Sertillanges argues that to advance your understanding of your field you must tackle the relevant topics systematically, allowing your converging rays of attention to uncover the truth latent in each....
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...
Here’s the routine: Once a week I require myself to summarize in my bible a paper I think might be relevant to my research. This summary must include a description of the result, how it compares to pr...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
Rule #4 is entitled Think Small, Act Big. It’s in this understanding of career capital and its role in mission that we get our explanation for this title. Advancing to the cutting edge in a field is a...
Be sure to also give yourself a specific time frame to keep the session a discrete challenge and not an open-ended slog.
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.
When we step back from these individual observations, we see a clear argument form: To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free fr...
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...
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...
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...
Sometimes to go deep, you must first go big.
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...
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...
In many cases these addictive properties of new technologies are not accidents, but instead carefully engineered design features.
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