In Praise of Deep Work, Full Disconnectivity and Deliberate Rest

Newport defines Deep Work as “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.”... in an average office setting such a state of prolonged “distraction-free concentration” is all but impossible... distractions are far from limited to work... Only deliberate focused practice leads to the reinforcement of neural pathways, while distracted work causes too many circuits firing simultaneously for any one of them to strengthen...
open offices are far from ideal... reduced productivity ... lower workplace satisfaction... a “hub-and-spoke” office plan, with communal hubs (water coolers, coffee machines, common rooms with whiteboards,…) ... new ideas and share information... your own isolated spoke to focus on actual work....
“Busyness is not a means to accomplishment, but an obstacle to it.”... In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable... knowledge workers turn back to... doing lots of stuff in a visible manner. Busyness is simply a much easier and clearer metric than productivity or creativity. This further fuels our desire (and others’ demand) for constant connectivity and distractions. ... to convince ourselves... colleagues and superiors that we are useful. We literally end up “performing” busyness. Meetings... often simply scheduled to provide highly visible and easy “markers of progress”... experience a quick sense of accomplishment without actually getting much done ... too lazy to question what ... could be automated, outsourced, or shouldn’t be done in the first place...
Deep Work is the opposite of busyness and requires a harder, more thoughtful approach. It is like a craftsman’s work, based on mastery and quality. The problem is that a traditional craftsman’s work, while hard to master, is usually easy to define...require extremely old fashioned and non-technical approaches and the rejection of many things high-tech, which creates further suspicion...
Flow ... effortless, but also of intense focus free from distractions...The ability to perform Deep Work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time as it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy... almost anyone performing at an elite level has some form of meditation practice as part of their daily routine... even more crucial than strengthening our self-control is eliminating the need to use it at all... routines, habits, and ritualization...
Work drives creativity... But it has to be Deep Work, free from distractions... mornings can be particularly interesting for scheduling creative work... We must rewire the brain to be comfortable resisting tempting stimuli....
Effective rest is a skill ... Deliberate rest is very different from just zoning out in front of the TV, scrolling down our Facebook ... clicking ... cat video on YouTube...Many studies have confirmed that there is an optimal amount of highly focused work of around three to four hours per day.... top performers... leisure time was more structured and planned ... Not only did they engage in deliberate practice, but also in deliberate rest... they slept on average one hour more... transitioning from work to rest is establishing a “work shutdown” routine... But what is good rest?... four major factors...: Relaxation, Control, Mastery, Detachment...
switch between ... being fully ON, focusing ... on their particular craft, or fully OFF, in a state of calm and detached relaxation... What our mind really wants is change. Having a demanding leisure time will not negatively affect ... work. It will boost our performance... Absorbed in a completely different challenge, our mind can fully unleash the subconscious on the process of incubation of a previously encountered problem... Long walks have been a particularly common habit among history’s great minds...