Simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, it’s incredibly valuable.
Returned to this paper regularly over a period of two weeks. When I was done, I had probably experienced fifteen hours total of deliberate practice–style strain, but due to its intensity it felt like...
Particular, identify a deep task (that is, something that requires deep work to complete) that’s high on your priority list. Estimate how long you’d normally put aside for an obligation of this type,...
Oracular
Many software companies now deploy the Scrum project management methodology, which replaces a lot of this ad hoc messaging with regular, highly structured, and ruthlessly efficient status meetings (of...
If it’s rare and valuable, it’s not easy to get. This insight brought me into the world of performance science, where I encountered the concept of deliberate practice—a method for building skills by r...
Consider the common practice of setting up regularly occurring meetings for projects. These meetings tend to pile up and fracture schedules to the point where sustained focus during the day becomes im...
Capital.
Argue that his approach to batching helps explain this paradox. In particular, by consolidating his work into intense and uninterrupted pulses, he’s leveraging the following law of productivity: High-...
You’ve got to find what you love…. [T]he only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle.
You’re either remarkable or invisible, says Seth Godin in his 2002 bestseller, Purple Cow.1 As he elaborated in a Fast Company manifesto he published on the subject: The world is full of boring stuff—...
Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it’s instead like a muscle that tires. This is why the subjects in the Hofmann and Baumeister stu...
Your ritual needs to specify a location for your deep work efforts.
Your ritual needs to ensure your brain gets the support it needs to keep operating at a high level of depth. For example, the ritual might specify that you start with a cup of good coffee,
You need your own philosophy for integrating deep work into your professional life.
You must be on your guard for looping, as it can quickly subvert an entire productive meditation session. When you notice it, remark to yourself that you seem to be in a loop, then redirect your atten...
You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. Your
You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it’s instead like a mu...
Writing in the early 1990s, as the personal computer revolution first accelerated, Postman argued that our society was sliding into a troubling relationship with technology. We were, he noted, no long...
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 already available to him. I