Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

by Cal Newport

In the Swiss canton of St. Gallen, near the northern banks of Lake Zurich, is a village named Bollingen. In 1922, the psychiatrist Carl Jung chose this spot to begin building a retreat.

Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.

In an age of network tools, in other words, knowledge workers increasingly replace deep work with the shallow alternative—constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction.

The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.

Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.

So seemingly simple, yet so complex.

A deep life is a good life.

In this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital.

Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy 1. The ability to quickly master hard things. 2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

To join the group of those who can work well with these machines, therefore, requires that you hone your ability to master hard things. And because these technologies change rapidly, this process of mastering hard things never ends: You must be able to do it quickly, again and again.

To excel in a particular area of medicine, to give another example, requires that you be able to quickly master the latest research on relevant procedures.

To summarize these observations more succinctly: If you can’t learn, you can’t thrive.

If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.

The two core abilities just described depend on your ability to perform deep work.

deliberate practice.

To be great at something is to be well myelinated.

To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction.

High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)

Leroy introduced an effect she called attention residue.

when you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task.

The results from this and her similar experiments were clear: “People experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor performance on that next task,” and the more intense the residue, the worse the performance.

To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. Put another way, the type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work.

The most “efficient” employees, he explained, set up their text editor to flash an alert on their screen when a new question or comment is posted to the company’s Hall account.

big trends in business today actively decrease people’s ability to perform deep work,

Cochran noted that even if he managed to spend only thirty seconds per message on average, this still added up to almost an hour and a half per day dedicated to moving information around like a human network router.

Instead, the consultants found more enjoyment in their work, better communication among themselves, more learning (as we might have predicted, given the connection between depth and skill development highlighted in the last chapter), and perhaps most important, “a better product delivered to the client.”

How well or how poorly you’re doing as an academic researcher can be boiled down to a simple question: Are you publishing important papers?

Knowledge workers, I’m arguing, are tending toward increasingly visible busyness because they lack a better way to demonstrate their value.

This is a fine generalization, but in fields like law and medicine, quantifying performance is pretty easy with billable hours and collections.

a deep life is not just economically lucrative, but also a life well lived.

the skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life

“Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.”

After a bad or disrupting occurrence in your life, Fredrickson’s research shows, what you choose to focus on exerts significant leverage on your attitude going forward.

“concentration so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems.”)

The world represented by your inbox, in other words, isn’t a pleasant world to inhabit.

In short, I’ll live the focused life, because it’s the best kind there is.”

Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.

Gallagher’s writing emphasizes that the content of what we focus on matters.

To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction.

If you cultivate this skill, you’ll thrive professionally.

A deep life is a good life, any way you look at it.

“deep work chambers”

“The purpose of the deep work chamber is to allow for total focus and uninterrupted work flow,”

In an ideal world—one in which the true value of deep work is accepted and celebrated—we’d all have access to something like the Eudaimonia Machine.

You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.

“What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.”

The Bimodal Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling

Jung, by contrast, sought this elimination only during the periods he spent at his retreat.

The bimodal philosophy believes that deep work can produce extreme productivity, but only if the subject dedicates enough time to such endeavors to reach maximum cognitive intensity—the state in which real breakthroughs occur. This is why the minimum unit of time for deep work in this philosophy tends to be at least one full day.

Seinfeld began his advice to Isaac with some common sense, noting “the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes,” and then explaining that the way to create better jokes was to write every day.

the rhythmic philosophy. This philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit.