QUICK NOTES FOR BOOKS HOW TO
Create a Cadence of Accountability: use weekly reviews to celebrate good weeks, understand what led to bad weeks, and figure out how to ensure a good score for the days aheadĪt the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning.Keep a Compelling Scoreboard: track the hours spent in deep work that week with a simple tally of tick marks in that week’s row.Act on the Lead Measures: time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal.Focus on the Wildly Important: identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours.“ The 4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX)” applied to Deep Work: Scheduling a specific time of the day in advance takes away the need to use willpower. Journalistic: alternate your day between deep and shallow work as it fits your blocks of time (not recommended to try out first)Ĭommit to scheduling deep work blocks into your calendar and sticking to them ( time blocking).Rhythmic: take 3-4 hours every day to perform deep work on your project.Bimodal: reserve a few consecutive days when you will be working like a monastic (you need at least one day a week).Monastic: isolate yourself for long periods of time without distractions no shallow work allowed.This reduces the willpower necessary to transition into a state of unbroken concentration. The Principle of Least Resistance: in a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment.īusyness as 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 indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner. Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, can produce a lot of valuable output. The New Law of Productivity: High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus) You need to be able to quickly master hard things and produce at an elite level (in terms of both quality and speed). Owners of capital (or people with access to it)ĭeep work focuses on the third type.Those who can work with intelligent machines.In the Knowledge Economy, 3 types of people will have a particular advantage: Those who cultivate this skill and make it the core of their working life will thrive. The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare and valuable in the Knowledge Economy. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate. Shallow Work: non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”
QUICK NOTES FOR BOOKS FULL
On the right, list out the full set of small tasks you plan to accomplish in that blockĬal Newport describes Deep Work as: “Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit.On the left, mark every other line with an hour of your workday.
QUICK NOTES FOR BOOKS PROFESSIONAL
Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit.