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Book Notes

Deep Work by Cal Newport

Deep Work vs. Shallow

  • Deep Work: activities performed with 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 mental strain that accompanies deep work is necessary to improve one’s abilities.
    • Deep work allows one to quickly learn complicated things and produce the absolute best work.
    • Deep work builds on values like quality, craftsmanship, and mastery that are decidedly old-fashioned and non technological. Even worse, to support deep work often requires A rejection of much of what is new and high tech.
    • For a novice, somewhere around 1 hr of intense concentration seems to be the limit, while for experts this number can expand to as many as 4 hours – but rarely more.
  • Deep Workers: Individuals that can quickly master hard things and produce at an elite level (in terms of quality and speed). Benefitsfor these few individuals include:
    • Recruitment: As AI improves, employers will continue to hire new machines instead of new people. Because the talent pool is universally accessible, the highest performers will thrive while the average will suffer. There’s a premium to being the best.
    • Compensation: VCs and startups using intelligent machines can hire significantly less people to do the job. Therefore, the share of wealth is much greater for each person involved.
  • Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming both increasingly rare and increasingly valuable in our economy. Because of this the few who can cultivate this skill within the core of their working life will thrive.
    • People fight desires all day long and we only have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as we use it.
  • Shallow work: non cognitively demanding, logistical style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts do not create much value in the world and are easy to replicate.
    • Shallow work often seems more vital in the moment than it actually is.
    • Most knowledge workers engage primarily in shallow work. On the worst days, it seems as if all knowledge work boils down to the same emails and PowerPoint, with only the charts used in slides differentiating from one career to another.

Attention and Concentration

  • Attention: Our brains construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to.
    • Elderly individuals are often happier because they’ve rewired their brains to ignore the negative and savor the positive.
    • If you spend enough time in deep work, your mind will understand your world as being richer in meaning and importance. Alternatively, the world represented by your inbox isn’t a pleasant world to inhabit.
    • With an idle mind, one tends to focus more on what is wrong with life instead of what’s right. We are always better off having a plan.
  • Flow state: When a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits voluntarily to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. The more flow experiences, the higher one’s life satisfaction.
  • Deliberate Practice: What separates expert performers from normal adults. Deliberate practice requires 2 things:
    • Tightly focused attention on a specific skill you’re trying to improve or an idea you’re trying to master.
    • Receiving feedback so you can correct your approach and keep your attention where it’s most productive.
  • Habits: Skills that reduce down to brain circuits. By focusing intensely on a specific skill, you’re forcing the specific relevant current to fire, again and again, in isolation.
  • Attention Residue: when one switches tasks and some of their attention is left behind in the previous task. Because of this, those who switch tasks frequently are likely to demonstrate poor performance on the next task.
    • If you spend enough time in shallowness you can permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.
    • Constant attention switching has a lasting negative effect on your brain.
  • Theories to Improve Concentration:
    • Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT): Loading up on relevant information then moving on to something else while letting the subconscious layers of your mind mull things over.
    • Attention Restoration Theory (ART): Spending time in nature can improve our ability to concentrate.
  • Nighttime Work: By evening, people typically reach beyond the point where they can continue to effectively work deeply. Any work fit into a night routine won’t be the type of high value activity that really advances one’s career; tasks done at this time are likely confined to low-value, shallow tasks (executed at a slow, low-energy pace).
  • Shut Down Ritual: ensuring that every incomplete task, goal, or project has been reviewed and that for each: (1) you have a plan for its completion or (2) it’s captured in a place where it will be revisited when the time is right.
    • Committing to a specific plan for a goal may free cognitive resources for other pursuits.
    • When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done.
  • Transition & Transformation: The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained. But efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.
    • You cannot fully transform through Deep work until you’ve stretched to the reaches of your mental capacity on a daily basis.
  • Productive Meditation: focusing your attention on a single well-defined professional problem – no email breaks, no daydreaming, no social media browsing, no repeated trips for coffee or food.
  • Memory: Humans are horrible at rote memorization an quickly internalizing abstract information, but we remember scenes well (possibly why stories and books are good for our brains).
  • Autopilot: People spend most of their days on autopilot, not giving much thought to what they’re doing with our time. This is a huge problem.
    • Without structure, it’s too easy to allow one’s time to devolve into the shallow– email, social media, web surfing.

Workplaces

  • Cultures of Connectivity persist in workplaces because:
    • People can get a quick response to their needs via IM and e-mail. Because of this, workers can get away with less advanced planning and be less organized. If workers did not receive instant answers to all our needs, they’d have to engage in more intentional, deep work.
    • It becomes acceptable to run one’s day out of an inbox – simply responding to the latest missive – all while feeling satisfyingly productive.
  • Metric Black Hole: The inability to measure the bottom-line impact of certain tools and behaviors in the workplace. For example, the impact brought by email, social media, and IMs.
  • The Principle of Least Resistance: Without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors to the bottom line, workers tend toward the behaviors that are easiest in the moment.
  • Busyness as a Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in one’s job, knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff (i.e., email) in a visible manner.

Environment

  • Eudaimonia Machine: A space designed for the sole purpose of enabling the deepest possible deep work (not found in most workplaces).
  • Grand Gesture: Leveraging a radical change to your normal environment, coupled perhaps with a significant investment. This increases the perceived importance of the task. For example, many writers build writing cabins on their properties.
  • Theory of Serendipitous Creativity: A theory that open-space offices lead to smart collaborations and new ideas as people bump into each other. There is little evidence to support this theory, and more evidence against it.
  • Hub and spoke arrangement: Alternative to the Theory of Serendipitous Creativity where one exposes themself to ideas in hubs on a regular basis, but maintains a spoke in which to work deeply on what is encountered.
  • Whiteboard effect: a back-and-forth collaborative form of deep work. In which each party would work deeply to get their part done and then come together to review new updates.

Execution and Measurement

  • Lead Measures: measuring new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures. Lead measures turn attention towards improving behaviors that will have a positive impact on long term goals but are directly within one’s control in the near future.
    • Important to have a public place to record and track lead measures (e.g., a scoreboard).
    • Cal Keeps track of hours spent in deep work with a simple tally of daily tick marks. When this tally is reviewed in the future, it can help calibrate expectations on how many hours of deep work are needed per result. This reality is often larger than assumed.
  • Execution vs. Strategizing: The division between what and how is crucial but too often overlooked in the professional world. We often know what to do but not how to do it. But if you don’t produce, you won’t thrive.
    • Execution is more difficult. It often requires more regular deep work periods in lieu of greater deep work intensity.

Network Tools

  • For book authors, their time is much more productively applied on writing the best possible book than author-driven marketing on social media (which often leads to negligible additional sales).
  • The Any-Benefit Approach to Network Tool Selection: Justifying the use of a network tool if there’s any possible benefit for its use or anything you might miss out on if you don’t use it.
    • The issue with this approach is that it ignores all the negatives.
    • Network tools are simply tools – they are not exceptional.
  • 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 substantially outweigh the negative.
    • Identifying what matters most and attempting to assess impacts of various tools is a challenging task requiring practice and experimentation and shouldn’t be reduced to a simple one-size-fits-all formula.
  • Communication: People are overly accessible through social media. This leads to more shallow communication and less depth.
  • Evaluating Impact of Network Tools:
    • Step 1. Identify your main high-level goals in personal and professional life (make it general).
      • Example: Be an effective researcher
    • Step 2. List 2-3 of the most important regular activities to help you satisfy that goal.
      • Example: Regularly read and understand the cutting-edge results in my field.
    • Step 3. Consider the network tools you currently use. Ask whether each tool has a substantially positive impact, a substantially negative impact, or little impact on your regular and successful participation in this activity.
    • Step 4. Keep using only the tools that have substantial positive impacts that outweigh the negative impacts.

Email

  • Sender Filter: Set conditions for any incoming email and reduce expectations that you’ll actually respond.
    • Be picky in what emails you’ll reply to. Most people overestimate how much others really care about receiving a response.
  • How to Respond: Do more work to create a process-centered response that closes the loop. Doing so should significantly reduce the time spent in one’s inbox and reduce the brainpower expended on this task.
    • When responding, follow a prompt such as this one: What is the project represented by this message and what is the most efficient (in terms of messages generated) process for bringing this project to completion?
  • Not Responding: Do not respond if any of the following applies:
    • The message is ambiguous or otherwise difficult to respond to.
    • The question or proposal does not interest you.
    • Nothing really good would happen if you respond; nothing bad would happen if you didn’t.

Daily Scheduling

  • Scheduling Work: Decide in advance what you’re going to do with every minute of the workday.
    • Internet: Schedule in advance when you’ll use the Internet (or check email), and then avoid it altogether outside of these times.
  • Quantify the Depth of Every Activity: Determine how much time you’re spending in shallow activities during the workday. Tasks that leverage your expertise tend to be deep tasks and provide a dual benefit: they return more value per time spent and they stretch your abilities, leading to improvement.
    • For each task, ask yourself: How long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task?
    • Then, ask your boss for a shallow work budget. Show him/her the exact percentage of your time spent in shallow work and remind them that it’s incredibly wasteful to pay a high-trained professional to send email messages and attend meetings for 30 hours per week. For most knowledge work, the amount of time spent in shallow tasks should range from 30-50% but should not exceed this.
  • Scheduling Free Time: Most people have 16 free hours outside of the work day (8 for sleeping, 8 for free time). You can and should make deliberate use of this free time outside work. To do so, its crucial to figure out in advance what you plan to do with your evenings and weekends before they begin.
    • If you give your mind something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you’ll end the day more fulfilled and begin the next one more relaxed. The alternative, allowing your mind to bathe for hours in semiconscious and unstructured web surfing, does not lead to a sense of accomplishment or relaxation at the completion of the day.
    • When people have fewer hours, they usually spend them more wisely.

Setting Yourself Up for Depth

  • Set Boundaries: Much of the stress suffered by knowledge workers is self-imposed. This is often related to spending too much time on shallow tasks and not making enough progress on deep work. To reduce this stress, we should reevaluate the time we currently spend and set boundaries.
    • The most dangerous word in one’s productivity vocabulary is “yes.” Be clear in your refusal to take on certain tasks, but be ambiguous in your explanation for refusal.
    • Set a firm goal to not work past a certain time each day. This can cause a scarcity mindset, which may make you reevaluate how your limited time is spent.
    • Decide in advance how many times you’ll travel per year for any purpose.
  • Pareto’s Principle: In most settings, 80% of a given effect is due to just 20% of the causes.
    • All activities consume your same limited store of time and attention. If you service low-impact activities, you’re taking away energy that could be applied to deeper activities that actually move the needle.
  • Deep Work Ritual: ignoring inspiration and focusing on building habits when it comes to creative work. Great creative minds think like artists but work like accountants. Finding the right ritual that sticks may require some experimentation. Good rituals ask one to address:
    • Where you’ll work and for how long: Specified location (e.g., office with the door shut and desk cleaned off)
    • How you’ll work once you start to work: Rules and processes to keep your efforts structured and focused (e.g., disconnecting from the Internet)
    • How you’ll support your work: ensuring your brain has the support it needs to keep operating at a high level of depth (e.g., cup of coffee, access to the right food, light exercise)

Deep Work Philosophy

  • Meaning in Deep Work: Through deep work we do not generate meaning, but rather cultivate in ourselves the skill of discerning the meanings that are already there.
    • In a post-Enlightenment world, we have tasked ourselves to identify what’s meaningful and what’s not – a seemingly arbitrary and impossible task. This makes life harder.
    • Your work is your craft, and if you hone your ability and apply it with respect and care, you can generate meaning in the daily efforts of your professional life. You don’t need a rarified job; you need a rarefied approach to your work.
  • Philosophy for Deep Work: It’s important for each of us to find or create our own philosophy for integrating deep work into professional life. It’s worth taking the time to find an approach that makes sense for you.
    • Monastic:  maximizing deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations.
    • Bimodal: dividing ones time by dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else
    • Rhythmic: transforming deep work sessions into simple regular habits. This includes the chain method – writing an X for every day a task is done. This approach often has a set starting time in which deep work is done every day.
    • Journalistic: fitting deep work wherever you can into your schedule. This is the most difficult approach to pull off and is not recommended for the deep work novice. However, it can be a surprisingly robust way to squeeze out large amounts of depth from an otherwise demanding schedule.

Famous Deep Workers

  • Bill Gates: Conducted “Think Weeks” twice a year to isolate oneself and think big thoughts. Was a serial obsessor that was able to work for two months straight, taking hardly any breaks to sleep or eat. This is an incredibly strong form of deep work but is evidence that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done.
  • Neal Stephenson: “If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time chunks, I can write novels.”

Studies/Polls

  • A 2012 McKenzie study found that, for the average knowledge worker, 60% of the work week was spent on online communication and Internet searching while 30% of time was dedicated to reading and answering e-mail alone.
    • A 2019 Asana study also found that 60% of a knowledge worker’s time is spent on work coordination (i.e., checking email, searching for information, meetings), with 13% of time spent on strategic planning and 27% of time spent on the skill-based job they were hired to do.*
  • HBS professor found that professionals spend around 20-25 hours per week out of the office monitoring e-mail.
  • A 2008 paper published in Psychological Science found that people who got a chance to prepare for a task by walking through the woods (vs. walking through a bustling city) typically displayed a 20% better performance on the task.
  • In 2013, the British TV licensing authority surveyed 25-34 year olds on their TV watching habits. Surveyed individuals vastly underestimated their hours spent watching television per week – they estimated between 15-16 hours each week, while the actual time spent was closer to 28 hours each week.

*This study was not in the book, I looked it up as I wanted to find a more recent study on the topic. source