Deep Work/深度工作

禁欲主义者的深度工作日程安排，是通过最摒弃或最小化肤浅职责，从而实现深度工作的最大化。禁欲主义哲学的实践者往往有明确且价值极高的职业目标追求，而且他们在职业上取得的大部分成就都是由于工作表现特别突出。

适用禁欲主义哲学的人是非常有限的。一般人（比如我）离这个群体差着遥远的N光年。

高德纳解释其职业目标

我努力掌握计算机科学某一领域的全部知识；然后我努力消化

这些知识，将其形式加以转化，使没时间做这些研究的人也能获取这些知识。

关于Email

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

Email（去掉连接线）

从1990年1月1日起，我成了一个快乐的人，那时起我不再有电子邮箱。我从1975年开始使用电子邮箱，在我看来一生用15年电子邮箱已经够长了。对于生活中要站到风口浪尖的人而言，电子邮箱是一种奇妙的东西。但对我来说却不是；我的角色是处理事情的底层。我所做的事情需要长时间的学习和无人干扰的高度专注。

Email (let's drop the hyphen)

I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.

On the other hand, I need to communicate with thousands of people all over the world as I write my books. I also want to be responsive to the people who read those books and have questions or comments. My goal is to do this communication efficiently, in batch mode — like, one day every three months. So if you want to write to me about any topic, please use good ol' snail mail and send a letter to the following address:

Prof. Donald E. Knuth Computer Science Department Gates Building 4B Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-9045 USA.

I have a wonderful secretary who looks at the incoming postal mail and separates out anything that she knows I've been looking forward to seeing urgently. Everything else goes into a buffer storage area, which I empty periodically.

My secretary also prints out all nonspam email messages addressed to [email protected] or [email protected], so that I can reply with written comments when I have a chance. If I run across such a message that was misaddressed — I mean, if the message asks a question instead of reporting an error — I try not to get angry. I used to just throw all such sheets in the wastebasket. But now I save them for scratch paper, so that I can print test material for The Art of Computer Programming on the blank sides. I DO NOT ANSWER UNSOLICITED EMAILS, nor do I respond to emails that were sent to my colleagues with a bothersome request for them to communicate with me. Email is a no-no EXCEPT for reporting errors in books.

You might also try faxing me at 650-725-4671. But be warned that I look at incoming fax mail last, perhaps only once every six months instead of three.

`I don't even have an e-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.' — Umberto Eco, quoted in the New Yorker Sometimes I do send email, through my secretary, with respect to the project I'm currently working on, when I believe that the recipient won't be bothered by my request. But I hope you can understand why I am almost always unhappy to receive unsolicited email myself. Thank you for your patience and cooperation as I try to finish The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP), a work that I began in 1962 and that I will need many years to complete. In return, I promise not to send unwelcome email requests to you.

A note on email versus e-mail

Newly coined nonce words of English are often spelled with a hyphen, but the hyphen disappears when the words become widely used. For example, people used to write ``non-zero'' and ``soft-ware'' instead of ``nonzero'' and ``software''; the same trend has occurred for hundreds of other words. Thus it's high time for everybody to stop using the archaic spelling ``e-mail''. Think of how many keystrokes you will save in your lifetime if you stop now! The form ``email'' has been well established in England for several years, so I am amazed to see Americans being overly conservative in this regard. (Of course, ``email'' has been a familiar word in France, Germany, and the Netherlands much longer than in England — but for an entirely different reason.)

将个人时间分成两块，将某一段明确的时间用于深度追求，余下的时间做其他所有事情。深度时间里追求高强度、无干扰的专注，浮浅时间专注并非首要的目标。比如每天早上 6点半到单位，进行2小时无干扰的工作，8点半后处理日常事务性的邮件等工作。我在 IBM Hursley的一周里，了解到有部分高级工程师，在进行复杂的设计时会在家里工作。

虽然无法达成双峰平衡，但还是可以在深度工作上投入时间的，需要根据自己所在工作场所的特点，进行适度调节。

我首先尝试早晨早到1小时工作，并在一天的上班时间里，尝试连续2小时脱离即时通信、电子邮箱等。 半年后更新结果。