Work 4 hours and Get MORE Done than a 12-hour Shifter: Deep Work by Cal Newport- 1/2 of Part #2
Last time on HavenoftheReaders…
Work 4 hours and Get MORE Done than a 12-hour Shifter: Deep Work by Cal Newport- Part #1
“I (and many others) believe one of the best self-help/ nonfiction books in the world is a book called Deep Work written by Cal Newport.”
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“That means you’re going to use your time wisely, HAVE that sense of urgency, and be able to take a 20-minute nap before turning it in because you worked so fast and with such BLISTERING INTENSITY.”
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“There’s 2 abilities that will allow you to thrive and be successful in this era.
Without at least 1 of these abilities, you will not be successful.
The ability to quickly master hard things.
The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.”
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“Have You Read “Deep Work”?”
Last time we covered Part 1 of Deep Work by Cal Newport. This time we’re covering some of Part 2. Part 1 was all philosophical stuff and what deep work is…
Now we’re moving on to how to DO deep work.
As said in MANY other books like Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday, doing is often more important than being or knowing.
So if you’re here, get ready to learn a bit on how to do! If you think I’m wrong in some way because you’ve read deep work and I got something wrong/ you think there’s an opinion that’s false, make sure to advise me in the comments of this post…
And now onto
Rule #1 and #2- Part 2 of Deep Work
Part 2’s structure is based off of 4 rules to help you do deep work and implement the art of deep work into your life.
Rule #1: Work Deeply
Although the title of this book may leave you smirking with an “okay, this was supposed to teach me how to work deeply and it just tells me to work… deep?”, read a few more pages through the book and you’ll see Cal Newport’s amazing advice.
In Rule #1, one of the main takeaways to implement deep work is to decide your deep work philosophy/ how you implement deep work.
If your profession is to write short stories without a 9–5/ a traditional job, you can go for any of the options, even the most extreme (Monastic Philosophy) one. However, if you had a 9–5/ traditional job, a Rhythmic or a Journalist philosophy might suit you most rather than “following your passion/ purpose” and completely abandoning everything. It’s always possible to abandon your job, but it’s not suitable for most which means some philosophies are going to be better than others depending on the person.
The 4 philosophies are:
1. The Monastic Deep Work Philosophy.
This deep work philosophy is where you go into a state of deep work- actually, it’s not just deep work, it’s a deep LIFE- for a long time and your entire life is pretty much only focused on doing deep work. Cal includes an example from a scholar in the past who moved to a tower for a few years to write and write.
In the beginning of Part 1 of the book another Monastic deep work philosophy-follower locked himself in a room with only code books and a notebook for some months so he could learn how to code. Monastic periods last a long time and revolve around the premise that your entire LIFE is deep work during this long period of time. Monastic practitioners also tend to maximize many parts of their life.
2. The Bimodal Deep Work Philosophy.
The best way to illustrate the Bimodal Deep Work Philosophy is with an entrepreneur named Iman Gadzhi. Iman Gadzhi has what he calls “Monk Mode” and his goal for 2022 is to do 6 months in Monk Mode.
Monk Mode can be thought of as a period of time where deep work is prioritized. During Monk Mode, deep work is essentially Iman Gadzhi’s life…
But the reason this is the Bimodal Philosophy is that outside of Monk Mode Iman parties and has fun. He doesn’t do much deep work and tastes the fruit he planted during Monk Mode.
If you haven’t caught on right now, the Bimodal Philosophy is one where you allocate a period of time every year/ month/ week to do deep work and the rest of the time you don’t do deep work. It’s the Monastic Philosophy but you take breaks and enjoy your rewards.
Of course, you don’t have to do 6 months like Iman, and even Iman doesn’t do the 6 months straight. Iman Gadzhi splits his Monk Mode periods into “cycles” where he goes into Monk Mode for 3 weeks. Then he might take a week off to party and have fun and then he goes for 4 weeks. Then he takes 2 weeks off and then he does 7 weeks… and this continues until 6 months are up. He’s alternating between deep work and resting periods which allows him to be fully focused on deep work some days and fully focused on enjoying himself on others.
If you’re interested on boosting your productivity and reading more efficiently, check out this article on these 2 mistakes readers (and maybe you) often do when they’re reading nonfiction!
3. The Rhythmic Deep Work Philosophy
The Rhythmic Deep Work Philosophy is a philosophy to schedule a routine for doing deep work.
For example, you might do deep work from 6:00 P.M. to 9:00 P.M. every night. This would be a “routine” to do deep work because you’ve set a time to do deep work and you follow it.
This is your best bet if you’re somebody who doesn’t normally do deep work or has a 9–5 job which takes up a portion of a day. Your brain gets accustomed to doing deep work at this time after a while and you get in 1–4 hours of deep work every day!
4. The Journalistic Deep Work Philosophy.
The Journalistic Deep Work Philosophy is to do deep work whenever you have the time to.
If you have obligations in life which prevent you from doing Monastic and Bimodal philosophies and you frequently have interruptions in your day which prevent you from following the Rhythmic philosophy of having a schedule, the Journalistic Deep Work Philosophy is the one for you.
This is a very simple yet effective philosophy because instead of browsing through social media or watching the TV, you do deep work. Cal Newport recalls an anecdote his [someone I forgot the title of, maybe father?] told him.
His [] had a journalist who they went on vacation with. During this time, they got to see how he worked. Every time they were relaxing, [] went up to his office, furiously wrote and wrote with deep-work-level intensity, and came back down.
Of course, this philosophy doesn’t mean you have to completely give up relaxing. You can relax for 30 minutes in the afternoon then perform your deep work, after which you relax some more. You can relax by reading some nonfiction/ fiction (or just reading ANYTHING really) or by wasting time- it’s completely up to you!
A general rule of deep work is to plan it.
With the Rhythmic Philosophy, okay, it’s planned for you, but with the Monastic and Bimodal philosophy you should have your deep work time planned out with a schedule. There’s more information about schedules later on too, which I’ll summarize:
Schedule your day. It’s not so much about following the schedule to a T, it’s more about being thoughtful of your time. Speaking from personal experience, I’ve had many days where I didn’t have something to do from X activity to Y activity so I did the easiest thing possible: I hopped onto YouTube and watched until the day was over.
Looking back, I realize that if I scheduled every minute of my day and if I was thoughtful about how I used my time, these 30 minutes of YouTube that quickly transformed into 5 hours would never have happened and I could have spent the time working or reading over the summer.
Again, it’s not about following the schedule to a T. It’s about being thoughtful about your time.
When you don’t have something to do and you have some free time it’s also a lot harder to do something productive without a schedule. You have infinite options to spend your time and the easiest choice is to hop onto social media. To do something productive or to do deep work requires a mental battle.
With a schedule you don’t have to think about it. “What am I supposed to be doing now? Writing? Okay, let me get to my computer.”
(continuing from the paragraph explaining the general rule of deep work)
With the Journalistic Philosophy it can be hard to create a schedule so one thing that I follow (that works well) is to create a schedule in the morning. I can roughly assume the things that are going to happen in the current day so it’s not too hard to predict and make a schedule. Of course, if something unexpected comes up I can always revise the schedule (which I do, revisions are VERY common) and it’s a good way to be thoughtful about my time.
If you don’t know what’s going to come up in your day, 1. There’s a lot of power in asking people if something’s going to come up later, and 2:
- Allocate more time for yourself when you originally create the schedule to make space for interruptions.
- Revise the schedule when something comes up (my preference)
- Use if statements. Ex. “If art class takes 1 1/2 hours, I will spend 1/2 hours writing. If art class takes 1 hour, I will spend 1 hour writing.”
Rule #2- Embrace Boredom
The KEY 🔑 point in Rule #2 is a wake-up call from “dopamine detoxes” or “internet detoxes”.
The way a lot of people structure detoxes is to structure time away from the internet. What Cal Newport says to do is to structure time away from deep work.
The rationale for this is simple: If you were eating healthy 2 days a week and binging on junk food 5 days a week, would you lose weight or gain weight? Would you make progress towards fitness goals or away from them?
Of course you would make progress away from your fitness goals! After all, if you’re spending the majority of your time not making progress and the minority making progress, you’re going to go in a negative direction. That’s why people usually have 1 “cheat” day and not 1 “gym” day.
The same logic can be applied to deep work and detoxing from the internet. If you’re spending the majority of your time not doing deep work and the minority doing deep work, you’re going to be making less progress to the goal of doing deep work.
On the other hand, if you’re spending more time on deep work than you are on the internet wasting time, you’re going to be making good progress to your deep work goal.
This does apply to everything- if you’re adding more books to your TBR list than reading them, you’re going to be having a constantly increasing TBR list. If you’re looking to be a UFC fighter but you’re not training and improving more than the average UFC fighter trains, you’re not going to be making good progress.
How to Implement this:
Instead of scheduling time away from internet usage/ wasting time, schedule times to have internet usage/ waste time. Outside of these times, avoid internet usage/ wasting time altogether and focus on creativity, deep work, and just living life.
Cal Newport only put “internet usage”, however for most of you reading this the internet is a core part of your deep work so you should schedule time away from time-wasting instead.
Here’s an example schedule:
7:00 A.M. Wake up and shower, brush teeth, and eat breakfast.
8:30 A.M. Go to work
9:00 A.M. Work
1:00 P.M. Negotiation meeting with client (Still at work)
5:30 P.M. Be at home and WASTE TIME.
6:30 P.M. Eat Dinner
7:00 P.M. Deep Work
11:00 P.M. 😴 Sleep
Notice how, in all caps, there were the words “WASTE TIME”. With this in mind, this implies that you’re not wasting time during other parts of your day because you get an HOUR to waste time.
This was Rule #1 and Rule #2 of Deep Work by Cal Newport.
The LAST part to the Deep Work Summary Series will be uploaded on Saturday, July 27th, 2022. Make sure to check it out, if you’re reading this past then I’ll give a link to it here:____.
This post has reached 2,000 words- most blog posts at Haven of the Readers stop at this marker because it’s more enjoyable for the reader. If there was a 10,000-word post you’d be unlikely to fully enjoy it, a 3,000+ one is nearing “long”, but a 2,000-word post is “perfect”- not too long but enough time to provide you a good amount of content.
Thank you so much for reading this blog post. I’m really grateful you’re reading this. If you have your own opinion on Deep Work, please make sure to leave me and the other readers a message in the comments. Deep Work is truly a book that can change your life if you implement these practices. Thank you and goodbye!
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