Deep Work
Parent Post
About the authorCal Newport
About the author
Cal Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University and a New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including, A World Without Email, Digital Minimalism, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, and Deep Work, which have been published in over 35 languages.
To summarize:A commitment to
To summarize:
A commitment to deep work is not a moral stance and it’s not a philosophical statement—it is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done.
The deep life, of course, is not for everybody. It requires hard work and drastic changes to your habits. For many, there’s a comfort in the artificial busyness of rapid e-mail messaging and social media posturing, while the deep life demands that you leave much of that behind.
But if you’re willing to sidestep these comforts and fears, and instead struggle to deploy your mind to its fullest capacity to create things that matter, then you’ll discover, as others have before you, that depth generates a life rich with productivity and meaning.
To summarize:A commitment to
Bonus: Talk by Dr. Cal Newport at a TEDx event.
To produce at your peak level, you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. Put another way, the type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work.
Decide on Your Depth
Decide on Your Depth Philosophy
There are many different ways to integrate deep work into your schedule, and it’s therefore worth taking the time to find an approach that makes sense for you.
- The monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling: This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations.
- 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. Cal Newport, the author of this book, uses this method for his work.
Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.
The differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.
The reason knowledge workers
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.
Deep Work is ValuableTwo
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)
About the bookDeep work
About the book
Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time.
In DEEP WORK, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite.
DEEP WORK is an indispensable guide to anyone seeking focused success in a distracted world.
Rule #3: Quit Social
Rule #3: Quit Social Media
Ban yourself from using them for thirty days.
After thirty days of this self-imposed network isolation, ask yourself the following two questions about each of the services you temporarily quit:
1. Would the last thirty days have been notably better if I had been able to use this service?
2. Did people care that I wasn’t using this service?
If your answer is “no” to both questions, quit the service permanently. If your answer was a clear “yes,” then return to using the service. If your answers are qualified or ambiguous, it’s up to you whether you return to the service, though lean toward quitting.
Striving for the outputSometimes,
RitualizeDeep work doesn’t just
Ritualize
Deep work doesn’t just happen—you need to make time for it in your schedule. 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.
- Will you start the work with coffee? Do you have enough food to maintain energy?
The shutdown ritualThe shutdown
The shutdown ritual
The shutdown ritual should ensure that every incomplete task, goal, or project has been reviewed and that for each you have confirmed that either (1) you have a plan you trust for its completion, or (2) it’s captured in a place where it will be revisited when the time is right.
The process should be an algorithm: a series of steps you always conduct, one after another. When you’re done, have a set phrase you say that indicates completion.
The concept of a shutdown ritual might at first seem extreme, but there’s a good reason for it: the Zeigarnik effect. This effect describes the ability of incomplete tasks to dominate our attention.
Deep Work is RareThe
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.
Deep work is hard and shallow work is easier and in the absence of clear goals for your job, the visible busyness that surrounds shallow work becomes self-preserving.
Deep Work is MeaningfulThe
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.
Rule #4: Drain the
Rule #4: Drain the Shallows
For shallow activities: batch them in small groups (2-3 per day).
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.
Divide the hours of your workday into blocks and assign activities to the blocks. To fully engage with this approach, you should draw a box covering the lines corresponding to these hours. The minimum length of a block should be thirty minutes.
When you’re done scheduling your day, every minute should be part of a block. You have, in effect, given every minute of your workday a job. Now, as you go through your day, use this schedule to guide you.
Quite often, your schedule will get interrupted, so make sure you revise your plan.
Rule #2: Embrace BoredomInstead
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.
Four rules of Deep
Four rules of Deep work
Rule #1: Work Deeply
Rule #2: Embrace Boredom
Rule #3: Quit Social Media
Rule #4: Drain the Shallows
Rule #1: Work DeeplyYou
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
To Work Deeply, You
To Work Deeply, You Must Separate Life and Work
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.
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.
Shallow Work: Non-cognitively demanding,
Shallow Work: Non-cognitively 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.