#Things to consider

  • To remain valuable in our economy today, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things.
  • Deep work can be considered the super power of the 21st century.
  • Once the talent market is made universally accessible, those at the peak of the market will thrive while the rest will suffer.
  • Don’t use the internet to entertain yourself. See your 16 free hours in a day as a “day-within-a-day.” During those hours you are free. Use those hours to perform rigorous self-improvement. The quality of leisure time has degraded. Put more thought into your leisure time.
  • Use process-centric responses to email. In crafting your email response to someone’s request, take a minute or two to think through a process that gets you from the current state to a desired outcome with a minimum of messages required.
  • Carl Jung spent two hours writing undisturbed every morning. Then he spent the afternoon meditating and taking long walks in the countryside.
  • Neal Stephenson once explained his omission: “If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. If I instead get interrupted a lot what replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time, there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons.”
  • Think weeks. Bill Gates conducted “think weeks” twice a year, during which he would isolate himself to do nothing but read and think big thoughts.

#Reading log

2016-11-01: I’ve heard much about this book recently. First I heard about it on several podcasts I’m listening to. Then a lot of people I admire started recommending it. For me, this year has mainly been about reading fiction on my part. But my interest for this book increased rapidly and so I focused last week on finally reading it. As I’ve been reading it, I felt that this book will probably have a huge impact on the way I approach my own work. I hope this to be a skill I can cultivate with time.

2016-11-10: Deep Work was a big eye opener. It’s been incredibly motivating to read and has lots of practical tips for getting started working in a distraction free way, which will generate work of a more valuable nature. Cal Newport elegantly makes the case of why this type of work is important and why it is so rare in our market today.

2019-05-20: One of my favorite books on the value of focus. To acquire skills for today’s and tomorrow’s information economy requires that we spend our time doing deep work, which is rare and valuable, while avoiding shallow work which is common and dispensable.

#Watch out for network tools

The reason why knowledge workers are losing their familiarity with deep work is because of modern network tools. This is a broad category that capture services like email and SMS, social media networks, and infotainment sites like BuzzFeed and Reddit. The use of these tools lead to fragmented attention.

#The core qualities for thriving in the new economy

  1. The ability to quickly master hard things.
  2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

#Myelin

Myelin is a fatty tissue that grows around the neurons, allowing the cells to fire faster and cleaner. As you get better at a skill you develop more myelin. You want to isolate the relevant neurological circuit to fire over and over to trigger useful myelination. This is what focus is all about.

#Attention residue

When you switch tasks, your attention doesn’t automatically follow. Part of your attention is still sticking on to your old task. Task switching has a mental cost. Working in a state of semi-distraction is potentially devastating to your performance.

#Busyness as a proxy for value

Knowledge workers are tending toward increasingly visible busyness because they lack a better way of demonstrating their value. Extracting value from information is an activity that’s often at odds with busyness, not supported by it. Systematically develop your ability to go deep. And get able to do one thing exceptionally well.

#Strategies for achieving deep work

  • The bimodal philosophy. Divide your time between deep work and shallow work. Dedicate some clearly defined stretches of time for deep pursuits and leave the rest open to everything else.
  • The rhythmic philosophy. The rhythmic philosophy supports deep work with rock-solid routines that make sure a little bit gets done in a regular basis. The rhythmic scheduler will often log a larger total number of deep work per year.
  • The journalistic philosophy - You find deep work stretches wherever you can find it. But waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan.
  • The grand gesture. By leveraging a radical change to your normal environment, all dedicated to supporting a deep work task, you increase the perceived importance of the task. This boost in importance reduces your mind’s instinct to procrastinate.

#The 4DX framework

  1. Focus on the wildly important.
  2. Act on the lead measures.
  3. Keep a compelling scoreboard.
  4. Create a cadence of accountability.

#Downtime aids insight

Concentrating requires directed attention. This resource is finite, if you exhaust it you will struggle to concentrate. Trying to squeeze out a little more work out of your evenings might reduce your effectiveness the next day, enough that you end up getting less done.

#The Zeigarnik effect

When incomplete tasks dominate our attention. The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained. Named after the twenty-century psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik

#Productive meditation

The idea of productive meditation practice is to take a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem. This could be walking or running for instance.

Productive meditation helps strengthening your distraction-resisting muscles, and by forcing you to push your focus deeper and deeper on a single problem, it strengthens your ability to concentrate.

Be vary of distraction and looping. When your mind is looping, it just keeps going over what you already know. It can block you from moving forward in your productive meditation practice.

#The any-benefit mindset

Identifies any possible benefit as sufficient justification for using a network tool. Treat your tool selection with the same level of care as other skilled craftsmen, such as farmers. Tools are ultimately aids to the larger goal’s of one’s craft.