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.

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

Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.

that network tools are distracting us from work that requires unbroken concentration, while simultaneously degrading our capacity to remain focused.

There are two reasons for this value. The first has to do with learning. We have an information economy that’s dependent on complex systems that change rapidly.

The second reason that deep work is valuable is because the impacts of the digital network revolution cut both ways. If you can create something useful, its reachable audience (e.g., employers or customers) is essentially limitless—which greatly magnifies your reward. On the other hand, if what you’re producing is mediocre, then you’re in trouble, as it’s too easy for your audience to find a better alternative online. Whether

Deep work is not, in other words, an old-fashioned skill falling into irrelevance. It’s instead a crucial ability for anyone looking to move ahead in a globally competitive information economy that tends to chew up and spit out those who aren’t earning their keep. The real rewards are reserved not for those who are comfortable using Facebook (a shallow task, easily replicated), but instead for those who are comfortable building the innovative distributed systems that run the service (a decidedly deep task, hard to replicate). Deep work is so important that we might consider it, to use the phrasing of business writer Eric Barker, “the superpower of the 21st century.”

identify three specific groups that will fall on the lucrative side of this divide and reap a disproportionate amount of the benefits of the Intelligent Machine Age. Not surprisingly, it’s to these three groups that Silver, Hansson, and Doerr happen to belong.

The High-Skilled Workers

The Superstars

The Owners

capital to invest in the new technologies that are driving the Great Restructuring.

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.

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.

differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.”

genius themselves were great only by bringing all their power to bear on the point on which they had decided to show their full measure.”

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

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

Open offices, for example, might create more opportunities for collaboration,* but they do so at the cost of “massive distraction

This theory tells us that your world is the outcome of what you pay attention to,

Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.

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

Deep work is an activity well suited to generate a flow state (the

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

Your work is craft, and if you hone your ability and apply it with respect and care, then like the skilled wheelwright you can generate meaning in the daily efforts of your professional life.

You don’t need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work.

Eudaimonia Machine.

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

bimodal philosophy of deep work. This philosophy asks that you divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else. During the deep time, the bimodal worker will act monastically—seeking intense and uninterrupted concentration. During the shallow time, such focus is not prioritized. This