7 published lessons with this tag.
Set dedicated times to process your inbox rather than handling items as they arrive. Batch processing protects cognitive depth; continuous processing fragments it.
You wake each day with a limited reservoir of focused attention — roughly three to four hours of genuine deep work — that depletes with every act of sustained concentration and cannot be refilled by willpower alone.
Every time you switch tasks, you pay a recovery tax — between 10 and 25 minutes of degraded cognition while your brain reloads the previous context. This cost is invisible because you feel busy the entire time.
Identify when you are sharpest and guard those hours for your most demanding work.
Extended focus needs environmental rituals and structural support to sustain. You cannot will yourself into deep work any more than you can will yourself into sleep — you have to construct the conditions that make it inevitable.
Reserve low-attention tasks for times when deep focus is not available.
Deep engagement with fewer sources extracts more signal than shallow engagement with many. Depth builds the perceptual structures that make signal detection possible. Breadth, pursued without depth, produces the illusion of being informed while degrading your capacity to understand anything.