Deep Work: The Ultimate Book Summary

In 15 minutes, digest the wisdom in Cal Newport’s infamous book…

Dear Timeless friends,

As the readers of Timeless Whatsapp will know, I’m quite the fan of Cal Newport’s writing on productivity and life.

He recently wrote a book — an important one. “Deep Work” can set you apart from the pack, and it can lead to a better and more fulfilling life.

I URGENTLY needed it — so I ended up highlighting and noting down a ton of stuff.

But as with many business books, the core idea was unnecessarily spread out & repeated over too many pages. So in the spirit of ‘15 minutes of Timeless’, I tried to make a summary of exactly 15 minutes. It’s become a cocktail of core messages, quotes, and some personal brain farts in between. It’s also become 17 minutes, but that’s close enough and I promise it will be worth your time :).

I hope it’s useful and applicable in your life. All credits for the ideas go to Cal Newport and his team… If you want the full experience — find the book here!

I’ll live the focused life… Because it’s the best kind there is.

Structure

We try to follow the structure of the book as much as possible.

1. The Big Idea

2. Why Deep Work?

• It’s Valuable
• It’s Rare
• It’s Meaningful

3. How Deep Work?

• Choose a system
• Ritualize it
• Cultivate Intensity
• Be Lazy (whut?)
• Train concentration like a muscle
• Quit social media (for a while)
• Meditate Productively
• Don’t become a CEO :-)

Let’s get into it.

Cal Newport, author of “Deep Work”

The Big Idea

The Deep Work Hypothesis:

The ability to perform 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.

To start off, it’s useful to define deep versus shallow work.

• 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.
• Shallow Work: Non-cognitively 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.

The basic proposition of the book is that we are in a great shift towards more shallow work, while ignoring the harder but more valuable deep work.

Before telling us how to Deep Work, Cal sets out to prove three things. He wants to establish that deep work is becoming increasingly Valuable, Rare and Meaningful.

Let’s dive in.

Part one: Why Deep Work?

1. Deep Work is Valuable

[Quick Summary: Some of the core skills of the 21st century include: learning new & complex things; producing at an elite level; working with very intelligent technology. Deep work or Deliberate Practice is the method for this.]

The case is that our economy is increasingly rewarding deep work — and that there is a massive opportunity for people who exploit it. Without going too deep (gotcha!), Newport points at:

• Knowledge workers increasingly making use of very intelligent tools and machines
• An rising and urgent need for people who can control and direct these intelligent tools
• The intelligent tools appearing, disappearing and changing at an ever-increasing rate (basically: technological change)
• The talent market being made universally accessible (freelancers, …)
• Both of these leading to increased competition and complexity for your average knowledge worker (programmer, marketeer, accountant, manager, …).

Basic conclusion: there is an enormous opportunity for people wo know how to learn complex things fast — and then produce amazing stuff with it.

In comes Deliberate Practice

So how do we become one of those people?

According to science, there’s two things to remember:

1. Your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill
2. You receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it’s most productive.

They call it Deliberate Practice — Newport, in his book, extends the definition to Deep Work.

Some more science (it’s pretty cool):

“The differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.”

• If you concentrate intensely on something, you strengthen the neural pathways related to that activity. It then becomes “easier” to access these paths in the future.

“Scientists increasingly believe the answer includes myelin — a layer of fatty tissue that grows around neurons, acting like an insulator that allows the cells to fire faster and cleaner.”

“By focusing intensely on a specific skill, you’re forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire, again and again, in isolation. The myelin layer thus grows.”

• If you’re distracted by other things, this strengthening of neural pathways does not happen. Simply because your brain cannot isolate the neurons well enough.

“By contrast, if you’re trying to learn a complex new skill in a state of low concentration (your Facebook feed is also open), you’re firing too many circuits simultaneously and haphazardly to isolate the group of neurons you actually want to strengthen.”

This is a very important finding — the reason why multi-tasking sucks.

Honestly, deep down I somehow knew that I was doing too much “shallow” work in my life, and I didn’t need any more motivation. I did ask myself:

If deep work is being rewarded highly — why don’t we all do it??

Well, that’s because it’s rare… Read on!

Q works with intelligent machines — without his Facebook feed open :)

2. Deep Work is Rare

[Quick Summary: Because of the synchronous trends of open offices, instant messaging and social media, the state of deep concentration is becoming increasingly difficult. At the same time, it is becoming harder and harder to measure how productive we are. The result is that we revert to being busy, aka producing a large amount of shallow work.]

Why is it rare?

There are Barriers to Deep Work

They emerged around the same time.
All are part of our modern “knowledge work”.
All our nagging away at your attention.

1. Open offices.
2. Social media.
3. Instant messaging inside companies (Slack, Skype, ..).

But Cal: That’s pretty pessimistic. All of these tools clearly have their benefits (communication, transparency, quick problem solving, …) Why then, is this a problem for the modern knowledge worker?

The First Problem: Attention Residue

Task switching (even in VERY small doses) has a major impact on your productivity.

As you start another task, you’re still thinking of the previous one. […] In a well-cited study, Mark and her co-authors observed knowledge workers in real offices and found that an interruption, even if short, delays the total time required to complete a task by a significant fraction.

The Real Problem: Busyness as a proxy for Productivity

If we were actually able to measure your productivity, we would know that it is declining, and we could act accordingly. But nowadays, in big companies, it’s extremely hard to measure…

In the modern economy, it is objectively difficult to measure individual contributions to a firm’s output.

Think about it: can you easily deceipher how much profit you’ve made for your company in the last 2 hours you worked? Do you know exactly how much you’ve advanced your career prospects yesterday? …

So now follows the real problem: in abscence of a clear way of measuring how productive we are, most of us do the exact opposite of what we should be doing: we try to show how productive we are by doing LOTS OF STUFF.

In short, shallow work thrives. We go for the low-hanging fruit. We chime in on the latest e-mail thread in which we were unnecessarily CC’d. Everybody sees that we answered their e-mail at 9pm — oh he must be so busy and important!!

Ok Cal, it’s rare and valuable… But what if it’s boring and lame? Is there some passion and purpose in working deeply??

Glad you asked…

3. Deep Work is Meaningful

[Quick summary: This chapter is a rally for Craftsmanship.
Newport argues that any knowledge worker should view their job as a craft — and take pride in performing it. The craft provides a deeper meaning and purpose to your work.]

Why do “craftsmen” find purpose where others don’t? And how can we replicate that in knowledge work? We rely on 3 disciplines: Neurology, Psychology and Philosophy. Yes, the big ones.

3.1 Neurology: Concentrate deeply, and your brain will attach importance and meaning to what you’re doing

The basic neurological finding: your brain will follow your activity when assigning meaning — not the other way around.

• If you treat what you do every second of every day as important and requiring full focus — your mind will do the same.
• If you concentrate deeply on important things — you simply do not allow yourself to notice all the petty little worries from your life.

Diverse disciplines suggest that 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.

If you spend enough time in a state of deep focus — your mind will interpret your world as rich in meaning and importance.

Deep concentration hijacks your attention apparatus, preventing you from noticing the many smaller and less pleasant things that unavoidably and persistently populate our lives.

3.2 Psychology: The best moments of people’s lives happen in a state of Flow

We rely on a Harvard study. Just saying that doubting this is at your own risk. ;)

Most people think they’re happy when they’re relaxing, vacationing or partying. This is a mistake. People are happiest when immersed deeply in something challenging.

When measured empirically, people were happier working and less happy relaxing than they suspected.

The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile

3.3 Philosphy: The meaning is in the craft — you just have to find it.

A craftsman finds meaning within the craft itself — and his ability to hone it to perfection. This is actually quite profound.

The woodworker has an intimate relationship with the wood he works. Its subtle virtues call out to be cultivated and cared for. In this appreciation for the “subtle virtues” of his medium, they note, the craftsman has stumbled onto something crucial: a source of meaning sited outside the individual.

The task of a craftsman, they conclude, “is not to generate meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill of discerning the meanings that are already there.”

This has to be one of the most beautiful quotes I have ever read:

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, but our craftsmanship will still be honored.

Margaret Hamilton, one of the “craftsman woman” that helped get us to the moon!

Waw, I hope we’ve established that Deep Work might be a good thing and not a bad thing. Yet we still don’t really know how to do it. What am I doing wrong Cal? How do I become more like you?????

Let’s dive in…

Part 2: How Deep Work?

If more information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs. — Derek Sivers

There are a lot of good ideas in this world — the key is actually putting them into practice. Luckily, Newport gives a ton of advice on how to cultivate a deep work habit.

The rest of this post is an attempt to catalog some of these principles. Personally, I use it as a “re-visit every now and then” thing. It is not exhaustive and it is my interpretation — don’t hesitate to comment if you have any thoughts!

Overview

1. Choose a system
2. Ritualize it
3. Cultivate Intensity
4. Be Lazy (whut?)
5. Train Concentration like a muscle
6. Quit social media (for a while…)
7. Meditate Productively
8. Don’t become a CEO. :-)

Hmm, it might take some more effort than this.

1. Choose a system of Deep Work

Throughout history, successful people have adapted different ways to maximize intense concentration on their work.

Cal lists four methods, going from the extremes (monastic schedule) to more practical adaptations (bi-modal, rhythmic and journalistic). We discuss what’s useful.

But why do you need a system?

The productivity equation is a non-linear one.

If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. But as those chunks get more separated and fragmented, my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly.

Bi-Modal schedule

On a a regular basis, completely seclude yourself from reality. For example twice a year, lock yourself up for two weeks.

People will usually respect your right to become inaccessible if these periods are well defined and well advertised.

Examples:

• Carl Jung — Had a retreat in Switzerland for multi-week thinking stretches.
• Adam Grant — University professor, teaches all his courses in one semester; in other semester, only thinking and writing with closed doors.

Carl Jung

Rhythmic

If you’re a creature of habit, & your life is more stable, this seems like a good option to instill a Deep Work discipline.

• Create a fixed timeslot every day.
• 6am to 8 am, before starting real work, is my DW time.

“I start my working day knowing I have already accomplished a crazy ton. It is both astronomically productive and guilt free.”

Examples:

• Jerry Seinfeld, famous of the “Don’t Break the Chain!” method

Journalistic

This seems to be the most practic and down-to-earth method.

• Deep Work, whenever you can!
• Any time you find a spare time slot — go into DEEP FOCUS.
• This requires some good and disciplined scheduling…

Journalists are trained to shift into a writing mode on a moment’s notice, as is required by the deadline-driven nature of their profession.

Cal Newport:

I’ll map out when I’ll work deeply during each week at the beginning of the week — and then refine these decisions, as needed, at the beginning of each day.

About Walter Isaacson:

It was always amazing … he could retreat up to the bedroom for a while, when the rest of us were chilling on the patio or whatever, to work on his book … he’d go up for twenty minutes or an hour, we’d hear the typewriter pounding, then he’d come down as relaxed as the rest of us … the work never seemed to faze him, he just happily went up to work when he had the spare time.

Tip:

• Make time, don’t find time. Actually schedule deep work sessions in your calendar and don’t let anything get in your way.
• Use something like Pomodoro timing to get you into the zone (this is one of our curated Timeless articles!)

2. Ritualize it

“Routine, in an intelligent person, is a sign of ambition.”

The general idea: limit the amount of willpower it takes for you to enter and remain in a state of deep focus. Build a ritual (of a couple of minutes) that gets you into the zone. Make sure you stay there.

Concrete tips:

• Go to a certain location (library, private office, your favourite coffee shop, …)
• Start with a certain cue / “energy ritual”
  Drink a certain type of coffee/tea specifically for DW sessions.
  Listen to a specific playlist.
  Start off by doing the same stretch/walk.
• Sustain your energy levels
  The lower your blood glucose, the easier distracted you will be. Have some nuts, crackers, … next to you.
• Decide exactly how long you’ll work. Do not make it open ended (!).
  90 minutes is recommended, as you will reap maximum benefits of getting into the zone, without fully tiring out.
• If possible, work on ONE TASK. And nothing else.
  If you need to do multiple small things, batch them into one group (eg “practical arrangements”) and ONLY DO THAT TYPE OF ACTIVITY.
• If possible, no internet or social media — unless truly necessary for that one task (Google research, Stack Overflow, …).

Do remember: It’s different for everyone. You will not do this flawlessly the first few times. As we discuss further — CONCENTRATION IS A MUSCLE YOU CAN TRAIN OVER TIME…

3. Cultivate INTENSITY in your work

So, after a few first attempts at “Deep Work sessions” — I asked myself… What makes certain work deep and other things shallow? How do I know if I’m actually on the right track?

A first indicator could be the definition we gave to Deep Work. Quick recap:

• Efforts that create new value (Am I CREATING something?)
• Improve your skill (Am I pushing my cognitive capabilities to their limit?)
• Hard to replicate (How long would it take for a college graduate to learn this?)

Another interesting factor is INTENSITY. Cal argues that deep concentration is almost always intense.

You don’t dabble in stuff or wallow around. Your eyes are fixed. Your brain is at work. You’re thinking deeply — you’re exploring —you’re trying. You want to FINISH something concrete. You’re like Teddy Roosevelt in his time at Harvard!

On the one hand, his attention might have appeared to be hopelessly scattered, spread over what one classmate called an “amazing array of interests”… But his concentration was so intense, and his reading so rapid, that he could afford more time off than most. Like Roosevelt at Harvard, attack the task with every free neuron until it gives way under your unwavering barrage of concentration.

Parkinson’s law is a good help for this.

• When beginning your one task, estimate how long you’d normally put aside for this.
• Then give yourself a HARD DEADLINE that reduces this time significantly. 1 hour instead of 1.5 hour normally.
  “You should be able to consistently beat the buzzer (or at least be close), but to do so should require teeth-gritting concentration.”

Your intensity muscle is important people. Get it to work!

4. Be Lazy

Uhm, what?

You were just talking about intensity? How can I be a laser-focused, teeth-gritting Deep Worker… And then also be lazy?

Well, here’s why you should consider…

For decisions that involve large amounts of information and multiple vague, and perhaps even conflicting, constraints, your unconscious mind is well suited to tackle the issue.

For complex problems, you need to give your unconscious brain the time and space to get involved. The best way to do this, is to do nothing really.

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets …

Idleness is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.

In addition to that, working deeply all the time is simply not possible.

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.

Here are some suggestions to activate your subconscious genius.

• Leave work BEHIND.
  “At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning — no after-dinner e-mail check, no mental replays of conversations, and no scheming about how you’ll handle an upcoming challenge.”
• Create a “shutdown ritual”.
  “I quickly skim every task in every list, and then look at the next few days on my calendar. These two actions ensure that there’s nothing urgent I’m forgetting or any important deadlines or appointments sneaking up on me. I have, at this point, reviewed everything that’s on my professional plate. To end the ritual, I use this information to make a rough plan for the next day. Once the plan is created, I say, “Shutdown complete,” and my work thoughts are done for the day.”
• If you can’t perform a task now — commit to plan or certain steps. This will shut up your monkey mind.

In short: stop work at 5, take nature walks, have fun, have a life!

Enjoy life, baby! This Deep Work thing is easy!

If you would like to learn more about how Cal schedules his days, read his free article “Fixed-Schedule Productivity”. Again one of our curated Timeless gems!

5. Train Concentration like a Muscle

• Concentration is a muscle.
• Resisting distraction is a muscle (albeit a different one).
• Every time you give in to a distraction, one muscle gets stronger, and the other gets weaker.

Hmm.

Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.

Much in the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, you’ll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom.

Hmm Hmm. Can we get a bit more practical Cal?

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…

Hmm hmm. More practical? Yes, you can still use Instagram. In order to train your brain, you don’t have to eliminate all distracting behavior. What is important, is that YOU consciously control when you perform these behaviors. So put your phone on airplane mode when you work deeply, or put it away. Only watch Youtube clips when YOU decide it’s time to do it.

6. Meditate Productively

Hmm hmm again. Meditate Productively? Isn’t that a bit backwards? I thought meditation was exactly about not doing anything, not being productive, and creating space to explore your own mind?

Cal proposes a special form of meditation.

The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you are occupied physically but not mentally (walking, jogging, driving, showering, …) and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem.

Don’t do this every time you walk. As we mentioned in 4), idleness and restoration of your brain is extremely important. However, selectively picking a time (1x or 2x perweek) to do this could be useful — it generated some important insights for Newport. Me brainstorming why:

• You’re thinking about a problem away from the “regular location”
  (doing maths in the park instead of the office)
• It helps structure your thinking
  (when it’s only you and your brain — without a computer or piece of paper — you need better and clearer structures to work with a problem)
• It generally strenghtens your concentration muscle.

7. Quit Social Media (for a while…)

Here Cal goes a bit more into the extremes. But bear with us, it’s less unreasonable than it sounds.

The argument:

• Yes, social media brings a lot of advantages and opportunities
• Yes, for some people it is crucial in our connected world.
• But, we need to keep weighing the disadvantages relative to the advantages.
• In most cases, the disadvantages of social media are bigger than you think (and for the most part unknown! We didn’t know cigarettes were harmful until we were 900 years in…)
• In most cases, the advantages are smaller than you think and there are other ways of connecting with people.

So here is Cal’s challenge — quit a certain social media account for a defined period of time (1 month). Evaluate if you actually missed it. Was your life really different without it? What concrete things did you miss out on?

“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.”

It’s on my to-do list to try this. But I will keep Whatsapp for now. :-)

8. Don’t become a CEO… :-)

The following is an argument Cal got frequently when discussing Deep Work with people. He started calling it the Jack Dorsey argument.

Cal, What about Jack Dorsey? He’s an extremely succesful CEO and entrepreneur. He’s a busy man: meetings, sales calls, running his team, ... He doesn’t seem to care about Deep Work at all, and he’s doing well. So Cal, are you a fraud? Why is Jack Dorsey not working deeply??

If you want the full argument, read the book, but here’s Newport’s answer in short:

“A good chief executive is essentially a hard-to-automate decision engine, not unlike IBM’s Jeopardy!-playing Watson system. They have built up a hard-won repository of experience and have honed and proved an instinct for their market. They’re then presented inputs throughout the day — in the form of e-mails, meetings, site visits, and the like — that they must process and act on.

To ask a CEO to spend four hours thinking deeply about a single problem is a waste of what makes him or her valuable.”

But that’s probably not how they became CEO in the first place… Good to remember.

In conclusion

There is SO MUCH left to think about in the world of focus and concentration nowadays. Also I have SO MUCH MORE to work on before I’m truly living the principles in this book.

However — even in the short time that I’ve tried, I have already felt the benefits and made stuff happen that I otherwise would not have. Among which this blogpost. :)

Might it be true? I’d love to hear your thoughts!!

If you like to absorb “snackable wisdom” like this, receiving 2–3 articles per week on productivity, technology, happiness, … Have a look at our Timeless Whatsapp service — it’s all free!

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