Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

by Cal Newport

“The feeling of repose and renewal that I had in this tower was intense from the start,”

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.

Deep work intro

Deep work, in other words, was exactly the type of effort needed to stand out in a cognitively demanding field like academic psychiatry in the

“Although he had many patients who relied on him, Jung was not shy about taking time off.” Deep work, though a burden to prioritize, was crucial for his goal of changing the world.

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 other words, talent is not a commodity you can buy in bulk and combine to reach the needed levels:

Quote

observations more succinctly: If

“The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.”

time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal.

their success with a lead measure, they become invested in perpetuating

Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction, Nass discovered, it’s hard to shake the addiction even when you want to concentrate. To put this more concretely: If every moment of potential boredom in your life—say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives—is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the “mental wrecks” in Nass’s research, it’s not ready for deep work—even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.

Eventual boredom controls mental readiness foe focus

Moonwalking with Einstein.

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.

Craftsman approach to select any tools (such as social media)

The next step in this strategy is to consider the network tools you currently use. For each such tool, go through the key activities you identified and ask whether the use of the tool has a substantially positive impact, a substantially negative impact, or little impact on your regular and successful participation in the activity. Now comes the important decision: Keep using this tool only if you concluded that it has substantial positive

Activity selection

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).

Social media goal example

Law of the Vital Few*: In many settings, 80 percent of a given effect is due to just 20 percent of the possible causes.

Law of effort (80/20) rule

What? You say that full energy given to those sixteen hours will lessen the value of the business eight? Not so. On the contrary, it will assuredly increase the value of the business eight. One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change—not rest, except in sleep.

How to live in 24 hours

In other words, I not only allow spontaneity in my schedule; I encourage it. Joseph’s critique is driven by the mistaken idea that the goal of a schedule is to force your behavior into a rigid plan. This type of scheduling, however, isn’t about constraint—it’s instead about thoughtfulness. It’s a simple habit that forces you to continually take a moment throughout your day and ask: “What makes sense for me to do with the time that remains?” It’s the habit of asking that returns results, not your unyielding fidelity to the answer.

Daily schedule

How long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task?

Deep or sallow

Of course, there’s always the possibility that when you ask this question the answer is stark. No boss will explicitly answer, “One hundred percent of your time should be shallow!” (unless you’re entry level, at which point you need to delay this exercise until you’ve built enough skills to add deep efforts to your official work responsibilities), but a boss might reply, in so many words, “as much shallow work as is needed for you to promptly do whatever we need from you at the moment.” In this case, the answer is still useful, as it tells you that this isn’t a job that supports deep work, and a job that doesn’t support deep work is not a job that can help you succeed in our current information economy. You should, in this case, thank the boss for the feedback, and then promptly start planning how you can transition into a new position that values depth.

Job nature

I don’t provide details—which might leave the requester the ability to suggest a way to fit his or her event into my existing obligations—but instead just say, “Sounds interesting, but I can’t make it due to schedule conflicts.” In turning down obligations, I also resist the urge to offer a consolation prize that ends up devouring almost as much of my schedule (e.g., “Sorry I can’t join your committee, but I’m happy to take a look at some of your proposals as they come together and

How to say no to shallow work

Tip #1: Make People Who Send You E-mail Do More Work

Email shawolow

What is the project represented by this message, and what is the most efficient (in terms of messages generated) process for bringing this project to a successful conclusion?

How to respond to email