For many people, this is what works sounds like nowadays.

It's a constant thrum of notifications, tweets and messages.

Every time we respond to an email or a text or Google a question that's just popped into

our head, we pay a small price.

In the moment, this price is imperceptible, but over time, it adds up.

We haven't quite come to terms with the cost of constant distraction.

We treat it, I think, in this more general sense of it, I probably should be less distracted,

and I think it's more urgent than people realize.

Today we look at the challenge of cultivating deep attention and what we gain by immersing

ourselves in meaningful work.

I spoke to someone who might seem like an unlikely advocate for technological restraint,

a computer scientist.

Kyle Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University.

He's deliberately tried to break away from the distractions of modern technology, and he's

trying to get the rest of us to follow his lead.

Kyle is the author of Deep Work, Rules for Focus Success in a Distracted World.

Kyle, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Well, thanks for having me on.

You're talking your book about several highly influential thinkers, people like the psychiatrist

Carl Jung, the writer Mark Twain, Jackie Rowling, and you say they all have a set of habits

that are quite striking in terms of how they're able to get great work done.

This was something I noticed to his very common two influential thinkers, is that they all

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