172 Quotes by Cal Newport

If you’re wearing headphones, or monitoring a text message chain, or, God forbid, narrating the stroll on Instagram – you’re not really walking, and therefore you’re not going to experience this practice’s greatest benefits.

The more time you spend “connecting” on these services, the more isolated you’re likely to become.

To have a mission is to have a unifying focus for your career.

You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. Your.

At the end of every week he prints his numbers to see how well he achieved this goal, and then uses this feedback to guide himself in the week ahead.

The key here isn’t to avoid or even to reduce the total amount of time you spend engaging in distracting behavior, but is instead to give yourself plenty of opportunities throughout your evening to resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom.

With these rough categorizations established, the strategy works as follows: Schedule in advance when you’ll use the Internet, and then avoid it altogether outside these times. I suggest that you keep a notepad near your computer at work. On this pad, record the next time you’re allowed to use the Internet. Until you arrive at that time, absolutely no network connectivity is allowed – no matter how tempting.

Knowledge workers, I’m arguing, are tending toward increasingly visible busyness because they lack a better way to demonstrate their value.

You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it’s instead like a muscle that tires.