Getting to the cutting edge of a field can be understood in these terms: This process builds up rare and valuable skills and therefore builds up your store of career capital. Similarly, identifying a...
For many, however, it’s not just self-control issues that bias them toward the rhythmic philosophy, but also the reality that some jobs don’t allow you to disappear for days at a time when the need to...
Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and...
Craftsmanship, Dreyfus and Kelly argue in their book’s conclusion, provides a key to reopening a sense of sacredness in a responsible manner.
But part of what makes social media insidious is that the companies that profit from your attention have succeeded with a masterful marking coup: convincing our culture that if you don’t use their pro...
At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning—no after-dinner e-mail check, no mental replays of conversations, and no scheming about how you’ll handle...
As the journalist Daniel Coyle surveys in his 2009 book, The Talent Code, these scientists increasingly believe the answer includes myelin—a layer of fatty tissue that grows around neurons, acting lik...
After returning from a trip to India, where he observed the practice of adding meditation rooms to homes, he expanded the complex to include a private office. In my retiring room I am by myself, Jung...
To put this more concretely: If every moment of potential boredom in your life—say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives—is relieved with a quick gla...
There’s nothing intrinsic about the manual trades when it comes to generating this particular source of meaning. Any pursuit—be it physical or cognitive—that supports high levels of skill can also gen...
Part of what makes this philosophy so effective is that the very act of being selective about your tools will bring you satisfaction, typically much more than what is lost from the tools you decide to...
Outside of these deep sessions, Grant remained famously open and accessible. In some sense, he had to be: His 2013 bestseller, Give and Take, promotes the practice of giving of your time and attention...
Mike’s goal with his spreadsheet is to become more intentional about how his workday unfolds. The easiest thing to do is to show up to work in the morning and just respond to e-mail the whole day, he...
Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioral economics to family counseling, similarly suggest that the skillful management of attention is t...
Knuth deploys what I call the monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling. This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations. Practitioners o...
It’s just that we don’t know what that passion is. If you ask someone, they’ll tell you what they think they’re passionate about, but they probably have it wrong. In other words, she believes that hav...
In such a culture, 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 taug...
In other words, forget why Jordan adopted this mindset and notice instead how he deploys it. In the next chapter, I will argue that regardless of how you feel about your job right now, adopting the cr...
In other words, I not only allow spontaneity in my schedule; I encourage it. Joseph’s critique is driven by the mistaken idea that the goal of a schedule is to force your behavior into a rigid plan. T...
In my work on this topic, I’ve become convinced that what you need instead is a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of w...