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.

Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted.

To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work.

The second reason that deep work is valuable is because the impacts of the digital network revolution cut both ways.

If what you create is valuable it can easily be reachable. If what you create is mediocre your audience can easily find better work.

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.

Once the talent market is made universally accessible, those at the peak of the market thrive while the rest suffer.

Economy effect

“Hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance.” In other words, talent is not a commodity you can buy in bulk and combine to reach the needed levels: There’s a premium to being the best.

Hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance.” In other words, talent is not a commodity you can buy in bulk and combine to reach the needed levels: There’s a premium to being the best

those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines,

one segment who thrive in the new economy

the best at what they do, and those with access to capital.

other segment that thrive in new economy

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.

core abilites that should exist no matter which segment you belong to

deliberate practice cannot exist alongside distraction,

To be great at something is to be well myelinated.

The reason, therefore, why it’s important to focus intensely on the task at hand while avoiding distraction is because this is the only way to isolate the relevant neural circuit enough to trigger useful myelination.

neurological argument for depth

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

increasing intenisty reduces time spent

Many other ideas are being prioritized as more important than deep work in the business world, including, as we just encountered, serendipitous collaboration, rapid communication, and an active presence on social media.

alternatives to deep work in the workplace

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

an interruption, even if short, delays the total time required to complete a task by a significant fraction.

attention residues reduces time spent on task

Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.

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

busyness as a measure of productivity

Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.

busyness as a measure of productivity

Knowledge work is not an assembly line, and extracting value from information is an activity that’s often at odds with busyness, not supported by it.

why busyness is not good measure for knowledge work

We were, he noted, no longer discussing the trade-offs surrounding new technologies, balancing the new efficiencies against the new problems introduced. If it’s high-tech, we began to instead assume, then it’s good. Case closed.

reason where alternatives to deep work presists

The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

knowledge work job cannot possibly become such a source of meaning because their job’s subject is much too mundane. But this is flawed thinking that our consideration of traditional craftsmanship can help correct.

a wooden wheel is not noble, but its shaping can be. The same applies to knowledge work. You don’t need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work.

that cultivating craftsmanship is necessarily a deep task and therefore requires a commitment to deep work.

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

your willpower decreases with its use and man it's finite

key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.

Sometimes to go deep, you must first go big.

“The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.” They elaborate that execution should be aimed at a small number of “wildly important goals.”

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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.

the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, you’ll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend

Don’t Take Breaks from Distraction. Instead Take Breaks from Focus.

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if you spend just one day a week resisting distraction, you’re unlikely to diminish your brain’s craving for these stimuli, as most of your time is still spent giving in to it.

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Schedule in advance when you’ll use the Internet,

Point #3: Scheduling Internet use at home as well as at work can further improve your concentration training.

I would suggest that you maintain the strategy of scheduling Internet use even after the workday is over.

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The key here isn’t to avoid or even to reduce the total amount of time you spend engaging in distracting behavior, but is instead to give yourself plenty of opportunities throughout your evening to resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom.

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to succeed with deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli.

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When faced with a hard problem, your mind, as it was evolved to do, will attempt to avoid excess expenditure of energy when possible.

The Any-Benefit Approach to Network Tool Selection: You’re justified in using a network tool if you can identify any possible benefit to its use, or anything you might possibly miss out on if you don’t use it.

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.

They offer personalized information arriving on an unpredictable intermittent schedule—making them massively addictive and therefore capable of severely damaging your attempts to schedule and succeed with any act of concentration.

These services aren’t necessarily, as advertised, the lifeblood of our modern connected world. They’re just products, developed by private companies, funded lavishly, marketed carefully, and designed ultimately to capture then sell your personal information and attention to advertisers.

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Put more thought into your leisure time.

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don’t default to whatever catches your attention at the moment, but instead dedicate some advance thinking to the question of how you want to spend your “day within a day.”

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

Not only will this preserve your ability to resist distraction and concentrate, but you might even fulfill Arnold Bennett’s ambitious goal of experiencing, perhaps for the first time, what it means to live, and not just exist.

We spend much of our day on autopilot—not giving much thought to what we’re doing with our time.

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At the beginning of each workday, turn to a new page of lined paper in a notebook you dedicate to this purpose. Down the left-hand side of the page, mark every other line with an hour of the day, covering the full set of hours you typically work. Now comes the important part: Divide the hours of your workday into blocks and assign activities to the blocks.

time block planning your workday