Deep Work - By Cal Newport

The best book I have read this year so far. It it’s deep and points out everything in detailed and based on evidence. I am definitely going to apply the principles I learned.

Actionable Takeaways

1. Use a word to wrap up the day.
2. Don’t give details why when you refuse something you don’t want to do.
3. Batch things - Do specific tasks for a specific amount of time, focusing on them and then switch to another project for another long period of time.
4. Advertise your inaccessible time to do deep work and reduce distraction
5. Put in the work everyday, ignore inspiration.
6. Give your brain quality alternatives for mindless internet entertainment.

NOTES

Two Core Abilities 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.

The point of providing these details is to emphasize that 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 because these technologies change rapidly, this process of mastering hard things never ends: You must be able to do it quickly, again and again.

If you can’t learn, you can’t thrive.

If you’re trying to learn a complex new skill (say, SQL database management) in a state of low concentration (perhaps you also have your Facebook feed open), you’re firing too many circuits simultaneously and haphazardly to isolate the group of neurons you actually want to strengthen.

The problem this research identifies with this work strategy is that 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.
This residue gets especially thick if your work on Task A was unbounded and of low intensity before you switched, but even if you finish Task A before moving on, your attention remains divided for a while.
By working on a single hard task for a long time without switching, Grant minimizes the negative impact of attention residue from his other obligations, allowing him to maximize performance on this one task.

Deep work is at a severe disadvantage in a technopoly because it builds on values like quality, craftsmanship, and mastery that are decidedly old-fashioned and nontechnological.
Even worse, to support deep work often requires the rejection of much of what is new and high-tech.

“The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” - Csikszentmihalyi

Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it.
Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.

As Jung, Grant, and Perlow’s subjects discovered, people will usually respect your right to become inaccessible if these periods are well defined and well advertised, and outside these stretches, you’re once again easy to find.

There is a popular notion that artists work from inspiration—that there is some strike or bolt or bubbling up of creative mojo from who knows where… but I hope {my work} makes clear that waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan.

In fact, perhaps the single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration -Mason Currey

Great minds like Caro and Darwin didn’t deploy rituals to be weird; they did so because success in their work depended on their ability to go deep, again and again—there’s no way to win a Pulitzer Prize or conceive a grand theory without pushing your brain to its limit.

When it comes to deep work, in other words, consider the use of collaboration when appropriate.

Psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, describes the ability of incomplete tasks to dominate our attention. - The Zeigarnik effect.

When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done.

“We found that one of the biggest differences between memory athletes and the rest of us is in a cognitive ability that’s not a direct measure of memory at all but of attention,”

In many settings, 80 percent of a given effect is due to just 20 percent of the possible causes. - The Law of the Vital Few.

When Ryan Nicodemus decided to simplify his life, one of his first targets was his possessions. At the time, Ryan lived alone in a spacious three-bedroom condo.
For years, driven by a consumerist impulse, he had been trying his best to fill this ample space. Now it was time to reclaim his life from his stuff.
The strategy he deployed was simple to describe but radical in concept. He spent an afternoon packing everything he owned into cardboard boxes as if he was about to move.
In order to transform what he described as a “difficult undertaking” into something less onerous, he called it a “packing party,” explaining: “Everything’s more exciting when it’s a party, right?”
Once the packing was done, Nicodemus then spent the next week going through his normal routine. If he needed something that was packed, he would unpack it and put it back where it used to go.
At the end of the week, he noticed that the vast majority of his stuff remained untouched in its boxes. So he got rid of it.

One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg.
All they want is change—not rest, except in sleep.

If you give your mind something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you’ll end the day more fulfilled, and begin the next one more relaxed, than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in semiconscious and unstructured Web surfing.

Do not reply to an e-mail message if any of the following applies:
• It’s ambiguous or otherwise makes it hard for you to generate a reasonable response.
• It’s not a question or proposal that interests you.
• Nothing really good would happen if you did respond and nothing really bad would happen if you didn’t.