To have a mission is to have a unifying focus for your career.
There’s no one correct deep work ritual—the right fit depends on both the person and the type of project pursued.
There’s a gravity and sense of importance inherent in deep work—whether you’re Ric Furrer smithing a sword or a computer programmer optimizing an algorithm. Gallagher’s theory, therefore, predicts tha...
Their rituals minimized the friction in this transition to depth, allowing them to go deep more easily and stay in the state longer.
The purpose of the deep work chamber is to allow for total focus and uninterrupted work flow, Dewane explains. He imagines a process in which you spend ninety minutes inside, take a ninety-minute brea...
Self-Determination Theory (SDT), which is arguably the best understanding science currently has for why some pursuits get our engines running while others leave us cold.8 SDT tells us that motivation,...
Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman explaining in an interview one of his less orthodox productivity strategies: To do real good physics work, you do need absolute solid lengths of time… it...
My Research Bible Routine At some point during my quest, I started what I came to call my research bible, which is, in reality, a document I keep on my computer. Here’s the routine: Once a week I requ...
It took them seven years, but their efforts culminated in the 2017 release of Lead Yourself First.
It is a lifetime accumulation of deliberate practice that again and again ends up explaining excellence.
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...
I decided that focusing my attention on a bottom-up understanding of my own field’s most difficult results would be a good first step toward revitalizing my career capital stores. To
How you'll work once you start to work. Your ritual needs rules and processes to keep your efforts structured.
Don’t follow your passion; rather, let it follow you in your quest to become, in the words of my favorite Steve Martin quote, so good that they can’t ignore you. To
Don’t follow your passion; rather, let it follow you in your quest to become, in the words of my favorite Steve Martin quote, so good that they can’t ignore you.
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...
Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable.
Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your
Consider consultant Clay Herbert, who is an expert in running crowd-funding campaigns for technology start-ups: a specialty that attracts a lot of correspondents hoping to glean some helpful advice. A...