Deep Work: Rules For Focused Success In A Distracted World
by
Cal Newport
160318-160328

Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill and are hard to replicate. p. 3

Deep work, though a burden to prioritize was crucial to [Jung’s] goal of changing the world. p.3

The reason that knowledge workers are losing their familiarity with Deep Work is well established: Network Tools. This is a broad category that captures communication services like email and SMS, social media networks like Twitter and Facebook and the shiny tangle of infotainment sites like Buzzfeed and Reddit. In aggregate, the rise of these tools, combined with ubiquitous access to them through smart phones and networked office computers has fragmented most knowledge workers attention into slivers. p. 5-6

Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks often performed when distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate. p. 6

Spend enough time in a frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity for concentration and contemplation. I locked myself in a room with no computer: just text books, notecards and a highlighter. p. 11

To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of producing—a task that requires depth. p. 13

Deep Work is the superpower of the 21st century. p. 14

The Deep Work hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time that it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it to the core of their working life, will thrive. p. 14

The Rules: (1) Work Deeply; (2) Embrace Boredom; (3) Quite Social Media; and (4) Drain The Shallows. (V. ?)

The people who will benefit in “The Intelligent Machine Age” are: (1) Highly Skilled Workers; (2) The Superstars; and (3) The Owners. p. 24

High-skilled workers will be those who are good at working with intelligent machines. p. 24

For the superstars there is no regionalism, the world is local. Once the talent market for consulting, marketing [writing], design and so on, is made universally accessible, those at the peak of the market thrive with the rest suffer. p.. 25

Talent is not a commodity you can buy in bulk and combine to reach the needed levels: there’s a premium to being the best. p. 26

The owners are those with capital to invest in the new technologies  that are driving the “Great Restructuring.” The Great Restructuring: As intelligent machines improve and the gap between machine and human abilities shrink, employers are becoming increasingly likely to hire “new machines” instead of “new people.” And when only a human will do, improvements in communications and collaboration technology are making remote work easier than ever before, motivating companies to outsource key roles to the stars—leaving the local talent pool underemployed. p. 23

How to become a winner in the New Economy: cultivate the ability to (1) quickly master hard skills/tasks; and (2) produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

Giving students iPads or allowing them to film homework assignments on YouTube prepares them for a high-tech economy about as much as playing with Hot Wheels would prepare them to thrive as auto mechanics. p. 31

Intelligent machines are complicated and hard to master. Those with the skills to master the machines quickly and do so repeatedly win. If you can’t learn, you can’t thrive. p. 31

If you don’t produce—no matter how skilled or talented you are—you won’t thrive. p. 32

If you haven’t mastered the foundational skill of performing Deep Work, you’ll struggle to hear had things or produce at an elite level. p. 32

Deep work helps you quickly become a lens, thanks to the converging rays of attention.

Let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea. —The Intellectual Life by Antonin-Gilbert Sertillanges, p 33

The core components of Deliberate Practice are usually identified as follows: (1) Your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill your trying to improve or an idea you’re trying to master; and (2) You receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it is most productive. p. 35

To be great at a skill or task is to be well myelinated. p. 36

Deliberate Practice works because by focusing intensely on a specific skill, you’re focusing the specific relevant circuits to fire, again and again, in isolation. This repetitive use of specific circuit triggers cells called oligopendrocytes to begin wrapping layers of myelin around the neurons in the circuits—effectively cementing the skill. p. 36 [Is there an age when this stops?]

Deep Work helps you produce at an elite level.

High-quality work produced = (time spent) x (intensity of focus) p. 40

When you switch from Task A to Task B your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the previous task. Your attention remains divided for a while. p. 42

By working on a single hard task for a long time without switching, you minimize the negative effect from other obligations, allowing for maximum performance on this one task. p. 43

Deep Work is rare:

Twitter is crack for media addicts. It scares me, not because I’m morally superior to it, but because I don’t think I can handle it. I’m afraid I’d end up letting my son go hungry.” —George Packer, staff writer for The New Yorker.

The Metric Black Hole—we should not expect the bottom—line impact of depth destroying behaviors to be easily detected, as Tom Cochran discovered, [in tracing first his and then his company’s email use] such metrics fall into an opaque region resistant to easy measurement—a region I call “The Metric Black Hole.” p. 55-6

The Metric Black Hole prevents the clarity to see how distracting alternatives and allows the shift toward distraction we increasingly encounter in the professional world. p. 56

Why do so many foster a culture of connectivity even though it hurts well-being and productivity, and probably doesn’t help the bottom line? The answer lies in the following reality: The Principle Of Least Resistance: In a business setting, without clear feedback on the effect of various behaviors to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment. p. 58

There are two big reasons why a Culture of Connectedness is easier: (1) Responsiveness to needs and (2) Responding to the latest missive in your inbox, while others pile up demand, feels satisfyingly productive. p. 58-9

[A culture of connectivity turns the maxim—Your failure to plan does not constitute an emergency for me—on its head. JH]

The Principle Of Least Resistance, protected from scrutiny by The Metric Black How, supports work cultures that save us from the short-term discomfort of concentration and planning, at the expense of long-term satisfaction and the production of real value. p. ?

Business as a proxy for productivity: Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not. p. 62

[So, I ask myself what matters? What matters for me, are words filling down the page and pages piling up in the box.]

In Frederic Taylor’s time, productivity was unambiguous: widgets created per unit time. p. 63

Business as a proxy for productivity—In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner. p. 64

BAPFP is anachronistic. Knowledge work is not an assembly line, and extracting value from information is an activity that’s often at odds with business, not supported by it. p. 65

The Cult Of The Internet. Deep Work is at a severe disadvantage in a technopoly because it builds on values like quality, craftsmanship and mastery that are decidedly old-fashion and nontechnological. Even worse, to support Deep Work often requires the rejection of much of what is new and high-tech behaviors, like the professional use of social media, not because the former is empirically inferior to the latter. Indeed, if we had hard metrics relating the effects of these behaviors on the bottom line our current technopoly would likely crumble. p. 69-70

The Metric Black Hole prevents clarity and allows us instead to elevate all things Internet into Evgeny Morozov’s über-Ideology. In such a culture, we should not be surprised that Deep Work struggles to compete against the shiny thrum of tweets, likes, tagged photos, ?, ? and all the other behaviors that we’re taught are necessary for no other reason than that they exist. p. 70

Bad For Business, Good For You. Deep Work should be a priority in today’s business climate, but it’s not. Among the various explanations for this paradox are the reality that Deep Work is hard, Shallow Work is easier, that in the absence of clear goals for your job the visible busyness that surround Shallow Work becomes self-preserving and our culture has developed a belief that if a behavior relates to The Internet then it’s good—regardless of its effect on our ability to provide valuable things. All these trends are enabled by the difficulty of directly measuring the value of depth or the cost of ignoring it. p. 70

A Neurological Argument For Depth:

Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from Anthropology to Education, Behavioral Economics to Family Counseling, similarly suggest the the skill management of attention is the sine qua non [an indispensable and essential action, condition or ingredient.] of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.” —Winifred Gallagher p. 77

Who you are, what you think, feel what you love—is the sum of what you focus on. —Winifred Gallagher p. 77

A workday driven by the shallow, from a neurological perspective, is likely to be a draining and upsetting day, even if most of the shallow things that capture your attention seem harmless or fun. p. 82

The implication of these findings is clear. In work, to increase the time you spend in a state of depth is to leverage the complex machinery of the human brain  in a way that for several different neurological reasons, maximizes the meaning and satisfaction you’ll associate with your working life. p. 82

A Psychological Argument For Depth:

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. —Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. p. 84

Csikszentmihalyi calls this mental state flow. p. 84

Deep Work is an activity well suited to generate a Flow state. (The phrases used by Csikszentmihalyi to describe what generates Flow notions of stretching your mind to its limits, concentrating and losing yourself in an activity—all of which describe Deep Work.

A Psychological Argument For Depth:

Craftsmanship provides a key to reopening a sense of sacredness [In an post-enlightenment world where we task ourselves to identify what’s meaningful and what’s not, an exercise that can seem arbitrary and induce a creeping Nihilism.]

The task of the craftsman is not to generate meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill of discerning the meanings that are already there. This frees the craftsman of the Nihilism of autonomous individuality, providing an ordered world of meaning. At the same time, this meaning seems safer than the sources cited in previous eras. The wheelwright cannot easily use the inherent quality of a pile of pine to justify a despotic monarchy. p. 88

A wooden wheel is not noble, but its shaping can be. The same applies to knowledge work. You don’t need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work. p. 91

To embrace Deep Work in your own career, and to direct it toward cultivating your skill, is an effort that can transform a knowledge work job from a distracted draining obligation into something satisfying—a portal to a world full of shining, wondrous things. p. 91

Homo Sapiens Deepenis.

I’ll live the focused life, because it’s the best kind there is. —Winifred Gallagher.

This is perhaps the best way to sum up the argument of his chapter and of Part One more broadly: A Deep Life is a good life, anyway you look at it. p. 92

Eudaemonia: A state in which you are achieving you full human potential. p. 95

You have a finite amount of will power that becomes depleted when you use it. p. 100

The key to developing a Deep Work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited will power necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration. p. 100

Six Strategies for Deep Work: (1) Decide on your Depth Philosophy, p. 101; (2) Ritualize, p. 117; (3) Make Grand Gestures, p 121; (4) Don’t Work Alone, p. 126; (5) Execute Like A Business, p. 134; and (6) Be Lazy, p. 142.

Four Depth Philosophies: (1) The Monastic Philosophy, p. 102; (2) The Bimodal Philosophy, p. 106; (3) The Rhythmic Philosophy, p. 110; and The Journalistic Philosophy, p.?

The Monastic Philosophy—The productivity equation is a non-linear one, in other words, this accounts for why I am a bad correspondent and why I rarely accept speaking engagements. If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. But as these chunks get separated and fragmented, my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly. p. 105

The Bimodal Philosophy—This philosophy asks that you divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else. p. 108

The Rhythmic Philosophy—The goal is to generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need to for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you are going to go deep [This is Jerry Seinfeld’s write-every-day/cross-out-days-on-the-calendar method. JH] p. 111

The Rhythmic Philosophy is one of the most common among Deep Workers in standard office jobs. p. 114

The Journalistic Philosophy—[Not for me!] p. 117

Ritualize—Great creative minds think like artists, but work like accountants. p. 119

Great minds don’t deploy rituals to be weird; they do so because success in their work depends 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 limits. Rituals minimize the friction in this transition to dept, allows them to go deep more easily and stay in the state longer. p.?

General questions for your Deep Work ritual must address: (1) Where you’ll work and for how long; (2) How you’ll work once you start to work; and (3) How you’ll support you work. p. 119-121

Make Grand Gestures—To put yourself in an exotic location to focus on a writing project or to take a week off from work just to think, or to lock yourself in a hotel room until you complete an important invention; these are gestures to push your deep goal to a level of mental priority that helps unlock the needed mental resources. Sometimes to go deep you must go big. p. ?

Don’t Work Alone—Collaborative Deep Work can yield better results. This strategy, therefore asks that you consider this option in contemplating how best to integrate depth into your professional life. In doing so, however, keep the following guidelines in mind: First, distraction remains a destroyer of depth, therefore, the hub-and-spoke model provides a crucial template. Separate your pursuit of serendipitous encounters from your efforts to think deeply and build on these inspirations. You should try to optimize each effort separately, as opposed to mixing them together into a sludge that impedes both goals. p. 133-4

Second, even when you retreat into a spoke to think deeply, when it’s reasonable to leverage the white-board effect, do so. By working side-by-side with someone on a problem, you can push each other toward deeper levels of depth and therefore toward the generation of more and more valuable output as compared to working alone. p.134

Execute Like A Business—I know what I need to do. I just don’t know how to do it. p. 135

Discipline No. 1: Focus on the wildly important—have a specific goal that will return tangible and substantial professional benefits to generate a steadier stream of enthusiasm. p. 137

Discipline No. 2: Act on the lead measures—Lead measures measure the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures. [In other words, lead measures turn your attention to improving the behaviors you directly control in the near future that will have a positive effect on your long-term goals.] p. 138

Discipline No. 3: Keep a compelling scorecard—I argued that for an individual focused on Deep Work, hours spent working deeply should be the lead measure. It follows, therefore, that the individual scorecard should be a physical artifact in the workspace that displays the individual’s current Deep Work hour count. p. 139

Tally marks circled at milestones serve two purposes. First, they allow a connection at a visceral level: accumulated Deep Work and tangible results. Second, the circled tally marks [chapters or word counts, for me] help to calibrate expectations for how many hours of Deep Work are needed per result. This reality (which was larger than first assumed) helped spur squeezing more such hours into each week. p. 140

Discipline No. 4: Create a cadence of accountability—during my experiment with 4DX (the four Disciplines of Execution), I used a weekly review to lover over my scorecard to celebrate good weeks, help understand what led to bad weeks and most important, figure out how to ensure a good score for the days ahead. p. 141

The 4DX framework is based on the fundamental promise that execution is more difficult than strategizing. p. 141

Be Lazy—At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning—no after dinner email check, no mental replays of conversations and no scheming about you you’ll handle an upcoming challenge. your mind must be free to encounter butter cups, stink bugs and stars. p. 144

The science behind the value of downtime—Reason No. 1: Downtime And Insights. Some decisions are better left to your unconscious mind to untangle. p. 145

A shutdown habit therefore, in not necessarily reducing the amount of time you’re engaged in productive work, but is instead diversifying the type of work you deploy p. 146

Reason No. 2: Downtime helps recharge the energy needed to work deeply. Attention restoration theory claims that spending time in nature improves your ability to concentrate. p. 147

Walking through nature exposes you to inherently fascinating stimuli such as sunsets. These stimuli invoke attention modestly,  allowing focused-attention mechanisms a chance to replenish. After 50 minutes of such replenishment, the subjects enjoyed a boost in there concentration. p. ?

Reason No. 3: The work that evening downtime replaces is usually not that important. The capacity for Deep Work is limited each day. Working beyond that isn’t possible. p. 150

To counter the Zeigarnik Effect, [below] create a shutdown ritual. (1) Final check of email; (2) Transfer notes of new tasks to grasscatcher list; (3) Skim the grasscatcher list for items important to be taken care of in the next week; (4) Create the Action Plan for the next day; (5) Verbally end the day with a phrase such as: Shutdown Complete.

Zeigarnik Effect: Early 20th century psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik described the ability of incomplete tasks to dominate our attention. Declaring that you’re done with work at 5 p.m. makes a struggle to keep clear of professional issues likely as they keep battling for your attention throughout the evening. p. 152-3

“Committing to a specific plan for a goal may therefore not only facilitate attainment, but may also free cognitive resources for other purposes.” Consider It Done! Plan Making Can Eliminate The Cognitive Effects Of Unfulfilled Goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 101.4 (2011): 667

The shutdown ritual forces you to capture every task in a common list, and then review these tasks before making a plan for the next day. This ritual ensures that no task will be forgotten: each will be reviewed daily and tackled when the time is appropriate. p. 153

Rule No. 2: Embrace Boredom. Much in the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, you’ll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom. p.157

The key ideal of the strategies are that getting the most out of Deep Work requires training, and this training must address two goals: (1) Improving your ability to concentrate intensely and (2) Overcoming your desire for distraction. p.159

Don’t take breaks from distraction. Instead, take breaks from focus. Schedule when you’ll use the Internet and then avoid it altogether outside the times. Keep a notepad near my computer at work and record the next time I’m allowed to use the Internet. Until I arrive at that time, absolutely no network connectivity is allowed—no matter how tempting. p. 161

Three points to consider: (1) This strategy works even if your job requires lots of Internet use and/or prompt email replies. p. 162 (2) Regardless of how you schedule your Internet blocks, you must keep your time outside those blocks absolutely free from Internet use. If vital information is need while offline resist the temptation to go online. In the extreme, schedule an online block no sooner than five minutes in the future. p. 163 (3) Scheduling Internet Use at home as well as at work can further improve your concentration training. p. 164

As in the workplace variation of this strategy, if the Internet plays a large and important role in your evening entertainment, schedule lots of long Internet blocks. The key isn’t to avoid or even reduce the total amount of time you spend engaging in distracting behavior, but is instead to give yourself plenty of opportunities through your evening to resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom. p. 165

By forcing you to resist distraction and return your attention repeatedly to a well-defined problem, productive meditation helps strengthen your distraction-resisting muscles and by forcing you to push your focus deeper and deeper on a single problem, it sharpens your concentration. p. 171

Two suggestions: (1) Be wary of distractions and looping and, (2) Structure your deep thinking by first carefully reviewing the variable relevant to the problem and then define the next-step question you need to answer using these variables. p. 173

[Memorize A Deck Of Cards: “How to memorize a deck of cards with superhuman speed” by Ron White, The Art Of Manliness. p. 176]

Rule No. 3: Quit Social Media. The Any-Benefit Approach To Network Tool Selection—You’re justified in using a network took if you can identify any possible to its use, or anything you might possibly miss out on if you don’t use it. p. 186

The Craftsman Approach To Tool Selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive effects on the factors substantially outweigh its negative effects. p. 191

The three strategies that follow in this rule are designed to grow your comfort from abandoning the any-benefit mindset and instead applying the more thoughtful Craftsman Philosophy in curating tools that lay claim to your time. p. 192

Strategy No. 1: Apply The Law Of The Vital Few to your Internet habits; Strategy No. 2: Quit social media; and Strategy No. 3: Don’t use the Internet to entertain yourself.

The first step in Strategy No. 1 is to identify the main, high-level goals in both your professional and personal lives and then list the two or three most important activities that help you satisfy the goal, e.g. regularly read and understand the cutting-edge results in my field. p. 194-5

This radical reduction of priorities is not arbitrary, but is instead motivated by an idea that has risen repeatedly in any number of different fields: The Law OF The Vital Few. In many settings 80 percent of a given effect is due to just 20 percent of the possible causes, i.e. contributors to an outcome are not evenly distributed. p. 202

If you service low-impact activities, therefore you’re taking away time you could be spending on higher-impact activities. It’s a zero-sum game. p. 202

Strategy No. 2: Quit Social Media. Done, but. How do I think about Have Coffee Will Write here? And how about all the other blogs, news sites and YouTube channels I frequent. No. I’m not done.

Strategy No. 3: Don’t Use The Internet To entertain Yourself—You both should and can make deliberate use of your time outside work, especially with respect to the goal of this rule, which is to reduce the effect of network tool on your ability to perform Deep Work. p. 211

Arnold Bennet, author of How To Live On 24 Hours A day, identified the solution to this problem a hundred years earlier: Put more thought into you leisure time. In other words, this strategy suggests that when it comes to your relaxation, don’t default to whatever catches your attention at the moment, but instead, dedicate some advance thinking to the question of how you want to spend your day within a day. p. 212

Won’t a structured evening leave you exhausted—not refreshed—the next day at work? Bennett responds:What? You say that full energy  given to those sixteen hours will lessen the value of the business eight? No. so. On the contrary, it will assuredly increase the value of the business eight. 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. p. 213-4

Rule No 4: Drain The Shallows. Very few people work even eight hours a day. You’re lucky if you get a few good hours in between all the meetings, interruptions, web surfing, office politics and personal business that form the  typical workday. Fewer official working hours helps squeeze the fat out of the typical workweek. Once everyone has less time to get their stuff done, they respect that time even more. People become stingy with their time and that’s a good thing. They don’t waste it on things that just don’t matter. When you have fewer hours you usually spend them more wisely. p. 216 [I have to wonder just how true this assumption is.]

We should see the goal of this rule as taming shallow work’s footprint in your schedule, not eliminating it. p. 219

Once you hit your Deep Work limit (four hours) in a given day, you’ll experience diminishing rewards if you try to cram in more. Shallow work therefore, doesn’t become dangerous until you add enough to begin to crowd out your bounded deep efforts for the day. p. 220

Strategies for Darin The Shallows: (1) Schedule every minute of your day; (2)  Quantify the depth of every activity [Scale of 1-5?]; (3)Ask your boss for a shallow-work budget [No more than 4 hours?]; (4) Finish your work by 1630; and (5) Become hard to reach.

We spend much of the day on autopilot. This is a problem. p. 222

It’s natural to resist the idea, as it’s undoubtedly easier to continue to allow the twin forces of the internal whim and external requests to drive your schedule. But you must overcome this distrust of structure if you want to approach your true potential as someone who creates things that matter. p. 227

This type of scheduling, however, isn’t about control—it’s instead about thoughtfulness [mindfulness?]. It’s a simple habit that forces you to continually take a moment throughout your day and ask: What makes sense for me to do with the time that remains? It’s the habit of asking that returns results, not your unyielding fidelity to the answer. p. 226

Without structure, it’s easy to allow your time to devolve into the shallows—email, social media web surfing. p. 227

Strategy No. 2: Quantify The Depth Of Every Activity. Reminder: shallow work is noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend not create much value in the world and are easy to replicate.

Ask: How long would it take, (in months) to train a smart, recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete the task?

Strategy No. 3: Ask your boss for a shallow-work budget. [Since I’m the boss, what percentage of my time should be spent on shallow work?] p. 232

Initially I will say 30 percent, but I will strive to drive that to 20 percent.

Four years later, on 23 May 2020, I thinking the number should be less than five percent. If my work day is eight hours and I devote four hours to Deep Work, 1.5 hours to Gillighan and exercise in the morning, that leave me with 3.5 hours to distribute. Five percent of eight hours would be 24 minutes. I’ll be generous and propose a Shallow-Work budget of 30 minutes/day, leaving me with three hours for all the rest.

Strategy No. 4: Finish your work by 1730. [For me, that number will be 0930. My day will be four hours of Deep Work, 3.5 hours of necessary work and a half-hour of shallow work, but I really need to figure out what my shallow work might be.]

Strategy No. 5: Become hard to reach. [Gillighan is the challenge here.]

Tip A: Make people who send you email do more work. p. 243

Tip B: Do more work when you send or reply to emails. p. 248

Process-Centric Approach asks: What is the project [event] represented by this message, and what is the most efficient (in terms of messages generated) process for bringing the project to successful conclusion?

Tip C: Don’t Respond—Professional Email Sorting, Do not reply to an email message if any of the following applies. (1) The message is ambiguous or otherwise makes it hard for you to generate a reasonable response; (2) The message is not a question or proposal that interests you; or (3) Nothing really good would happen if you did respond and nothing really bad would happen if you did not. p. 255

Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for life-changing big things. —Tim Ferris. p. 255

A commitment to Deep Work is not a moral stance and it’s not a philosophical statement—it is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable tasks done. Deep Work is important in other words, not because distraction is evil, but because Deep Work enabled Bill Gates to start a billion-dollar industry in less than a semester. p. 258

Circling Back To Part I: The Idea