Five years of reporting on attention have confirmed some home truths, Gallagher reports. [Among them is the notion that] ‘the idle mind is the devil’s workshop’… when you lose focus, your mind tends t...
Jung retreated to Bollingen, not to escape his professional life, but instead to advance it.
If you want a great job, you need something of great value to offer in return.
I get an extra 20 IQ points from being in that office,
Here’s the routine: Once a week I require myself to summarize in my bible a paper I think might be relevant to my research. This summary must include a description of the result, how it compares to pr...
Deep work is so important that we might consider it, to use the phrasing of business writer Eric Barker, the superpower of the 21st century.
Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.
The key question will be: are you good at working with intelligent machines or not?
Jordan left me in the dust. I played. But he practiced.
From Descartes’s skepticism came the radical belief that the individual seeking certainty trumped a God or king bestowing truth. The resulting Enlightenment, of course, led to the concept of human rig...
You visit Knuth’s website at Stanford with the intention of finding his e-mail address, you’ll instead discover the following note: I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer...
The batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches.
Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy The ability to quickly master hard things. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed. Let’s
The point of providing these details is to emphasize that intelligent machines are complicated and hard to master.* To join the group of those who can work well with these machines, therefore, require...
The 4 Disciplines of Execution,
In hindsight, these observations are obvious. If life-transforming missions could be found with just a little navel-gazing and an optimistic attitude, changing the world would be commonplace. But it’s...
As the author Max Brooks quipped in a 2017 TV appearance, We need to reevaluate [our current relationship with] online information sort of the way we reevaluated free love in the 80s.
We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness. ■
We can now step back and use Gallagher’s grand theory to better understand the role of deep work in cultivating a good life. This theory tells us that your world is the outcome of what you pay attenti...
The key here isn’t to avoid or even to reduce the total amount of time you spend engaging in distracting behavior, but is instead to give yourself plenty of opportunities throughout your evening to re...