Deep Work
From Deep Work
Bills Gates and the power of focus
“Gates worked with such intensity for such lengths during this two-month stretch that he would often collapse into sleep on his keyboard in the middle of writing a line of code.”
“The one trait that differentiated Gates from Allen was focus. Allen’s mind would flit between many ideas and passions, but Gates was a serial obsessor.”
Email Sorting
“Professorial E-mail Sorting: Do not reply to an e-mail message if any of the following applies:
- It’s ambiguous or otherwise makes it hard for you to generate a reasonable response.
- It’s not a question or proposal that interests you.
- Nothing really good would happen if you did respond and nothing really bad would happen if you didn’t.”
Focus lifestyle
“On good days, I can get in four hours of focus before the first meeting,” he told me. “Then maybe another three to four hours in the afternoon. And I do mean ‘focus’: no e-mail, no Hacker News, just programming.” ”
Deal with email and distraction
“As a graduate student at MIT, I had the opportunity to interact with famous academics. In doing so, I noticed that many shared a fascinating and somewhat rare approach to e-mail: Their default behavior when receiving an e-mail message is to not respond.
Over time, I learned the philosophy driving this behavior: When it comes to e-mail, they believed, it’s the sender’s responsibility to convince the receiver that a reply is worthwhile.”
Dealing with distractions
“Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things”
