Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

by Cal Newport

Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity.

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

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

is exposing a massive economic and personal opportunity for the few who recognize the potential of resisting this trend and prioritizing depth—an

distinguish himself early in his career—fell to the wayside. By the time he quit, Benn was well aware of his difficulties with deep work, so when he dedicated himself to learning how to code, he knew he had to simultaneously teach his mind how to go deep. His method was drastic but effective. “I locked myself in a room with no computer: just textbooks, notecards, and a highlighter.” He would highlight the computer programming textbooks, transfer the ideas to notecards, and then practice them out loud. These periods free from electronic distraction were hard at first, but Benn gave himself no other option: He had to learn this material, and he made sure there was nothing in that room to distract him. Over time, however, he got better at concentrating, eventually getting to a point where he was regularly clocking five or more disconnected hours per day in the room, focused without distraction on learning this hard new skill. “I probably read something like eighteen books

“Some people show up not prepared,” he said. “They can’t focus. They can’t learn quickly.” Only half the students who started the program with Benn ended up graduating on time. Benn not only graduated, but was also the top student in his class.

If you don’t cultivate this ability, you’re likely to fall behind as technology advances.

we shift to an information economy, more and more of our population are knowledge workers, and deep work is becoming a key currency—even if most haven’t yet recognized this reality.

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.”

This book has two goals, pursued in two parts. The first, tackled in Part 1, is to convince you that the deep work hypothesis is true. The second, tackled in Part 2, is to teach you how to take advantage of this reality by training your brain and transforming your work habits to place deep work at the core of your professional life.

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.

More generally, the lack of distraction in my life tones down that background hum of nervous mental energy that seems to increasingly pervade people’s daily lives.

This book is best described as an attempt to formalize and explain my attraction to depth over shallowness, and to detail the types of strategies that have helped me act on this attraction.

A deep life is a good life.

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

The two core abilities just described depend on your ability to perform deep work. If you haven’t mastered this foundational skill, you’ll struggle to learn hard things or produce at an elite level.

To learn requires intense concentration.

In reflecting on the life of the mind in the 1920s, Sertillanges uncovered a fact about mastering cognitively demanding tasks that would take academia another seven decades to formalize.

normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.”

To master a cognitively demanding task requires this specific form of practice—there are few exceptions made for natural talent.

This brings us to the question of what deliberate practice actually requires. Its core components are usually identified as follows: (1) your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you’re trying to improve or an idea you’re trying to master; (2) you receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it’s most productive.

oligodendrocytes to begin wrapping layers of myelin around the

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. By contrast, if you’re trying to learn a complex new skill (say, SQL database management) in a state of low concentration (perhaps you also have your Facebook feed open), you’re firing too many circuits simultaneously and haphazardly to isolate the group of neurons you actually want to strengthen.

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

The best students understood the role intensity plays in productivity and therefore went out of their way to maximize their concentration—radically reducing the time required to prepare for tests or write papers, without diminishing the quality of their results.

The problem this research identifies with this work strategy is that when you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task.

By working on a single hard task for a long time without switching, Grant minimizes the negative impact of attention residue from his other obligations, allowing him to maximize performance on this one task.

might seem harmless to take a quick glance at your inbox every ten minutes or so. Indeed, many justify this behavior as better than the old practice of leaving an inbox open on the screen at all times (a straw-man habit that few follow anymore). But Leroy teaches us that this is not in fact much of an improvement. That quick check introduces a new target for your attention. Even worse, by seeing messages that you cannot deal with at the moment (which is almost always the case), you’ll be forced to turn back to the primary task with a secondary task left unfinished. The attention residue left

by such unresolved switches dampens your performance.

To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction.

way, the type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work.

If you’re not comfortable going deep for extended periods of time, it’ll be difficult to get your performance to the peak levels of quality and q...

professionally. Unless your talent and skills absolutely dwarf those of your competition, the deep workers ...

big trends in business today actively decrease people’s ability to perform deep work, even though the benefits promised by these trends (e.g., increased serendipity, faster responses to requests, and more exposure)

are arguably dwarfed by the benefits that flow from a commitment to deep work (e.g., the ability to learn hard things fast and produce at an elite level).

the skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.

Such concentration hijacks your attention apparatus, preventing you from noticing the many smaller and less pleasant things that unavoidably and persistently populate our lives.

(The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whom we’ll learn more about in the next section, explicitly identifies this advantage when he emphasizes

the advantage of cultivating “concentration so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrele...

Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. 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.

If we give rapt attention to important things, and therefore also ignore shallow negative things, we’ll experience our working life as more important and positive.

Though he would likely agree with the research cited by Gallagher, his theory notes that the feeling of going deep is in itself very rewarding. Our minds like this challenge, regardless of the subject.

This brings us to the final room of the machine, a collection of what Dewane calls “deep work chambers” (he adopted the term “deep work” from my articles on the topic). Each chamber is conceived to be six by ten feet and protected by thick soundproof walls (Dewane’s plans call for eighteen inches of insulation). “The purpose of the deep work chamber is to allow for total focus and uninterrupted work flow,” Dewane explains. He imagines a process in which you spend ninety minutes inside, take a ninety-minute break, and repeat two or three times—at which point your brain will have achieved its limit of concentration for the day.

They’ll show you how to transform deep work from an aspiration into a regular and significant part of your daily schedule.

“Desire turned out to be the norm, not the exception.”

The lure of the Internet and television proved especially strong: The subjects succeeded in resisting these particularly addictive distractions only around half the time.

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

The 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.

On the other hand, if you deployed smart routines and rituals—perhaps a set time and quiet location used for your deep tasks each afternoon—you’d require much less willpower to start and keep going.