Deep Work - doraithodla/notes GitHub Wiki
1 Chain Method: Jerry Seinfeld uses this method to stay productive. If he writes jokes that day, he marks a red X on the calendar. After a few days, you have a chain. The longer the chain gets, the more motivated you are to not break it.
2.Brain Chappel’s method: Wake up early and dedicate the first part of the morning to deep work. The time is scheduled; every day at the same time block he is committed to deep work. The scheduled time is more effective than throwing in 90 minute sessions whenever possible. Human nature —at least in the era we’re in now—is distracted, so lesser tasks will often fill the time.
3.This method works better for people with lots of different things on their schedule. Some gets done every day, but you can also take care of other obligations.
- Self control plays a huge role in the effectiveness of this method. One needs to fight distractions to make sure the deep work time is uninterrupted.
Deep Work, Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World Cal Newport Grand Central Publishing
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103 notes/highlights • 2 bookmarks Created by Dorai Thodla – Last synced December 8, 2019
Introduction
analytical psychology
July 1, 2019 3
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
July 1, 2019 4
Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity. We now know from decades of research in both psychology and neuroscience that the state of mental strain that accompanies deep work is also necessary to improve your abilities. Deep work, in other words, was exactly the type of effort needed to stand out in a cognitively demanding field like academic psychiatry in the early twentieth century
July 1, 2019 4
If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. [If I instead get interrupted a lot] what replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time… there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons.”
July 1, 2019 6
In an age of network tools, in other words, knowledge workers increasingly replace deep work with the shallow alternative—constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction. Larger efforts that would be well served by deep thinking, such as forming a new business strategy or writing an important grant application, get fragmented into distracted dashes that produce muted quality. To make matters worse for depth, there’s increasing evidence that this shift toward the shallow is not a choice that can be easily reversed. Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce
July 1, 2019 7
The Shallows was just the first in a series of recent books to examine the Internet’s effect on our brains and work habits. These subsequent titles include William Powers’s Hamlet’s BlackBerry, John Freeman’s The Tyranny of E-mail, and Alex Soojung-Kim Pang’s The Distraction Addiction—all of which agree, more or less, that network tools are distracting us from work that requires unbroken concentration, while simultaneously degrading our capacity to remain focused.
#Books
July 1, 2019 8
Our work culture’s shift toward the shallow (whether you think it’s philosophically good or bad) is exposing a massive economic and personal opportunity for the few who recognize the potential of resisting this trend and prioritizing depth
July 1, 2019 8
There are many ways to discover that you’re not valuable in our economy. For Jason Benn the lesson was made clear when he realized, not long after taking a job as a financial consultant, that the vast majority of his work responsibilities could be automated by a “kludged together” Excel script.
May 23, 2019 9
Learning something complex like computer programming requires intense uninterrupted concentration on cognitively demanding concepts—the
May 23, 2019 10
Deep work is not some nostalgic affectation of writers and early-twentieth-century philosophers. It’s instead a skill that has great value today.
May 23, 2019 12
There are two reasons for this value. The first has to do with learning. We have an information economy that’s dependent on complex systems that change rapidly
July 1, 2019 12
To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you
July 1, 2019 12
must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work. If you don’t cultivate this ability, you’re likely to fall behind as technology advances.
July 1, 2019 12
To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of producing—a task that requires depth.
May 23, 2019 13
Deep work is so important that we might consider it, to use the phrasing of business writer Eric Barker, “the superpower of the 21st century.”
May 23, 2019 13
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.
May 23, 2019 14
the ability to focus is considered a crucial occupational skill
July 1, 2019 14
This compressed schedule is possible because I’ve invested significant effort to minimize the shallow in my life while making sure I get the most out of the time this frees up
July 1, 2019 15
Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output
July 1, 2019 15
full value-producing potential
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As you struggle and ultimately triumph with the ideas and rules in the chapters ahead, you can be assured that I’m following suit—ruthlessly culling the shallow and painstakingly cultivating the intensity of my depth. (You’ll learn how I fare in this book’s conclusion.)
July 1, 2019 16
A deep life is a good life
July 1, 2019 17
PART 1: The Idea
Race
July 1, 2019 20
Against the Machine,
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“We are in the early throes of a Great Restructuring,” Brynjolfsson and McAfee explain early in their book. “Our technologies are racing ahead but many of our skills and organizations are lagging behind.”
May 23, 2019 20
As intelligent machines improve, and the gap between machine and human abilities shrinks, employers are becoming increasingly likely to hire “new machines” instead of “new people.”
May 23, 2019 20
In 2013, for example, the George Mason economist Tyler Cowen published Average Is Over, a book that echoes this thesis of a digital division.
July 1, 2019 21
Tyler Cowen published Average Is Over
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those with the oracular ability to work with and tease valuable results out of increasingly complex machines will thrive. Tyler Cowen summarizes this reality more bluntly: “The key question will be: are you good at working with intelligent machines or not?”
May 23, 2019 21
It no longer makes sense, for example, to hire a full-time programmer, put aside office space, and pay benefits, when you can instead pay one of the world’s best programmers, like Hansson, for just enough time to complete the project at hand.
July 1, 2019 22
the growing number of fields where technology makes productive remote work possible—consulting, marketing, writing, design, and so on. Once the talent market is made universally accessible, those at the peak of the market thrive while the rest suffer.
July 1, 2019 22
talent is not a commodity you can buy in bulk and combine to reach the needed levels: There’s a premium to being the best.
May 23, 2019 23
bargaining theory, a key component in standard economic thinking, argues that when money is made through the combination of capital investment and
July 1, 2019 24
labor, the rewards are returned, roughly speaking, proportional to the input.
July 1, 2019 24
those who can work creatively with intelligent machines and those who are stars in their field.
July 1, 2019 25
Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy1. The ability to quickly master hard things.2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.
July 1, 2019 25
intelligent machines are complicated and hard to master.* To join the group of those who can work well with these machines, therefore, requires that you hone your ability to master hard things.
July 1, 2019 27
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If you want to become a superstar, mastering the relevant skills is necessary, but not sufficient. You must then transform that latent potential into tangible results that people value.
July 1, 2019 28
This provides another general observation for joining the ranks of winners in our economy: If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are
July 1, 2019 28
The Intellectual Life. Sertillanges wrote the book as a guide to “the development and deepening of the mind”
May 23, 2019 29
a branch of psychology, sometimes called performance psychology, began to systematically explore what separates experts (in many different fields) from everyone else.
May 23, 2019 29
In the early 1990s, K. Anders Ericsson, a professor at Florida State University, pulled together these strands into a single coherent answer, consistent with the growing research literature, that he gave a punchy name: deliberate practice.
May 23, 2019 29
Ericsson opens his seminal paper on the topic with a powerful claim: “We deny that these differences [between expert performers and normal adults] are immutable… Instead, we argue that the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.”
July 1, 2019 30
To master a cognitively demanding task requires this specific form of practice—there are few exceptions made for natural talent. (On this point too, Sertillanges seems to have been ahead of his time, arguing in The Intellectual Life, “Men of genius themselves were great only by bringing all their power to bear on the point on which they had decided to show their full measure.” Ericsson couldn’t have said it better.)
July 1, 2019 30
what deliberate practice actually requires. Its core components are usually identified as follows: (1) your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you’re trying to improve or an idea you’re trying to master; (2) you receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it’s most productive.
July 1, 2019 30
book, The Talent Code,
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this sequence of thinking about thinking points to an inescapable conclusion:
July 1, 2019 32
To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction. To learn, in other words, is an act of deep work. If you’re comfortable going deep, you’ll be comfortable mastering the increasingly complex systems and skills needed to thrive in our economy. If you instead remain one of the many for whom depth is
May 23, 2019 32
book titled Give and Take
May 23, 2019 33
data-driven observations about how to produce academic work at an optimum rate. T
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there’s one idea in particular that seems central to his method: the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches.
July 1, 2019 33
High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)
May 23, 2019 34
The best students understood the role intensity plays in productivity and therefore went out of their way to maximize their concentration—
August 24, 2019 35
radically reducing the time required to prepare for tests or write papers, without diminishing the quality of their results.
August 24, 2019 35
Leroy introduced an effect she called attention residue.
August 24, 2019 35
when you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task. This residue gets
August 24, 2019 35
especially thick if your work on Task A was unbounded and of low intensity before you switched, but even if you finish Task A before moving on, your attention remains divided for a while
August 24, 2019 35
the common habit of working in a state of semi-distraction is potentially devastating to your performance.
May 23, 2019 36
To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. Put another way, the type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work. If you’re not comfortable going deep for extended periods of time, it’ll be difficult to get your performance to the peak levels of quality and quantity increasingly necessary to thrive professionally. Unless your talent and skills absolutely dwarf those of your competition, the deep workers among them will outproduce you.
May 23, 2019 37
If deep work is so important, why are there distracted people who do well?
May 23, 2019 38
A good chief executive is essentially a hard-to-automate decision engine,
May 23, 2019 39
To ask a CEO to spend four hours thinking deeply about a single problem is a waste of what makes him or her valuable. It’s better to hire three smart subordinates to think deeply about the problem and then bring their solutions to the executive for a final decision.
August 24, 2019 39
There are, we must continually remember, certain corners of our economy where depth is not valued. In addition to executives, we can also include, for example, certain types of salesmen and lobbyists, for whom constant connection is their most valued currency.
August 24, 2019 40
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.
May 23, 2019 41
book The Unwinding, which came out soon after and promptly
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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.
May 23, 2019 49
May 23, 2019 51
Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.
May 23, 2019 52
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.
May 23, 2019 54
book, To Save Everything, Click Here, Morozov
May 23, 2019 57
a deep life is not just economically lucrative, but also a life well lived.
May 23, 2019 64
understand the role that attention—that is, what we choose to focus on and what we choose to ignore—plays
May 23, 2019 64
Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioral economics to family counseling, similarly suggest that 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.
May 23, 2019 64
“Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.”
May 23, 2019 65
There is, however, a hidden but equally important benefit to cultivating rapt attention in your workday: Such concentration hijacks your attention apparatus, preventing you from noticing the many smaller and less pleasant things that unavoidably and persistently populate our lives.
May 23, 2019 67
advantage of cultivating “concentration so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems.”)
May 23, 2019 67
when you lose focus, your mind tends to fix on what could be wrong with your life instead of what’s right.”
May 23, 2019 69
“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.”
May 23, 2019 70
Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.
May 23, 2019 71
Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.
May 23, 2019 71
book, All Things Shining
May 23, 2019 73
craftsmanship as a path to meaning
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Any pursuit—be it physical or cognitive—that supports high levels of skill can also generate a sense of sacredness.
May 23, 2019 75
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.” It’s much like as if you were writing a poem.
May 23, 2019 75
You don’t need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work.
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that cultivating craftsmanship is necessarily a deep task and therefore requires a commitment to deep work.
May 23, 2019 76
A deep life is a good life, any way you look at it.
May 23, 2019 78
PART 2: The Rules
book, Willpower (co-authored with the science writer John Tierney): “Desire turned out to be the norm, not the exception.”
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willpower: You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.
May 23, 2019 84
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.
May 23, 2019 84
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.
May 23, 2019 86
Knuth deploys what I call the monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling.
December 8, 2019 87
“I try to learn certain areas of computer
May 23, 2019 87
science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study.”
May 23, 2019 87
Persons who wish to interfere with my concentration are politely requested not to do so, and warned that I don’t answer e-mail… lest [my communication policy’s] key message get lost in the verbiage, I will put it here succinctly: All of my time and attention are spoken for—several times over. Please do not ask for them.
May 23, 2019 88
As Bell Labs chronicler Jon Gertner notes about this design: “Traveling the hall’s length without encountering a number of acquaintances, problems, diversions and ideas was almost impossible. A physicist on his way to lunch in the cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.”
December 8, 2019 108
At the same time, their theorists formulated both information theory and coding theory, their astronomers won the Nobel Prize for empirically validating the Big Bang Theory, and perhaps most important of all, their physicists invented the transistor.
December 8, 2019 109
book titled The 4 Disciplines of Execution,
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impact of these mental calisthenics—and
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it wasn’t some fancy school that pushed their intellect higher; it became clear it was instead their daily study that started as early as the fifth grade.”
May 23, 2019 131
The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained.
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productive meditation.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.
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Moonwalking with Einstein
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“attentional control,”
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