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3.98 AVERAGE
3.98 AVERAGE
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
informative
fast-paced
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
A lot fluffier than digital minimalism. There's a bit of a crossover so it felt like I was rereading the same things. Also the focus is on improving your professional life, but the rules can be applied broadly. Still decent.
Stopping distractions!
In the age of AI is even harder but smarter to do. This will keep us in the jobs we have.
In the age of AI is even harder but smarter to do. This will keep us in the jobs we have.
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
fast-paced
This book is your instruction manual on how to achieve things in your life with speed and passion. Use the tips it provides, read, reread, revisit, and reevaluate the things it says. I've found it very useful and wish I had read this book earlier. Looking forward to reading more of Cal Newport's books.
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
This book is amazing, and makes me think about how I can practice deep, thoughtful work in my everyday life, more and more. Life is too short for shallowness.
Though a little repetitive, there were lots of great nuggets in this one. My own imperative for picking it up was the desire to help my students and myself reign in the distractions and regain the ability to zone in. Newport lays out a well-organized argument for honing the skill of concentration in a world that’s increasingly distracted and absorbed in the shallow, but his argument seems motivated by his desire to be the best in a field that’s highly individualized (e.g. writing and publishing peer-reviewed academic papers). Some strategies, like “don’t respond to emails” seem difficult to apply for anyone other than a very narrow group of people. That said, I did feel that there’s a lot to take from here, and I was busy underlining and starring passages as I read, which is typically a good sign.
The best book I have read this year. The book starts by giving a comprehensive rationale for deep work: the economic, cognitive, psychological and philosophical reasons for why in the words of another author Gallagher of Rapt, "I'll live the focused life because it's the best life there is". In the half of the book, the author gives explicit rules for leading such a life with a slew of techniques ranging from a wonderful technique for judging the depth of any activity to how to manage the "Tyranny of email". A must read for any knowledge worker in this century.
In what ended up being a bizarre exercise in concentration, I finished this book in a day. The insights were valuable though not entirely unexpected. Newport lays out a very good argument not only about why our modern distractions are frying our brain but also how we might save ourselves from them. The focus was not only on productivity but on creating value and meaning. The four stars are because what he outlines is so simple, I can actually apply them.
Sadly though I was a third of the way through the book before a woman was mentioned, and she was an example not of deep work and achievement, but the opposite. Why is this even relevant? I found reading the book valuable, the information so relevant, I almost forgot that in my mind's eye every story of incredible productivity and deep effort (bar one) has as its star a white man, untethered to any obligations but those to himself. And sadly some of those things to which I and many women find themselves tethered are the things that bring our lives meaning and value.
Sadly though I was a third of the way through the book before a woman was mentioned, and she was an example not of deep work and achievement, but the opposite. Why is this even relevant? I found reading the book valuable, the information so relevant, I almost forgot that in my mind's eye every story of incredible productivity and deep effort (bar one) has as its star a white man, untethered to any obligations but those to himself. And sadly some of those things to which I and many women find themselves tethered are the things that bring our lives meaning and value.