“ When paying more than $1,000 a day to write the chapter in a suite of an old hotel down the street from a Hogwarts-style castle, mustering the energy to begin and sustain this work is easier than if y… Cal Newport
“ 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 what tools you should use and how you should use them… Cal Newport
“ This finding pushed back against conventional wisdom. Most people assumed (and still do) that relaxation makes them happy. We want to work less and spend more time in the hammock. But the results from… Cal Newport
“ The skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience. Cal Newport
“ Suggest starting with a careful review of the relevant variables for solving the problem and then storing these values in your working memory. For example, if you’re working on the outline for a book… Cal Newport
“ If you’re not careful to keep pushing forward, your improvement can taper off to what the performance scientist Anders Ericsson called an acceptable level, where you then remain stuck. Cal Newport
“ If you just show up and work hard, you’ll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better. This Cal Newport
“ Big trends in business today actively decrease people’s ability to perform deep work, even though the benefits promised by these trends (e.g., increased serendipity, faster responses to requests, and… Cal Newport
“ When an entire cohort unintentionally eliminated time alone with their thoughts from their lives, their mental health suffered dramatically. On reflection, this makes sense. These teenagers have lost… Cal Newport
“ To work deeply is a big deal and should not be an activity undertaken lightly. Surrounding such efforts with a complicated (and perhaps, to the outside world, quite strange) ritual accepts this realit… Cal Newport
“ To summarize, big trends in business today actively decrease people’s ability to perform deep work, even though the benefits promised by these trends (e.g., increased serendipity, faster responses to… Cal Newport
“ This strategy is classic digital minimalism. By removing your ability to access social media at any moment, you reduce its ability to become a crutch deployed to distract you from bigger voids in your… Cal Newport
“ The two core abilities just described depend on your ability to perform deep work. If you haven’t mastered this foundational skill, you’ll struggle to learn hard things or produce at an elite level. Cal Newport
“ The reason knowledge workers are losing their familiarity with deep work is well established: network tools. Cal Newport
“ The presence of the other party waiting for your next insight—be it someone physically in the same room or collaborating with you virtually—can short-circuit the natural instinct to avoid depth. Cal Newport
