书中的核心概念是“人的意志力是有限的”，因此书中提出的大部分建议都围绕下面两点展开:
- 减少意志力的开销,
- 减少干扰。
Rhythmic
通过制定生活和工作中的routines，尝试把deep work变成一个简单的习惯，从而减少自己精神里的犹豫和拖延，确保自己每天投资时间在自己的项目上。这个方法对没有deadline的项目尤其重要。一些简单的habit tracker app就能满足这方面的需要，例如我在使用的Productive.
Take breaks from Focus
书中提到，与其尝试在闲散时间中建立集中精力的状态，倒不如把集中精力当作常态，而把闲散时间当作休息。这种理念与Pomodoro方法很契合，所以我打算用Be Focused作为执行的工具。注意的是在Pomodoro的工作时间内，你必须确保这段时间里有足够高的工作强度。自己自定一个deadline是个很好的方法，来逼出自己最大的效率。
Schedule every minute of your work hour
Pomodoro方法能够提供一个low-level的保持集中力方案，但是从high-level上，你也应该做好每天(work hours)里的计划。 这样做一方面能给自己足够的压力在每个Pomodoro session里面保持专注，另一方面能够了解自己一天能有多少工作时间，有助于自己的时间规划和效率分析。 我在尝试用David Seah的Emergent Task Planner作为每天行程规划的模版。
Schedule Internet usage in advance
现实意义来说，不用Internet是个很难完成的任务，所以我把目标降低成减少Internet带来的干扰。 把Email和Slack这种的工作都放在一个5到15分钟的block里面处理，减少Pomodoro session里面互联网的使用。 DevDocs和Dash这样的工具能够满足大部分查阅文档的需要。 HN有毒，能不上就不上。 坦白说我把目标降低后，因为没有了一个强硬的禁闭手段，确实更容易让自己的时间浪费上无关重要的页面上了。 作为折中，我尝试使用Rescue Time来分析自己的时间使用效率。 现阶段我打算每周回顾一次，但是如果时间上允许的话，也许每日回顾能更有效的发现不好的效率信号然后更快地作出改变。
Project Execution
在执行具体项目的时候，可以用上很多管理团队项目的概念。
- 侧重在最重要的事情上
- 建立自己的计分牌，找到自己效率的metrics，然后根据lead measures而行动。在书中提出的工作模式里，花了多少时间在deep work session是一个不错的关注点
- 回顾自己的计分牌，不停挑战自己的极限
Quit Social Media
回顾自己使用的社交网络工具，评价每一个对自己的重要性，然后放弃对自己并不重要的那些。 同时，不要使用互联网来娱乐自己。安排自己每晚的时间，尝试建立自己的兴趣爱好(structured hobbies)，为自己打发时间的方式找到目标并以此行动。
Drain the Shallows
问问自己，你现在手头中的工作如果要交给一个没有相关背景的聪明大学毕业生，他需要多久的训练才能完成这样的工作？
找到能够增长自己价值的deep work，减少自己在shallow work上面花的时间和精力。
Work-life balance
在下午5:30时结束工作，并通过这个hard deadline在逼使自己在工作时间内达到高效率。 不要尝试回复每一封邮件，让发信人做更多的功课来说服你来回复。 同时，在自己的回复花费更多的功夫，目标是更有效率地推动手上的项目进行，而不是进入没有意义的扯皮中。 回答书中提到的三个问题，能够更好的归纳自己的思路。
What is the project represented by this message, and what is the most efficient (in terms of messages generated) process for bringing this project to a successful conclusion?
Work Deeply
Willpower is finite. Add routines and rituals to your working life to minimize willpower cost and distraction.
Philosophies
Monastic
- What: eliminating or radically minimize shallow obligations.
- When: your contribution to the world is discrete, clear and individual.
Bimodal
- What: divide your time and dedicate some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits
…people will usually respect your right to become inaccessible if these periods are well defined and well advertised, and outside these stretches, you’re once again easy to find.
Rhythmic
- What: transforms deep work sessions into a simple regular habit.
- Why: removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you’re going to go deep. Make you disciple to work on projects that don’t have hard deadline.
- How: a simple scheduling heuristic (do the work everyday) with an easy way to remind yourself to do the work (red X’s on calendar as visual indicator; a set starting time every day).
Journalistic
- What: fit deep work into wherever you can into your schedule.
- How: create a plan ahead of time about how you’re gonna enter/implement your deep work, which eventually make it easier to dive in whenever you have a chance.
Ritualize
Build ritual with strictness and idiosyncrasy:
- Where you’ll work and how long
- Radical change to your environment
- A significant investment of effort or money
- How you’ll work once you start to work
- Forbids Internet access
- Maintain a metric
- How you’ll support your work
- Coffee, food
- Light exercises
Don’t work alone
This combination of soundproofed offices connected to large common areas yields a hub-and-spoke architecture of innovation in which both serendipitous encounter and isolated deep thinking are supported.
…Expose yourself to ideas in hubs on a regular basis, but maintain a spoke in which to work deeply on what you encounter.
Execution
Focus on the wildly important
Act on the lead measures
Lag measures describe the thing you’re ultimately trying to improve. However, they come too late to change your behaviour.
Lead measures measure the new behaviours that will drive success on the lag measures. For individual work, time spent in a state of deep work dedicated towards your wildly important goal.
Keep a compelling scoreboard
A scoreboard creates a sense of competition that drives people to focus on the (lead) measures.
Create a cadence of accountability
…the team members must confront their scoreboard, commit to specific actions to help improve the score before the next meeting, and describe what happened with the commitments they made at the last meeting.
For individual, it can be done as a habit of a weekly review in which you make a plan for the workweek ahead.
Be Lazy
Disconnected from work at the end of the workday helps to recharge and focus on things outside of work.
Embrace Boredom
Take breaks from Focus
…and don’t take breaks from distraction.
Schedule Internet usage in advance
Work like Teddy Roosevelt with great intensity
Give your brain practice with intensity, but also giving it time to rest in between. Always keep your self-imposed deadlines right at the edge of feasibility.
Productive Meditation
- Be wary of distractions and looping (on what you already know about it)
- Structure your deep thinking (review variables → define specific next-step question → review the answer you identified)
Memorize a Deck of Cards
- You begin by cementing in your mind the mental image of walking through five rooms in your home.
- Once you can easily recall this mental walkthrough of a well-known location, fix in your mind a collection of ten items in each of these rooms.
- Combined this is only fifty items, so add two more items, perhaps in your backyard, to get to the full fifty-two items you’ll later need when connecting these images to all the cards in a standard deck.
- Associate a memorable person or thing with each of the fifty-two possible cards.
- As you encounter each item, look at the next card from the shuffled deck, and imagine the corresponding memorable person or thing doing something memorable near that item. For example.
Quit Social Media
The Any-Benefit Approach to Network Tool Selection: You’re justified in using a network tool if you can identify any possible benefit to its use, or anything you might possibly miss out on if you don’t use it.
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 its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.
Apply the Law of the Vital Few to Your Internet Habits
- Identify the main high-level goals in both your professional and your personal life.
- List for each the two or three most important (specific enough to act, but general enough that are not tied to a onetime outcome) activities that help you satisfy the goal.
- Consider the network tools you’re currently use. Go through the key activities and ask whether the use of the tool has a substantially positive, substantially negative, or little impact on your regular and successful participation in the activity.
The Law of the Vital Few * : In many settings, 80 percent of a given effect is due to just 20 percent of the possible causes.
Quit Social Media
Don’t Use the Internet to Entertain Yourself
Figure out in advance what you’re going to do with your evenings and weekends before they begin.
Structured hobbies provide good fodder for these hours, as they generate specific actions with specific goals to fill your time.
Drain the Shallows
Very few people work even 8 hours a day. You’re lucky if you get a few good hours in between all the meetings, interruptions, web surfing, office politics, and personal business that permeate the typical workday.
Treat shallow work with suspicion. Keep it confined to a point where it doesn’t impede your ability to take full advantage of the deeper efforts.
Schedule Every Minute of Your Day
Maintain a thoughtful say in what you’re doing with your time going forward.
Quantify the Depth of Every Activity
Shallow Work: Non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.
How long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task?
Ask Your Boss for a Shallow Work Budget
What percentage of my time should be spent on shallow work?
Finish Your Work by Five Thirty
- Set drastic quotas on the major sources of shallow endeavours in her academic life.
- Avoid providing enough specificity about the excuse that the requester has the opportunity to defuse it.
Become Hard to Reach
Make People Who Send you E-mail Do More Work
Do More Work When You Send or Reply to E-mails
What is the project represented by this message, and what is the most efficient (in terms of messages generated) process for bringing this project to a successful conclusion?
Don’t Respond
When it comes to e-mail, they believed, it’s the sender’s responsibility to convince the receiver that a reply is worthwhile.