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I listened to the audiobook narrated by Jeff Bottoms, who I mostly enjoyed. He seemed to be very interested in what he was saying, (which is the most important trait of a narrator, if you ask me,) but he got a bit too constantly-high-pitched about it at times I thought. 3.5 stars for the narration.
I love these kind of armchair-psychology, life-hack books. They are so interesting and generally helpful. This one was aimed at a particular kind of professional, but I think the applications apply to many, many areas--including my spiritual life!
"Deep work: professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate" (Introduction).
"Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not" (Chapter 2).
"As Gallagher summarizes, 'Who you are, what you think feel and do, what you love--is the sum of what you focus on'" (Chapter 3).
"Fredrickson's research shows what you choose to focus on exerts significant leverage on your attitude going forward. These simple choices can provide a reset button to your emotions. She provides the example of a couple fighting over inequitable splitting of household chores. Rather than choosing to focus on your partner's selfishness and sloth, she suggests, you might focus on the fact that at least a festering conflict has been aired, which is the first step toward a solution to the problem, and to your improved mood. This seems like a simple exhortation to look on the bright side, but Fredrickson found that skillful use of these emotional "leverage points" can generate a significantly more positive outcome after negative events" (Chapter 3).
"Gallagher's theory, therefore, predicts that if you spent enough time in this state, your mind will understand your world as rich in meaning and importance. There is, however, a hidden, but equally important, benefit to cultivating rapt attention in your workday. Such concentration hijacks your attention apparatus, preventing you from noticing the many smaller and less pleasant things that unavoidably and persistently populate our lives" (Chapter 3).
"Among many breakthroughs, Csikzentmihalyi's work with ESM [Experience Sampling Method] helped validate a theory he had been developing over the prededing decade: '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.' Csikzentmihalyi calls this mental state 'Flow,' a term he popularized with a 1990 book of the same title. At the time, this finding pushed back against conventional wisdom. Most people assumed, and still do, that relaxation makes them happy. We want to work less, and spend more time in the hammock. But the results from Csikzentmihalyi's ESM studies reveal that most people have this wrong. 'Ironically,' he writes, 'jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because, like flow activities, they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one's work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed'" (Chapter 3).
"Decades of research stemming from Csikzentmihalyi's original ESM experiments validate that the act of going deep orders the consciousness in a way that makes life worthwhile" (Chapter 3).
"You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit. It's instead like a muscle that tires" (Chapter 4).
The 4 Disciples of the 4DX Framework:
1 Focus on the wildly important.
2 Act on the lead measures
3 Keep a compelling scorecard
4 Accountability
"If the internet plays a large and important role in your evening entertainment, that's fine. Schedule lots of long internet blocks. The key here isn't to avoid, or even to reduce the amount of time you spend engaging in distracting behavior, but is instead to give yourself plenty of opportunities throughout your evening to resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom. One place where this strategy becomes particularly difficult outside work is when you're force to wait. For example, standing in line at a store. It's crucial in these situations that if you're in an offline block, you simply gird yourself for the temporary boredom, and fight through it, with only the company of your thoughts. To simply wait, and be bored, has become a novel experience in modern life. But from the perspective of concentration training, it's incredibly valuable" (Part II - Rule 2).
"...you might worry that adding such structure to your relaxation will defeat the purpose of relaxing, which many believe requires complete freedom from plans or obligations. Won't a structured evening leave you exhausted, and not refreshed the next day at work? Bennett, to his credit, anticipated this complaint. As he argues, such worries misunderstand what energizes the human spirit. What? You say that full energy given to to those 16 hours will lessen the value of the business 8? Not so. On the contrary, it will assuredly increase the value of the business 8. One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity. They do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change, not rest, except in sleep. In my experience, this analysis is spot-on. If you give your mind to something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you'll end the day more fulfilled, and begin the next one more relaxed than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in semi-conscious and unstructured web-surfing. To summarize, if you want to eliminate the addictive pull of entertainment sites on your time and attention, give your brain a quality alternative. Not only will this preserve your ability to resist distraction and concentrate, but you might even fulfill Arnold Bennett's ambitious goal of experiencing, perhaps for the first time, what it means to live, and not just exist" (Rule 3).
"I worried when I first started setting a sender filter, that it would seem pretentious, as if my time was more valuable than that of my readers, and that it would upset people. But this fear wasn't realized. Most people easily accept the idea that you have a right to control your own incoming communication, as they would like to enjoy this same right" (Rule 4).
" ...the technologies underlying e-mail are transformative, but the current social conventions guiding how we apply this technology are under-developed. The notion that all messages, regardless of purpose or sender, arrive in the same undifferentiated inbox, and that there's an expectation that every message requires a timely response, is absurdly unproductive" (Rule 4).
"A commitment to deep work is not a moral stance, and it's not a philosophical statement. It is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done. Deep work is important, in other words, not because distraction is evil, but because it enabled Bill Gates to start a billion-dollar industry in less than a semester" (Conclusion).
"There's also an uneasiness that surrounds any effort to produce the best things you're capable of producing, as this forces you to confront the possibility that your best is not yet that good. It's safer to comment on our culture than to step into the Roseveltian ring and attempt to wrestle it into something better. But if you're willing to sidestep these comforts and fears, and instead struggle to deploy your mind to its fullest capacity to create things that matter, then you'll discover, as others have before you, that depth generates a life rich with productivity and meaning. In Part 1, I quoted write Winifred Gallagher, saying, 'I'll live the focused life, because it's the best kind there is.' I agree... and hopefully, now that you've finished this book, you agree too (Conclusion).
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