Tim Ferriss on Deep Work Quotes

"Efficiency is futile if you are efficient at doing the wrong thing."

"Deep work requires a sanctuary from the noise of the world."

"Selection: Which 20% of the blocks should I focus on for 80% of the desired outcome?"

"Focus on being productive instead of busy."

"You don't need more time, you need more intensity."

"Productivity is for the birds. If you want to be successful, you need to be effective."

"Fear-setting is an operating system for thriving in high-stress environments."

"Information is useless if it is not applied to something important or if you will forget it before you have a chance to apply it."

"Someday is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you."

"Reality is negotiable."

"The most important work happens when you are not interrupted."

"There is no one-size-fits-all diet. There is only the diet that works for you right now."

"Your goal is to find the lead domino—the one task that makes everything else easier or unnecessary."

"$1,000,000 in the bank isn't the fantasy. The fantasy is the lifestyle of complete freedom it supposedly allows."

"The best way to get things done is to stop doing things that don't matter."

"The 80/20 principle is the cornerstone of results-oriented deep work."

"Focus on the critical few and ignore the trivial many."

"Pareto’s Law can be summarized as follows: 80% of the outputs result from 20% of the inputs."

"Optimize for the long term because almost everything that matters in life is an iterated game."

"The goal is not to do more, but to have more done with less."

"Most information is time-consuming, negative, irrelevant to your goals, and outside of your influence."

"I can trace all of my biggest wins and all of my biggest disasters averted back to doing fear-setting."

"I decided to view the money as tuition for a 'real-world MBA'. If I lost it all, it was the cost of education."

"Material beats method. You can have the best instructional method in the world, but if you teach the wrong material, it doesn't matter."

"Effectiveness is doing the things that get you closer to your goals. Efficiency is performing a given task (whether important or not) in the most economical manner possible."

"Multi-tasking is a myth. You are just task-switching and losing 40% of your productivity."

"The subjective experience of 'connectedness' during these sessions seems to be a primary driver of the therapeutic outcome."

"Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things."

"Don't ever arrive at the office or in front of your computer without a clear list of priorities."

"The question is not 'What if it goes wrong?' but 'What will I do if it goes wrong?'"

"I avoid 'me too' products. I want to see a product that is 10x better than the status quo, not 10% better."

"The goal is not to simply learn a skill, but to learn how to learn."

"Set your schedule based on your energy levels, not the clock."