[Book Note] Deep Work
Published in
9 min readMar 27, 2021
- The author, Cal Newport, has been cultivating his own ability to concentrate on hard things. To understand the origins of his interest, it helps to know that he is a theoretical computer scientist who performed his doctoral training in MIT’s famed Theory of Computation group- a setting where the ability to focus is crucial.
- He argues in the introduction that, many famous people like Bill Gates, J.K. Rowling, Peter Higgs are successful because they have the ‘deep work ability’. This ability is becoming increasingly rare at the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our new economy.
- This book has two goals: 1. convince you why should anyone cultivate the deep work habit. (Point 1–3); 2. the strategy to train and develop this habit. (Rule 1–4)
- Definition of 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.
Point 1: Deep Work is Valuable
There are two valuable abilities that depend on your ability of deep work.
- Quickly master hard thing. This requires deliberate practice with uninterrupted concentration. By focusing intensely, you repetitively isolate the relevant neural circuit enough to trigger myelination (useful for learning complex new skill). If you work with distraction, you are firing too many circuits simultaneously and haphazardly.
- Produce at an elite level (in terms of quality & speed). This is related to an effect called attention residue. When you switch from one task to another, your attention doesn’t immediately follow, it remains stuck on the original task. This residue gets especially thick if your original task is unbounded and of low intensity. High-Quality work = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus). When you maximize your concentration, you will radically reduce the time required to produce.
Point 2: Deep Work is Rare
Why don’t our society cultivate a deep work ethic anymore?
- The cost of many seemingly harmless behaviors is difficult to measure, which is called the ‘metric black holes’.
- The distracting behaviors, for example, the culture of constant connectivity in workplace, persist because we tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment, especially in the absence of metrics.
- Many knowledge workers turn towards ‘visible busyness’ as a proxy for productivity, which is depth-destroying and does not produce much values.
We have a culture of ‘technopoly’.
- We are quick to idolize the products of the Internet without questioning the trade-offs.
- Deep work is at a severe disadvantage in a technopoly because it builds on values like quality, craftsmanship, and mastery that are decidedly old-fashioned and nontechnological. However, to support deep work often requires the rejection of much of what is new and high-tech.
Point 3: Deep Work is Meaningful
Neurological argument:
- Research shows that our rewireable brains construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to.
- There is a sense of importance inherent in deep work, and if you skillfully manage your attention in this state for enough time, your mind will understand your world as rich in meaning and importance.
- Such concentration hijacks your attention apparatus, preventing you from noticing the many insignificant things in life.
Psychological argument:
- Research also finds that the feeling of going deep is in itself very rewarding.
- When a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile, he enters the mental state of ‘flow’. Flow generates happiness.
- Free time, by contrast, is unstructured and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.
Philosophical argument:
- Any pursuit that supports high level of skill can generate a sense of sacredness. It is due to the appreciation inherent in craftsmanship.
- Your work is craft, if you hone your ability and apply it with respect and care, you cultivate meanings in the daily efforts of your professional life.
- A deep life is a good life.
Rule 1: Work Deeply
Choose a philosophy of deep work that fits your circumstances.
- Monastic — They maximize deep efforts by radically eliminating shallow obligations. They tend to have a well-defined professional goal, and the success comes from doing this ‘one’ thing exceptionally well.
- Bimodal — They divide their months or weeks into two modes, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else. They need substantial commitments to non-deep pursuits.
- Rhythmic — They transform deep work into regular daily habit and routines which remove the need to invest energy in deciding if and when they’re going to go deep.
- Journalistic — They would switch into a deep work mode whenever they could find some free time. This is the most flexible approach but without practice, such switches can seriously deplete the finite willpower reserves.
Strict rituals are required to minimize the friction in the transition to depth, which address:
- Where you’ll work and for how long- Specific location and time for deep work.
- How you’ll work once you start to work- Keep your efforts structured by maintaining a metric eg. work produced per 20 minutes.
- How you’ll support your work- eg. a cup of good coffee, enough food, environment.
Discipline in the execution. We can expect to be bombarded by desires which win out most of the time.
- Focus on the wildly important- Specific goal that makes you unaware of the trivial distractions.
- Act on the lead measures- Two type of metrics: lag and lead measures. Lag measures are the ultimate result. The relevant lead measure on deep work: time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal.
- Keep a compelling scoreboard- Keep track of hours spent with scores. People play differently when they’re keeping score.
- Create a cadence of accountability- Weekly review which serves as a meeting with yourself.
When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done.
- Resting enables your unconscious mind to sort through your most complex professional challenges, which is beneficial according to the research.
- Directed attention is finite, you restore your ability to direct your attention if you give this activity a rest. Particularly, by evening, you’re likely beyond the natural limit where you can continue to effectively work deeply.
- Once your workday shuts down, you cannot allow even the smallest incursion of professional concerns into your field of attention. Setting a shutdown ritual also ensures that each task will only be tackled when the time is appropriate.
Rule 2: Embrace Boredom
The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained.
- It requires a lot of practice to rewire your brain so you are comfortable resisting distracting stimuli, even if you’re potentially bored.
- Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction (eg. relieved boredom with a quick glance at smartphone), it’s hard to shake the addiction even when you want to concentrate.
Don’t prevent distraction, instead prevent constant switching.
- The constant switching from low-stimuli/high-value activities to high-stimuli/low-value activities harms your brain’s ability to focus.
- The Internet blocks technique. Schedule in advance when you’ll use the Internet, then avoid it altogether outside these time.
- Even if there is a serious need to reschedule your Internet blocks, put a minor 5-minute gap before using the Internet. From a behaviorist perspective, it separates the sensation of wanting to go online from the reward of actually doing so.
Another mental training: productive meditation.
- The goal is to take a period in which you are occupied physically but not mentally (walking, showering) and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem.
- It will rapidly strengthening your distraction-resisting muscles to improve your ability to think deeply.
- Try to redirect your attention when your thinking seem to be in a loop. Structure your thinking with a careful review of the relevant ‘variables’ for solving a problem.
Rule 3: Quit Social Media
Take the craftsman approach in choosing your technology tool.
- Adapt a tool only if its positive impacts substantially outweigh its negative impacts.
- The threshold for allowing a site regular access to your time and attention should be much more stringent.
The law of the vital few. Most important 20% provide 80% of benefits.
- Identify the main high-level goals and two or three key activities supporting this goal.
- If you service low-impact activities, you are taking away time you could be spending on higher impact activities. It’s a zero-sum game.
- Social medias are engineered to be addictive- robbing time and attention from activities that more directly support your professional goals.
Don’t use Internet to entertain yourself.
- Put more thought into your leisure time, give your brain a quality alternative, then you’ll end the day more fulfilled, begin the next one more relaxed. eg. spend regular time each night reading on a series of deliberately chosen books.
- Network tools are just products, developed by private companies, funded lavishly, marketed carefully and designed ultimately to capture and sell your attention to advertisers.
- Preplanned leisure activities are more meaningful than allowing your mind to bathe for hours in semiconscious and unstructured Web surfing.
Rule 4: Drain the Shallow
Quantify depth
- Shallow work is usually non-cognitively demanding, logistical tasks, often performed while distracted.
- You can evaluate your activities by asking: How long would it take to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task?
- Treat shallow work with suspicion because its damage is often vastly underestimated, its importance is vastly overestimated.
Schedule every minute of your day
- The problem is many people spend much of the day on autopilot, not giving much thought to what they’re doing with the time. Without structure, it’s easy to allow your time devolve into the shallow.
- The strategy: divide the hours of your workday into blocks and assign activities to the blocks (for simplicity the minimum unit is 30 minutes). Dedicating to the specific activity within each block.
- Your estimates to finish a task could be wrong and new obligations will unexpectedly appear. But this can be solved, take a few minutes to create a revised schedule. Inject stability and practicality into the schedule. (not use it as an incarnation of wishful thinking)
- This isn’t about constraint, it’s instead about thoughtfulness, by asking yourself, “What makes sense for me to do with the time remains?”
Fixed-schedule productivity
- The author himself don’t work after five-thirty. His colleague sets drastic quotas on academic travels per year. The strategy is to ruthlessly cap the shallow to protect and preserve the deep efforts. They free up their time without diminishing the amount of new value they generate.
- The artificial limits to the time also necessitate more careful thinking about our organizational habits.
- Raise the bar for gaining access to your time and attention. Become hard to reach and only focus on the stuff that are considered important to you.
