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.

Agnes Li

Deep Work in a Distracted World

unfinished notes for the book, Deep Work in a Distracted World

work

Distraction

attention

focus

success

Agnes Li

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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.

Agnes Li

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.

Agnes Li

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.

Agnes Li

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

Agnes Li

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

Agnes Li

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.

Agnes Li

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.

Agnes Li

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.

Agnes Li

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

Agnes Li

Why deep work is so important?

Agnes Li

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.

Agnes Li

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.

Agnes Li

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.

Agnes Li

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.

Agnes Li

Deep work is the superpower of the 21st century.

Eric Barker

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

Agnes Li

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.

Cal Newport

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.

Cal Newport

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.

Cal Newsport

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.

Cal Newsport

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

Cal Newsport

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.

Cal Newsport

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.

Cal Newsport

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.

Agnes Li

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.

Agnes Li

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.

Agnes Li

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.

Agnes Li

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

Agnes Li

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.

Agnes Li

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.

Agnes Li

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.

Agnes Li

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

Sherwin Rosen

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.

Agnes Li

3. owners

Agnes Li

We owe it to our service men and women and their families, who sacrificed so much for our country, to find out the answers they deserve and make care and treatment for them, their children, and their grandchildren a priority.

Elizabeth Esty

I got the dragon on my leg when I was still living with my dad. He's not a fan of tattoos, so I had to get it behind his back; he kind of freaked out when he saw it.

Jeff Hardy

There is nothing good to be had in the country or if there be they will not let you have it.

William Hazlitt

You must understand the texture of your hair before you choose a style.

Jaclyn Smith

Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories - much of the debugging has to be done by others.

Alan Kay

I'm a bit of a history goon, and I love all that. Anything that's medieval-based up until, probably, the Tudor period and just after, I'm quite into.

Greg Rutherford

My earliest memories are making little Super 8 films - or watching my brother make stop-motion space spectaculars.

Jonathan Nolan

Like myself, President Obama is the father of two daughters. He understands the obstacles that they face as women, but he also understands the emergency of the state of young black men in America.

Al Sharpton

Everyone should get their news however they want to and in whatever form they want. I'm not going to sit back in judgment of other people and the way they do it.

Jim Lehrer

The Air Force has it far worse than the Navy in terms of existential fears, primarily due to the rapid rise and unbelievable dissemination of drones, where seemingly now every military unit has their own miniature air wing of what would have recently passed as toys.

Thomas P.M. Barnett

Each stone, each bend cries welcome to him. He identifies with the mountains and the streams, he sees something of his own soul in the plants and the animals and the birds of the field.

Paulo Coelho

To create something new is both thrilling and excruciating at the same time. It's great to have all these choices in front of you, and to have the writers in the room so you know exactly what they meant. But the downside is you want so badly not to screw it up!

Kate Baldwin

I think there must be a place inside of us where dreams go and wait their turn.

Sue Monk Kidd

Growing up, I was such a picky eater. I'm finally starting to expand.

Mike Trout