Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

by Cal Newport

Allen is joined in his rejection of computers by Peter Higgs, a theoretical physicist who performs his work in such disconnected isolation that journalists couldn’t find him after it was announced he had won the Nobel Prize.

Our work culture’s shift toward the shallow (whether you think it’s philosophically good or bad) is exposing a massive economic and personal opportunity for the few who recognize the potential of resisting this trend and prioritizing depth—an opportunity that, not too long ago, was leveraged by a bored young

thwarted

Learning something complex like computer programming requires intense uninterrupted concentration on cognitively demanding concepts—the type of concentration that drove Carl Jung to the woods surrounding Lake Zurich.

To remain valuable in our economy,

therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work. If you don’t cultivate this ability, you’re likely to fall behind as technology advances.

If you can create something useful, its reachable audience (e.g., employers or customers) is essentially limitless—which greatly magnifies

To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of producing—a task that requires depth.

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).

As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.

To understand the origins of this interest, it helps to know that I’m a theoretical computer scientist who performed my doctoral

training in MIT’s famed Theory of Computation group—a professional setting where the ability to focus is considered a crucial occupational skill.

This could go on for hours. I’d go to lunch; I’d come back—still staring. This particular professor is hard to reach. He’s not on Twitter and if he doesn’t know you, he’s unlikely to respond to your e-mail. Last year he published sixteen papers.

I’ve worked with on my books, I’ve never had a Facebook or Twitter account, or any other social media presence outside of a blog. I don’t Web surf and get most of my news from my home-delivered Washington Post and NPR.

I build my days around a core of carefully chosen deep work, with the shallow activities I absolutely cannot avoid batched into smaller bursts at the peripheries of my schedule. 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.

Our third and final example of a clear winner in our economy is John Doerr, a general partner in the famed Silicon Valley venture capital fund Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Doerr helped fund many of the key companies fueling the current technological revolution, including Twitter, Google, Amazon, Netscape, and Sun Microsystems. The return on these investments has been astronomical: Doerr’s net worth, as of this writing, is more than $3 billion.

It no longer makes sense, for example, to hire a full-time programmer, put aside office space, and pay benefits, when you can instead pay one of the world’s best programmers, like Hansson, for just enough time to complete the project at hand. In this scenario, you’ll

The Great Restructuring, unlike the postwar period, is a particularly good time to have access to capital.

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.

If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.

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.

Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converging rays of attention; let your soul

be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea.”

Instead, we argue that the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate

effort to improve performance in a specific domain.”

To understand the role of myelin in improvement, keep in mind that skills, be they intellectual or physical, eventually reduce down to brain circuits.

But to Grant, it’s important to enforce strict isolation until he completes the task at hand.

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

Something I noticed in these interviews is that the very best students often studied less than the group of students right below them on the GPA rankings.

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.

Many other ideas are being prioritized as more important

as we just encountered, serendipitous collaboration, rapid communication, and an active presence on social media.

ingot,

ingot,

exhortation

After a week, the researchers had gathered more than 7,500 samples. Here’s the short version of what they found: People fight desires all day long.

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

They tell us that you can expect to be bombarded with the desire to do anything but work deeply throughout the day,

You might respond at this point that you will succeed where these subjects failed because you understand the importance of depth

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.

What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.”

strictures

This division of time between deep and open can happen on multiple

For example, on the scale of a week, you might dedicate a four-day weekend to depth and the rest to open time. Similarly, on the scale of a year, you might dedicate one season to contain most of your deep stretches (as many academics do over the summer or while on sabbatical).

This is why the minimum unit of time for deep work in this philosophy tends to be at least one full day. To put aside a few hours in the morning, for example, is too short to count as a deep work stretch for an adherent of this approach.

the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”

communities that thrive on the ability to do hard things consistently.

This philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit.

This habit also requires a sense of confidence in your abilities—a conviction that what you’re doing is important and will succeed. This type of conviction is typically built on a foundation of existing professional accomplishment.