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Deep Work versus Shallow Work
“Deep Work,” by Cal Newport
— “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. Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity.”
— “If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. [If I instead get interrupted a lot] what replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time… there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons.”
— “Shallow Work: …constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction.”
— “Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.”
— “[there is] a massive economic and personal opportunity for the few who recognize the potential of resisting this trend and prioritizing depth. “
— “Deep work is so important that we might consider it, to use the phrasing of business writer Eric Barker, “the superpower of the 21st century.”
