Cal Newport Quotes

In most cases, people don’t measure the productivity of knowledge workers and when we do, we do it in really silly ways, like how many papers do academics produce, regardless of quality.

The key to meaningful work is in the decision to keep returning to the efforts you find important. Not in getting everything right every time.

the people I knew who signed up for thefacebook.com were almost certainly spending significantly more time playing Snood (a Tetris-style puzzle game that was inexplicably popular)

I argue that his approach to batching helps explain this paradox. In particular, by consolidating his work into intense and uninterrupted pulses, he’s leveraging the following law of productivity: High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)

Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.

Deep work should be a priority in today’s business climate. But it’s not. I’ve just summarized various explanations for this paradox. Among them are the realities that deep work is hard and shallow work is easier, that in the absence of clear goals for your job, the visible busyness that surrounds shallow work becomes self-preserving, and that our culture has developed a belief that if a behavior relates to “the Internet,” then it’s good — regardless of its impact on our ability to produce valuable things. All of these trends are enabled by the difficulty of directly measuring the value of depth or the cost of ignoring it.

Digital Minimalism A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.

Also as in natural settings, in workplaces without well-defined processes, energy minimization becomes prioritized. This is fundamental human nature: if there’s no structure surrounding how hard efforts are coordinated, we default to our instinct to not expend any more energy than is necessary. Most of us are guilty of acting on this instinct when given a chance. An email arrives that informally represents a new responsibility for you to manage; because there’s no formal process in place to assign the work or track its progress, you seek instead the easiest way to get the responsibility off your plate — even if just temporarily — so you send a quick reply asking for an ambiguous clarification. Thus unfolds a game of obligation hot potato, as messages bounce around, each temporarily shifting responsibility from one inbox to another, until a deadline or irate boss finally stops the music, leading to a last-minute scramble to churn out a barely acceptable result. This, too, is obviously a terribly inefficient way to get work done.

As a 2018 article from the MIT Sloan Management Review explains: “The ‘keep everybody busy’ theory remains alive and well . . . in knowledge work.”39 (The article elaborates that the manufacturing sector, by contrast, figured out in the 1980s that relentless busyness was not an optimal way to run things.)

In an open marketplace for attention, darker emotions attract more eyeballs than positive and constructive thoughts.

Stop focusing on these little details,” it told me. “Focus instead on becoming better.

Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it’s instead like a muscle that tires.

running is cheaper than therapy.

You cannot expect an app dreamed up in a dorm room, or among the Ping-Pong tables of a Silicon Valley incubator, to successfully replace the types of rich interactions to which we’ve painstakingly adapted over millennia. Our sociality is simply too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages and emojis.

This focus on stretching your ability and receiving immediate feedback provides the core of a more universal principle — one that I increasingly came to believe provides the key to successfully acquiring career capital in almost any field.