Deep Work: Rules For Focused Success In A Distracted World Quotes
"The key question will be: are you good at working with intelligent machines or not?"
"Our technologies are racing ahead but many of our skills and organizations are lagging behind."
"To join the group of those who can work well with these machines, therefore, requires that you hone your ability to master hard things."
"If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are."
"The two core abilities just described depend on your ability to perform deep work."
"To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction."
"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."
"The world used to be, in its various forms, a world of sacred, shining things."
"The Enlightenment’s metaphysical embrace of the autonomous individual leads not just to a boring life; it leads almost inevitably to a nearly unlivable one."
"Craftsmanship provides a key to reopening a sense of sacredness in a responsible manner."
"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."
"A deep life is a good life, any way you look at it."
"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."
"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.'"
"The productivity equation is a non-linear one."
"To work deeply is a big deal and should not be an activity undertaken lightly."
"In the scheme of your life and what you want to accomplish, they’re [social media services] a lightweight whimsy, one unimportant distraction among many threatening to derail you from something deeper."
"Your mind, in other words, is released from its duty to keep track of these obligations at every moment—your shutdown ritual has taken over that responsibility."
"The process should be an algorithm: a series of steps you always conduct, one after another."
"To make this suggestion more concrete, let me walk through the steps of my own shutdown ritual."
"The concept of a shutdown ritual might at first seem extreme, but there’s a good reason for it: the Zeigarnik effect."
"Fortunately, we don’t need to complete a task to get it off our minds."
"Shutdown rituals can become annoying, but they’re necessary for reaping the rewards of systematic idleness."
"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."
"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 to a point where it’s not ready for deep work."
"Don’t Use the Internet to Entertain Yourself."
"The point of the 4-day work week is about doing less work."
"Very few people work even 8 hours a day. You’re lucky if you get a few good hours in between all the meetings, interruptions, web surfing, office politics, and personal business that permeate the typical workday."
"Fewer official working hours helps squeeze the fat out of the typical workweek. Once everyone has less time to get their stuff done, they respect that time even more."
"People become stingy with their time and that’s a good thing. They don’t waste it on things that just don’t matter."
"When you have fewer hours you usually spend them more wisely."
"I’d take 5 days in a row over 5 days spread out over 5 weeks."
"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?"
"The shallow work that increasingly dominates the time and attention of knowledge workers is less vital than it often seems in the moment."
"The strategies that follow are designed to help you ruthlessly identify the shallowness in your current schedule, then cull it down to minimum levels."
"For one thing, a nontrivial amount of shallow work is needed to maintain most knowledge work jobs."
"Deep work is exhausting because it pushes you toward the limit of your abilities."
"Shallow work doesn’t become dangerous until after you add enough to begin to crowd out your bounded deep efforts for the day."
"The typical workday is eight hours. The most adept deep thinker cannot spend more than four of these hours in a state of true depth."
"We spend much of our day on autopilot—not giving much thought to what we’re doing with our time."
"You have, in effect, given every minute of your workday a job."
"The value of deep work vastly outweighs the value of shallow, but this doesn’t mean that you must quixotically pursue a schedule in which all of your time is invested in depth."
"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."
"The strategies that follow will help you act on this reality."