Deep Work §

Summary §

What is Deep Work? What are the reasons that make knowledge workers lose their familiarity with it? What is the consequence of spending too much time on shallow work?

Deep work is a professional activity performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes cognitive capabilities to their limit. It creates new value, improves skills, and is hard to replicate. Knowledge workers are losing their familiarity with deep work due to network tools. These tools, combined with easy access to them through smartphones and networked office computers, have fragmented most knowledge workers’ attention. This state of fragmented attention cannot accommodate deep work, which requires long periods of uninterrupted thinking. Spending enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness can permanently reduce one’s capacity to perform deep work.

Indeed, the concept of deep work and its relationship to satisfaction and meaning in one’s work and life is a recurring theme in the book. The idea that cultivating focus and immersion in challenging tasks can lead to a state of flow and deep satisfaction is supported by the research of Fredrickson and Csikszentmihalyi, among others.

Moreover, there is a connection between craftsmanship and this sense of sacredness and meaning in one’s work. The idea that any pursuit that supports high levels of skill can generate a sense of sacredness is a powerful one, and it reminds us that the specifics of the job we choose are not necessarily what matter most for our career satisfaction.

In short, a deep life, one in which we engage in meaningful and challenging work that requires our full attention and skill, is a good life, regardless of the specifics of the work itself.

The author describes four different philosophies for incorporating deep work into one’s life: the monastic philosophy, the bimodal philosophy, the rhythmic philosophy, and the journalistic philosophy. Each approach has different ways of scheduling time for deep work and achieving a state of unbroken concentration. Additionally, the author suggests creating rituals to support deep work sessions, including specific locations, time frames, and rules for working. Finally, the author emphasizes the importance of minimizing decision-making during deep work sessions to conserve willpower.

The first discipline of the Four Disciplines of Execution is to focus on the wildly important, which means identifying a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours. The second discipline is to act on lead measures, which measure the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures. For an individual focused on deep work, the relevant lead measure would be time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward their wildly important goal. The third discipline is to keep a compelling scoreboard to create a sense of competition and drive focus on lead measures. The fourth discipline is to create a cadence of accountability with regular and frequent meetings where team members confront their scoreboard, commit to specific actions, and describe what happened with their commitments from the last meeting.

The 4DX framework focuses on execution over strategizing and isolates a few basic disciplines that work well. Idleness is necessary for the brain like vitamin D is for the body, and it is required for deep work. To get deep work done, individuals should regularly include idleness into their day. It is important to shut down work thinking completely at the end of the workday to allow the unconscious mind to sort through the most complex professional challenges. Attention restoration theory (ART) suggests that spending time in nature can improve concentration, and individuals should avoid interrupting their evening with work-related tasks to restore their directed attention centers.

Deliberate practice is the activity required to get better at something, and it overlaps substantially with deep work. To succeed with deep work, individuals should hit their daily deep work capacity during their workday and implement a strict shutdown ritual at the end of the day. Regularly resting the brain improves the quality of deep work, and the ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained. Finally, individuals must wean their minds from a dependence on distraction to deepen their focus.

In summary, to succeed in deep work and increase concentration, one should schedule time for distraction-free work, practice resistance to distractions, and use artificial deadlines to increase productivity. Additionally, productive meditation can help focus on a specific professional problem during physical activities, but one should be aware of the mind’s tendency to loop over known information and distract from the task at hand.

In order to structure your deep thinking process, start by identifying the relevant variables and defining the specific next-step question. Once the next-step question is identified, focus your attention on solving it and consolidate your gains by reviewing the answer.

There are two approaches to selecting network tools: the Any-Benefit Approach and the Craftsman Approach. The Craftsman Approach requires that the positive impacts of a tool outweigh the negative impacts on factors that are important to you.

The Law of the Vital Few states that in many cases, 80% of an effect is due to just 20% of the possible causes.

A strategy for limiting social media and to improve your leisure time, dedicate some advance thinking to how you want to spend it and plan out what you will do with your evenings and weekends in advance. Another strategy involves banning yourself from using all social media services for thirty days and then asking whether the last thirty days would have been better if you had used them and whether people cared that you weren’t using them.

The typical person needs to learn that their mental faculties do not tire like an arm or a leg, but rather want change, not rest, except during sleep. Working a few good hours in a typical workday is lucky due to interruptions, meetings, web surfing, and personal business. Fewer official working hours can help people spend their time more wisely. 37signals gave employees the entire month of June off for deep work, resulting in new ideas. Shallow work can be dangerous if it begins to crowd out deep efforts. Scheduling every minute of the day can increase productivity and ensure significant blocks of time for deep work or brainstorming. If an important insight arises, it’s okay to abandon the schedule for the day. With structure, innovation is more likely to occur, and being willing to abandon the plan allows for creative follow-up.

This text provides several strategies to prioritize deep work over shallow work, which can be detrimental to productivity. One of the strategies is to quantify the depth of every activity and bias time towards the deeper ones. Another suggestion is to ask your boss for a shallow work budget, which is the amount of time allowed for shallow tasks. The text also suggests implementing a fixed-schedule productivity strategy, where you set a goal to finish work by a certain time and work backwards to find productivity strategies to achieve that goal. Additionally, the author recommends being cautious with saying “yes” to shallow work obligations and being clear in refusal but ambiguous in explanation. These strategies can help individuals focus on deep work and increase productivity.

In this section, the author discusses the problem of being constantly accessible through email and offers tips for becoming harder to reach. One strategy is to make people who email you do more work by setting up a sender filter, which requires them to answer specific questions or meet certain criteria before you’ll respond. The author also suggests adopting a process-centric approach to email, which involves taking time to think through the project represented by a message and identifying the most efficient process for bringing it to a successful conclusion. Additionally, the author notes that many successful academics have a default behavior of not responding to emails unless the sender makes a convincing case and minimizes the effort required to respond. Ultimately, the author argues that a commitment to deep work requires letting go of the artificial busyness of rapid email messaging and social media posturing.

Highlights §

• 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. (Location 32)
• The reason knowledge workers are losing their familiarity with deep work is well established: network tools. (Location 64)
• the rise of these tools, combined with ubiquitous access to them through smartphones and networked office computers, has fragmented most knowledge workers’ attention into slivers. (Location 66)
• This state of fragmented attention cannot accommodate deep work, which requires long periods of uninterrupted thinking. (Location 69)
• Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate. (Location 72)
• 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. (Location 74)
• Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work. (Location 78)
• 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— (Location 92)
• To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you 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. (Location 148)
• To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of producing— a task that requires depth. (Location 154)
• 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. (Location 166)
• I build my days around a core of carefully chosen deep work, with the shallow activities I absolutely cannot avoid batched into smaller bursts (Location 188)
• Tyler Cowen summarizes this reality more bluntly: “The key question will be: are you good at working with intelligent machines or not?” (Location 252)
• Once the talent market is made universally accessible, those at the peak of the market thrive while the rest suffer. (Location 264)
• 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. (Location 285)
• In this 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. (Location 293)
• I just identified two groups that are poised to thrive and that I claim are accessible: those who can work creatively with intelligent machines and those who are stars in their field. (Location 302)
• Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy 1. The ability to quickly master hard things. 2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed. (Location 305)
• The two core abilities just described depend on your ability to perform deep work. If you haven’t mastered this foundational skill, you’ll struggle to learn hard things or produce at an elite level. (Location 343)
• 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.” (Location 363)
• 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. (Location 371)
• science of performance argues that you get better at a skill as you develop more myelin around the relevant neurons, allowing the corresponding circuit to fire more effortlessly and effectively. To be great at something is to be well myelinated. (Location 381)
• The reason, therefore, why it’s important to focus intensely on the task at hand while avoiding distraction is because this is the only way to isolate the relevant neural circuit enough to trigger useful myelination. (Location 386)
• If you’re comfortable going deep, you’ll be comfortable mastering the increasingly complex systems and skills needed to thrive in our economy. (Location 393)
• High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus) (Location 426)
• 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. (Location 442)
• By working on a single hard task for a long time without switching, Grant minimizes the negative impact of attention residue from his other obligations, allowing him to maximize performance on this one task. (Location 452)
• the common habit of working in a state of semi-distraction is potentially devastating to your performance. (Location 456)
• To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. (Location 462)
• other ideas are being prioritized as more important than deep work in the business world, including, as we just encountered, serendipitous collaboration, rapid communication, and an active presence on social media. It’s bad enough that so many trends are prioritized ahead of deep work, but to add insult to injury, many of these trends actively decrease one’s ability to go deep. (Location 542)
• big trends in business today actively decrease people’s ability to perform deep work, even though the benefits promised by these trends (e.g., increased serendipity, faster responses to requests, and more exposure) are arguably dwarfed by the benefits that flow from a commitment to deep work (Location 560)
• as knowledge work makes more complex demands of the labor force, it becomes harder to measure the value of an individual’s efforts. (Location 587)
• 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. (Location 620)
• a culture of connectivity makes life easier is that it creates an environment where it becomes acceptable to run your day out of your inbox— responding to the latest missive with alacrity while others pile up behind it, all the while feeling satisfyingly productive (Location 629)
• consider the common practice of setting up regularly occurring meetings for projects. These meetings tend to pile up and fracture schedules to the point where sustained focus during the day becomes impossible. Why do they persist? They’re easier. (Location 638)
• Instead of trying to manage their time and obligations themselves, they let the impending meeting each week force them to take some action on a given project and more generally provide a highly visible simulacrum of progress. (Location 640)
• The Principle of Least Resistance, protected from scrutiny by the metric black hole, supports work cultures that save us from the short-term discomfort of concentration and planning, at the expense of long-term satisfaction and the production of real value. (Location 647)
• Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not. (Location 668)
• 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. (Location 686)
• 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. (Location 697)
• This potent mixture of job ambiguity and lack of metrics to measure the effectiveness of different strategies allows behavior that can seem ridiculous when viewed objectively to thrive in the increasingly bewildering psychic landscape of our daily work. (Location 703)
• Postman argued that our society was sliding into a troubling relationship with technology. We were, he noted, no longer discussing the trade-offs surrounding new technologies, balancing the new efficiencies against the new problems introduced. If it’s high-tech, we began to instead assume, then it’s good. Case closed. (Location 721)
• In his 2013 book, To Save Everything, Click Here, Morozov attempts to pull back the curtains on our technopolic obsession with “the Internet” (Location 728)
• the uproar, mentioned earlier, that arose when Jonathan Franzen dared suggest that novelists shouldn’t tweet. It riled people not because they’re well versed in book marketing and disagreed with Franzen’s conclusion, but because it surprised them that anyone serious would suggest the irrelevance of social media. In an Internet-centric technopoly such a statement is the equivalent of a flag burning— desecration, not debate. (Location 740)
• 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. (Location 749)
• The myopia of your peers and employers uncovers a great personal advantage. Assuming the trends outlined here continue, depth will become increasingly rare and therefore increasingly valuable. (Location 763)
• Gallagher set out to better understand the role that attention— that is, what we choose to focus on and what we choose to ignore— plays in defining the quality of our life. (Location 820)
• 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. (Location 824)
• Our brains instead construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to. If you focus on a cancer diagnosis, you and your life become unhappy and dark, but if you focus instead on an evening martini, you and your life become more pleasant— even though the circumstances in both scenarios are the same. (Location 829)
• “Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love— is the sum of what you focus on.” (Location 831)
• After a bad or disrupting occurrence in your life, Fredrickson’s research shows, what you choose to focus on exerts significant leverage on your attitude going forward. (Location 833)
• 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. (Location 851)
• ‘the idle mind is the devil’s workshop’… when you lose focus, your mind tends to fix on what could be wrong with your life instead of what’s right.” A workday driven by the shallow, from a neurological perspective, is likely to be a draining and upsetting day, even if most of the shallow things that capture your attention seem harmless or fun. (Location 879)
• In work (and especially knowledge work), to increase the time you spend in a state of depth is to leverage the complex machinery of the human brain in a way that for several different neurological reasons maximizes the meaning and satisfaction you’ll associate with your working life. (Location 882)
• “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.” Csikszentmihalyi calls this mental state flow (a term he popularized with a 1990 book of the same title). (Location 901)
• 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. (Location 905)
• Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging. (Location 910)
• Gallagher’s writing emphasizes that the content of what we focus on matters. If we give rapt attention to important things, and therefore also ignore shallow negative things, we’ll experience our working life as more important and positive. (Location 912)
• Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow, by contrast, is mostly agnostic to the content of our attention. Though he would likely agree with the research cited by Gallagher, his theory notes that the feeling of going deep is in itself very rewarding. Our minds like this challenge, regardless of the subject. (Location 914)
• Deep work is an activity well suited to generate a flow state (the phrases used by Csikszentmihalyi to describe what generates flow include notions of stretching your mind to its limits, concentrating, and losing yourself in an activity— all of which also describe deep work). And as we just learned, flow generates happiness. (Location 917)
• modern companies should embrace this reality, suggesting that “jobs should be redesigned so that they resemble as closely as possible flow activities.” Noting, however, that such a redesign would be difficult and disruptive (Location 921)
• To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction. (Location 925)
• In 2011, Dreyfus and Kelly published a book, All Things Shining, which explores how notions of sacredness and meaning have evolved throughout the history of human culture. (Location 930)
• Craftsmanship, Dreyfus and Kelly argue in their book’s conclusion, provides a key to reopening a sense (Location 942)
• There’s nothing intrinsic about the manual trades when it comes to generating this particular source of meaning. Any pursuit— be it physical or cognitive— that supports high levels of skill can also generate a sense of sacredness. (Location 959)
• The Pragmatic Programmer, a well-regarded book in the computer programming field, makes this connection between code and old-style craftsmanship more directly by quoting the medieval quarry worker’s creed in its preface: “We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals.” (Location 965)
• Our obsession with the advice to “follow your passion” (the subject of my last book), for example, is motivated by the (flawed) idea that what matters most for your career satisfaction is the specifics of the job you choose. (Location 977)
• Throughout most of human history, to be a blacksmith or a wheelwright wasn’t glamorous. But this doesn’t matter, as the specifics of the work are irrelevant. (Location 980)
• A deep life is a good life, any way you look at it. (Location 1000)
• examples of deep work produced in the building. It’s meant to inspire users of the machine, creating a “culture of healthy stress and peer pressure.” (Location 1016)
• You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. (Location 1062)
• 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. (Location 1066)
• The goal is to convince you that there are many different ways to integrate deep work into your schedule, and it’s therefore worth taking the time to find an approach that makes sense for you. (Location 1092)
• the monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling. This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations. (Location 1105)
• the bimodal philosophy of deep work. This philosophy asks that you divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else. During the deep time, the bimodal worker will act monastically— seeking intense and uninterrupted concentration. During the shallow time, such focus is not prioritized. This division of time between deep and open can happen on multiple scales. (Location 1151)
• The bimodal philosophy believes that deep work can produce extreme productivity, but only if the subject dedicates enough time to such endeavors to reach maximum cognitive intensity— the state in which real breakthroughs occur. This is why the minimum unit of time for deep work in this philosophy tends to be at least one full day. To put aside a few hours in the morning, for example, is too short to count as a deep work stretch for an adherent of this approach. (Location 1156)
• the rhythmic philosophy. This philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit. The goal, in other words, is to generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you’re going to go deep. The chain method is a good example of the rhythmic philosophy of deep work scheduling because it combines a simple scheduling heuristic (do the work every day), with an easy way to remind yourself to do the work: the big red Xs on the calendar. (Location 1188)
• Another common way to implement the rhythmic philosophy is to replace the visual aid of the chain method with a set starting time that you use every day for deep work. In much the same way that maintaining visual indicators of your work progress can reduce the barrier to entry for going deep, eliminating even the simplest scheduling decisions, such as when during the day to do the work, also reduces this barrier. (Location 1192)
• The rhythmic philosophy provides an interesting contrast to the bimodal philosophy. It perhaps fails to achieve the most intense levels of deep thinking sought in the daylong concentration sessions favored by the bimodalist. The trade-off, however, is that this approach works better with the reality of human nature. By supporting deep work with rock-solid routines that make sure a little bit gets done on a regular basis, the rhythmic scheduler will often log a larger total number of deep hours per year. (Location 1210)
• I call this approach, in which you fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule, the journalist philosophy. This name is a nod to the fact that journalists, like Walter Isaacson, are trained to shift into a writing mode on a moment’s notice, as is required by the deadline-driven nature of their profession. (Location 1240)
• This approach is not for the deep work novice. As I established in the opening to this rule, the ability to rapidly switch your mind from shallow to deep mode doesn’t come naturally. Without practice, such switches can seriously deplete your finite willpower reserves. This habit also requires a sense of confidence in your abilities— a conviction that what you’re doing is important and will succeed. (Location 1243)
• In the final accounting, the journalistic philosophy of deep work scheduling remains difficult to pull off. But if you’re confident in the value of what you’re trying to produce, and practiced in the skill of going deep (a skill we will continue to develop in the strategies that follow), it can be a surprisingly robust way to squeeze out large amounts of depth from an otherwise demanding schedule. (Location 1260)
• An often-overlooked observation about those who use their minds to create valuable things is that they’re rarely haphazard in their work habits. (Location 1264)
• “[ Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.” (Location 1278)
• To make the most out of your deep work sessions, build rituals of the same level of strictness and idiosyncrasy as the important thinkers mentioned previously. (Location 1280)
• Where you’ll work and for how long. Your ritual needs to specify a location for your deep work efforts. This location can be as simple as your normal office with the door shut and desk cleaned off (a colleague of mine likes to put a hotel-style “do not disturb” sign on his office door when he’s tackling something difficult). If it’s possible to identify a location used only for depth— for instance, a conference room or quiet library— the positive effect can be even greater. (Location 1287)
• Regardless of where you work, be sure to also give yourself a specific time frame to keep the session a discrete challenge and not an open-ended slog. (Location 1291)
• How you’ll work once you start to work. Your ritual needs rules and processes to keep your efforts structured. For example, you might institute a ban on any Internet use, or maintain a metric such as words produced per twenty-minute interval to keep your concentration honed. Without this structure, you’ll have to mentally litigate again and again what you should and should not be doing during these sessions and keep trying to assess whether you’re working sufficiently hard. These are unnecessary drains on your willpower reserves. (Location 1292)
• the ritual might specify that you start with a cup of good coffee, or make sure you have access to enough food of the right type to maintain energy, or integrate light exercise such as walking to help keep the mind clear. (Location 1297)
• a curious but effective strategy in the world of deep work: the grand gesture. The concept is simple: By leveraging a radical change to your normal environment, coupled perhaps with a significant investment of effort or money, all dedicated toward supporting a deep work task, you increase the perceived importance of the task. (Location 1319)
• The relationship between deep work and collaboration is tricky. It’s worth taking the time to untangle, however, because properly leveraging collaboration can increase the quality of deep work in your professional life. (Location 1358)
• This combination of soundproofed offices connected to large common areas yields a hub-and-spoke architecture of innovation in which both serendipitous encounter and isolated deep thinking are supported. It’s a setup that straddles a spectrum where on one extreme we find the solo thinker, isolated from inspiration but free from distraction, and on the other extreme, we find the fully collaborative thinker in an open office, flush with inspiration but struggling to support the deep thinking needed to build on it.* (Location 1417)
• Expose yourself to ideas in hubs on a regular basis, but maintain a spoke in which to work deeply on what you encounter. (Location 1427)
• the whiteboard effect. 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 presence of the other party waiting for your next insight— be it someone physically in the same room or collaborating with you virtually— can short-circuit the natural instinct to avoid depth. (Location 1440)
• when pursuing innovation— collaborative deep work can yield better results. This strategy, therefore, asks that you consider this option in contemplating how best to integrate depth into your professional life. (Location 1445)
• First, distraction remains a destroyer of depth. Therefore, the hub-and-spoke model provides a crucial template. 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. (Location 1447)
• Second, even when you retreat to a spoke to think deeply, when it’s reasonable to leverage the whiteboard effect, do so. By working side by side with someone on a problem, you can push each other toward deeper levels of depth, and therefore toward the generation of more and more valuable output as compared to working alone. (Location 1449)
• this division between what and how is crucial but is overlooked in the professional world. It’s often straightforward to identify a strategy needed to achieve a goal, but what trips up companies is figuring out how to execute the strategy once identified. (Location 1465)
• Discipline 1: Focus on the Wildly Important (Location 1477)
• “The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.” (Location 1478)
• execution should be aimed at a small number of “wildly important goals.” (Location 1478)
• For an individual focused on deep work, the implication is that you should identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours. (Location 1480)
• “If you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to say ‘no’ to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say ‘yes’ to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else.” (Location 1483)
• Discipline 2: Act on the Lead Measures (Location 1488)
• Once you’ve identified a wildly important goal, you need to measure your success. In 4DX, 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. (Location 1489)
• the problem with lag measures is that they come too late to change your behavior: “When you receive them, the performance that drove them is already in the past.” (Location 1492)
• Lead measures, on the other hand, “measure the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures.” (Location 1493)
• In other words, lead measures turn your attention to improving the behaviors you directly control in the near future that will then have a positive impact on your long-term goals. (Location 1496)
• For an individual focused on deep work, it’s easy to identify the relevant lead measure: time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal. (Location 1497)
• When I shifted to tracking deep work hours, suddenly these measures became relevant to my day-to-day: Every hour extra of deep work was immediately reflected in my tally. (Location 1501)
• Discipline 3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard (Location 1502)
• when attempting to drive your team’s engagement toward your organization’s wildly important goal, it’s important that they have a public place to record and track their lead measures. This scoreboard creates a sense of competition that drives them to focus on these measures, even when other demands vie for their attention. (Location 1504)
• Discipline 4: Create a Cadence of Accountability (Location 1517)
• the final step to help maintain a focus on lead measures is to put in place “a rhythm of regular and frequent meetings of any team that owns a wildly important goal.” (Location 1518)
• During these meetings, the team members must confront their scoreboard, commit to specific actions to help improve the score before the next meeting, and describe what happened with the commitments they made at the last meeting. (Location 1519)
• The 4DX framework is based on the fundamental premise that execution is more difficult than strategizing. After hundreds and hundreds of case studies, its inventors managed to isolate a few basic disciplines that seem to work particularly (Location 1528)
• 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, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets… it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. (Location 1550)
• you should follow Kreider’s lead by injecting regular and substantial freedom from professional concerns into your day, providing you with the idleness paradoxically required to get (deep) work done. (Location 1555)
• At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning— no after-dinner e-mail check, no mental replays of conversations, and no scheming about how you’ll handle an upcoming challenge; shut down work thinking completely. (Location 1558)
• unconscious thought theory (UTT)— an attempt to understand the different roles conscious and unconscious deliberation play in decision making. At a high level, this theory proposes that for decisions that require the application of strict rules, the conscious mind must be involved. (Location 1575)
• UTT hypothesizes that this is due to the fact that these regions of your brain have more neuronal bandwidth available, allowing them to move around more information and sift through more potential solutions than your conscious centers of thinking. Your conscious mind, according to this theory, is like a home computer on which you can run carefully written programs that return correct answers to limited problems, whereas your unconscious mind is like Google’s vast data centers, in which statistical algorithms sift through terabytes of unstructured information, teasing out surprising useful solutions to difficult questions. (Location 1579)
• providing your conscious brain time to rest enables your unconscious mind to take a shift sorting through your most complex professional challenges. A shutdown habit, therefore, is not necessarily reducing the amount of time you’re engaged in productive work, but is instead diversifying the type of work you deploy. (Location 1584)
• attention restoration theory (ART), which claims that spending time in nature can improve your ability to concentrate. (Location 1593)
• To concentrate requires what ART calls directed attention. This resource is finite: If you exhaust it, you’ll struggle to concentrate. (Location 1596)
• Put another way, when walking through nature, you’re freed from having to direct your attention, as there are few challenges to navigate (like crowded street crossings), and experience enough interesting stimuli to keep your mind sufficiently occupied to avoid the need to actively aim your attention. (Location 1603)
• the implications of ART expand beyond the benefits of nature. The core mechanism of this theory is the idea that you can restore your ability to direct your attention if you give this activity a rest. (Location 1610)
• if you keep interrupting your evening to check and respond to e-mail, or put aside a few hours after dinner to catch up on an approaching deadline, you’re robbing your directed attention centers of the uninterrupted rest they need for restoration. Even if these work dashes consume only a small amount of time, they prevent you from reaching the levels of deeper relaxation in which attention restoration can occur. (Location 1615)
• trying to squeeze a little more work out of your evenings might reduce your effectiveness the next day enough that you end up getting less done than if you had instead respected a shutdown. (Location 1619)
• deliberate practice is the systematic stretching of your ability for a given skill. It is the activity required to get better at something. Deep work and deliberate practice, as I’ve argued, overlap substantially. (Location 1623)
• The implication of these results is that your capacity for deep work in a given day is limited. If you’re careful about your schedule (using, for example, the type of productivity strategies described in Rule 4), you should hit your daily deep work capacity during your workday. (Location 1631)
• To succeed with this strategy, you must first accept the commitment that once your workday shuts down, you cannot allow even the smallest incursion of professional concerns into your field of attention. This includes, crucially, checking e-mail, as well as browsing work-related websites. (Location 1638)
• to support your commitment to shutting down with a strict shutdown ritual that you use at the end of the workday to maximize the probability that you succeed. In more detail, this ritual should ensure that every incomplete task, goal, or project has been reviewed and that for each you have confirmed that either (1) you have a plan you trust for its completion, or (2) it’s captured in a place where it will be revisited when the time is right. (Location 1643)
• the Zeigarnik effect. This effect, which is named for the experimental work of the early-twentieth-century psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, describes the ability of incomplete tasks to dominate our attention. (Location 1657)
• “Committing to a specific plan for a goal may therefore not only facilitate attainment of the goal but may also free cognitive resources for other pursuits.” (Location 1668)
• Shutdown rituals can become annoying, as they add an extra ten to fifteen minutes to the end of your workday (and sometimes even more), but they’re necessary for reaping the rewards of systematic idleness summarized previously. (Location 1673)
• regularly resting your brain improves the quality of your deep work. When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done. (Location 1678)
• The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained. (Location 1706)
• it’s common to treat undistracted concentration as a habit like flossing— something that you know how to do and know is good for you, but that you’ve (Location 1707)
• Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction. (Location 1713)
• People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand… they’re pretty much mental wrecks. (Location 1719)
• If every moment of potential boredom in your life— say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives— is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the “mental wrecks” in Nass’s research, it’s not ready for deep work— even (Location 1727)
• Don’t Take Breaks from Distraction. Instead Take Breaks from Focus. (Location 1737)
• Internet Sabbath cannot by itself cure a distracted brain. If you eat healthy just one day a week, you’re unlikely to lose weight, as the majority of your time is still spent gorging. Similarly, if you spend just one day a week resisting distraction, you’re unlikely to diminish your brain’s craving for these stimuli, as most of your time is still spent giving in to it. (Location 1750)
• Instead of scheduling the occasional break from distraction so you can focus, you should instead schedule the occasional break from focus to give in to distraction. (Location 1753)
• Schedule in advance when you’ll use the Internet, and then avoid it altogether outside these times. I suggest that you keep a notepad near your computer at work. On this pad, record the next time you’re allowed to use the Internet. Until you arrive at that time, absolutely no network connectivity is allowed— no matter how tempting. (Location 1758)
• It’s instead the constant switching from low-stimuli/ high-value activities to high-stimuli/ low-value activities, at the slightest hint of boredom or cognitive challenge, that teaches your mind to never tolerate an absence of novelty. (Location 1761)
• if you’ve scheduled your next Internet block thirty minutes from the current moment, and you’re beginning to feel bored and crave distraction, the next thirty minutes of resistance become a session of concentration calisthenics. A full day of scheduled distraction therefore becomes a full day of similar mental training. (Location 1766)
• To simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, it’s incredibly valuable. (Location 1805)
• to succeed with deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli. This doesn’t mean that you have to eliminate distracting behaviors; it’s sufficient that you instead eliminate the ability of such behaviors to hijack your attention. (Location 1807)
• identify a deep task (that is, something that requires deep work to complete) that’s high on your priority list. Estimate how long you’d normally put aside for an obligation of this type, then give yourself a hard deadline that drastically reduces this time. If possible, commit publicly to the deadline— (Location 1831)
• Deep work requires levels of concentration well beyond where most knowledge workers are comfortable. Roosevelt dashes leverage artificial deadlines to help you systematically increase the level you can regularly achieve— providing, in some sense, interval training for the attention centers of your brain. An additional benefit is that these dashes are incompatible with distraction (Location 1841)
• 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. Depending on your profession, this problem might be outlining an article, writing a talk, making progress on a proof, or attempting to sharpen a business strategy. As in mindfulness meditation, you must continue to bring your attention back to the problem at hand when it wanders or stalls. (Location 1859)
• As a novice, when you begin a productive meditation session, your mind’s first act of rebellion will be to offer unrelated but seemingly more interesting thoughts. (Location 1879)
• looping. When faced with a hard problem, your mind, as it was evolved to do, will attempt to avoid excess expenditure of energy when possible. One way it might attempt to sidestep this expenditure is by avoiding diving deeper into the problem by instead looping over and over again on what you already know about (Location 1884)
• Structure Your Deep Thinking (Location 1890)
• structure for this deep thinking process. I suggest starting with a careful review of the relevant variables for solving the problem and then storing these values in your working memory. (Location 1892)
• Once the relevant variables are identified, define the specific next-step question you need to answer using these variables. (Location 1895)
• With the relevant variables stored and the next-step question identified, you now have a specific target for your attention. Assuming you’re able to solve your next-step question, the final step of this structured approach to deep thinking is to consolidate your gains by reviewing clearly the answer you identified. (Location 1897)
• A side effect of memory training, in other words, is an improvement in your general ability to concentrate. This ability can then be fruitfully applied to any task demanding deep work. (Location 1921)
• 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. (Location 2030)
• 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. (Location 2085)
• Whereas the any-benefit mind-set identifies any potential positive impact as justification for using a tool, 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. (Location 2087)
• Of course Facebook offers benefits to your social life, but none are important enough to what really matters to you in this area to justify giving it access to your time and attention.* (Location 2180)
• 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. (Location 2195)
• (an 80/ 20 split is roughly what you would expect when describing a power law distribution over impact— a type of distribution that shows up often when measuring quantities in the real world), but it’s probably most useful when applied heuristically as a reminder that, in many cases, contributions to an outcome are not evenly distributed. (Location 2199)
• this strategy asks that you perform the equivalent of a packing party on the social media services that you currently use. Instead of “packing,” however, you’ll instead ban yourself from using them for thirty days. All of them: Facebook, Instagram, Google +, Twitter, Snapchat, Vine— or (Location 2238)
• After thirty days of this self-imposed network isolation, ask yourself the following two questions about each of the services you temporarily quit: 1. Would the last thirty days have been notably better if I had been able to use this service? 2. Did people care that I wasn’t using this service? (Location 2243)
• For most people and most services, the news might be sobering— no one outside your closest friends and family will likely even notice you’ve signed off. (Location 2280)
• The “great and profound mistake which my typical man makes in regard to his day,” he elaborates, is that even though he doesn’t particularly enjoy his work (seeing it as something to “get through”), “he persists in looking upon those hours from ten to six as ‘the day,’ to which the ten hours preceding them and the six hours following them are nothing but a prologue and epilogue.” This is an attitude that Bennett condemns as “utterly illogical and unhealthy.” (Location 2300)
• with the rise of the Internet and the low-brow attention economy it supports, the average forty-hour-a-week employee— especially those in my tech-savvy Millennial generation— has seen the quality of his or her leisure time remain degraded, consisting primarily of a blur of distracted clicks on least-common-denominator digital entertainment. If Bennett were brought back to life today, he’d likely fall into despair at the lack of progress in this area of human development. (Location 2309)
• you both should and can make deliberate use of your time outside work, remains relevant today— especially (Location 2314)
• such behavior is dangerous, as it weakens your mind’s general ability to resist distraction, making deep work difficult later when you really want to concentrate. (Location 2327)
• Arnold Bennett identified the solution to this problem a hundred years earlier: Put more thought into your leisure time. In other words, this strategy suggests that when it comes to your relaxation, don’t default to whatever catches your attention at the moment, but instead dedicate some advance thinking to the question of how you want to spend your “day within a day.” (Location 2330)
• figure out in advance what you’re going to do with your evenings and weekends before they begin. (Location 2335)
• One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change— not rest, except in sleep. (Location 2346)
• If you give your mind something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you’ll end the day more fulfilled, and begin the next one more relaxed, than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in semiconscious and unstructured Web surfing. (Location 2348)
• Drain the Shallows (Location 2355)
• 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. (Location 2369)
• 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. (Location 2371)
• 37signals implemented something radical: The company gave its employees the entire month of June off to work deeply on their own projects. This month would be a period free of any shallow work obligations— no status meetings, no memos, and, blessedly, no PowerPoint. At the end of the month, the company held a “pitch day” (Location 2383)
• “How can we afford to put our business on hold for a month to ‘mess around’ with new ideas?” Fried asked rhetorically. “How can we afford not to?” (Location 2390)
• Deep work is exhausting because it pushes you toward the limit of your abilities. (Location 2403)
• The implication is that once you’ve hit your deep work limit in a given day, you’ll experience diminishing rewards if you try to cram in more. Shallow work, therefore, doesn’t become dangerous until after you add enough to begin to crowd out your bounded deep efforts for the day. At first, this caveat might seem optimistic. (Location 2407)
• to treat shallow work with suspicion because its damage is often vastly underestimated and its importance vastly overestimated. (Location 2420)
• Schedule Every Minute of Your Day (Location 2423)
• Schedule every minute of your day. Here’s my suggestion: At the beginning of each workday, turn to a new page of lined paper in a notebook you dedicate to this purpose. Down the left-hand side of the page, mark every other line with an hour of the day, covering the full set of hours you typically work. Now comes the important part: Divide the hours of your workday into blocks and assign activities to the blocks. (Location 2440)
• There might be time blocks for lunch or relaxation breaks. To keep things reasonably clean, the minimum length of a block should be thirty minutes (i.e., one line on your page). This means, for example, that instead of having a unique small box for each small task on your plate for the day— respond to boss’s e-mail, submit reimbursement form, ask Carl about report— you can batch similar things into more generic task blocks. You might find it useful, in this case, to draw a line from a task block to the open right-hand side of the page where you can list out the full set of small tasks you plan to accomplish in that block. (Location 2446)
• Cross out the blocks for the remainder of the day and create new blocks to the right of the old ones on the page (I draw my blocks skinny so I have room for several revisions). On some days, you might rewrite your schedule half a dozen times. Don’t despair if this happens. (Location 2457)
• In my own daily scheduling discipline, in addition to regularly scheduling significant blocks of time for speculative thinking and discussion, I maintain a rule that if I stumble onto an important insight, then this is a perfectly valid reason to ignore the rest of my schedule for the day (Location 2480)
• With structure, on the other hand, you can ensure that you regularly schedule blocks to grapple with a new idea, or work deeply on something challenging, or brainstorm for a fixed period— the type of commitment more likely to instigate innovation. (Recall, for example, the discussion in Rule 1 about the rigid rituals followed by many great creative thinkers.) And because you’re willing to abandon your plan when an innovative idea arises, you’re just as well suited as the distracted creative to follow up when the muse strikes. (Location 2491)
• Quantify the Depth of Every Activity (Location 2500)
• An advantage of scheduling your day is that you can determine how much time you’re actually spending in shallow activities. (Location 2500)
• planning meeting— probably not. Such meetings rarely dive into substantive content and tend to feature a lot of small talk and posturing in which participants try to make it seem like they’re committing to a lot without actually having to commit. (Location 2534)
• Once you know where your activities fall on the deep-to-shallow scale, bias your time toward the former. (Location 2543)
• Ask Your Boss for a Shallow Work Budget (Location 2548)
• What percentage of my time should be spent on shallow work? This strategy suggests that you ask it. If you have a boss, in other words, have a conversation about this question. (Location 2549)
• non-entry-level knowledge work jobs, the answer to the question will be somewhere in the 30 to 50 percent range (there’s a psychological distaste surrounding the idea of spending the majority of your time on unskilled tasks, so 50 percent is a natural upper limit, (Location 2553)
• drop the need for a weekly status meeting in preference for results-driven reporting (“ let me know when you’ve made significant progress; then we’ll talk”). (Location 2559)
• part of the reason shallow work persists in large quantities in knowledge work is that we rarely see the total impact of such efforts on our schedules. (Location 2568)
• 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. (Location 2570)
• (it’s incredibly wasteful, for example, to pay a highly trained professional to send e-mail messages and attend meetings for thirty hours a week), (Location 2572)
• By instead picking and sticking with a shallow-to-deep ratio, you can replace this guilt-driven unconditional acceptance with the more healthy habit of trying to get the most out of the time you put aside for shallow work (therefore still exposing yourself to many opportunities), but keeping these efforts constrained to a small enough fraction of your time and attention to enable the deep work that ultimately drives your business forward. (Location 2580)
• Finish Your Work by Five Thirty (Location 2590)
• fixed-schedule productivity, as I fix the firm goal of not working past a certain time, then work backward to find productivity strategies that allow me to satisfy this declaration. (Location 2594)
• Nagpal opens the article by claiming that much of the stress suffered by tenure-track professors is self-imposed. (Location 2611)
• According to her article, one of the main techniques for respecting her hour limit was to set drastic quotas on the major sources of shallow endeavors in her academic life. (Location 2621)
• she decided she would travel only five times per year for any purpose, as trips can generate a surprisingly large load of urgent shallow obligations (Location 2622)
• The travel quota is just one of several tactics that Nagpal used to control her workday (she also, for example, placed limits on the number of papers she would review per year), but what all her tactics shared was a commitment to ruthlessly capping the shallow while protecting the deep efforts— that is, original research— that ultimately determined her professional fate. (Location 2626)
• I, too, am incredibly cautious about my use of the most dangerous word in one’s productivity vocabulary: “yes.” It takes a lot to convince me to agree to something that yields shallow work. (Location 2630)
• Another tactic that works well for me is to be clear in my refusal but ambiguous in my explanation for the refusal. The key is to avoid providing enough specificity about the excuse that the requester has the opportunity to defuse it. (Location 2632)
• I don’t provide details— which might leave the requester the ability to suggest a way to fit his or her event into my existing obligations— but instead just say, “Sounds interesting, but I can’t make it due to schedule conflicts.” In turning down obligations, I also resist the urge to offer a consolation prize that ends up devouring almost as much of my schedule (Location 2635)
• the reduction in shallow frees up more energy for the deep alternative, allowing us to produce more than if we had defaulted to a more typical crowded schedule. (Location 2645)
• the limits to our time necessitate more careful thinking about our organizational habits, also leading to more value produced as compared to longer but less organized schedules. (Location 2646)
• Your default answer becomes no, the bar for gaining access to your time and attention rises precipitously, and you begin to organize the efforts that pass these obstacles with a ruthless efficiency. (Location 2651)
• Become Hard to Reach (Location 2663)
• Tip 1: Make People Who Send You E-mail Do More Work (Location 2672)
• If you have an offer, opportunity, or introduction that might make my life more interesting, e-mail me at interesting [at] calnewport.com. For the reasons stated above, I’ll only respond to those proposals that are a good match for my schedule and interests. (Location 2679)
• As for my own interest in helping my readers, I now redirect this energy toward settings I carefully choose to maximize impact. (Location 2687)
• 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. For most, therefore, an inbox full of messages generates a major sense of obligation. (Location 2691)
• By instead resetting your correspondents’ expectations to the reality that you’ll probably not respond, the experience is transformed. The inbox is now a collection of opportunities that you can glance at when you have the free time— seeking out those that make sense for you to engage. But the pile of unread messages no longer generates a sense of obligation. (Location 2693)
• To contact him, you must first consult an FAQ to make sure your question has not already been answered (Location 2710)
• If you make it through this FAQ sieve, he then asks you to fill out a survey that allows him to further screen for connections that seem particularly relevant to his expertise. For those who make it past this step, Herbert enforces a small fee you must pay before communicating with him. (Location 2711)
• consider Antonio Centeno, who runs the popular Real Man Style blog. Centeno’s sender filter lays out a two-step process. If you have a question, he diverts you to a public location to post it. Centeno thinks it’s wasteful to answer the same questions again and again in private one-on-one conversations. If you make it past this step, he then makes you commit to, by clicking check boxes, the following three promises: I am not asking Antonio a style question I could find searching Google for 10 minutes. I am not SPAMMING Antonio with a cut-and-pasting generic request to promote my unrelated business. I will do a good deed for some random stranger if Antonio responds within 23 hours. (Location 2716)
• To summarize, the technologies underlying e-mail are transformative, but the current social conventions guiding how we apply this technology are underdeveloped. (Location 2723)
• The sender filter is a small but useful step toward a better state of affairs, and is an idea whose time has come— at least for the increasing number of entrepreneurs and freelancers who both receive a lot of incoming communication and have the ability to dictate their accessibility. (Location 2726)
• interrogative e-mails like these generate an initial instinct to dash off the quickest possible response that will clear the message— temporarily— out of your inbox. A quick response will, in the short term, provide you with some minor relief because you’re bouncing the responsibility implied by the message off your court and back onto the sender’s. This relief, however, is short-lived, as this responsibility will continue to bounce back again and again, continually sapping your time and attention. (Location 2738)
• the right strategy when faced with a question of this type is to pause a moment before replying and take the time to answer the following key prompt: What is the project represented by this message, and what is the most efficient (in terms of messages generated) process for bringing this project to a successful conclusion? (Location 2742)
• Process-Centric Response to E-mail (Location 2759)
• Less mental clutter means more mental resources available for deep thinking. (Location 2777)
• Process-centric e-mails might not seem natural at first. For one thing, they require that you spend more time thinking about your messages before you compose them. In the moment, this might seem like you’re spending more time on e-mail. But the important point to remember is that 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. (Location 2778)
• famous academics. In doing so, I noticed that many shared a fascinating and somewhat rare approach to e-mail: Their default behavior when receiving an e-mail message is to not respond. (Location 2788)
• When it comes to e-mail, they believed, it’s the sender’s responsibility to convince the receiver that a reply is worthwhile. If you didn’t make a convincing case and sufficiently minimize the effort required by the professor to respond, you didn’t get a response. (Location 2790)
• Professorial E-mail Sorting: 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. (Location 2802)
• “Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things.” (Location 2812)
• A commitment to deep work is not a moral stance and it’s not a philosophical statement— it is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done. (Location 2836)
• For many, there’s a comfort in the artificial busyness of rapid e-mail messaging and social media posturing, while the deep life demands that you leave much of that behind. (Location 2887)