It took them seven years, but their efforts culminated in the 2017 release of Lead Yourself First.
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...
In a 2009 paper, titled, intriguingly, Why Is It So Hard to Do My Work?, Leroy introduced an effect she called attention residue. In the introduction to this paper, she noted that other researchers ha...
If you want to observe the power of control up close in the workplace, look toward companies embracing a radical new philosophy called Results-Only Work Environment (or, ROWE, for short).
If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are. Having
Driven by this insight, while my classmates contemplated their true calling, I went seeking opportunities to master rare skills that would yield big rewards.
Does it really help your work to be constantly connected? To do so, she did something extreme: She forced each member of the team to take one day out of the workweek completely off—no connectivity to...
Consider a 2012 study, led by psychologists Wilhelm Hofmann and Roy Baumeister, that outfitted 205 adults with beepers that activated at randomly selected times (this is the experience sampling method...
A leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous,
Using money as a neutral indicator of value—a way of determining whether or not you have enough career capital to succeed with a pursuit. I called this the law of financial viability, and concluded th...
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 n...
The importance of ability. The things that make a great job great, I discovered, are rare and valuable. If you want them in your working life, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return....
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...
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 r...
Recognize a truth embraced by the most productive and important personalities of generations past: A deep life is a good life.
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 phil...
Focus completely and without distraction on a single research task. (He typically divides the writing of a scholarly paper into three discrete tasks: analyzing the data, writing a full draft, and edit...
Fighting desires—over time these distractions drained their finite pool of willpower until they could no longer resist. The same will happen to you, regardless of your intentions—unless, that is, you’...
Differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.
Continuous and harsh feedback he received accelerated the growth of his ability.