Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

by Cal Newport

This question is meant as a thought experiment (I’m not going to ask you to actually hire a recent college graduate to take over tasks that score low). But the answers it provides will help you objectively quantify the shallowness or depth of various activities. If our hypothetical college graduate requires many months of training to replicate a task, then this indicates that the task leverages hard-won expertise. As argued earlier, 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. On the other hand, a task that our hypothetical college graduate can pick up quickly is one that does not leverage expertise, and therefore it can be understood as shallow. What should you do with this strategy? Once you know where your activities fall on the deep-to-shallow scale, bias your time toward the former.

Bias Your Time Toward What’s Hard to Replace