Summary of 'Deep Work' by Cal Newport. (2 Summaries in 1: In-Depth Summary and Bonus 2-Page PDF.)

When either of these happens, simply revise the schedule for the rest of your day. It's not uncommon to revise the schedule six or eight times in a given day. The point is not to keep a perfect schedule, but rather to develop awareness of how long tasks truly take, how much of your day is spent on shallow versus deep work, and how your day evolves

K. Anders Ericsson, a professor at Florida State University, found that outstanding performance isn't a result of natural talent. Rather, it is a result of hard work in the form of deliberate practice.

Sophie Leroy, a business professor at the University of Minnesota, discovered in experiments that when people switch tasks, attention doesn't immediately follow. Part of the attention remains stuck on the prior task, resulting in worse performance on the next task. She called this effect attention residue, which becomes stronger in these instances:

the whiteboard effect: Creative energies produced by team members while bouncing ideas and experiments off one another. Social pressure to make progress towards a mutual goal.

Deep work: "Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit.

Deliberate practice is a complex topic. In a nutshell, it is practice designed to improve a specific skill using intense focus, repetition and continuous feedback. Deliberate practice is cognitively demanding, requires intense concentration and cannot be done with distraction. As Ericsson explains, "Diffused attention is almost antithetical to

In simplified terms, learning and mastering hard things involves the myelination of neural circuits, which requires the intense focus of deliberate practice and deep work.

A good process-centric email does two things: Anticipates the conversation and tries to get to a resolution with the fewest possible emails. Maintains control of your schedule and puts the burden of work on the sender.

Instead of quitting the Internet completely or on a weekly sabbatical, a more sensible approach is using offline / online time blocks,