Cal Newport

“If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“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.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“What we choose to focus on and what we choose to ignore—plays in defining the quality of our life.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“As the author Tim Ferriss once wrote: “Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“To simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, it’s incredibly valuable.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“If you keep interrupting your evening to check and respond to e-mail, or put aside a few hours after dinner to catch up on an approaching deadline, you’re robbing your directed attention centers of the uninterrupted rest they need for restoration. Even if these work dashes consume only a small amount of time, they prevent you from reaching the levels of deeper relaxation in which attention restoration can occur. Only the confidence that you’re done with work until the next day can convince your brain to downshift to the level where it can begin to recharge for the next day to follow. Put another way, trying to squeeze a little more work out of your evenings might reduce your effectiveness the next day enough that you end up getting less done than if you had instead respected a shutdown.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“If you can’t learn, you can’t thrive.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“(As Nietzsche said: “It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.”)”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Another key commitment for succeeding with this strategy is to support your commitment to shutting down with a strict shutdown ritual that you use at the end of the workday to maximize the probability that you succeed. In more detail, this ritual should ensure that every incomplete task, goal, or project has been reviewed and that for each you have confirmed that either (1) you have a plan you trust for its completion, or (2) it’s captured in a place where it will be revisited when the time is right. The process should be an algorithm: a series of steps you always conduct, one after another. When you’re done, have a set phrase you say that indicates completion (to end my own ritual, I say, “Shutdown complete”). This final step sounds cheesy, but it provides a simple cue to your mind that it’s safe to release work-related thoughts for the rest of the day.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World