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 typi...
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and one traveler chose the path to mastery while the other was called toward passion’s glow.
Turning her attention to the workplace, Turkle finds young employees who retreat to email because the thought of an unstructured conversation terrifies them, and unnecessary office tensions that feste...
To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction.
To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction. To learn, in other words, is an act of deep work.
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...
Their rituals minimized the friction in this transition to depth, allowing them to go deep more easily and stay in the state longer.
Their plans were circumspect and small-time. They weren’t dreaming of taking over the world.
The theory of serendipitous creativity, in other words, seems well justified by the historical record. The transistor, we can argue with some confidence, probably required Bell Labs and its ability to...
The superstar effect, in other words, has a broader application today than Rosen could have predicted thirty years ago. An increasing number of individuals in our economy are now competing with the ro...
The problem this research identifies with this work strategy is that when you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains s...
Shankman did something unconventional. He booked a round-trip business-class ticket to Tokyo. He wrote during the whole flight to Japan, drank an espresso in the business class lounge once he arrived...
Pushing past what’s comfortable, however, is only one part of the deliberate-practice story; the other part is embracing honest feedback—even if it destroys what you thought was good. As Colvin explai...
Others, such as Alan Lightman, or Erez Lieberman, who earned fame by the age of thirty-one through his combination of mathematics and cultural studies, or Esther Duflo, who won a MacArthur Genius Gran...
Once we view these personal technology processes through the perspective of diminishing returns, we’ll gain the precise vocabulary we need to understand the validity of the second principle of minimal...
Most people assumed (and still do) that relaxation makes them happy. We want to work less and spend more time in the hammock. But the results from Csikszentmihalyi’s ESM studies reveal that most peopl...
Most knowledge workers, however, as I argued earlier in this introduction, have lost their ability to perform deep work.
Jordan had a name for the worries about what his friends are doing with their lives and whether his accomplishments compare favorably: the cloud of external distractions.
It’s natural, at first, to resist this idea, as it’s undoubtedly easier to continue to allow the twin forces of internal whim and external requests to drive your schedule. But you must overcome this d...
It was time for Morse to make his first major demonstration of his invention. All he needed was an inaugural message. Based on a suggestion from the daughter of the patent commissioner who had support...