Deep Work: Rules for focues success in a distracted world - Cal Newport
Ironically, jobs are acutally easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encoruage on 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.
Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.
A deep life is a good life, any way you look at it
You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it
There is a popular notion that artist work from inspiration - that there is some strike or bolt or bubling 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.
Disipline #1: Focus on Wildly Important
Discipline #2: Act of the Lead Measures
Discipline #3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard
Discipline #4: Create a Cadence of Accountability
Attention Restoration Theory (ART), which claims that spending time in nature can improve your ability to concentrate
Decades of work from multiple diffrent subfields within psychology all point toward the conclusion that regularly resting your brain improves the quality of your deep work. When you work, work hard. Whne you’re done, be done.
Don’t take breaks from distraction. Instead take breaks from focus.
Once you’re wired for distraction, you crave it. Motivated by this reality, this strategy is designed to help you reqire your brain to a configuration better suited to staying on task.
Instead of scheduling the occasional break from distraction so you can focus, you should instead schedule the occasional break from focus to give in to distraction.
If you haven’t given yourself something to do in a given moment, they’ll [shallow activities] always beckon as an appealing option. If you instead fill this free time with something of more quality [reading, enriching], their grip on your attention will loosen.
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.
It’s the habit of asking that returns results, not your unyielding fidelity to the answer.
Cal Newport’s system of daily scheduling:
- Plan your day ahead of you by chunk of 30 minutes
- Rank the important and depth of your task by asking “How long would it takes to train an amateur to do what I do now?”
- If your plan change, be flexible and modify your schedule accordingly, it is not about sticking to the schedule but about being thoughtful about your day.
- Do not break the flow when inspiration hit. Instead, drop everything else and let the inspiration carry you until it runs out of smoke. Then, re-plan your task again afterward.