Deep Work by Cal Newport: Summary & Notes

Notes

Introduction

• 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.
• The reason knowledge workers are losing their familiarity with deep work is well established: network tools. This is a broad category that captures communication services like e-mail and SMS, social media networks like Twitter and Facebook, and the shiny tangle of infotainment sites like BuzzFeed and Reddit.
• Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.
• 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.

Part I: The Idea

Chapter One: Deep Work is Valuable

• Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy
• 1. The ability to quickly master hard things.
• 2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.
• These two abilities depend on your ability to do deep work.
• High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)

Chapter Two: Deep Work is Rare

• The Principle of Least Resistance: In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment.
• Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.

Chapter Three: Deep Work is Meaningful

• The more flow experiences that occur in a given week, the higher the subject’s life satisfaction. Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.
• Deep work is an activity well suited to generate a flow state (the phrases used by Csikszentmihalyi to describe what generates flow include notions of stretching your mind to its limits, concentrating, and losing yourself in an activity—all of which also describe deep work). And as we just learned, flow generates happiness.
• You don’t need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work.

Part II: The Rules

Rule #1: Work Deeply

• You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.
• The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.
• The monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling: This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations. Practitioners of the monastic philosophy tend to have a well-defined and highly valued professional goal that they’re pursuing, and the bulk of their professional success comes from doing this one thing exceptionally well.
• The bimodal philosophy of deep work: This philosophy asks that you divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else.
• The rhythmic philosophy: This philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit. The goal, in other words, is to generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you’re going to go deep.
• The journalistic philosophy: any time you can find some free time, you switch into deep work mode and hammer away. It requires being able to shift into deep work mode at a moment’s notice, and is not for the deep work novice.
• You should build a ritual to prepare for deep work, and it should include the following:
• Where you’ll work and how long.
• How you’ll work once you start to work.
• How you’ll support your work.
• The grand gesture: a tool for encouraging deep work where you radically change your environment, invest significant effort or money, all dedicated towards a deep work task (increasing its significance).
• At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning. This is necessary to reset your mind.
• This should be tied to a shutdown ritual which ensures you have a step-by-step plan in place to complete the next part of the project.

Rule #2: Embrace Boredom

• Instead of scheduling the occasional break from distraction so you can focus, you should instead schedule the occasional break from focus to give in to distraction.
• Schedule in advance when you’ll use the Internet, and then avoid it altogether outside these times.

Rule #3: Quit Social Media

• You should quit social media and begin evaluating the network tools you use much more strictly.
• The Any-Benefit Approach to Network Tool Selection: You’re justified in using a network tool if you can identify any possible benefit to its use, or anything you might possibly miss out on if you don’t use it.
• The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.
• The Law of the Vital Few: In many settings, 80 percent of a given effect is due to just 20 percent of the possible causes.
• You should also put more thought into your leisure time - give yourself something meaningful to do.
• Schedule every minute of your day: to accomplish deep work, you must treat your time with respect, and this is a good first step. Break your day into blocks, and assign activities.

Rule #4: Drain the Shallows

• For shallow activities: batch them in small groups (2-3 per day).

Rule 1 — Work Deeply

• Newport gives four "depth philosophies" for scheduling deep work — pick the one that fits your job and temperament:
• Monastic philosophy — maximize deep work by radically minimizing or eliminating shallow obligations. Practitioners isolate themselves and become hard to reach (Newport cites Donald Knuth and Neal Stephenson).
• Bimodal philosophy — divide your time into clearly defined stretches devoted entirely to deep work, leaving the rest open to everything else. The deep stretch must be at least a full day (Carl Jung’s Bollingen Tower retreats are the model).
• Rhythmic philosophy — turn deep work into a simple daily habit by working at the same time every day — the "chain method" / a fixed block — so you don’t have to summon willpower to start.
• Journalistic philosophy — fit deep work into your schedule wherever you can, switching into deep mode on demand. It’s effective but demanding, suited to people already practiced at the habit (named for Walter Isaacson).
• Beyond choosing a philosophy, Newport prescribes four supporting tactics:
• Ritualize — build rituals so starting deep work doesn’t drain willpower. A ritual should specify where you’ll work and for how long, how you’ll work once started (rules and metrics), and how you’ll support the work (coffee, food, exercise).
• Make grand gestures — leverage a radical change to your environment plus a significant investment of effort or money to boost the perceived importance of the task (e.g. J.K. Rowling renting a luxury hotel suite to finish a novel).
• Don’t work alone — use the "whiteboard effect" — for some kinds of problems, working alongside another person on a shared problem pushes you deeper than you could go alone — while still protecting solo concentration via a hub-and-spoke arrangement.
• Execute like a business — adopt the 4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX): focus on the wildly important; act on the lead measures (track time spent in deep work, not just results); keep a compelling scoreboard of deep-work hours; and create a cadence of accountability with a regular review.

Rule 2 — Embrace Boredom

• Concentration is a skill you train; constant novelty-seeking rewires the brain for distraction. Newport’s tactics build attention "muscle":
• Don’t take breaks from distraction; take breaks from focus — schedule in advance the blocks when you’ll use the Internet and avoid it entirely outside them — even when bored or stuck — so you’re not training your brain to bolt to novelty on cue. This works even if your job demands frequent connectivity.
• Meditate productively — while occupied physically but not mentally (walking, driving, showering), focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem, redirecting it whenever it wanders or loops.
• Memorize a deck of cards — use a structured memory feat (Newport cites memory champion Daniel Kilov / Ron White) to drill the rapid, deliberate focus and attention control that deep work requires.

Rule 3 — Quit Social Media

• Rather than the "any-benefit" mindset (keep any tool that offers any possible upside), evaluate tools the way skilled craftsmen evaluate their equipment:
• The craftsman approach to tool selection — identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life, then adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on those factors substantially outweigh its negatives.
• Apply the law of the vital few — in many pursuits, roughly 80% of a given effect comes from 20% of the possible causes — so concentrate on the few high-value activities and drop the low-value tools that crowd them out.
• Quit social media as an experiment — stop using the social-media services for thirty days without announcing it, then ask whether the last month would have been notably better with them and whether people actually cared that you stopped. Go back only if the answer to both is yes.
• Don’t use the Internet to entertain yourself — plan your leisure time in advance and give yourself something meaningful to do (per Arnold Bennett), instead of defaulting to whatever distraction is most convenient, so your free time also strengthens — rather than fragments — your attention.

Rule 4 — Drain the Shallows

• Shallow work is unavoidable, but it should be contained and treated with suspicion. Newport’s tactics cap and quantify it:
• Schedule every minute of your day — give every minute a job by blocking your day into chunks assigned to specific tasks, revising the plan as reality intervenes — this forces deliberate choices about where deep and shallow work go.
• Quantify the depth of every activity — ask how many months it would take to train a smart recent college graduate to do the task; the longer the answer, the deeper (and more valuable) the work — a metric for ranking activities.
• Ask your boss for a shallow-work budget — agree explicitly on what percentage of your time should go to shallow work (Newport suggests 30–50% for most knowledge jobs), which makes it legitimate to decline shallow obligations beyond that line.
• Finish your work by five-thirty (fixed-schedule productivity) — set a hard cap on the workday and then work backward, ruthlessly cutting and refusing commitments to fit the deep work that matters inside the available hours.
• Become hard to reach — use a sender-filter on email (make people who write to you do more work); answer email with a "process-centric" approach that minimizes back-and-forth; and accept that you don’t have to respond to every message.