First, distraction remains a destroyer of depth.
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.
Depth-destroying behaviors such as immediate e-mail responses and an active social media presence are lauded, while avoidance of these trends generates suspicion.
By contrast, if you’re trying to learn a complex new skill (say, SQL database management) in a state of low concentration (perhaps you also have your Facebook feed open), you’re firing too many circui...
But this brings me back to my nagging question. I had notebooks filled with potential missions, yet I had resisted devoting myself to any one in particular. And I’m not alone in this reluctance to act...
At the end of every week he prints his numbers to see how well he achieved this goal, and then uses this feedback to guide himself in the week ahead.
And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth.
An interesting experience shared by some participants was that they eagerly returned to their optional technologies only to learn they had lost their taste for them. Here, for example, is how Kate des...
A similar reality creates problems for many knowledge workers. They want to prove that they’re productive members of the team and are earning their keep, but they’re not entirely clear what this goal...
2012 McKinsey study found that the average knowledge worker now spends more than 60 percent of the workweek engaged in electronic communication and Internet searching, with close to 30 percent of a wo...
When walking through nature, you’re freed from having to direct your attention, as there are few challenges to navigate (like crowded street crossings), and experience enough interesting stimuli to ke...
We should not be surprised that deep work struggles to compete against the shiny thrum of tweets, likes, tagged photos, walls, posts, and all the other behaviors that we’re now taught are necessary fo...
Two forces from this longer treatment that not only seemed particularly relevant to our discussion, but as you’ll soon learn, repeatedly came up in my own research on how tech companies encourage beha...
This ritual should ensure that every incomplete task, goal, or project has been reviewed and that for each you have confirmed that either (1) you have a plan you trust for its completion, or (2) it’s...
There’s something liberating about the craftsman mindset: It asks you to leave behind self-centered concerns about whether your job is just right, and instead put your head down and plug away at getti...
The whiteboard effect. For some types of problems, working with someone else at the proverbial shared whiteboard can push you deeper than if you were working alone. The presence of the other party wai...
The monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling. This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations. Practitioners of the monastic philosophy...
The message at the core of this book: Working right trumps finding the right work—it’s a simple idea, but it’s also incredibly subversive, as it overturns decades of folk career advice all focused on...
Taking on projects that were beyond his current comfort zone;