Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

by Cal Newport

You should be able to consistently beat the buzzer (or at least be close), but to do so should require teeth-gritting concentration.

It was this reality that led me to develop the practice that I’ll now suggest you adopt in your own deep work training: productive meditation.

Suggestion #1: Be Wary of Distractions and Looping

When you notice your attention slipping away from the problem at hand, gently remind yourself that you can return to that thought later, then redirect your attention back.

When faced with a hard problem, your mind, as it was evolved to do, will attempt to avoid excess expenditure of energy when possible. One way it might attempt to sidestep this expenditure is by avoiding diving deeper into the problem by instead looping over and over again on what you already know about it.

Suggestion #2: Structure Your Deep Thinking

Once the relevant variables are identified, define the specific next-step question you need to answer using these variables.

This cycle of reviewing and storing variables, identifying and tackling the next-step question, then consolidating your gains is like an intense workout routine for your concentration ability.

“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,” explained Roediger in a New York Times blog post (emphasis mine).

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

Perhaps you come in the door, walk through your front hallway, then turn into the downstairs bathroom, walk out the door and enter the guest bedroom, walk into the kitchen, and then head down the stairs into your basement. In each room, conjure a clear image of what you see.

Practice this mental exercise of walking through the rooms, and looking at items in each room, in a set order.

The second step in preparing to memorize a deck of cards is to associate a memorable person or thing with each of the fifty-two possible cards.

For example, if the first item and location is the mat in your front entry, and the first card is the King of Diamonds, you might picture Donald Trump wiping mud off of his expensive loafers on the entry mat in your front hallway.

Like a muscle responding to weights, this will strengthen your general ability to concentrate—allowing you to go deeper with more ease.

If card memorization seems weird to you, in other words, then choose a replacement that makes similar cognitive requirements.

“I was less stressed about not knowing new things; I felt that I still existed despite not having shared documentary evidence of said existence on the Internet.”

The first point is that we increasingly recognize that these tools fragment our time and reduce our ability to concentrate.

There is a middle ground, and if you’re interested in developing a deep work habit, you must fight to get there.

There’s nothing wrong with such lightweight friendships, but they’re unlikely to be at the center of this user’s social life.

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).

This complexity underscores an important reality: The notion that identifying some benefit is sufficient to invest money, time, and attention in a tool is near laughable to people in his trade.

Of course a hay baler offers benefits—every tool at the farm supply store has something useful to offer. At the same time, of course it offers negatives as well.

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.

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.

“It’s amazing how overly accessible people are. There’s a lot of communication in my life that’s not enriching, it’s impoverishing.”

Once you’ve identified these goals, list for each the two or three most important activities that help you satisfy the goal.

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.

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.*

What’s key to understand here, however, is that this radical reduction of priorities is not arbitrary, but is instead motivated by an idea that has arisen repeatedly in any number of different fields, from client profitability to social equality to prevention of crashes in computer programs.

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

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.

It’s a zero-sum game. And because your time returns substantially more rewards when invested in high-impact activities than when invested in low-impact activities, the more of it you shift to the latter, the lower your overall benefit.

Nicodemus’s packing party provided him with definitive evidence that most of his stuff was not something he needed, and it therefore supported his quest to simplify.

In more detail, this strategy asks that you perform the equivalent of a packing party on the social media services that you currently use. Instead of “packing,” however, you’ll instead ban yourself from using them for thirty days.

After thirty days of this self-imposed network isolation, ask yourself the following two questions about each of the services you temporarily quit: Would the last thirty days have been notably better if I had been able to use this service? Did people care that I wasn’t using this service? If your answer is “no” to both questions, quit the service permanently.

Part of what fueled social media’s rapid assent, I contend, is its ability to short-circuit this connection between the hard work of producing real value and the positive reward of having people pay attention to you.

By dropping off these services without notice you can test the reality of your status as a content producer. For most people and most services, the news might be sobering—no one outside your closest friends and family will likely even notice you’ve signed off.

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.

The shallow work that increasingly dominates the time and attention of knowledge workers is less vital than it often seems in the moment.

You might be able to avoid checking your e-mail every ten minutes, but you won’t likely last long if you never respond to important messages. In this sense, we should see the goal of this rule as taming shallow work’s footprint in your schedule, not eliminating it.

The twenty-five-to thirty-four-year-olds who thought they watched fifteen hours a week, it turns out, watch more like twenty-eight hours.

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

Schedule every minute of your day.

If your schedule is disrupted, you should, at the next available moment, take a few minutes to create a revised schedule for the time that remains in the day.

Your goal is not to stick to a given schedule at all costs; it’s instead to maintain, at all times, a thoughtful say in what you’re doing with your time going forward—even if these decisions are reworked again and again as the day unfolds.

First, you should recognize that almost definitely you’re going to underestimate at first how much time you require for most things.

The second tactic that helps is the use of overflow conditional blocks. If you’re not sure how long a given activity might take, block off the expected time, then follow this with an additional block that has a split purpose.

The third tactic I suggest is to be liberal with your use of task blocks. Deploy many throughout your day and make them longer than required to handle the tasks you plan in the morning.

I maintain a rule that if I stumble onto an important insight, then this is a perfectly valid reason to ignore the rest of my schedule for the day (with the exception, of course, of things that cannot be skipped).