1) Jot down new tasks and assignments on your list during the day; (2) next morning, transfer these new items from your list onto your calendar; and (3) then take a couple of minutes to plan your day.
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...
Unconscious thought theory (UTT)—an attempt to understand the different roles conscious and unconscious deliberation play in decision making.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,
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.
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...