DeepWork

Deep Work (Cal Newport)

  • Fantastic!
  • Deepwork: professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to the limit. These efforts create new value, improve skill and are hard to replicate.
  • Our work culture shift toward the shallow is exposing a massive economic and personal opportunity for the few that recognize the potential of resisting this trend.
  • The growing necessity of deep work is new. In an industrial economy most workers could do fine with out working without distraction. In the information economy, deep work is becoming a key currency. "Super power of the 21C" NowIsDifferent
  • "Deep work hypothesis" DW is becoming increasingly rare at the same time its becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. Paradox
  • Core abilities for future: Be able to quickly master hard things. Be able to produce at an elite level. Both quality and speed.
  • If you dont produce you wont thrive, no matter how skilled or talented you are.
  • To learn hard things quickly you must focus intensely without distraction. Mental Models
  • When you switch tasks your attention doesn't immediately follow, there is a residual that is stuck in the previous task.
  • DW more valuable than ever before, yet not promoted by individuals or organizations. (Paradox)
  • Skillful management of attention is the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience. (Buddhism) (SystemsNotGoals)
  • "Who you are, what you think, feel and do, what you love - is the sum of what you focus on"
  • A workday driven by the shallow is likely to be draining and upsetting even if they seem harmless or fun in the moment.
  • Most people assume that relaxation will make them happy. Our felling of going deep is in itself very rewarding.
  • In the post enlightenment world we have tasked ourselves to identify whats meaningful and whats not, an exercise that can seem arbitrary and induce nihilism.
  • The key to developing a DW habit is to add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the barrier to DW.
  • People who use their minds to create value are rarely haphazard in their work habits.
  • Focus on the WILDLY IMPORTANT: The more you try to do the less you actually accomplish.
  • Act on the leading measures: you need to measure your success: Lagging vs Leading measures. Leading measures turn your attention to improving the behaviors you directly control that will have positive impact on long-term goals.
  • Keep a compelling scoreboard: "People play differently when you keep score."
  • Create a cadence of accountability: Use weekly review / celebrate good weeks / understand bad weeks.
  • Shutdown at the end of work day: If need more time, extend workday. Downtime adds insights; unconscious mind well suited for complex tasks, integrating large amounts of information with multiple, vague and conflicting constraints.
  • The work that evening downtime replaces is usually not that important.
  • Decades of work from multiple subfields all point towards the conclusion that regularly resting your brain improves the quality of your deep work.
  • If every potential moment of boredom is relieve with a glance at a smart phone, then your brain has been rewired to point where it is not ready for deep work. [BROKEN LINK: 4H5I6J7K-8L9M-0N1O-2P3Q-4R5S6T7U8V9W] David Foster Wallace
  • Schedule in advance when you will use the internet, then avoid outside these times.
  • To simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern times.
  • Put more thought into your leisure time. Dedicate some advanced thinking to the question of how you want to spend your time "off".
  • Mental facilities are capable of continuous hard activity; they do not tire like a arm or a leg. All they want is change - not rest, except in sleep.
  • Treat shallow work with suspicion. b/c its damage often vastly underestimated and its importance is vastly over estimated.
  • Stumbling on important insights are perfectly valid reasons to ignore schedules.
  • Time blocking is about thoughtfulness, not constraint. Simple habit that focuses you to continually take a moment throughout your day to ask "what makes sense for me to do?" The habit of asking is what returns results.

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