This state of fragmented attention cannot accommodate deep work, which requires long periods of uninterrupted thinking. At the same time, however, modern knowledge workers are not loafing. In fact, they report that they are as busy as ever. What explains the discrepancy? A lot can be explained by another type of effort, which provides a counterpart to the idea of deep work: Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate. (Location 100)
I build my days around a core of carefully chosen deep work, with the shallow activities I absolutely cannot avoid batched into smaller bursts at the peripheries of my schedule. Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output. (Location 231)
thrive, but I’m convinced that I haven’t yet reached my full value-producing potential. (Location 245)
triumph with the ideas and rules in the chapters ahead, you can be assured that I’m following suit—ruthlessly culling the shallow and painstakingly cultivating the intensity of my depth. (Location 246)
The professors at MIT—some of the most innovative technologists in the world—wanted nothing to do with an open-office-style workspace. They instead demanded the ability to close themselves off. (Location 1582)
Once you’ve identified a wildly important goal, you need to measure your success. In 4DX, there are two types of metrics for this purpose: lag measures and lead measures. (Location 1662)
So we have scales that allow us to divide up people into people who multitask all the time and people who rarely do, and the differences are remarkable. People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand … they’re pretty much mental wrecks. (Location 1914)
What about a less famous writer? In this case, book marketing might play a more primary role in his or her goals. But when forced to identify the two or three most important activities supporting this goal, it’s unlikely that the type of lightweight one-on-one contact enabled by Twitter would make the list. This is the result of simple math. Imagine that our hypothetical author diligently sends ten individualized tweets a day, five days a week— (Location 2397)
What’s key to understand here, however, is that this radical reduction of priorities is not arbitrary, but is instead motivated by an idea that has arisen repeatedly in any number of different fields, from client profitability to social equality to prevention of crashes in computer programs. (Location 2437)
Note: lol “number of fields”
The business world understands this math. (Location 2459)
Note: ew
Now it was time to reclaim his life from his stuff. (Location 2472)
Note: lol
It has instead replaced this timeless capitalist exchange with a shallow collectivist alternative: I’ll pay attention to what you say if you pay attention to what I say—regardless of its value. (Location 2525)
Note: such a twat. i mean y even frame it in those terms? lol “timeless”
Don’t Use the Internet to Entertain Yourself (Location 2544)
Note: wtaf
this particular moment, for example, some of the most popular articles on BuzzFeed include, “17 Words That Mean Something Totally Different When Spelled Backward” and “33 Dogs Winning at Everything.” These sites are especially harmful after the workday (Location 2579)
Note: looool
The purpose of this strategy is to give you an accurate metric for resolving such ambiguity—providing you with a way to make clear and consistent decisions about where given work tasks fall on the shallow-to-deep scale. To do so, it asks that you evaluate activities by asking a simple (but surprisingly illuminating) question: How long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task? (Location 2788)
