"Deep Work" by Cal Newport

• Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.
• Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity.
• Shallow Work: Non-cognitively 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.
• Network tools negatively impact deep work.
• Learning something complex [...] requires intense uninterrupted concentration on cognitively demanding concepts.
• Deep work is a skill that has great value today.
• We have an information economy that’s dependent on complex systems that change rapidly.
• To remain valuable in our economy you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things.
• To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of producing.
• Deep work is so important that we might consider it “the superpower of the 21st century”.
• The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.
• Our technologies are racing ahead, but many of our skills and organizations are lagging behind.
• There are three groups of workers who will succeed in the new economy: high-skilled workers, superstars, and owners.
• Once the talent market is made universally accessible, those at the peak of the market thrive while the rest suffer.
• Access to capital provides massive advantages.
• As digital technology reduces the need for labor in many industries, the proportion of the rewards returned to those who own the intelligent machines is growing.
• In the new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital.
• Two core abilities for thriving in the new economy:
• The ability to quickly master hard things.
• The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.
• Intelligent machines are complicated and hard to master.
• If you can’t learn, you can’t thrive.
• If you want to become a superstar, mastering the relevant skills is necessary, but not sufficient.
• If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive--no matter how skilled or talented you are.
• To learn requires intense concentration.
• The core components of deliberate practice are:
• Your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you’re trying to improve or an idea you’re trying to master.
• You receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it’s most productive.
• Deliberate practice cannot exist alongside distraction.
• To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensly without distraction.
• To learn is an act of deep work.
• high-quality work produced = (time spent) x (intensity of focus)
• To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction.
• The type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work.
• 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.
• Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.
• Busyness as a 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.
• 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.
• Human beings are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.
• Beautiful code is short and concise.
• You don’t need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work.
• You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.
• 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.
• Attempting to schedule deep work in an ad hoc fashion is not an effective way to manage your limited willpower.
• The minimum unit of time for deep work tends to be at least one full day.
• The easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit.
• An often-overlooked observation about those who use their minds to create valuable things is that they’re rarely haphazard in their work habits.
• To work deeply is a big deal and should not be an activity undertaken lightly.
• Expose yourself to ideas in hubs on a regular basis, but maintain a spoke in which to work deeply on what you encounter.
• Distraction remains a destroyer of depth.
• 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.
• 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 division between what and how is crucial but is overlooked in the professional world.
• The Four Disciplines of Execution:
• Focus on the wildly important.
• Act on the lead measures.
• Keep a compelling scoreboard.
• Create a cadence of accountability.
• The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.
• Once you’ve identified a wildly important goal, you need to measure success. There are two types of metrics for this purpose: lag measures and lead measures.
• Lag measures describe the thing you’re ultimately trying to improve.
• Lead measures measure the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures.
• People play differently when they’re keeping score.
• Execution is more difficult than strategizing.
• At the end of the workday, shutdown your consideration of work issues until the next morning.
• Downtime aids insights.
• Downtime helps recharge the energy needed to work deeply.
• The work that evening downtime replaces is usually not that important.
• Use an end-of-day “shutdown” ritual to clear your mind of any remaining work related tasks.
• When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done.
• The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained.
• Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction it’s hard to shake the addiction even when you want to concentrate.
• Estimate how long you’d normally put aside for an obligation, then give yourself a hard deadline that drastically reduces this time.
• Deep work requires levels of concentration well beyond where most knowledge workers are comfortable.
• The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem.
• When productive meditating be wary of distractions and looping.
• We’re not hardwired to memorize abstract information, but we are, however, really good at remembering scenes.
• To master the art of deep work you must take back control of your time and attention from the many diversions that attempt to steal them.
• The Any-Benefit Approach to Network Tool Selection: You’re justified in using a network tool if you can identify any possible benefit to its use, or anything you might possibly miss out on if you don’t use it.
• 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.
• 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.
• Don’t use the internet to entertain yourself.
• Put more thought into your leisure time.
• If you want to eliminate the addictive pull of entertainment sites on your time and attention, give your brain a quality alternative.
• The shallow work that increasingly dominates the time and attention of knowledge workers is less vital than it often seems in the moment.
• Deep work is exhausting because it pushes you toward the limit of your abilities.
• We spend much of our day on autopilot--not giving much thought to what we’re doing with our time.
• Schedule every minute of your day.
• Without structure, it’s easy to allow your time to devolve into the shallow.
• Decide in advance what you’re doing to do with every minute of your workday.
• One way to determine if your work is shallow or deep is to ask yourself “How long in months would it take to train a college grad with no specialized training in my field to complete this task?”
• The most dangerous word in your productivity vocabulary is “yes”.
• Be clear in your refusal, but ambiguous about your excuse. The key is to avoid providing enough specificity about the excuse that the requester has the opportunity to defuse it.
• Become hard to reach.
• Make people who send you email do more work.
• A good process-centric email immediately closes the loop with respect to the project at hand.
• Less mental clutter means more mental resources available for deep thinking.
• There’s an uneasiness that surrounds any effort to produce the best things you’re capable of producing, as this forces you to confront the possibility that your best is yet not that good.
• Rules for deep work:
• Work deeply
• Embrace boredom
• Quit social media
• Drain the shallows