Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

by Cal Newport

To master the art of deep work, therefore, you must take back control of your time and attention from the many diversions that attempt to steal them.

Overwhelmed by these tools’ demands on his time, Thurston felt that his only option was to (temporarily) quit the Internet altogether. This idea that a drastic Internet sabbatical* is the only alternative to the distraction generated by social media and infotainment has increasingly pervaded our cultural conversation.

The problem with this binary response to this issue is that these two choices are much too crude to be useful.

For all the insight and clarity that Thurston gained during his Internet sabbatical, for example, it didn’t take him long once the experiment ended to slide back into the fragmented state where he began. On the day when I first started writing this chapter, which fell only six months after Thurston’s article originally appeared in Fast Company, the reformed connector had already sent a dozen Tweets in the few hours since he woke up.

accepting that these tools are not inherently evil, and that some of them might be quite vital to your success and happiness, but at the same time also accepting that the threshold for allowing a site regular access to your time and attention (not to mention personal data) should be much more stringent, and that most people should therefore be using many fewer such tools.

The Any-Benefit Approach to Network Tool Selection: You’re justified in using a network tool if you can identify any possible benefit to its use, or anything you might possibly miss out on if you don’t use it. The problem with this approach, of course, is that it ignores all the negatives that come along with the tools in question. These services are engineered to be addictive—robbing time and attention from activities that more directly support your professional and personal goals (such as deep work).

The use of network tools can be harmful. If you don’t attempt to weigh pros against cons, but instead use any glimpse of some potential benefit as justification for unrestrained use of a tool, then you’re unwittingly crippling your ability to succeed in the world of knowledge work.

The notion that identifying some benefit is sufficient to invest money, time, and attention in a tool is near laughable to people in his trade.

The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.

Identifying what matters most in your life, and then attempting to assess the impacts of various tools on these factors, doesn’t reduce to a simple formula—this task requires practice and experimentation.

Lewis, for example, worries that adding more accessibility will sap his energy and reduce his ability to research and write great stories, noting: “It’s amazing how overly accessible people are. There’s a lot of communication in my life that’s not enriching, it’s impoverishing.”

Professional Goal: To craft well-written, narrative-driven stories that change the way people understand the world. Key Activities Supporting This Goal: • Research patiently and deeply. • Write carefully and with purpose.

Personal Goal: To maintain close and rewarding friendships with a group of people who are important to me. Key Activities Supporting This Goal: 1. Regularly take the time for meaningful connection with those who are most important to me (e.g., a long talk, a meal, joint activity). 2. Give of myself to those who are most important to me (e.g., making nontrivial sacrifices that improve their lives).

The Law of the Vital Few*: In many settings, 80 percent of a given effect is due to just 20 percent of the possible causes. For example, it might be the case that 80 percent of a business’s profits come from just 20 percent of its clients, 80 percent of a nation’s wealth is held by its richest 20 percent of citizens, or 80 percent of computer software crashes come from just 20 percent of the identified bugs. There’s a formal mathematical underpinning to this phenomenon (an 80/20 split is roughly what you would expect when describing a power law distribution over impact—a type of distribution that shows up often when measuring quantities in the real world), but it’s probably most useful when applied heuristically as a reminder that, in many cases, contributions to an outcome are not evenly distributed.

Even if you accept this result, however, you still might argue that you shouldn’t ignore the other 80 percent of possible beneficial activities. It’s true that these less important activities don’t contribute nearly as much to your goal as your top one or two, but they can provide some benefit, so why not keep them in the mix? As long as you don’t ignore the more important activities, it seems like it can’t hurt to also support some of the less important alternatives.

This argument, however, misses the key point that all activities, regardless of their importance, consume your same limited store of time and attention. If you service low-impact activities, therefore, you’re taking away time you could be spending on higher-impact activities. It’s a zero-sum game.

To abandon a network tool using this logic, therefore, is not to miss out on its potential small benefits, but is instead to get more out of the activities you already know to yield large benefits.

This strategy picks specifically on social media because among the different network tools that can claim your time and attention, these services, if used without limit, can be particularly devastating to your quest to work deeper.

part of what makes social media insidious is that the companies that profit from your attention have succeeded with a masterful marketing coup: convincing our culture that if you don’t use their products you might miss out.

For most people this reality will confirm something that seems obvious only once you’ve done the hard work of freeing yourself from the marketing messages surrounding these tools: They’re not really all that important in your life.

for some people another part of the delusion that binds them to social media is the idea that people want to hear what you have to say, and that they might be disappointed if you suddenly leave them bereft of your commentary. I’m being somewhat facetious here in my wording, but this underlying sentiment is nonetheless common and important to tackle.

earning people’s attention online is hard, hard work. Except now it’s not. Part of what fueled social media’s rapid ascent, I contend, is its ability to short-circuit this connection between the hard work of producing real value and the positive reward of having people pay attention to you.

this quest for self-importance plays an important role in convincing people to continue to thoughtlessly fragment their time and attention.

These services aren’t necessarily, as advertised, the lifeblood of our modern connected world. They’re just products, developed by private companies, funded lavishly, marketed carefully, and designed ultimately to capture then sell your personal information and attention to advertisers. They can be fun, but in the scheme of your life and what you want to accomplish, they’re a lightweight whimsy, one unimportant distraction among many threatening to derail you from something deeper.

Bennett writes in his 1910 self-help classic, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day. This hypothetical London salaryman, he notes, has a little more than sixteen hours left in the day beyond these work-related hours. To Bennett, this is a lot of time, but most people in this situation tragically don’t realize its potential. The “great and profound mistake which my typical man makes in regard to his day,” he elaborates, is that even though he doesn’t particularly enjoy his work (seeing it as something to “get through”), “he persists in looking upon those hours from ten to six as ‘the day,’ to which the ten hours preceding them and the six hours following them are nothing but a prologue and epilogue.”

“during those sixteen hours he is free; he is not a wage-earner; he is not preoccupied with monetary cares; he is just as good as a man with a private income.”

If anything, with the rise of the Internet and the low-brow attention economy it supports, the average forty-hour-a-week employee—especially those in my tech-savvy Millennial generation—has seen the quality of his or her leisure time remain degraded, consisting primarily of a blur of distracted clicks on least-common-denominator digital entertainment. If Bennett were brought back to life today, he’d likely fall into despair at the lack of progress in this area of human development.

use of carefully crafted titles and easily digestible content, often honed by algorithms to be maximally attention catching.

Every available trick of human psychology, from listing titles as “popular” or “trending,” to the use of arresting photos, is used to keep you engaged.

These sites are especially harmful after the workday is over, where the freedom in your schedule enables them to become central to your leisure time.

Put more thought into your leisure time.

dedicate some advance thinking to the question of how you want to spend your “day within a day.”

figure out in advance what you’re going to do with your evenings and weekends before they begin.

In the summer of 2007, the software company 37signals (now called Basecamp) launched an experiment: They shortened their workweek from five days to four. Their employees seemed to accomplish the same amount of work with one less day, so they made this change permanent:

Very few people work even 8 hours a day. You’re lucky if you get a few good hours in between all the meetings, interruptions, web surfing, office politics, and personal business that permeate the typical workday. Fewer official working hours helps squeeze the fat out of the typical workweek. Once everyone has less time to get their stuff done, they respect that time even more. People become stingy with their time and that’s a good thing.

The shallow stuff that can seem so urgent in the moment turned out to be unexpectedly dispensable.

To test this theory, 37signals implemented something radical: The company gave its employees the entire month of June off to work deeply on their own projects. This month would be a period free of any shallow work obligations—no status meetings, no memos, and, blessedly, no PowerPoint. At the end of the month, the company held a “pitch day” in which employees pitched the ideas they’d been working on. Summarizing the experiment in an Inc. magazine article, Fried dubbed it a success.

The shallow work that increasingly dominates the time and attention of knowledge workers is less vital than it often seems in the moment. For most businesses, if you eliminated significant amounts of this shallowness, their bottom line would likely remain unaffected.

Deep work is exhausting because it pushes you toward the limit of your abilities. Performance psychologists have extensively studied how much such efforts can be sustained by an individual in a given day.*

once you’ve hit your deep work limit in a given day, you’ll experience diminishing rewards if you try to cram in more.

We spend much of our day on autopilot—not giving much thought to what we’re doing with our time. This is a problem.

If your schedule is disrupted, you should, at the next available moment, take a few minutes to create a revised schedule for the time that remains in the day.

Your goal is not to stick to a given schedule at all costs; it’s instead to maintain, at all times, a thoughtful say in what you’re doing with your time going forward—even if these decisions are reworked again and again as the day unfolds.

someone following this combination of comprehensive scheduling and a willingness to adapt or modify the plan as needed will likely experience more creative insights than someone who adopts a more traditionally “spontaneous” approach where the day is left open and unstructured.

tasks that leverage your expertise tend to be deep tasks and they can therefore provide a double benefit: They return more value per time spent, and they stretch your abilities, leading to improvement.

you need to say no to some things and to streamline others—even if this makes life less convenient for the boss, or for you, or for your coworkers. Because, of course, in the end, a business’s goal is to generate value, not to make sure its employees’ lives are as easy as possible.

a job that doesn’t support deep work is not a job that can help you succeed in our current information economy.

For example, she decided she would travel only five times per year for any purpose, as trips can generate a surprisingly large load of urgent shallow obligations (from making lodging arrangements to writing talks).

be clear in my refusal but ambiguous in my explanation for the refusal.

A commitment to fixed-schedule productivity, however, shifts you into a scarcity mind-set. Suddenly any obligation beyond your deepest efforts is suspect and seen as potentially disruptive. Your default answer becomes no, the bar for gaining access to your time and attention rises precipitously, and you begin to organize the efforts that pass these obstacles with a ruthless efficiency.