Book Summary: Deep Work by Cal Newport
Rules for focused success in a distracted world
What is Deep Work versus Shallow Work?
Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free with focus. This flow state pushes 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.
Why is Deep Work rare in the business world??
The culture of constant connectivity, where one is expected to read and respond to emails and messages quickly.
Without a clear understanding of the impact of behaviors on the bottom line, people tend to adopt behaviors that are easy at the moment. For example:- Producing an email with in-depth analysis to make a decision is tough; calling out a meeting to discuss it for an hour is easy. People may adopt the second option, and this gives them a false sense of progress.
Why is Deep Work meaningful??
To remain valuable in our changing world, you must master learning the complex subjects quickly and produce an expert level work. To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction.
If a company celebrates answering emails at all hours and attending meetings constantly, these behaviors can convince yourself and others that you are doing your job well.
Deep work generates a flow state: stretching your mind to its limits, concentrating, and losing yourself in an activity. You know the flow state, and how it feels, we are all experienced at some point in our lives. The flow generates happiness and pure satisfaction.
How to incorporate Deep Work in your distracting world?
Doing Deep Work: When it comes to replacing distraction with focus, matters are not so simple. It requires strong will power. You need to add routines and rituals to minimize distractions and to utilize limited will power.
The monastic approach is disconnecting with the entire world to allow oneself to write or think about the problem or product. For example- Think weeks.
The bimodal philosophy of deep work — seek intense and uninterrupted concentration, followed by shallow work such as checking emails or returning phone calls.
Ritualize: Train yourself to be organized. The rituals minimize the friction and allow you to go to the flow state easily and stay there longer. Your rituals need rules and processes to keep your efforts structured.
Collaboration: The relationship between deep work and collaboration is tricky. Separate your efforts on working side by side with someone on a problem, with efforts to think deeply and build on these inspirations.
Concentration: The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained. Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.
Quit Social Media: We increasingly recognize that these social media outlets fragment our time and reduce our ability to concentrate. 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.
Drain the shallows: You need to divide the hours of your workday into blocks and assign activities to the blocks. The motivation for this strategy is to schedule deep work and also treat your time with respect. You aspire to spend at least 50% of your workday on deep work activities, which helps you to produce work and helps with your long term career goals. Learn how to manage emails and message communications.
References: Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
