Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

by Cal Newport

The trade-off, however, is that this approach works better with the reality of human nature.

To make the most out of your deep work sessions, build rituals of the same level of strictness and idiosyncrasy as the important thinkers mentioned previously. There’s a good reason for this mimicry.

Without this structure, you’ll have to mentally litigate again and again what you should and should not be doing during these sessions and keep trying to assess whether you’re working sufficiently hard.

(As Nietzsche said: “It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.”)

He eventually realized that thirty thousand feet was an ideal environment for him to focus.

He wrote during the whole flight to Japan, drank an espresso in the business class lounge once he arrived in Japan, then turned around and flew back, once again writing the whole way—arriving

This back-and-forth represents a collaborative form of deep work (common in academic circles) that leverages what I call the whiteboard effect.

“You are such a naïve academic. I asked you how to do it, and you told me what I should do. I know what I need to do. I just don’t know how to do it.”

For an individual focused on deep work, the implication is that you should identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours.

“People play differently when they’re keeping score,”

The 4DX authors elaborate that the final step to help maintain a focus on lead measures is to put in place “a rhythm of regular and frequent meetings of any team that owns a wildly important goal.”

The 4DX framework is based on the fundamental premise that execution is more difficult than strategizing.

This strategy argues that you should follow Kreider’s lead by injecting regular and substantial freedom from professional concerns into your day, providing you with the idleness paradoxically required to get (deep) work done.

At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning—no after-dinner e-mail check, no mental replays of conversations, and no scheming about how you’ll handle an upcoming challenge; shut down work thinking completely.

Reason #1: Downtime Aids Insights

Reason #2: Downtime Helps Recharge the Energy Needed to Work Deeply

The core finding of the study is that the nature group performed up to 20 percent better on the task.

Only the confidence that you’re done with work until the next day can convince your brain to downshift to the level where it can begin to recharge for the next day to follow.

Ericsson notes that for a novice, somewhere around an hour a day of intense concentration seems to be a limit, while for experts this number can expand to as many as four hours—but rarely more.

So many people do not realize concentration can be trained. It’s a skill. “I just can’t concentrate.” No.

“Committing to a specific plan for a goal may therefore not only facilitate attainment of the goal but may also free cognitive resources for other pursuits.”

Decades of work from multiple different subfields within psychology all point toward the conclusion that regularly resting your brain improves the quality of your deep work.

The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained.

Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.

This strategy asks you to inject the occasional dash of Rooseveltian intensity into your own workday.

Like Roosevelt at Harvard, attack the task with every free neuron until it gives way under your unwavering barrage of concentration.

The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally—walking, jogging, driving, showering—and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem.

I suggest that you adopt a productive meditation practice in your own life.

In fact, you might even consider scheduling a walk during your workday specifically for the purpose of applying productive meditation to your most pressing problem at the moment.

“We found that one of the biggest differences between memory athletes and the rest of us is in a cognitive ability that’s not a direct measure of memory at all but of attention,”

The first thing White emphasizes is that professional memory athletes never attempt rote memorization, that is, where you simply look at information again and again, repeating it in your head.

Your mind, in other words, can quickly retain lots of detailed information—if it’s stored in the right way.

your ability to concentrate is only as strong as your commitment to train it.

Willpower is limited, and therefore the more enticing tools you have pulling at your attention, the harder it’ll be to maintain focus on something important.

But I will ask you to reject the state of distracted hyperconnectedness that drove him to that drastic experiment in the first place.

I don’t doubt the existence of these friends, but we can assume that these friendships are lightweight—given that they’re based on sending short messages back and forth over a computer network.

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).

Whereas the any-benefit mind-set identifies any potential positive impact as justification for using a tool, the craftsman variant requires that these positive impacts affect factors at the core of what’s important to you and that they outweigh the negatives.

There’s a lot of communication in my life that’s not enriching, it’s impoverishing.”

it allows you to maintain lightweight contact with people you know but don’t run into regularly,

Of course Facebook offers benefits to your social life, but none are important enough to what really matters to you in this area to justify giving it access to your time and attention.*

The law of the vital few, however, reminds us that the most important 20 percent or so of these activities provide the bulk of the benefit.

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.

If 80 percent of their profits come from 20 percent of their clients, then they make more money by redirecting the energy from low-revenue clients to better service the small number of lucrative contracts—each hour spent on the latter returns more revenue than each hour spent on the former.

But 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.

There were, I’m embarrassed to admit, long stretches where no one read it (a term I’m using literally).

Put more thought into your leisure time.

my smartphone and computer, and the distractions they can offer, typically remain neglected between the end of the workday and the next morning.

To summarize, if you want to eliminate the addictive pull of entertainment sites on your time and attention, give your brain a quality alternative.

They note that for someone new to such practice (citing, in particular, a child in the early stages of developing an expert-level skill), an hour a day is a reasonable limit. For those familiar with the rigors of such activities, the limit expands to something like four hours, but rarely more.

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