The Best Way to Unlock our Potential?

The bottom line: By doing deep work, we can reach new heights of achievement. Deep work is doing professional activities in a state of distraction-free concentration that push mental capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, make us better, and are hard to replicate. Deep work is becoming increasingly rare at same time it’s becoming increasingly valuable. By scheduling deep work stretches, we’ll see huge productivity and satisfaction gains. We’ll execute better by finding the best outcomes to pursue. By also scheduling lazy downtime, and avoiding unstructured web surfing, we’ll recharge for deep work.

When working deeply, we can feel parts of the mind activating for the first time in months. And we come to realize the mind is like water; we only can see deep when the surface is free of motion.

Inspired by Cal Newport’s eponymous book on Deep Work, below are 16 deep work mantras we can hold onto. As if they were dogma for a productivity religion…

1. Daily life is becoming too full of shallow work, hurting our ability to concentrate. Distraction, especially from tech devices and e-mail, fills our daily lives with a background hum of nervous mental energy. After too much frenetic shallowness, we lose our capacity to perform deep work.
2. Deep work leads to massive productivity. We’ll thrive when we can work deeply to: quickly master hard things; produce at elite quality and speed.
3. A deep life is a good life. We are at our best when…