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.

1. The Law of the Vital Few (or the 80/20 Principle) To properly evaluate a network tool, you need to understand the role of that tool in the context of your goals and activities in 3 steps: Identify your primary professional or

personal goal. Identify the two to three most important activities for that goal. Evaluate whether the network tool helps you in these activities.

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

6 Strategies To Reduce Shallow Work Quantify the depth of every activity Create a shallow work budget Schedule your entire day Use fixed-schedule productivity Learn how to say "no" Manage email senders

Rhythmic deep work is the habit of performing deep work daily, ideally at the same time and place and for the same duration. An example is dedicating the first two hours of each morning to deep work.

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 the

So Newport create a sender filter on his website as follows: "If you have an offer, opportunity, or introduction that might make my life more interesting, e-mail me at interesting@calnewport.com. For the reasons stated above, I'll only respond to those proposals that are a good match for my schedule and interests." Newport's sender filter does two