Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

by Cal Newport

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.

a MacArthur

In other words, those with the oracular ability to work with and tease valuable results out of increasingly complex machines will thrive.

One of his key insights was to explicitly model talent—labeled, innocuously, with the variable q in his formulas—as a factor with “imperfect substitution,” which Rosen explains as follows: “Hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance.” In other words, talent is not a commodity you can buy in bulk and combine to reach the needed levels: There’s a premium to being the best. Therefore, if you’re in a marketplace where the consumer has access to all performers, and everyone’s q value is clear, the consumer will choose the very best. Even if the talent advantage of the best is small compared to the next rung down on the skill ladder, the superstars still win the bulk of the market.

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.

This provides another general observation for joining the ranks of winners in our economy: If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.

By focusing intensely on a specific skill, you’re forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire, again and again, in isolation. This repetitive use of a specific circuit triggers cells called oligodendrocytes to begin wrapping layers of myelin around the neurons in the circuits—effectively cementing the skill. 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.

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

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. This residue gets especially thick if your work on Task A was unbounded and of low intensity before you switched,

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

As Cochran recalls in a blog post he wrote about his experiment for the Harvard Business Review, these simple statistics got him thinking about the rest of his company. Just how much time were employees of Atlantic Media spending moving around information instead of focusing on the specialized tasks they were hired to perform? Determined to answer this question, Cochran gathered company-wide statistics on e-mails sent per day and the average number of words per e-mail. He then combined these numbers with the employees’ average typing speed, reading speed, and salary. The result: He discovered that Atlantic Media was spending well over a million dollars a year to pay people to process e-mails, with every message sent or received tapping the company for around ninety-five cents of labor costs. “A ‘free and frictionless’ method of communication,” Cochran summarized, “had soft costs equivalent to procuring a small company Learjet.”

The Principle of Least Resistance, protected from scrutiny by the metric black hole, supports 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. By doing so, this principle drives us toward shallow work in an economy that increasingly rewards depth. It’s not, however, the only trend that leverages the metric black hole to reduce depth. We must also consider the always present and always vexing demand toward “productivity,” the topic we’ll turn our attention to next.

Feynman was adamant in avoiding administrative duties because he knew they would only decrease his ability to do the one thing that mattered most in his professional life: “to do real good physics work.” Feynman, we can assume, was probably bad at responding to e-mails and would likely switch universities if you had tried to move him into an open office or demand that he tweet. Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.

In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.

A foundation for our answer can be found in a warning provided by the late communication theorist and New York University professor Neil Postman.

Writing in the early 1990s, as the personal computer revolution first accelerated, Postman argued that our society was sliding into a troubling relationship with technology. We were, he noted, no longer discussing the trade-offs surrounding new technologies, balancing the new efficiencies against the new problems introduced. If it’s high-tech, we began to instead assume, then it’s good. Case closed.

He called such a culture a technopoly, and he didn’t mince words in warning against it. “Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World,” he argued in his 1993 book on the topic. “It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It doe...

To Save Everything, Click Here, Morozov

But the metric black hole prevents such clarity and allows us instead to elevate all things Internet into Morozov’s feared “uber-ideology.” In such a culture, we should not be surprised that deep work struggles to compete against 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.

Knowledge work exchanges this clarity for ambiguity. It can be hard to define exactly what a given knowledge worker does and how it differs from another:

‘the idle mind is the devil’s workshop’ … when you lose focus, your mind tends to fix on what could be wrong with your life instead of what’s right.”

The Pragmatic Programmer, a well-regarded book in the computer programming field, makes this connection between code and old-style craftsmanship more directly by quoting the medieval quarry worker’s creed in its preface: “We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals.” The book then elaborates that computer programmers must see their work in the same way: Within the overall structure of a project there is always room for individuality and craftsmanship … One hundred years from now, our engineering may seem as archaic as the techniques used by medieval cathedral builders seem to today’s civil engineers, while our craftsmanship will still be honored.

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

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

people will usually respect your right to become inaccessible if these periods are well defined and well advertised, and outside these stretches, you’re once again easy to find.

give yourself a specific time frame to keep the session a discrete challenge and not an open-ended slog.

When it comes to deep work, in other words, consider the use of collaboration when appropriate, as it can push your results to a new level.

For an individual focused on deep work, it’s easy to identify the relevant lead measure: time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal.

Walking through nature, by contrast, exposes you to what lead author Marc Berman calls “inherently fascinating stimuli,” using sunsets as an example. These stimuli “invoke attention modestly, allowing focused-attention mechanisms a chance to replenish.” Put another way, when walking through nature, you’re freed from having to direct your attention, as there are few challenges to navigate (like crowded street crossings), and experience enough interesting stimuli to keep your mind sufficiently occupied to avoid the need to actively aim your attention. This state allows your directed attention resources time to replenish. After fifty minutes of such replenishment, the subjects enjoyed a boost in their concentration.

(You might, of course, argue that perhaps being outside watching a sunset puts people in a good mood, and being in a good mood is what really helps performance on these tasks. But in a sadistic twist, the researchers debunked that hypothesis by repeating the experiment in the harsh Ann Arbor winter. Walking outside in brutal cold conditions didn’t put the subjects in a good mood, but they still ended up doing better on concentration tasks.)

The final argument for maintaining a clear endpoint to your workday requires us to return briefly to Anders Ericsson, the inventor of deliberate practice theory. As you might recall from Part 1, deliberate practice is the systematic stretching of your ability for a given skill. It is the activity required to get better at something. Deep work and deliberate practice, as I’ve argued, overlap substantially. For our purposes here we can use deliberate practice as a general-purpose stand-in for cognitively demanding efforts.

In Ericsson’s seminal 1993 paper on the topic, titled “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” he dedicates a section to reviewing what the research literature reveals about an individual’s capacity for cognitively demanding work. Ericsson notes that for a novice, somewhere around an hour a day of intense concentration seems to be a limit, while for experts this number can expand to as many as four hours—but rarely more.

shutdown ritual that you use at the end of the workday to maximize the probability that you succeed. In more detail, this ritual should ensure that every incomplete task, goal, or project has been reviewed and that for each you have confirmed that either (1) you have a plan you trust for its completion, or (2) it’s captured in a place where it will be revisited when the time is right.

The concept of a shutdown ritual might at first seem extreme, but there’s a good reason for it: the Zeigarnik effect. This effect, which is named for the experimental work of the early-twentieth-century psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, describes the ability of incomplete tasks to dominate our attention. It tells us that if you simply stop whatever you are doing at five p.m. and declare, “I’m done with work until tomorrow,” you’ll likely struggle to keep your mind clear of professional issues, as the many obligations left unresolved in your mind will, as in Bluma Zeigarnik’s experiments, keep battling for your attention throughout the evening (a battle that they’ll often win). At first, this challenge might seem unresolvable. As any busy knowledge worker can attest, there are always tasks left incomplete. The idea that you can ever reach a point where all your obligations are handled is a fantasy. Fortunately, we don’t need to complete a task to get it off our minds. Riding to our rescue in this matter is our friend from earlier in the rule, the psychologist Roy Baumeister, who wrote a paper with E.J. Masicampo playfully titled “Consider It Done!” In this study, the two researchers began by replicating the Zeigarnik effect in their subjects (in this case, the researchers assigned a task and then cruelly engineered interruptions), but then found that they could significantly reduce the effect’s impact by asking the subjects, soon after the interruption, to make a plan for how t...

Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction, Nass discovered, it’s hard to shake the addiction even when you want to concentrate. To put this more concretely: If every moment of potential boredom in your life—say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives—is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the “mental wrecks” in Nass’s research, it’s not ready for deep work—even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.

Schedule in advance when you’ll use the Internet, and then avoid it altogether outside these times. I suggest that you keep a notepad near your computer at work. On this pad, record the next time you’re allowed to use the Internet. Until you arrive at that time, absolutely no network connectivity is allowed—no matter how tempting.

In a world where your work is the internet, define the sites that are of limits and write down next time you allowed to use them (social, news, mail)

The idea motivating this strategy is that the use of a distracting service does not, by itself, reduce your brain’s ability to focus. It’s instead the constant switching from low-stimuli/high-value activities to high-stimuli/low-value activities, at the slightest hint of boredom or cognitive challenge, that teaches your mind to never tolerate an absence of novelty. This constant switching can be understood analogously as weakening the mental muscles responsible for organizing the many sources vying for your attention. By segregating Internet use (and therefore segregating distractions) you’re minimizing the number of times you give in to distraction, and by doing so you let these attention-selecting muscles strengthen. For example, if you’ve scheduled your next Internet block thirty minutes from the current moment, and you’re beginning to feel bored and crave distraction, the next thirty minutes of resistance become a session of concentration calisthenics. A full day of scheduled distraction therefore becomes a full day of similar mental training.

If you’re required to spend hours every day online or answer e-mails quickly, that’s fine: This simply means that your Internet blocks will be more numerous than those of someone whose job requires less connectivity. The total number or duration of your Internet blocks doesn’t matter nearly as much as making sure that the integrity of your offline blocks remains intact.

It’s crucial in this situation, therefore, that you don’t immediately abandon an offline block, even when stuck. If it’s possible, switch to another offline activity for the remainder of the current block (or perhaps even fill in this time relaxing). If this is infeasible—perhaps you need to get the current offline activity done promptly—then the correct response is to change your schedule so that your next Internet block begins sooner. The key in making this change, however, is to not schedule the next Internet block to occur immediately. Instead, enforce at least a five-minute gap between the current moment and the next time you can go online. This gap is minor, so it won’t excessively impede your progress, but from a behavioralist perspective, it’s substantial because it separates the sensation of wanting to go online from the reward of actually doing so.

To simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, it’s incredibly valuable.

This strategy asks you to inject the occasional dash of Rooseveltian intensity into your own workday. In particular, identify a deep task (that is, something that requires deep work to complete) that’s high on your priority list. Estimate how long you’d normally put aside for an obligation of this type, then give yourself a hard deadline that drastically reduces this time. If possible, commit publicly to the deadline—for example, by telling the person expecting the finished project when they should expect it. If this isn’t possible (or if it puts your job in jeopardy), then motivate yourself by setting a countdown timer on your phone and propping it up where you can’t avoid seeing it as you work. At this point, there should be only one possible way to get the deep task done in time: working with great intensity—no e-mail breaks, no daydreaming, no Facebook browsing, no repeated trips to the coffee machine. Like Roosevelt at Harvard, attack the task with every free neuron until it gives way under your unwavering barrage of concentration. Try this experiment no more than once a week at first—giving your brain practice with intensity, but also giving it (and your stress levels) time to rest in between. Once you feel confident in your ability to trade concentration for completion time, increase the frequency of these Roosevelt dashes. Remember, however, to always keep your self-imposed deadlines right at the edge of feasibility. You should be able to consistently beat the buzz...

The main motivation for this strategy is straightforward. Deep work requires levels of concentration well beyond where most knowledge workers are comfortable. Roosevelt dashes leverage artificial deadlines to help you systematically increase the level you can regularly achieve—providing, in some sense, interval training for the attention centers of your brain. An additional benefit is that these dashes are incompatible with distraction (there’s no way you can give in to distraction and still make your deadlines). Therefore, every completed dash provides a session in which you’re potentially bored, and really want to seek more novel stimuli—but you resist. As argued in the previous strategy, the more you practice resisting such urges, the easier such resistance becomes. After a few months of deploying this strategy, your understanding of what it means to focus will likely be transformed as you reach levels of intensity stronger than anything you’ve experienced before. And if you’re anything like a young Roosevelt, you can then repurpose the extra free time it generates toward the finer pleasures in life, like trying to impress the always-discerning members of the Nuttall Ornithological Club.

The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally—walking, jogging, driving, showering—and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem. Depending on your profession, this problem might be outlining an article, writing a talk, making progress on a proof, or attempting to sharpen a business strategy. As in mindfulness meditation, you must continue to bring your attention back to the problem at hand when it wanders or stalls.

Suggestion #1: Be Wary of Distractions and Looping As a novice, when you begin a productive meditation session, your mind’s first act of rebellion will be to offer unrelated but seemingly more interesting thoughts. My mind, for example, was often successful at derailing my attention by beginning to compose an e-mail that I knew I needed to write. Objectively speaking, this train of thought sounds exceedingly dull, but in the moment it can become impossibly tantalizing. 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.

This transformation into a world-class mental athlete was rapid, but not unprecedented. In 2006, the American science writer Joshua Foer won the USA Memory Championship after only a year of (intense) training—a journey he chronicled in his 2011 bestseller, Moonwalking with Einstein. But what’s important to us about Kilov’s story is what happened to his academic performance during this period of intensive memory development. While training his brain, he went from a struggling student with attention deficit disorder to graduating from a demanding Australian university with first-class honors. He was soon accepted into the PhD program at one of the country’s top universities, where he currently studies under a renowned philosopher. One explanation for this transformation comes from research led by Henry Roediger, who runs the Memory Lab at the University of Washington in Saint Louis. In 2014, Roediger and his collaborators sent a team, equipped with a battery of cognitive tests, to the Extreme Memory Tournament held in San Diego. They wanted to understand what differentiated these elite memorizers from the population at large. “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). The ability in question is called “attentional control,” and it measures the subjects’ ability to maintain the...

The technique for card memorization I’ll teach you comes from someone who knows quite a bit about this particular challenge: Ron White, a former USA Memory Champion and world record holder in card memorization.* The first thing White emphasizes is that professional memory athletes never attempt rote memorization, that is, where you simply look at information again and again, repeating it in your head. This approach to retention, though popular among burned-out students, misunderstands how our brains work. We’re not wired to quickly internalize abstract information. We are, however, really good at remembering scenes. Think back to a recent memorable event in your life: perhaps attending the opening session of a conference or meeting a friend you haven’t seen in a while for a drink. Try to picture the scene as clearly as possible. Most people in this scenario can conjure a surprisingly vivid recollection of the event—even though you made no special effort to remember it at the time. If you systematically counted the unique details in this memory, the total number of items would likely be surprisingly numerous. Your mind, in other words, can quickly retain lots of detailed information—if it’s stored in the right way. Ron White’s card memorization technique builds on this insight.

We know about Thurston’s experiment because he wrote about it in a cover article for Fast Company magazine, ironically titled “#UnPlug.” As Thurston reveals in the article, it didn’t take long to adjust to a disconnected life. “By the end of that first week, the quiet rhythm of my days seemed far less strange,” he said. “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.” Thurston struck up conversations with strangers. He enjoyed food without Instagramming the experience. He bought a bike (“turns out it’s easier to ride the thing when you’re not trying to simultaneously check your Twitter”). “The end came too soon,” Thurston lamented. But he had start-ups to run and books to market, so after the twenty-five days passed, he reluctantly reactivated his online presence.

The first point is that we increasingly recognize that these tools fragment our time and reduce our ability to concentrate. This reality no longer generates much debate; we all feel it. This is a real problem for many different people, but the problem is especially dire if you’re attempting to improve your ability to work deeply. In the preceding rule, for example, I described several strategies to help you sharpen your focus. These efforts will become significantly more difficult if you simultaneously behave like a pre-experiment Baratunde Thurston, allowing your life outside such training to remain a distracted blur of apps and browser tabs. Willpower is limited, and therefore the more enticing tools you have pulling at your attention, the harder it’ll be to maintain focus on something important. To master the art of deep work, therefore, you must take back control of your time and attention from the many diversions that attempt to steal them.

But I will ask you to reject the state of distracted hyperconnectedness that drove him to that drastic experiment in the first place.

The problem with this approach, of course, is that it ignores all the negatives that come along with the tools in question. 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). Eventually, if you use these tools enough, you’ll arrive at the state of burned-out, hyperdistracted connectivity that plagued Baratunde Thurston and millions of others like him.