book New York Grand Central Newport Cal Attachments - Stored Formation for Academic Life Deep work: rules for focused success in a distracted world Newport's book argues for the value of developing the skill of extreme focus on completing difficult and valuable projects—a.k.a., "deep work." For this argument, Part 1 offers three interconnected reasons that address the value, rarity, and meaningfulness of deep work. In a society where more and more can be done by automation and human knowledge workers are more and more distracted (and, therefore, less and less productive), the skill of deep work becomes an increasingly valuable commodity. This skill has great boons for employers as it increases the amount and significance of employee output. But it also has huge benefits for employees (including, e.g., faculty) because of how it allows them to accumulate "career capital," or a body of distinctive work and expertise. To foster this skill, Newport recommends two negative actions—to "drain the shallows" generally and to "quit social media" specifically. Like Hyatt's first two productivity steps, these actions have the primary function of recovering space for deep work (e.g., time, attention) that is currently being lost to less valuable activities. A third supporting practice is to "embrace boredom," which Newport suggests helps to tamp down the brain's craving for "novel stimuli" (e.g., social media) as a way of avoiding the effort required to apply your attention to a difficult problem. In addition to these supporting practices, Newport of course also recommends actually doing deep work, for which he describes several possible general approaches. 2016 295 ISBN 978-1-4555-8669-1 Deep work https://amzn.to/3hSfWQW Library of Congress ISBN BF323.D5 N49 2016 dimensions: yes