Busyness as a Proxy for Productivity
Little bet, in the setting of mission exploration, has the following characteristics: It’s a project small enough to be completed in less than a month. It forces you to create new value (e.g., master...
Intelligent machines are complicated and hard to master.* To join the group of those who can work well with these machines, therefore, requires that you hone your ability to master hard things. And be...
Dedication to stretching his ability, guided by feedback.
You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?
To work deeply is a big deal and should not be an activity undertaken lightly.
To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work.
To maximize your chances of success, you should deploy small, concrete experiments that return concrete feedback.
The idle mind is the devil’s workshop
Stephenson summarizes his communication policy as follows: Persons who wish to interfere with my concentration are politely requested not to do so, and warned that I don’t answer e-mail… lest [my comm...
People play differently when they’re keeping score, the 4DX authors explain.
Once you know where your activities fall on the deep-to-shallow scale, bias your time toward the former.
Neither Wozniak nor Jobs left their regular jobs: This was strictly a low-risk venture meant for their free time.
Junior faculty members used to come up to me and say, ‘Wow, you got tenure early; what’s your secret?’ I said, ‘It’s pretty simple, call me any Friday night in my office at ten o’clock and I’ll tell y...
In an age of network tools, in other words, knowledge workers increasingly replace deep work with the shallow alternative—constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, w...
If you want to observe the power of control up close in the workplace, look toward companies embracing a radical new philosophy called Results-Only Work Environment (or, ROWE, for short). In a ROWE co...
Discipline #3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard
When you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task.
If you just show up and work hard, you’ll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better.
Deep work. If you haven’t mastered this foundational skill, you’ll struggle to learn hard things or produce at an elite level.