public place to record and track their lead measures.

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.

Willpower is limited, and therefore the more enticing tools you have pulling at your attention, the harder it’ll be to maintain focus on something important.

To master the art of deep work, therefore, you must take back control of your time and attention from the many diversions that attempt to steal them.

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.

How can we afford to put our business on hold for a month to ‘mess around’ with new ideas? How can we afford not to?

When you have fewer hours you usually spend them more wisely.

The shallow work that increasingly dominates the time and attention of knowledge workers is less vital than it often seems in the moment.

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.

The world represented by your inbox isn’t a pleasant world to inhabit.

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.

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

A deep life is a good life, any way you look at it.

Deep work is important, in other words, not because distraction is evil, but because it enabled Bill Gates to start a billion-dollar industry in less than a semester.

At first, the team resisted putting their careers in jeopardy, but ultimately, a better product delivered to the client was the result.

You cannot gain a high h-index value simply by pumping out a lot of low-value papers, or by having a small number of papers that are cited often.

To leave the distracted masses to join the focused few, I’m arguing, is a transformative experience.

The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.

It’s this propensity to view ‘the Internet’ as a source of wisdom that can lead to a superficial engagement with one's work.

The principle of least resistance explains why many professionals default to shallow work, as it is often easier and more immediately rewarding.

To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction.

Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit.

The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy.

Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.

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.

Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.

Schedule in advance when you’ll use the Internet, and then avoid it altogether outside these times.

The extra two to three minutes you spend at this point will save you many more minutes reading and responding to unnecessary extra messages later.

Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things.

The state of fragmented attention cannot accommodate deep work, which requires long periods of uninterrupted thinking.

Sometimes to go deep, you must first go big.

Separate your pursuit of serendipitous encounters from your efforts to think deeply.

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.