Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

by Cal Newport

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.

It didn’t take him long to realize that these ambitions would be thwarted so long as his main professional skills could be captured in an Excel macro.

Learning something complex like computer programming requires intense uninterrupted concentration

you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work.

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.

and virtual meeting software have destroyed regionalism

The final group that will thrive in our new economy—the group epitomized by John Doerr—consists of those with capital to invest in the new technologies that are driving the Great Restructuring.

A venture capitalist in today’s economy can fund a company like Instagram, which was eventually sold for a billion dollars, while employing only thirteen people.

a venture capitalist I interviewed for my last book admitted to me with some concern, “Everyone wants my job.”

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 The ability to quickly master hard things. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

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.

To learn requires intense concentration.

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

To learn, in other words, is an act of deep work.

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

To do real good physics work, you do need absolute solid lengths of time … it needs a lot of concentration … if you have a job administrating anything, you don’t have the time.

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

You need your own philosophy for integrating deep work into your professional life.

I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.

once or twice a month, take a period of two to four days to become completely monastic.

the ability to rapidly switch your mind from shallow to deep mode doesn’t come naturally. Without practice, such switches can seriously deplete your finite willpower reserves.

There’s no one correct deep work ritual—the right fit depends on both the person and the type of project pursued. But there are some general questions that any effective ritual must address:

Where you’ll work and for how long. Your ritual needs to specify a location for your deep work efforts.

How you’ll work once you start to work. Your ritual needs rules and processes to keep your efforts structured. For example, you might institute a ban on any Internet use, or maintain a metric such as words produced per twenty-minute interval

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

many writers, including Dan Pink and Michael Pollan, simulate the experience year-round by building—often at significant expense and effort—writing cabins on their properties.

Read cabin as "workplace"

Separate your pursuit of serendipitous encounters from your efforts to think deeply

execution should be aimed at a small number of “wildly important goals.”

For an individual focused on deep work, it’s easy to identify the relevant lead measure: time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal.

“People play differently when they’re keeping score

Once the team notices their success with a lead measure, they become invested in perpetuating this performance.

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.

If you need more time, then extend your workday, but once you shut down, your mind must be left free