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.

Indeed, if you study the lives of other influential figures from both distant and recent history, you’ll find that a commitment to deep work is a common theme.

Yes, they were mostly affluent men. The only woman mentioned was also the only one who did not have a châteaux or a summer shed. She also had to do it outside hours she was working or taking car of her kids. This is why Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One's Own.

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.

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

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

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

Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.

In short, I’ll live the focused life, because it’s the best kind there is.”

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

Any pursuit—be it physical or cognitive—that supports high levels of skill can also generate a sense of sacredness.

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

First, distraction remains a destroyer of depth.