DEEP WORK by Cal Newport

• 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.
• Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity.
• The ubiquity of deep work among influential individuals is important to emphasize because it stands in sharp contrast to the behavior of most modern knowledge workers—a group that’s rapidly forgetting the value of going deep.
• 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.
• We have an information economy that’s dependent on complex systems that change rapidly.
• To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of producing—a task that requires depth.
• The growing necessity of deep work is new.
• Deep work is so important that we might consider it, to use the phrasing of business writer Eric Barker, “the superpower of the 21st century.”
• 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.
• There’s a premium to being the best.
• 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.
• To summarize these observations more succinctly: If you can’t learn, you can’t thrive.
• If you want to become a superstar, mastering the relevant skills is necessary, but not sufficient. You must then transform that latent potential into tangible results that people value.
• To learn requires intense concentration.
• This brings us to the question of what deliberate practice actually requires. Its core components are usually identified as follows: (1) your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you’re trying to improve or an idea you’re trying to master; (2) you receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it’s most productive.
• By focusing intensely on a specific skill, you’re forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire, again and again, in isolation.
• To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction. To learn, in other words, is an act of deep work.
• High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)
• the type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work.
• If you’re not comfortable going deep for extended periods of time, it’ll be difficult to get your performance to the peak levels of quality and quantity increasingly necessary to thrive professionally.
• A good chief executive is essentially a hard-to-automate decision engine,
• Just because your current habits make deep work difficult doesn’t mean that this lack of depth is fundamental to doing your job well.
• Deep work is not the only skill valuable in our economy, and it’s possible to do well without fostering this ability, but the niches where this is advisable are increasingly rare. Unless you have strong evidence that distraction is important for your specific profession, you’re best served, for the reasons argued earlier in this chapter, by giving serious consideration to depth.
• To summarize, big trends in business today actively decrease people’s ability to perform deep work, even though the benefits promised by these trends (e.g., increased serendipity, faster responses to requests, and more exposure) are arguably dwarfed by the benefits that flow from a commitment to deep work (e.g., the ability to learn hard things fast and produce at an elite level).
• It turns out to be really difficult to answer a simple question such as: What’s the impact of our current e-mail habits on the bottom line?
• When it comes to distracting behaviors embraced in the workplace, we must give a position of dominance to the now ubiquitous culture of connectivity, where one is expected to read and respond to e-mails (and related communication) quickly.
• 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.
• If you work in an environment where you can get an answer to a question or a specific piece of information immediately when the need arises, this makes your life easier—at least, in the moment.
• Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.
• 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.
• Knowledge work is not an assembly line, and extracting value from information is an activity that’s often at odds with busyness, not supported by it.
• Deep work should be a priority in today’s business climate. But it’s not.
• This connection between deep work and a good life is familiar and widely accepted when considering the world of craftsmen.
• Just because this connection between depth and meaning is less clear in knowledge work, however, doesn’t mean that it’s nonexistent.
• When measured empirically, people were happier at work and less happy relaxing than they suspected.
• Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.
• To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction.
• Any pursuit—be it physical or cognitive—that supports high levels of skill can also generate a sense of sacredness.
• Whether you’re a writer, marketer, consultant, or lawyer: Your work is craft, and if you hone your ability and apply it with respect and care, then like the skilled wheelwright you can generate meaning in the daily efforts of your professional life.
• A deep life is a good life, any way you look at it.
• 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.
• You need your own philosophy for integrating deep work into your professional life.
• 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 chain method is a good example of the rhythmic philosophy of deep work scheduling because it combines a simple scheduling heuristic (do the work every day), with an easy way to remind yourself to do the work: the big red Xs on the calendar.
• An often-overlooked observation about those who use their minds to create valuable things is that they’re rarely haphazard in their work habits.
• Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.”
• To make the most out of your deep work sessions, build rituals of the same level of strictness and idiosyncrasy as the important thinkers mentioned previously.
• Your ritual needs to specify a location for your deep work efforts.
• Regardless of where you work, be sure to also give yourself a specific time frame to keep the session a discrete challenge and not an open-ended slog.
• Your ritual needs rules and processes to keep your efforts structured.
• Your ritual needs to ensure your brain gets the support it needs to keep operating at a high level of depth.
• To maximize your success, you need to support your efforts to go deep. At the same time, this support needs to be systematized so that you don’t waste mental energy figuring out what you need in the moment.
• By leveraging a radical change to your normal environment, coupled perhaps with a significant investment of effort or money, all dedicated toward supporting a deep work task, you increase the perceived importance of the task.
• Both intuition and a growing body of research underscore the reality that sharing a workspace with a large number of coworkers is incredibly distracting—creating an environment that thwarts attempts to think seriously.
• Expose yourself to ideas in hubs on a regular basis, but maintain a spoke in which to work deeply on what you encounter.
• First, distraction remains a destroyer of depth. Therefore, the hub-and-spoke model provides a crucial template. Separate your pursuit of serendipitous encounters from your efforts to think deeply and build on these inspirations.
• Second, even when you retreat to a spoke to think deeply, when it’s reasonable to leverage the whiteboard effect, do so.
• By working side by side with someone on a problem, you can push each other toward deeper levels of depth, and therefore toward the generation of more and more valuable output as compared to working alone.
• It’s often straightforward to identify a strategy needed to achieve a goal, but what trips up companies is figuring out how to execute the strategy once identified.
• Discipline #1: Focus on the Wildly Important
• “The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.”
• For an individual focused on deep work, the implication is that you should identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours.
• Discipline #2: Act on the Lead Measures
• Once you’ve identified a wildly important goal, you need to measure your success.
• Lag measures describe the thing you’re ultimately trying to improve.
• the problem with lag measures is that they come too late to change your behavior:
• Lead measures, on the other hand, “measure the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures.”
• lead measures turn your attention to improving the behaviors you directly control in the near future that will then have a positive impact on your long-term goals.
• For an individual focused on deep work, it’s easy to identify the relevant lead measure: time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal.
• Discipline #3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard
• Once the team notices their success with a lead measure, they become invested in perpetuating this performance.
• The 4DX framework is based on the fundamental premise that execution is more difficult than strategizing.
• Reason #1: Downtime Aids Insights
• Reason #2: Downtime Helps Recharge the Energy Needed to Work Deeply
• Only the confidence that you’re done with work until the next day can convince your brain to downshift to the level where it can begin to recharge for the next day to follow.
• Reason #3: The Work That Evening Downtime Replaces Is Usually Not That Important
• Deep work and deliberate practice, as I’ve argued, overlap substantially.
• The idea that you can ever reach a point where all your obligations are handled is a fantasy.
• Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.
• People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy.
• Don’t Take Breaks from Distraction. Instead Take Breaks from Focus.
• To simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, it’s incredibly valuable.
• To summarize, to succeed with deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli.
• Deep work requires levels of concentration well beyond where most knowledge workers are comfortable.
• The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally—walking, jogging, driving, showering—and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem.
• Suggestion #1: Be Wary of Distractions and Looping
• Suggestion #2: Structure Your Deep Thinking
• “Thinking deeply” about a problem seems like a self-evident activity, but in reality it’s not.
• A side effect of memory training, in other words, is an improvement in your general ability to concentrate. This ability can then be fruitfully applied to any task demanding deep work.
• We’re not wired to quickly internalize abstract information. We are, however, really good at remembering scenes.
• Your mind, in other words, can quickly retain lots of detailed information—if it’s stored in the right way.
• 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
• The problem with this approach, of course, is that it ignores all the negatives that come along with the tools in question.
• These services are engineered to be addictive—robbing time and attention from activities that more directly support your professional and personal goals (such as deep work).
• 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.
• Don’t Use the Internet to Entertain Yourself
• Put more thought into your leisure time.
• It’s crucial, therefore, that you figure out in advance what you’re going to do with your evenings and weekends before they begin.
• To summarize, if you want to eliminate the addictive pull of entertainment sites on your time and attention, give your brain a quality alternative.
• The value of deep work vastly outweighs the value of shallow, but this doesn’t mean that you must quixotically pursue a schedule in which all of your time is invested in depth. For one thing, a nontrivial amount of shallow work is needed to maintain most knowledge work jobs.
• Deep work is exhausting because it pushes you toward the limit of your abilities.
• To summarize, I’m asking you to treat shallow work with suspicion because its damage is often vastly underestimated and its importance vastly overestimated. This type of work is inevitable, but you must keep it confined to a point where it doesn’t impede your ability to take full advantage of the deeper efforts that ultimately determine your impact.
• Decide in advance what you’re going to do with every minute of your workday.
• An advantage of scheduling your day is that you can determine how much time you’re actually spending in shallow activities.
• Shallow Work: Noncognitively 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.
• Make People Who Send You E-mail Do More Work
• To summarize, the technologies underlying e-mail are transformative, but the current social conventions guiding how we apply this technology are underdeveloped.
• Do More Work When You Send or Reply to E-mails
• The process-centric approach to e-mail can significantly mitigate the impact of this technology on your time and attention.
• Don’t Respond
• 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.
• Deep work is important, in other words, not because distraction is evil, but because it enabled Bill Gates to start a billion-dollar industry in less than a semester.
• Deep work is way more powerful than most people understand.