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Personal Knowledge Management

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

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1️⃣ Sentence Synopsis

Cal Newport discusses the importance of regular sessions of “deep work” (distraction-free concentration), arguing that this way of working produces neurological, psychological and philosophical benefits and is needed for the jobs of the future.

🖼️ Contexts

This book is consistently recommended in productivity circles but I wasn’t compelled to read it until I heard Newport discuss his career in an interview last year. I found his style of writing—combining dense research and storytelling—compelling and breezy. One of the aspects I like most about this book are the many “breadcrumbs” of interesting research and literature he cites throughout that are a joy to follow up on (see “brain tickles” below).

🔑 Key Takeaways

  • “Deep work” is defined as “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive abilities to their limit” producing value and skill acquisition that is hard to replicate in other ways. “Shallow work” is non-cognitively demanding in nature, consisting of tasks that can be done while distracted (emails, etc.)
  • Uninterrupted, carefully curated distraction-free “deep work” can be done up to four hours per day (but rarely more). While learning or applying new skills, only 1-2 hours of “deep work” can usually be accomplished per day.
  • Routines, ritual and location play a big role in enacting “deep work.” Banning internet use during sessions, or instituting a metric (like words per day), or even changing locations—having a special place where deep work is done—can provide useful constraints. “Start up” and “wind down” rituals (like, a cup of coffee and a walk) are also beneficial for signaling the shift for your mind and body.
  • It is important to aim for a small number of “wildly important goals.”

💯 Strong Lines

  • Why deep work matters: “The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.
  • On the challenge of deep work in our tech-driven society: “Deep work is at a severe disadvantage in a technopoly because it builds on values like quality, craftsmanship, and mastery that are decidedly old-fashioned and nontechnological.”
  • On the pitfalls of modern work culture**:** “On our worst days, it can seem that all knowledge work boils down to the same exhausting roil of e-mails and PowerPoint, with only the charts used in the slides differentiating one career from another.
  • On the importance of ending a workday: “At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning—no after-dinner e-mail check, no mental replays of conversations, and no scheming about how you’ll handle an upcoming challenge; shut down work thinking completely.”

🧠 Brain Tickles

  • The Intellectual Life by Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges, who wrote “Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converging rays of attention; let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea.”
  • “Attention residue” as defined by Sophie Leroy in “Why is it so hard to do my work?”
  • Dreyfus and Kelly’s All Things Shining which cites the Enlightenment as a turning point in how we see ourselves in relation to work and the world: “The Enlightenment’s metaphysical embrace of the autonomous individual leads not just to a boring life…it leads almost inevitably to a nearly unlivable one.”
  • The practice of giving of your time and attention, without expectation of reward or anything in return, as explored in Adam Grant’s Give and Take.
  • Kaplan’s Attention restoration theory (ART) —the importance of being in nature as a natural remedy for chronic concentration loss.

🍎 Ideas and Excerpts for Teaching and Learning

There are no explicit sections for teaching and learning (though Newport himself is a professor and has authored another book aimed directly at a student audience), but a lot of the cited studies have implications for how we teach:

  • For example, we should think about just how much students can learn of an unfamiliar concept or discipline: “…for a novice, somewhere around an hour a day of intense concentration seems to be a limit.”
  • On the importance of building “boredom stamina”: “Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction…it’s hard to shake the addition even when you want to concentrate.”
  • Incorporation of “productive meditation” into learning—spaces where students are occupied physically but not mentally (walking, jogging, building, etc.) so that periods of focused concentration are more productive.
  • Not from the book but from his blog: “The Advice I gave my Students” (a low-key approach to digital minimalism during exams).

4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

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1️⃣ Sentence Synopsis

This stoic’s approach to time management argues that the ways we’ve been conditioned to “use” our time ultimately leave us exhausted and overwhelmed because there is an “unbridgeable gap” between what we’d ideally like to do with our lives and the realities of our finite existence on earth.

🖼️ Contexts

I was listening to an interview with Cal Newport, the author of Deep Work (among many other books), and he recommended this as a thought-provoking take on the productivity-industrial complex. I found it helpful to reframe some of my own life goals and get closer to the heart of what I truly would like to experience with whatever time I’m gifted.

🔑 Key Takeaways

  • Time shouldn’t be viewed as a resource. Once we commodify it, it can be exploited, wasted, bought, or sold. This connects with the “attention economy” but more deeply to our individual feelings and the self-loathing when feel when we don’t use it as “productively” as we should. Max Weber names this “idleness aversion” as one of the key components of the modern soul (in earlier times, our yearnings for productivity would have been yearnings for eternal life).
  • Existential overwhelm is the epidemic of our age. We have a greater sense today, as a result of the internet, of the variety of worthwhile experiences a human being can have. This “inexhaustible supply” of potentiality can lead to feelings of regret, overwhelm and decision paralysis.
  • Embrace being-towards-death. This idea, developed by the philosopher Martin Heidegger, requires that we fully acknowledge our limitations and come to embrace the idea that we cannot depend on a single moment in the future (because none of us know if we shall indeed live to experience it).
  • Procrastinators and productivists are two sides of the same coin. The former believe they have all the time in the world to do a task, while the latter believe they can cram all the tasks in the world into a finite period of time. Each is in denial of mortality.
  • All “distractions” relieve us of the discomfort of confronting our own limited control. Zen Buddhists say all human suffering is connected to our efforts to resist paying full attention to life as it is (wanting circumstance to be different from what it is) or wishing we had more control in the process.
  • Plans are just thoughts. We need plans as tools to construct meaningful lives – but take them to be frameworks for exerting control over the future when all they really can be is “a present-moment statement of intent.”
  • Hobbies are subversive. In a world where every activity is a means to an end, hobbies are a refreshing antidote (he also says they should be a “little embarassaing” in order to qualify as real hobbies).

💯 Strong Lines

  • On secular modernity: “When people stop believing in an afterlife, everything depends on making the most of this life.”
  • On time management systems: “The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.”
  • On saying no to the things you love: “You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life.”
  • On the illusion of creating a perfect anything: “Something—our limited talents, our limited time, our limited control over events, and over the actions of other people—will always render our creation less than perfect.
  • On worry loops and anxiety spirals: “Worry, at its core, is the repetitious experience of a mind attempting to generate a feeling of security about the future, failing, then trying again and again and again.”
  • On capitalism: “One way of understanding capitalism, in fact, is as a giant machine for instrumentalizing everything it encounters—the earth’s resources, your time and abilities (or “human resources”)—in the service of future profit.”
  • On digital nomadism: “…every gain in personal temporal freedom entails a corresponding loss in how easy it is to coordinate your time with other people’s. The digital nomad’s lifestyle lacks the shared rhythms required for deep relationships to take root.”

🧠 Brain Tickles

  • On Settling, Robert Goodin’s treatise on the connection between settling and striving (you cannot become successful at anything without first settling on that thing)
  • I loved this quote by Simone de Beauvoir that was shared about how chance and choice converge in life:

I go to sleep after lunch in the room where I work, sometimes I wake up with a feeling of childish amazement—why am I myself? What astonishes me, just as it astonishes a child when he becomes aware of his own identity, is the fact of finding myself here, and at this moment, deep in this life and not in any other. What stroke of chance has brought this about?… The penetration of that particular ovum by that particular spermatozoon, with its implications of the meeting of my parents and before that of their birth and the birth of all their forebears, had not one chance in hundreds of millions of coming about. And it is chance, a chance quite unpredictable in the present state of science, that caused me to be born a woman. From that point on, it seems to me that a thousand different futures might have stemmed from every single movement of my past: I might have fallen ill and broken off my studies; I might not have met Sartre; anything at all might have happened.

  • Most parenting advice focuses on the future adult the child will become (either the most happy, most successful, most economically productive) and our assumption is that a child’s purpose is to grow up rather than to be a child.
  • If you’re willing to endure the discomfort of not knowing, a solution will often present itself (this applies almost everywhere—creative work, relationship troubles, politics, parenting).
  • Cosmic insignificance therapy. In the grand scheme of things, all we can hope for is a modestly meaningful life given the minute significance we actually have.

🍎 Ideas & Excerpts for Teaching and Learning

  • Loved the critique of the “big rocks” metaphor (which is often used in the classroom and elsewhere for goal-setting activities) on page 73: “The real problem of time management today, though, isn’t that we’re bad at prioritizing the big rocks. It’s that there are too many rocks—and most of them are never making it anywhere near that jar.”
  • “Attention is the beginning of devotion” – a whole different way to think about the attention economy starting with this line from Mary Oliver’s Upstream (excerpt here) and with the author’s recollection of a moment on a wind-swept Scottish beach, pg. 97.
  • Jennifer Roberts’ assignment on patience (as described on page 174)
  • This description of the writing process (from Robert Boice): “It was precisely the students’ impatient desire to hasten their work beyond its appropriate pace, to race on to the point of completion, that was impeding their progress. They couldn’t stand the discomfort that arose from being forced to acknowledge their limited control over the speed of the creative process—and so they sought to escape it, either by not getting down to work at all, or by rushing headlong into stressful all-day writing binges, which led to procrastination later on, because it made them learn to hate the whole endeavor.”

Five Questions (starting on pg. 220:

  1. Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?
    • James Hollis recommends this version at key decisions in life: “Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?”
  2. What would you do differently with your time, today, if you knew in your bones that salvation was never coming—that your standards had been unreachable all along, and that you’ll therefore never manage to make time for all you hoped you might?
  3. In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?
  4. In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing?
  5. How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?

Life Advice (starting on pg. 235)

  1. Adopt a fixed-volume approach to productivity. Keep two lists – one “open” (with all the tasks you could ever want or hope to do) and one “closed” that can only have 4, or 6 or 10 entries at a time. Or, set boundaries for work times. Only work as much as you can within those constraints.
  2. Serialize, serialize, serialize. Focus on one project at a time.
  3. Decide, in advance, what to fail at.
  4. Focus on what you’ve already completed.
  5. Consolidate your caring.
  6. Embrace boring and single-purpose technology.
  7. Seek out novelty in the mundane.
  8. Be a “researcher” in relationships.
  9. Cultivate instantaneous generosity.
  10. Practice doing nothing.

No Zombie Projects: 3 Takeaways from Building a Second Brain’s Online Course

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I enrolled in Cohort 14 of Building a Second Brain in March of this year and thought I’d share some insights from that course to complement my notes from Tiago Forte’s recent book of the same title. Here are three that are still rattling around in my head all these months later that I didn’t find in the book:

1. No Zombie Projects

It’s easy to pile up a list of 10-15 ongoing projects in a master list and watch many of them atrophy from neglect as the months go by. My ideal self lives in my projects — the articles I haven’t written, books I haven’t read, presentations I have yet to give, courses I have yet to take, habits I want to adopt or break, creativity that wants to find expression in the tiny cracks of daylight between the “actual” (re: paying) work that consumes most workdays. Every project is “a hypothesis” that requires testing, in Tiago’s words, and so he advises that it is better for any endeavor to “fail fast” than to continue on in a project-list purgatory forever.

2. Your Attention is your Most Valuable Currency

The course begins with a module on “the perspective age” with the argument that one’s perspective – the way we experience the world, our education, desires, skills and interests—are uniquely ours and that it is the expression of this perspective that adds the most value to what we do creatively. There are a lot of implications that follow from this argument but one that I found compelling was the importance of paying attention to what I am paying attention to. In other words, making sure my information diet is rich with diverse perspectives and depth, and that I have some way of retrieving these – as well as the connected ideas they spark within me – when I need. In the Distill session, he remarked: “If you can just know what you know” you’ll be lightyears ahead in terms of navigating the endless space of the digital information universe.

3. Creative Decisions Really are Agonizing 

In Week 4, Tiago showed this simple graphic of the creative process: 

Forte, T. (2022, May 03). Week 4: Express [Powerpoint slides]. Building a Second Brain, Forte Labs.

“Divergent” stages of thinking – when we pin, like, and save all manner of digital ephemera – has to eventually come to a “convergent stage” of eliminating many of these ideas, even our most beloved (“decision” contains the Latin root –cide meaning “act of killing”). At some point, not all the ideas can progress forward, only the select few – the ones that most align to the purpose of the project. You will inevitably axe material you deeply love – that metaphor, example, chart, or image – but those can be worked into other projects, other spaces. This wasn’t revelatory information but has proved helpful in nudging me along from divergent states (which are always so fun!) to convergent states of thinking and creating that are more challenging. 

Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte

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1️⃣ Sentence Synopsis

The internet age requires us to outsource the capturing, organizing and distillation of information to a “second brain” (a “personal knowledge management system” or digital repository) so that we can be more productive in our creative efforts.

🖼️ Contexts

I fell down a productivity-guru rabbit hole about a year ago, stumbling upon numerous videos using this term “second brain” (like this one and this one) that led me to the Forte Labs website and Tiago’s blog (as well as the e-books that were created from them). I applied for a scholarship to attend his virtual workshop (Cohort 14) and can say the systems he presents have helped me feel less scattered and more able to connect interesting ideas from what I’m reading, watching and listening to. He covers a lot of ground here – this book really does function as the written equivalent of his course – including his lauded PARA system (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive). This overarching framework can function as a “life management” system and is adaptable any productivity app — Evernote, Notion, Obsidian, Roam. PARA helps us know where to put the information we consume. As to the what, how, when and why—there is another framework for how to develop and embed the information into creative projects: CODE (Capture, Organize, Distill, Express). Both are versatile and customizable methods that can help knowledge workers (and whole organizations) manage and make use of the information streams we swim in every day.

🔑 Key Takeaways

  • It is better to organize information by utility and action rather than theme or topic (i.e, How is this going to help me move forward one of my current projects?)
  • The goal of notetaking (and PKM more broadly) is creative expression —that is, to evaluate, share, teach, record, post, lobby, publish, speak, present, perform, produce, write, draw interpret, critique or translate.
  • To avoid saving/bookmarking too much: Ask yourself: Does it inspire me? Is it useful? Is it personal? Is it surprising?
  • Think about projects in terms of “intermediate packets” – the drafts, sketches, pilots, prototypes, concepts and demos—the smaller stepping stones that can be remixed, recycled and reused once a project is complete (key question: what are the knowledge assets you’re creating today that will be most valuable in the future?)

💯 Strong Lines

  • Surrounded by knowledge, starving for wisdom: So many of us share the feeling that we are surrounded by knowledge, yet starving for wisdom. That despite all the mind-expanding ideas we have access to, the quality of our attention is only getting worse. That we are paralyzed by the conflict between our responsibilities and our most heartfelt passions, so that we are never quite able to focus and also never quite able to rest.
  • Creative Constraints: “Innovation and impact don’t happen by accident or chance. Creativity depends on creative process.”
  • Don’t get too Complicated: “We don’t need complex, sophisticated systems to be able to produce complex, sophisticated works.”
  • The purpose of notes: “Your job as a notetaker is to preserve the notes you’re taking on the things you discover in such a way that they can survive the journey into the future.”
  • Save the in-between work: “—the notes, the drafts, the outlines, the feedback—tends to be underappreciated and undervalued….If we consider how precious little time we have to produce something extraordinary in our careers, it becomes imperative that we recycle that knowledge back into a system where it can become useful again.”
  • On the attention economy: “The ability to intentionally and strategically allocate our attention is a competitive advantage in a distracted world.”
  • It all goes back to childhood: “Underlying our struggles and challenges with productivity, creativity, and performance is our fundamental relationship to the information in our lives. That relationship was forged during your upbringing as you encountered new experiences, and was influenced by your personality, learning style, relationships, and your genes. You learned to react in a certain way when faced with new ideas. You adopted a default “blueprint” for how you treated incoming information—with anticipation, fear, self-doubt or some complex mix of feelings that is unique to you. That default attitude to information colors every aspect of your life.”

🧠 Brain Tickles

  • Archipelago of ideas: a metaphor that comes from Steven Johnson’s work, where he describes his writing process: “…I used to lose weeks stalling before each new chapter because it was a big sea of nothingness. Now each chapter starts life as a kind of archipelago of inspiring quotes, which make sit seem far less daunting. All I have to do is build bridges between the islands.” It’s a practice similar to outlining.
  • Hemingway bridge: Ernest Hemingway famously ended his writing sessoins mid-sentence or mid-idea so that he knew what would come next in the story—this way the generative energy of one day could fuel the creativity of the next. A similar effect can be done with next steps, current status, thought captures, and intentions for follow up sessions.
  • Dial down the scope: common among project managers and software developers, this term refers to removing features and functionality for the launch of a product rather than delaying it all together.
  • Cathedral Effect: the spaces we inhabit change our ways of thinking.

🍎 Ideas & Excerpts for Teaching and Learning

The description of creative processes were illuminating and helped illustrate a variety of human creative endeavor and expression. In particular:

  • Twyla Tharp’s “boxes” (pp. 81-84, also detailed in her book The Creative Habit)
  • Octavia Butler’s commonplace books (pp. 145-149; you can also read about/see them here)
  • Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather notebooks (pp. 133-116, you can also watch him talk about them here)

The description of the “knowledge flywheel” (pg. 201) connects to sustainable assignments and open pedagogical approaches.

How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens

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1️⃣ Sentence Synopsis

Ahrens presents an overview of Niklas Luhmann’s “Zettlekasten” (Slip Box) methodology and provides cognitive research to support premises as to why this method works to achieve “flow” in academic writing by making it associative, and therefore more self-directed, motivating, and fun.

🖼️ Contexts

This book had been recommended over and over again in the world of personal knowledge management. The rather uninspiring title does no justice to this book that I was tempted to highlight in full. If you are interested in how to make novel connections between ideas (and the importance of this based on deep and varied research), this book is time well spent.

🔑 Key Takeaways

  • The writing process does not begin with the blank page; rather, it is the work that comes before – copious and associative note-taking, chunking of ideas and sources, that allow for the “writing” of argument to be a matter of piecing together, looking for holes/fallacies, and tightening transitions.
  • Attention and short-term memory are limited resources. Writing things down helps alleviate the cognitive load of both.The writing process does not begin with the blank page; rather, it is the work that comes before – copious and associative note-taking, chunking of ideas and sources, that allow for the “writing” of argument to be a matter of piecing together, looking for holes/fallacies, and tightening transitions.
  • The biggest threat to creativity is lack of structure and restriction.

💯 Strong Lines

  • About Expertise/Knowledge Management: “Experts…have internalized the necessary knowledge so they don’t have to actively remember rules or think consciously about their choices….They have acquired enough experience in various situations to be able to rely on their intuition to know what to do in which kind of situation. Their decisions in complex situations are explicitly not made by long rational-analytical considerations, but rather come from the gut…gut feeling is not a mysterious force, but an incorporated history of experience.”
  • When we think we have the solution: “Sometimes it is more important to rediscover the problems for which we already have a solution than to think solely about the problems that are present to us….without intense elaboration on what we already know, we would have trouble seeing its limitations, what is missing or possibly wrong.”

🧠 Brain Tickles

  • Handwriting (as opposed to typing) is better for authentic paraphrasing
  • Confirmation bias is a (if not the) major problem in academic thinking + writing
  • The goal is to write/express oneself in a simplified (not simple) way and this leads to better speaking.
  • “Writing for Learning” or “Elaboration Method” is the best researched and most successful learning method.
  • Storage Strength (cannot be improved) and is often the focus of education (which makes no sense). Retrieval strength should be the focus (Bjork 2011).
  • Learning vs. Understanding (understanding is the goal).>br>
  • We like our first ideas best (and are reluctant to let them go!)
  • Try working on different manuscripts at once. This way, “flow” can continue even when we run out of thoughts in one space.
  • The longer nights of winter offer invitations to explore “liminal spaces” – to sleep more, to reflect more and to thus gain unexpected insight as we, in the dead of night, “repair the fragmented narratives of our days.”

🍎 Ideas & Excerpts for Teaching and Learning

I don’t think there is a single excerpt that would be applicable to the classroom but here are some additional “strong lines” relevant to teaching writing:

  • “Writing is, without dispute, the best facilitator for thinking, reading, learning, understanding, and generating ideas we have.”
  • “The professor is not there for the student and the student not for the professor. Both are only there for the truth.”
  • “Writing a paper involves much more than just typing on the keyboard. It also means reading, understanding, reflecting, getting ideas, making connections, distinguishing terms, finding the right words, structuring, organizing, editing, correcting and rewriting.”
  • “Teachers tend to mistake the ability to follow (their) rules with the ability to make the right choices in real situations.” (Hubert and Dreyfus)
  • “The key to creativity is being able to switch between a wide-open, playful mind and a narrow analytical frame.” (Dean, 2013, 152)
  • “Luhmann states as clearly as possible: it is not possible to think systematically without writing” (Luhmann)
  • “Learning, thinking and writing should not be about accumulating knowledge, but about becoming a different person with a different way of thinking.”