#deep-work

"Sometimes to go deep, you must first go big. A grand gesture—like locking yourself away for a week, flying across an ocean to write on a plane, or clearing your calendar for a month—can push your mind past the usual surface skimming and into a deeper gear."

"Protecting time to work without distraction sharpens focus."

"Treat your time block for your ONE Thing as a sacred appointment and protect it from emails, calls, and interruptions."

"Multitasking is harmful because every interruption destroys concentration, leaving you operating at partial capacity all day."

"I had monomaniacal focus, giving up weekends and vacations never felt like a sacrifice because I genuinely believed computers would become mainstream and loved working toward that future."

"If you service low-impact activities, you are by definition taking time away from high-impact ones. Because time is a zero-sum game, every hour of reactive email and shallow work is an hour not spent honing a rare skill or building something that actually moves the needle."

"Great work requires spending unreasonable amounts of focused time."

"The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill and then make it the core of their working life will thrive. Everyone else will feel increasingly busy while producing less and less of real value."

"Great work usually entails spending what would seem to most people an unreasonable amount of time on a problem. You can’t think of this time as a cost, or it will always seem too high. You have to find the work so engaging in the moment that years of focused effort feel less like sacrifice and more like curiosity pulling you forward."

"When you organize your days around deep work, you stop letting the twin forces of internal whim and external requests drive your schedule. You decide in advance what you’re going to do with every minute of your workday. At first this structure can feel rigid, but over time it becomes freeing, because you realize it is the only way to approach your true potential and actually create things that matter."

"To remain valuable you must learn complicated things quickly, and that requires deep focus."

"The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable."

"Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, and what you love is the sum of what you focus on."

"Deep work consists of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive abilities to their limit and creates new value."

"Leaders use Monday to remove noise, not add it."

"Monday carries the quiet power of direction."