Deep Work

Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy
1. The ability to quickly master hard things.

2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

Throughout history, skilled laborers have applied sophistication and skepticism to their encounters with new tools and their decisions about whether to adopt them. There’s no reason why knowledge workers cannot do the same when it comes to the Internet—the fact that the skilled labor here now involves digital bits doesn’t change this reality.

Tim Ferriss once wrote: “Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things

But there are some general questions that any effective ritual must address:
• Where you’ll work and for how long

There is a popular notion that artists work from inspiration—that there is some strike or bolt or bubbling up of creative mojo from who knows where… but I hope [my work] makes clear that waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan. In fact, perhaps the single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration.

People experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor performance on that next task,” and the more intense the residue, the worse the performance.

particular, by consolidating his work into intense and uninterrupted pulses, he’s leveraging the following law of productivity:
High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)

The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

experience sampling method (ESM),

experience sampling metho