Deep Work by Cal Newport

1. Deep work is focusing on a single, challenging task without distraction.
2. Your ability to succeed in your career is increasingly hinging on your ability to do deep work.
3. You can train your ability to concentrate, like a muscle, and to do more deep work.

Basics

• Work can be divided into two types: deep & shallow.

• Deep work is focusing on just one cognitively demanding task (e.g. designing a minimum viable product).
• Shallow work is logistical style work that isn't very cognitively demanding (e.g. scheduling a meeting).

• Deep work tasks should be plumbing the depths of some niche to create value.
• A way to evaluate depth is to consider how long it would take a new college grad to do the same work. If a couple months, it's shallow work. If years, it's deep.

• The ability to concentrate must be trained like a muscle. You can’t use it if you haven’t trained it. But if you train it in a structured way and push yourself to your limit, it will get stronger.

• Every time you get distracted and indulge the distraction, you weaken your ability to focus and to resist distractions. If you check your phone every time you get bored, you reinforce your brain’s rewiring to be addicted to distraction. Training your brain to never tolerate the absence of novelty!

• Psychologically, deep work insulates our mind from many distracting, often negative psychic irritants.
• We tend to place a lot of emphasis on our circumstances (what happens to us) when studies suggest our happiness is really dependent on what we pay attention to.

Details

• ”The Principle of Least Resistance: In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviours to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviours 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.”

• Working deeply for 3 or 4 hours per day, 5 days per week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration can turn out a lot of valuable output
• Batch shallow work into bursts at the peripheries of your schedule

• “This new science of performance argues that you get better at a skill as you develop more myelin around the relevant neurons, allowing the corresponding circuit to fire more effortlessly and effectively. To be great at something is to be well myelinated.”

• Residue concept - “When you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task.”
• According to Sophie Leroy, “People experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor performance on that next task,” and the more intense the residue, the worse the performance.”
• “To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction.”

3 Philosophies for Deploying Deep Work:

1. Monastic, radical action to minimize shallow obligations (monk like)
2. Bimodal, divided time in clearly defined stretches between deep and shallow work
3. Rhythmic, establishing a simple, regular habit for when deep work occurs (& using tactics like Seinfeld’s chain method)
4. Journalistic, for advanced practitioners, has special prerequisites

• Location is important.
• 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 fallacy of the “Any Benefit” approach

• Social media is literally designed to keep you scrolling and to short circuit the connection between the hard work of producing real value and the positive reward of having people pay attention to you (like for like).
• “Treat shallow work with suspicion because its damage is often vastly underestimated and its importance vastly overestimated.”
• Studies showing how much people watch TV vs how much they THINK they watch. Same for how much they work vs. how much they THINK they work

• Schedule your whole day in 30min blocks. Reschedule when you go astray.
• OK to follow an insight to its end, even if it takes the whole day. The goal is not to contain or enact rigidity. The goal is to be thoughtful about how you spend your time.

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