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.

“This is the real me, but you won’t be hearing from me often I am afraid, as pen and paper is my priority at the moment.”

should have stayed that way.

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,

you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things.

To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of producing—a

deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.

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.

A deep life is a good life.

ability to quickly master hard things.

ability to produce at an elite level,

If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no

To learn requires intense concentration.

No shit.

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

you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction.

“Even though you are not aware at the time, the brain responds to distractions.”

we will tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment.

work cultures that save us from the short-term discomfort of concentration and planning, at the expense of long-term satisfaction and the production of real value.

If it’s high-tech, we began to instead assume, then it’s good.

to support deep work often requires the rejection of much of what is new and high-tech.

the shiny thrum of tweets, likes, tagged photos, walls, posts, and all the other behaviors that we’re now taught are necessary for no other reason than that they exist.

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.

brains instead construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to.

After a bad or disrupting occurrence in your life, Fredrickson’s research shows, what you choose to focus on exerts significant leverage on your attitude going forward. These simple choices can provide a “reset button” to your emotions.

your world is the outcome of what you pay attention to,

the habit of frequently checking inboxes ensures that these issues remain at the forefront of their attention.

The world represented by your inbox, in other words, isn’t a pleasant world to inhabit.

when you lose focus, your mind tends to fix on what could be wrong with your life instead of what’s right.”

Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.

Hmm.

Deep work is an activity well suited to generate a flow state

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

Beautiful code is short and concise, so if you were to give that code to another programmer they would say, “oh, that’s well written code.” It’s much like as if you were writing a poem.

except not all beautiful poems are short and concise.

Your work is craft, and if you hone your ability and apply it with respect and care, then like the skilled wheelwright you can generate meaning in the daily efforts of your professional life.

Deep work, therefore, is key to extracting meaning from your profession

People fight desires all day long.

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

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.

attempting to schedule deep work in an ad hoc fashion is not an effective way to manage your limited willpower.)

choose a philosophy that fits your specific circumstances,

the monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling. This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations.

the bimodal philosophy of deep work. This philosophy asks that you divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else.

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.

Says who?

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

it takes time to ease into a state of concentration)

the journalist philosophy. This name is a nod to the fact that journalists, like Walter Isaacson, are trained to shift into a writing mode on a moment’s notice,

This approach is not for the deep work novice.

waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan.

single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration.

build rituals of the same level of strictness and idiosyncrasy as the important thinkers mentioned

Your ritual needs to specify a location for your deep work efforts.