“I’d take 5 days in a row”: from Fried’s company’s blog: “Workplace Experiments.” https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3186-workplace-experiments-a-month-to-yourself.
“How can we afford to”: from an Inc.com article: Fried, Jason. “Why I Gave My Company a Month Off.” Inc., August 22, 2012. http://www.inc.com/magazine/201209/jason-fried/why-company-a-month-off.html.
The notes on how many hours a day of deliberate practice are possible come from page 370 of: Ericsson, K.A., R.T. Krampe, and C. Tesch-R?mer. “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance.” Psychological Review 100.3 (1993): 363–406.
Schedule Every Minute of Your Day
The statistics about British TV habits come from this Guardian article, by Mona Chalabi, published on October 8, 2013: “Do We Spend More Time Online or Watching TV?” http://www.theguardian.com/politics/reality-check/2013/oct/08/spend-more-time-online-or-watching-tv-internet.
The Laura Vanderkam article in the Wall Street Journal: “Overestimating Our Overworking,” May 29, 2009, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB124355233998464405.
“I think you far understate”: from comment #6 of the blog post “Deep Habits: Plan Your Week in Advance,” August 8, 2014. http://calnewport.com/blog/2014/08/08/deep-habits-plan-your-week-in-advance.
Finish Your Work by Five Thirty
“Scary myths and scary data abound” and general information about Radhika Nagpal’s fixed-schedule productivity habit:
“The Awesomest 7-Year Postdoc or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-Track Faculty Life,” Scientific American, July 21, 2013. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/07/21/the-awesomest-7-year-postdoc-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-tenure-track-faculty-life/.
Matt Welsh’s quote about typical travel for junior faculty: “The Fame Trap.” Volatile and Decentralized, August 4, 2014. http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-fame-trap.html.
The issue of Science where Radhika Nagpal’s work appears on the cover: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/343/6172.toc; Science 343.6172 (February 14, 2014): 701–808.
Become Hard to Reach
“we are slowly eroding our ability to explain”: from page 13 of Freeman, John. The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox. New York: Scribner, 2009.
To see my sender filters in action: http://calnewport.com/contact/.
“So, when I emailed Cal to ask if he”: Glei, Jocelyn. “Stop the Insanity: How to Crush Communication Overload.” 99U, http://99u.com/articles/7002/stop-the-insanity-how-to-crush-communication-overload.
“At some point, the number of people reaching out” and more details on Clay Herbert and Antonio Centeno’s filters: Simmons, Michael. “Open Relationship Building: The 15-Minute Habit That Transforms Your Network.” Forbes, June 24, 2014. http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelsimmons/2014/06/24/open-relationship-building-the-15-minute-habit-that-transforms-your-network/.
Notice, this Forbes.com article also talks about my own sender filter habit. (I suggested the name “sender filter” to the article’s author, Michael Simmons, who is also a longtime friend of mine.)
See Antonio’s filters in action: http://www.realmenrealstyle.com/contact/.
“Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen”: from Tim Ferriss’ blog: “The Art of Letting Bad Things Happen.” The Tim Ferriss Experiment, October 25, 2007. http://fourhourworkweek.com/2007/10/25/weapons-of-mass-distractions-and-the-art-of-letting-bad-things-happen/.
Conclusion
“a prodigious feat of concentration”: from an article for the Harvard Gazette: Isaacson, Walter. “Dawn of a Revolution,” September 2013. http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/09/dawn-of-a-revolution/.
“The one trait that differentiated [Gates from Allen] was focus”: Isaacson, Walter. The Innovators. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014. The quote came from 9:55 into Chapter 6 of Part 2 in the unabridged Audible.com audio version of the book.
The details of the Bill Gates story came mainly from Isaacson, “Dawn of a Revolution,” article, which Walter Isaacson excerpted (with modification) from his Innovators. I also pulled some background details, however, from Stephen Manes’s excellent 1994 business biography. Manes, Stephen. Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry—and Made Himself the Richest Man in America. New York: Doubleday, 1992.
Newport, Cal. So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skill Trumps Passion in the Quest for Work You Love. New York: Business Plus, 2012.
You can find a list of my computer science publications, organized by year, at my academic website: http://people.cs.georgetown.edu/~cnewport. The publications from my year of living deeply are listed under 2014. Notice that theoretical computer scientists, like myself, publish mainly in competitive conferences, not journals, and that we tend to list authors alphabetically, not in order of contribution.
“I’ll live the focused life”: from page 14 of Gallagher, Rapt.
* The complex reality of the technologies that real companies leverage to get ahead emphasizes the absurdity of the now common idea that exposure to simplistic, consumer-facing products—especially in schools—somehow prepares people to succeed in a high-tech economy. Giving students iPads or allowing them to film homework assignments on YouTube prepares them for a high-tech economy about as much as playing with Hot Wheels would prepare them to thrive as auto mechanics.
* After Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea of deliberate practice in his 2008 bestseller, Outliers: The Story of Success, it became fashionable within psychology circles (a group suspicious, generally speaking, of all things Gladwellian) to poke holes in the deliberate practice hypothesis. For the most part, however, these studies did not invalidate the necessity of deliberate practice, but instead attempted to identify other components also playing a role in expert performance. In a 2013 journal article, titled “Why Expert Performance Is Special and Cannot Be Extrapolated from Studies of Performance in the General Population: A Response to Criticisms,” and published in the journal Intelligence 45 (2014): 81–103, Ericsson pushed back on many of these studies. In this article, Ericsson argues, among other things, that the experimental designs of these critical papers are often flawed because they assume you can extrapolate the difference between average and above average in a given field to the difference between expert and non-expert.
* In the United States, there are three ranks of professors: assistant, associate, and full. You’re typically hired as an assistant professor and promoted to associate professor when you receive tenure. Full professorship is something that usually requires many years to achieve after tenure, if you achieve it at all.
* Lexical decision games flash strings of letters on the screen; some form real words, and some do not. The player has to decide as quickly as possible if the word is real or not, pressing one key to indicate “real” and another to indicate “not real.” These tests allow you to quantify how much certain keywords are “activated” in the player’s mind, because more activation leads the player to hit the “real word” quicker when they see it flash on the screen.
* In Part 2, I go into more detail about why this claim is not necessarily true.