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

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open, I quickly skim every task in every list, and then look at the next few days on my calendar. These two actions ensure that there’s nothing urgent I’m forgetting or any important deadlines or appointments sneaking up on me. I have, at this point, reviewed everything that’s on my professional plate. To end the ritual, I use this information to make a rough plan for the next day. Once the plan is created, I say, “Shutdown complete,” and my work thoughts are done for the day. The concept of a shutdown ritual might at first seem extreme, but there’s a good reason for it: the Zeigarnik effect. This effect, which is named for the experimental work of the early-twentieth-century psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, describes the ability of incomplete tasks to dominate our attention. It tells us that if you simply stop whatever you are doing at five p.m. and declare, “I’m done with work until tomorrow,” you’ll likely struggle to keep your mind clear of professional issues, as the many obligations left unresolved in your mind will, as in Bluma Zeigarnik’s experiments, keep battling for your attention throughout the evening (a battle that they’ll often win). At first, this challenge might seem unresolvable. As any busy knowledge worker can attest, there are always tasks left incomplete. The idea that you can ever reach a point where all your obligations are handled is a fantasy. Fortunately, we don’t need to complete a task to get it off our minds. Riding to our rescue in this matter is our friend from earlier in the rule, the psychologist Roy Baumeister, who wrote a paper with E.J. Masicampo playfully titled “Consider It Done!” In this study, the two researchers began by replicating the Zeigarnik effect in their subjects (in this case, the researchers assigned a task and then cruelly engineered interruptions), but then found that they could significantly reduce the effect’s impact by asking the subjects, soon after the interruption, to make a plan for how they would later complete the incomplete task. To quote the paper: “Committing to a specific plan for a goal may therefore not only facilitate attainment of the goal but may also free cognitive resources for other pursuits.” The shutdown ritual described earlier leverages this tactic to battle the Zeigarnik effect. While it doesn’t force you to explicitly identify a plan for every single task in your task list (a burdensome requirement), it does force you to capture every task in a common list, and then review these tasks before making a plan for the next day. This ritual ensures that no task will be forgotten: Each will be reviewed daily and tackled when the time is appropriate. Your mind, in other words, is released from its duty to keep track of these obligations at every moment—your shutdown ritual has taken over that responsibility.
Shutdown rituals can become annoying, as they add an extra ten to fifteen minutes to the end of your workday (and sometimes even more), but they’re necessary for reaping the rewards of systematic idleness summarized previously. From my experience, it should take a week or two before the shutdown habit sticks—that is, until your mind trusts your ritual enough to actually begin to release work-related thoughts in the evening. But once it does stick, the ritual will become a permanent fixture in your life—to the point that skipping the routine will fill you with a sense of unease. Decades of work from multiple different subfields within psychology all point toward the conclusion that regularly resting your brain improves the quality of your deep work. When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done. Your average e- mail response time might suffer some, but you’ll more than make up for this with the sheer volume of truly important work produced during the day by your refreshed ability to dive deeper than your exhausted peers.
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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
Page 39 and 40: concrete sense of accomplishment he
Page 41 and 42: cultivate important sources, pull t
Page 43 and 44: not be surprised that deep work str
Page 45 and 46: At one point about halfway through
Page 47 and 48: experience. This concept upends the
Page 49 and 50: • Re: Fwd: Study Hacks. This e-ma
Page 51 and 52: hammock. But the results from Csiks
Page 53 and 54: they use as an organizing example a
Page 55 and 56: The second key observation about th
Page 57 and 58: Rule #1 Work Deeply Soon after I me
Page 59 and 60: distractions.) Before proceeding to
Page 61 and 62: his website: “What I do takes lon
Page 63 and 64: here succinctly: All of my time and
Page 65 and 66: At the same time, the bimodal philo
Page 67 and 68: Chappell began by attempting a vagu
Page 69 and 70: Isaacson was methodic: Any time he
Page 71 and 72: In a New York Times column on the t
Page 73 and 74: tower. It’s also located only a c
Page 75 and 76: Don’t Work Alone The relationship
Page 77 and 78: the construction of a new home for
Page 79 and 80: y side, pushing each other toward b
Page 81 and 82: Discipline #1: Focus on the Wildly
Page 83 and 84: tangible results. Second, it helped
Page 85 and 86: This strategy argues that you shoul
Page 87 and 88: This study, it turns out, is one of
Page 89: capacity during your workday. It fo
Page 93 and 94: exceptionally well educated when he
Page 95 and 96: task. Before diving into the detail
Page 97 and 98: Point #2: Regardless of how you sch
Page 99 and 100: the Adirondacks, in the summer afte
Page 101 and 102: Massachusetts Avenue Bridge. After
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
Page 115 and 116: too general (what does it look like
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
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excuse that the requester has the o
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Most nonfiction authors are easy to
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Herbert’s filters still enable hi
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“Sometime in the next week e-mail
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the famous names at the Institute:
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Conclusion The story of Microsoft
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fall of 2011, my obligations did in
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Also by Cal Newport So Good They Ca
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Chapter 1 Information about Nate Si
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“He is a disrupter on a massive s
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“undoubtedly true”: Manzi, Jim.
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Chapter 3 “I do all my work by ha
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Lifehacker.com: http://lifehacker.c
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name: http://hbr.org/2010/07/how-wi
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The reference to Thurston’s Twitt
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The issue of Science where Radhika
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* After Malcolm Gladwell popularize
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* Lexical decision games flash stri
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* I’m being somewhat loose in my
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* You can see a snapshot of my “h
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* The specific article by White fro
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* It was exactly this type of analy
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* The studies I cite are looking at
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Contents Cover Title Page Welcome I
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Deep Work_ Rules for focused success in a distracted world ( PDFDrive.com )

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