• Page 215: Drain the shallows.
• Page 221: Schedule every minute of your day.
• Page 222: We spend much of our day on autopilot, not giving much thought to what we’re doing with our time. This is the problem.
• Page 223: At the beginning of each workday, turn to a new page of lined paper in a notebook dedicated for this purpose. Down the left-hand side of the page, mark every other line with an hour of the day, covering the full set of hours in your typical workday.
• Page 223: To keep things reasonably clean, the minimum length of a block should be 30 minutes. Batch similar things into more generic task blocks.
• Page 224: If your schedule is disrupted, take a few minutes at the next available moment to create a revised schedule for the remaining time in the day. You can erase and redraw blocks, or cross out the blocks for the remainder of the day and create new ones.
• Page 224: The goal isn’t to stick to a given schedule at all costs, but to maintain a thoughtful say in how you spend your time, even if those decisions are reworked as the day unfolds.
• Page 225: Use overflow conditional blocks. If you're unsure how long an activity will take, block off extended time, then follow it with another block that has a split purpose.
• Page 225: Be liberal with task blocks.
• Page 226: I maintain a rule that if I stumble upon an important insight, it’s a valid reason to ignore the rest of my schedule for the day.
• Page 226: This type of scheduling isn’t about constraint; it’s about thoughtfulness.
• Page 227: Without structure, it’s easy for your time to devolve into the shallows—email, social media, and web surfing. The motivation behind this strategy is recognizing that deep work requires treating your time with respect. Decide in advance how you will spend every minute of your workday.
• Page 228: Quantify the depth of every activity. Shallow work is non-cognitively demanding, logistical tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend not to create much new value and are easy to replicate. For example, editing a draft of an academic paper isn’t shallow work.
• Page 229: To rate the depth of an activity, ask: how long would it take to train a smart, recent college graduate with no specific training in my field to complete this task?
• Page 232: Ask your boss for a shallow work budget. For most non-entry-level knowledge jobs, this will likely be between 30-50%.
• Page 233: These decisions should start with a conversation with your boss, establishing implicit support from your workplace.
• Page 236: Finish your workday by 5:30 PM.
• Page 238: It didn’t take long for her to realize that this strategy was unsustainable, so she set a limit of 50 hours per week and worked backward to determine what rules and habits were needed to satisfy this constraint.
• Page 238: One technique for respecting her hour limit was to set drastic quotas on major sources of shallow endeavors in her academic life.