Study the brain behavior of subjects presented with both positive and negative imagery. She found that for young people, their amygdala (a center of emotion) fired with activity at both types of image...
Soon realize that network tools are not exceptional; they’re tools, no different from a blacksmith’s hammer or an artist’s brush, used by skilled laborers to do their jobs better (and occasionally to...
Other technologies like data visualization, analytics, high speed communications, and rapid prototyping have augmented the contributions of more abstract and data-driven reasoning, increasing the valu...
Now checks AllSides.com once a day—a news site that covers the top stories, but for each story it neutrally links to three articles: one from a source associated with the political left, one from the...
More detail, 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,...
Monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling. This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations.
If you’re not putting in the effort to become, as Steve Martin put it, so good they can’t ignore you, you’re not likely to end up loving your work—regardless of whether or not you believe it’s your tr...
He came to realize a simple truth: Working right trumps finding the right work. He didn’t need to have a perfect job to find occupational happiness—he needed instead a better approach to the work alre...
For the first time in human history solitude is starting to fade away altogether.
Dialectical
Deliberate practice to describe this style of serious study, defining it formally as an activity designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an...
Cultivating concentration so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems.)
Craft-centric. Getting better and better at what I did became what mattered most, and getting better required the strain of deliberate practice. This is a different way of thinking about work, but onc...
Constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction.
Background-research process, which combines exposure to potentially relevant material with free-form re-combination of ideas, comes straight out of Steven Johnson’s book, Where Good Ideas Come From,
Attention restoration theory (ART), which claims that spending time in nature can improve your ability to concentrate.
As we shift to an information economy, more and more of our population are knowledge workers, and deep work is becoming a key currency—even if most haven’t yet recognized this reality.
You’re either remarkable or invisible, says Seth Godin in his 2002 bestseller, Purple Cow.
Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on. In
When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, seek evidence of whether people are willing to pay for it. If you find this evidence, continu...