In an age of network tools, in other words, knowledge workers increasingly replace deep work with the shallow alternative—constantly sending and receiving email messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction.

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. We now know from decades of research in both psychology and neuroscience that the state of mental strain that accompanies deep work is also necessary to improve your abilities.

Deep work is exactly the type of effort needed to stand out in a cognitively demanding field like academic psychiatry in the early twentieth century.

A study has found that nearly 30 % of a worker's time is dedicated to reading and answering e-mail.

This state of fragmented attention cannot accommodate deep work, which requires long periods of uninterrupted thinking.

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

Larger efforts that would be well served by deep thinking, such as forming a new business strategy or writing an important grant application, get fragmented into distracted dashes that produce muted quality.

Spending time in a state of shallow work will permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.

Why deep work is so important?

We have an information economy that is dependent on complex systems that change rapidly. To remain valuable in our economy, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This requires deep work. If you get used to doing shallow work, you will fall behind as technology advances.

If you created something great, its reachable audience is essentially unlimited. If you created something useful, your audience will continue to grow, if what you created is not good, it would be very easy for your audience to find a better alternative online.

Deep work is not an old-fashioned skill. It is a crucial ability for anyone looking forward to move ahead in a globally competitive information economy that hew up and spit out those who are not earning their keep.

The real rewards are not reserved for those who are comfortable with using Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, but instead for those who are comfortable building the innovative distributes systems that run the service.

Deep work is the superpower of the 21st century.

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

During these years, I shared a graduate student office down the hall from a MacArthur “genius grant” winner—a professor who was hired at MIT before he was old enough to legally drink.

It wasn’t uncommon to find this theoretician sitting in the common space, staring at markings on a whiteboard, with a group of visiting scholars arrayed around him, also sitting quietly and staring. This could go on for hours. I’d go to lunch; I’d come back—still staring.

This particular professor is hard to reach. He’s not on Twitter and if he doesn’t know you, he’s unlikely to respond to your e-mail. Last year he published sixteen papers.

My commitment to depth has rewarded me. In the ten-year period following my college graduation, I published four books, earned a PhD, wrote peer-reviewed academic papers at a high rate, and was hired as a tenure-track professor at Georgetown University.

I maintained this voluminous production while rarely working past five or six p.m. during the workweek.

This compressed schedule is possible because I’ve invested significant effort to minimize the shallow in my life while making sure I get the most out of the time this frees up.

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.

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.

When Carl Jung wanted to revolutionize the field of psychiatry, he built a retreat in the woods. Jung’s Bollingen Tower became a place where he could maintain his ability to think deeply and then apply the skill to produce work of such stunning originality that it changed the world.

I’ll try to convince you to join me in the effort to build our own personal Bollingen Towers; to cultivate an ability to produce real value in an increasingly distracted world; and to recognize a truth embraced by the most productive and important personalities of generations past: A deep life is a good life.

An increasing number of people will lose in this new economy as their skill becomes automatable or easily outsourced, there are others who will not only survive, but thrive—becoming more valued (and therefore more rewarded) than before.

Who will be valuable in the Intelligent Machine Age? 1. highly skilled workers 2. superstars 3. owners

1. highly skilled workers Robotics and voice recognition are automating many low skilled positions, but other technologies such as data visualization, analytics, high speed communications, and rapid prototyping are increasing the value of abstract and data-driven reasoning skills.

2. superstars Working remotely is more effective and productive due to the advance of e-mail and virtual meeting software. Employers would rather hire an overseas superstar of the field to finish the work, than hiring full time low-skilled employees, so that they can save money.

The talented remote workers will earn more because they can work for many companies. Once the talent market is made universally accessible, those at the peak of the market thrive while the rest suffer.

Hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance

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.

3. owners

You feel like a stud out there when people swing and miss. As I've gotten older, I've preached to our young guys that strikeouts are sexy, but outs are outs, man, no matter how you get them. It's a lot cooler for me pitching in the seventh or eighth inning than it is going 5 1/3. Your manager likes it a lot more, too.

Individual potential of life is cosmic potential. Individual is divine deep inside. Transcendental experience awakens that divinity in man. And when you kill a man you deprive him of that birthright of it.

I find it scary to sing - scarier than acting actually.

Begin to see yourself as a soul with a body rather than a body with a soul.

The Amish communities of Pennsylvania, despite the retro image of horse-drawn buggies and straw hats, have long been engaged in a productive debate about the consequences of technology.

These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I'm not downplaying that.

These days I'm pretty much a businessman.

We learned about dignity and decency - that how hard you work matters more than how much you make... that helping others means more than just getting ahead yourself.

It shouldnt matter how slowly a child learns as long as we are encouraging them not to stop.

Earmarks are almost always inserted by a member of Congress without any notice to other members, and without a chance for Congress as a whole to debate a particular earmark as they relate to national priorities.

We progress a step farther in each tick of the clock.

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.

You have to look out for becoming trapped in a place where people want to see you all the time doing one thing.

The network made me join Twitter. I am very scared of social media, and I don't know how to use it, so it's kind of trial and error.