Deep Work_ Rules for focused success in a distracted world ( PDFDrive.com )

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immediately “closes the loop” with respect to the project at hand. When a project is initiated by an e-mail that you send or receive, it squats in your mental landscape— becoming something that’s “on your plate” in the sense that it has been brought to your attention and eventually needs to be addressed. This method closes this open loop as soon as it forms. By working through the whole process, adding to your task lists and calendar any relevant commitments on your part, and bringing the other party up to speed, your mind can reclaim the mental real estate the project once demanded. Less mental clutter means more mental resources available for deep thinking. Process-centric e-mails might not seem natural at first. For one thing, they require that you spend more time thinking about your messages before you compose them. In the moment, this might seem like you’re spending more time on e-mail. But the important point to remember is that the extra two to three minutes you spend at this point will save you many more minutes reading and responding to unnecessary extra messages later. The other issue is that process-centric messages can seem stilted and overly technical. The current social conventions surrounding e-mail promote a conversational tone that clashes with the more systematic schedules or decision trees commonly used in process-centric communication. If this concerns you, I suggest that you add a longer conversational preamble to your messages. You can even separate the process-centric portion of the message from the conversational opening with a divider line, or label it “Proposed Next Steps,” so that its technical tone seems more appropriate in context. In the end, these minor hassles are worth it. By putting more thought up front into what’s really being proposed by the e-mail messages that flit in and out of your inbox, you’ll greatly reduce the negative impact of this technology on your ability to do work that actually matters. Tip #3: Don’t Respond As a graduate student at MIT, I had the opportunity to interact with famous academics. In doing so, I noticed that many shared a fascinating and somewhat rare approach to e- mail: Their default behavior when receiving an e-mail message is to not respond. Over time, I learned the philosophy driving this behavior: When it comes to e-mail, they believed, it’s the sender’s responsibility to convince the receiver that a reply is worthwhile. If you didn’t make a convincing case and sufficiently minimize the effort required by the professor to respond, you didn’t get a response. For example, the following e-mail would likely not generate a reply with many of
the famous names at the Institute: Hi professor. I’d love to stop by sometime to talk about . Are you available? Responding to this message requires too much work (“Are you available?” is too vague to be answered quickly). Also, there’s no attempt to argue that this chat is worth the professor’s time. With these critiques in mind, here’s a version of the same message that would be more likely to generate a reply: Hi professor. I’m working on a project similar to with my advisor, . Is it okay if I stop by in the last fifteen minutes of your office hours on Thursday to explain what we’re up to in more detail and see if it might complement your current project? Unlike the first message, this one makes a clear case for why this meeting makes sense and minimizes the effort needed from the receiver to respond. This tip asks that you replicate, to the extent feasible in your professional context, this professorial ambivalence to e-mail. To help you in this effort, try applying the following three rules to sort through which messages require a response and which do not. Professorial E-mail Sorting: Do not reply to an e-mail message if any of the following applies: • It’s ambiguous or otherwise makes it hard for you to generate a reasonable response. • It’s not a question or proposal that interests you. • Nothing really good would happen if you did respond and nothing really bad would happen if you didn’t. In all cases, there are many obvious exceptions. If an ambiguous message about a project you don’t care about comes from your company’s CEO, for example, you’ll respond. But looking beyond these exceptions, this professorial approach asks you to become way more ruthless when deciding whether or not to click “reply.” This tip can be uncomfortable at first because it will cause you to break a key convention currently surrounding e-mail: Replies are assumed, regardless of the relevance or appropriateness of the message. There’s also no way to avoid that some bad things will happen if you take this approach. At the minimum, some people might get confused or upset—especially if they’ve never seen standard e-mail conventions
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Begin Reading Table of Contents New
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Carl Jung went on to become one of
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workers are not loafing. In fact, t
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had a plan, but they weren’t happ
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your situation has become similar t
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wife and two sons in the evenings,
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Chapter One Deep Work Is Valuable A
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workers. Advances such as robotics
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employing only thirteen people. Whe
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And because these technologies chan
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how easy this is for me!?” Matt D
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Soon after meeting Grant, my own ac
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subjects working on a set of word p
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company (two companies, in fact). I
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Chapter Two Deep Work Is Rare In 20
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in the frothy back-and-forth of onl
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nevertheless flourish in our busine
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one of many examples of business be
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concrete sense of accomplishment he
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cultivate important sources, pull t
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not be surprised that deep work str
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At one point about halfway through
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experience. This concept upends the
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• Re: Fwd: Study Hacks. This e-ma
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hammock. But the results from Csiks
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they use as an organizing example a
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The second key observation about th
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Rule #1 Work Deeply Soon after I me
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distractions.) Before proceeding to
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his website: “What I do takes lon
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here succinctly: All of my time and
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At the same time, the bimodal philo
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Chappell began by attempting a vagu
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Isaacson was methodic: Any time he
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In a New York Times column on the t
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tower. It’s also located only a c
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Don’t Work Alone The relationship
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the construction of a new home for
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y side, pushing each other toward b
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Discipline #1: Focus on the Wildly
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tangible results. Second, it helped
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This strategy argues that you shoul
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This study, it turns out, is one of
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capacity during your workday. It fo
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Shutdown rituals can become annoyin
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exceptionally well educated when he
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task. Before diving into the detail
Page 97 and 98: Point #2: Regardless of how you sch
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Page 103 and 104: actual variables, or assumptions, o
Page 105 and 106: would likely be surprisingly numero
Page 107 and 108: Rule #3 Quit Social Media In 2013,
Page 109 and 110: understand the current default deci
Page 111 and 112: away from traditional monoculture c
Page 113 and 114: asks that you give any particular n
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Page 117 and 118: important to me (e.g., a long talk,
Page 119 and 120: impact activities, therefore, you
Page 121 and 122: personalized information arriving o
Page 123 and 124: you sample life without them. Don
Page 125 and 126: quick click away. Fortunately, Arno
Page 127 and 128: Rule #4 Drain the Shallows In the s
Page 129 and 130: 37signals’ experiments highlight
Page 131 and 132: stubbornly remain. In a Wall Street
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Page 135 and 136: decisions about where given work ta
Page 137 and 138: and this is the important part—tr
Page 139 and 140: with few exceptions, I don’t send
Page 141 and 142: excuse that the requester has the o
Page 143 and 144: Most nonfiction authors are easy to
Page 145 and 146: Herbert’s filters still enable hi
Page 147: “Sometime in the next week e-mail
Page 151 and 152: Conclusion The story of Microsoft
Page 153 and 154: fall of 2011, my obligations did in
Page 155 and 156: Also by Cal Newport So Good They Ca
Page 157 and 158: Chapter 1 Information about Nate Si
Page 159 and 160: “He is a disrupter on a massive s
Page 161 and 162: “undoubtedly true”: Manzi, Jim.
Page 163 and 164: Chapter 3 “I do all my work by ha
Page 165 and 166: Lifehacker.com: http://lifehacker.c
Page 167 and 168: name: http://hbr.org/2010/07/how-wi
Page 169 and 170: The reference to Thurston’s Twitt
Page 171 and 172: The issue of Science where Radhika
Page 173 and 174: * After Malcolm Gladwell popularize
Page 175 and 176: * Lexical decision games flash stri
Page 177 and 178: * I’m being somewhat loose in my
Page 179 and 180: * You can see a snapshot of my “h
Page 181 and 182: * The specific article by White fro
Page 183 and 184: * It was exactly this type of analy
Page 185 and 186: * The studies I cite are looking at
Page 187 and 188: Contents Cover Title Page Welcome I
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