Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

by Cal Newport

It simply asks that you give any particular network tool the same type of measured, nuanced accounting that tools in other trades have been subjected to throughout the history of skilled labor.

“Twitter is crack for media addicts.” He goes so far as to describe Carr’s rave about the service as “the most frightening picture of the future that I’ve read thus far in the new decade.”

The first step of this strategy is to identify the main high-level goals in both your professional and your personal life. If you have a family, for example, then your personal goals might involve parenting well and running an organized household. In the professional sphere, the details of these goals depend on what you do for a living. In my own work as a professor, for example, I pursue two important goals, one centered on being an effective teacher in the classroom and effective mentor to my graduate students, and another centered on being an effective researcher. While your goals will likely differ, the key is to keep the list limited to what’s most important and to keep the descriptions suitably high-level. (If your goal includes a specific target—“to reach a million dollars in sales” or “to publish a half dozen papers in a single year”—then it’s too specific for our purposes here.) When you’re done you should have a small number of goals for both the personal and professional areas of your life.

But part of what makes social media insidious is that the companies that profit from your attention have succeeded with a masterful marketing coup: convincing our culture that if you don’t use their products you might miss out.

but a boss might reply, in so many words,

“as much shallow work as is needed for you to promptly do whatever we need from you at the moment.” In this case, the answer is still useful, as it tells you that this isn’t a job that supports deep work, and a job that doesn’t support deep work is not a job that can help you succeed in our current information economy. You should, in this case, thank the boss for the feedback, and then promptly start planning how you can transition into a new position that values depth.