First Lines of Cal Newport's "Deep Work"

"In the Swiss canton of St. Gallen, near the northern banks of Lake Zurich, is a village named Bollingen. In 1922, the psychiatrist Carl Jung chose this spot to begin building a retreat. He began with a basic two-story stone house he called the Tower. After returning from a trip to India, where he observed the practice of adding meditation rooms to homes, he expanded the complex to include a private office."

- Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

This useful book has helped me in a number of ways already - and I'm only 75% completed. First, it provides an inspirational picture of what we can do if we can conduct "Deep Work" - what Newport defines as "Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit." He provides a lot of detail, but mainly the culprit in our inability to conduct Deep Work is in what he calls "network tools... constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction." The best part though is that he provides four rules for building your ability to conduct Deep Work: 

1. Work Deeply.
2. Embrace Boredom
3. Quit Social Media
4. Drain the Shallows