Hardness scares off the daydreamers and the timid, leaving more opportunity for those like us who are willing to take the time to carefully work out the best path forward and then confidently take act...
The point of providing these details is to emphasize that intelligent machines are complicated and hard to master.* To join the group of those who can work well with these machines, therefore, require...
The respected New Yorker staff writer George Packer captured this fear well in an essay about why he does not tweet: Twitter is crack for media addicts. It scares me, not because I’m morally superior...
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...
Digital minimalists see new technologies as tools to be used to support things they deeply value—not as sources of value themselves. They don’t accept the idea that offering some small benefit is just...
The first thing I do is take a final look at my e-mail inbox to ensure that there’s nothing requiring an urgent response before the day ends. The next thing I do is transfer any new tasks that are on...
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 visit Knuth’s website at Stanford with the intention of finding his e-mail address, you’ll instead discover the following note: I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer...
Five years of reporting on attention have confirmed some home truths, Gallagher reports. [Among them is the notion that] ‘the idle mind is the devil’s workshop’… when you lose focus, your mind tends t...
We can now step back and use Gallagher’s grand theory to better understand the role of deep work in cultivating a good life. This theory tells us that your world is the outcome of what you pay attenti...
To understand the role of myelin in improvement, keep in mind that skills, be they intellectual or physical, eventually reduce down to brain circuits. This new science of performance argues that you g...
Deep work should be a priority in today’s business climate. But it’s not. I’ve just summarized various explanations for this paradox. Among them are the realities that deep work is hard and shallow wo...
As the author Max Brooks quipped in a 2017 TV appearance, We need to reevaluate [our current relationship with] online information sort of the way we reevaluated free love in the 80s.
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 perceive...
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.
To summarize, I’ve presented two different ways people think about their working life. The first is the craftsman mindset, which focuses on what you can offer the world. The second is the passion mind...
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 work...
In other words, forget why Jordan adopted this mindset and notice instead how he deploys it. In the next chapter, I will argue that regardless of how you feel about your job right now, adopting the cr...
The fault of the courage culture, therefore, is not its underlying message that courage is good, but its severe underestimation of the complexity involved in deploying this boldness in a useful way.
The batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches.
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