## Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World ### Rule 1 Work Deeply - Decide on your depth philosophy - Monastic philosophy - Radically minimise shallow obligations - Bimodal philosophy - Eliminating distractions for a period through a retreat - Divide time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else - Rhythmic Philosophy - Transform Deep Work sessions into a simple regular habit - Generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need for you to invest energy - Journalistic Philosophy - Fit deep work wherever you can in your schedule - Typically hard to achieve as a novice - Ritualise - To make the most out of deep work sessions build rituals of a level of strictness and idiosyncrasies - Helps minimise the friction in transition to depth - Where you'll work and for how long, How you'll work once you start to work, How you'll support your work - Make grand gestures - By leveraging a radical change you increase the perceived motivation. Reduces your mind's instinct to procrastinate - Don't work alone - Hub and spoke model MIT architecture - Execute like a business - 4 disciplines of execution 4DX - Focus on the wildly important - Act on the lead measures - Keep a compelling scoreboard - Create a cadence of accountability - Be lazy - Inject regular and substantial freedom from professional concerns into your day - Downtime aids insights - Downtime helps recharge the energy needed to work deeply - The work that evening downtime replaces is usually not that important - Shutdown ritual ### Rule 2 Embrace Boredom - Don't take breaks from distraction. Instead take breaks from focus. - Schedule in advance when you'll use the internet - Have a full day of scheduled distraction - Work like Teddy Roosevelt - Inject the occasional dash of Rooseveltian intensity into your work day. Commit to a work and give yourself a hard deadline that drastically reduces this time. - Meditate productively - Be wary of distractions and looping - Structure your deep thinking - Memorise a deck of cards ### Rule 3 Quit Social Media - Any benefit approach to network tool selection - You're justified in using a network tool if you can identify any possible benefit to it's use or anything you might possibly miss out on if you don't use it. vs The craftsman approach to tool selection - Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if it's positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh it's negative impacts. - Apply the law of the vital few to your internet habits. "In many settings 80 percent of a given effect is due to just 20% of the possible causes." - Don't use the internet to entertain yourself ### Rule 4 Drain the Shallows - Schedule every minute of your day; be intentional about changes, not necessarily rigid - Quantify the depth of each activity - how long would it take to train a recent college graduate? - Ask your boss for a shallow work budget - Finish your work by 5:30 - Become hard to reach - Make people who send you email do more work - Do more work when you send a reply to email. Process centric email - Don't respond