Sharing what I have learned from what I have read: A blog by Joe Abittan
A line from John Hudak's book Marijuana: A Short History is worth thinking about if we are someone who frequently thinks about public policy. Hudak writes, "The black market just has to deliver marijuana; the legal market must meet consumer demand." Hudak's line comes from an early paragraph in his book where he discusses historical … Continue reading A Thought About Black Markets
The final quote that I have from Cal Newport's book Deep Work is just a reminder of the pragmatic reality of deep work: "the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done." The reason we should take ideas of deep work seriously is because it will help us be better at doing the … Continue reading Deep Work is Pragmatic
In the knowledge economy, many of us have a thousand things we could do with our time at any given moment. Email (as I have written about previously) is always an available option to us, we usually have a lot of reports we could work on, and there is always another meeting we could be … Continue reading Deciding Which Tasks to Own
How much time do you need for some of the mundane tasks in your life? You probably have a good sense for how long it takes you to get yourself together for work in the morning, how long it takes to prep your easy Thursday dinner, and how long it takes you to brush your … Continue reading Estimating Our Schedule
"We spend much of our day on autopilot – not giving much thought to what we're doing with our time," writes Cal Newport in his book Deep Work. "This is a problem. It's difficult to prevent the trivial from creeping into every corner of your schedule if you don't face, without flinching, your current balance … Continue reading Spending Our Days on Autopilot
Cal Newport writes, "in many cases, contributions to an outcome are not evenly distributed," in his book Deep Work. Across many different domains, several of which Newport mentions in his book, we find an 80/20 split emerge terms of relationships between important things. Newport states that 80% of computer program crashes are caused by just … Continue reading Focus on the Few Major Items
In his book Deep Work, Cal Newport contrasts two types of approaches to the digital tools that we use and create. We have a lot of powerful social media and network messaging applications, and these tools and applications are often given to us, or seemingly forced onto us, without much choice on our end. If … Continue reading How We Think About Our Digital Tools
How often are you bored? How often do you actually experience boredom without instantaneously having something to do that will keep your mind at least somewhat occupied, even if not occupied by anything important? You have probably had a boring work training that you had to sit through without nodding off, but outside of that, … Continue reading The Value of Boredom
My last post was about training the brain to become less dependent on continuous novelty and to become better at concentrated focus. Training the brain for deep work requires that we wean ourselves from distractions and in some senses rewire our brains to be less dependent on distracting stimuli. Cal Newport describes exactly what … Continue reading Constant Task Switching
"Once you're wired for distraction, you crave it," writes Cal Newport in his book Deep Work. Our technology today is not built nor designed to provide us with the best space for focus, it is not intended to provide us the maximum possible value, and it is not sold to us to truly enhance … Continue reading Wired for Distraction