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

thinking near paper submission deadlines, the 4DX habit kept my mind concentrated
throughout the full year. It ended up, I must admit, an exhausting year (especially given
that I was writing this book at the same time). But it also turned out to produce a
convincing endorsement for the 4DX framework: By the summer of 2014, I had nine
full papers accepted for publication, more than doubling what I had managed to
accomplish in any preceding year.
Be Lazy
In a 2012 article written for a New York Times blog, the essayist and cartoonist Tim
Kreider provided a memorable self-description: “I am not busy. I am the laziest
ambitious person I know.” Kreider’s distaste for frenetic work, however, was put to
the test in the months leading up to the writing of his post. Here’s his description of the
period: “I’ve insidiously started, because of professional obligations, to become
busy… every morning my in-box was full of e-mails asking me to do things I did not
want to do or presenting me with problems that I now had to solve.”
His solution? He fled to what he calls an “undisclosed location”: a place with no
TV and no Internet (going online requires a bike ride to the local library), and where
he could remain nonresponsive to the pinprick onslaught of small obligations that seem
harmless in isolation but aggregate to serious injury to his deep work habit. “I’ve
remembered about buttercups, stink bugs and the stars,” Kreider says about his retreat
from activity. “I read. And I’m finally getting some real writing done for the first time
in months.”
It’s important for our purposes to recognize that Kreider is no Thoreau. He didn’t
retreat from the world of busyness to underscore a complicated social critique. His
move to an undisclosed location was instead motivated by a surprising but practical
insight: It made him better at his job. Here’s Kreider’s explanation:
Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable
to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental
affliction as disfiguring as rickets… it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting
any work done.
When Kreider talks of getting work done, of course, he’s not referencing shallow
tasks. For the most part, the more time you can spend immersed in shallow work the
more of it that gets accomplished. As a writer and artist, however, Kreider is instead
concerned with deep work—the serious efforts that produce things the world values.
These efforts, he’s convinced, need the support of a mind regularly released to leisure.