Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World - Cal Newport

Summary: Cal Newport contends that in order to accomplish work that is valued by others, we have to engage in what he calls "deep work". He presents arguments for why deep work is important in today's world (e.g. with quickly changing technology, it's important to be able to learn new skills quickly), and identifies obstacles to accomplishing it (e.g. apps vying for your attention, expectations that you should respond to emails at any hour of the day). He then offers a range of suggestions to cultivate an environment where deep work is possible.

Thoughts: There are a bunch of useful ideas and suggestions here. Since reading it, I've limited the windows during which I check emails and social media, and (mostly) implemented an 8:30-4:30 workday, which has been fairly successful so far.

(The notes below are not a summary of the book, but rather raw notes - whatever I thought, at the time, might be worth remembering.)

Newport, Cal. 2016. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Grand Central Publishing.

Introduction

• Deep work - a way to leverage your current capabilities to their maximum degree
• Many successful people - Woody Allen, Gates, Rowling, choose not to engage with social media, to disconnect from the internet, for weeks to years at a time.
• Shallow work reduces your ability to engage in deep work?
• In order to stay afloat in today’s world, you need to be able to learn new skills quickly. To do that requires deep work.
• Deep work is becoming more valuable at the same time as it is becoming more difficult to achieve.

Part I

Chapters 1 and 2

• Are people’s economic fates becoming separated, between those who can learn and specialize, and those whose jobs are being replaced?
• People who stand to benefit
  • high-skilled workers - those who depend on intelligent machines to do their jobs
  • Superstars - workers who have good reputations, who can complete work quickly
  • Owners
• Winner take all markets
• Instagram
• We can’t all become owners, but we can become high skilled workers or superstars
• Two core abilities for thriving in the new economy:
  • the ability to master hard skills quickly
  • The ability to produce at an elite level
• If you can’t learn, you can’t thrive
• If you don’t produce, you can’t thrive
• Both of these skills depend on being able to do deep work
• Learning requires deliberate practice, intense concentration - lifelong (cf. grit)
• Deliberate practice requires:
  • focussed attention on a specific skill
  • Feedback, allowing you to focus on what is most needed
  • absence of distractions
• During deliberate practice, you myelinate certain neural pathways
• Adam Grant - successful because he batches his work, at multiple levels
• High quality work produced = time spent x intensity of focus
• Attention residue… task switching
• Leslie perlow - measured how much responding to emails mattered: taking one day off of email every week led to improved performance, communication…
• We tend to revert to behaviours, without clear feedback of detrimental effects, that are easiest at the moment
• Busyness != productivity
• In the absence of clear measures of output, people opt to be demonstrably busy in order to show they’re doing their job
• Neil Postman’s technopoly - he argued in the 1990s that people were no longer looking at the trade offs surrounding new technologies, instead accepting them as good since they were high tech

chapter 3 - Deep work is meaningful

a neurological argument for depth

• Winifred Gallagher’s work suggests that the skillful management of attention is the key to improving one’s experience of life
• Our worldview is shaped by what we pay attention to
• If you spend all your time in rapt attention, you don’t have brain space to think about negative things - instead, you will think of the world as rich and full of meaning

A psychological argument for depth

• Csikszentmihalyi and Larson - experience sampling method
• “the best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile”
• Work provides goals and challenges, while free time is generally too unstructured to allow flow

A philosophical argument for depth

• Enlightenment’s focus on the individual has led to a decrease in being able to find purpose in one’s life?
• Dreyfus and Kelly argue that craftsmanship can step into this void of meaning

Part 2 - The rules

Rule 1 - Work deeply

• Eudaimonia the state when you’re achieving your full human potential
• It’s important to develop routines and habits for deep work, since willpower is limited
• Six strategies:

Decide on your depth philosophy

• Monastic philosophy
• vs bimodal approach
  • You can alternate between monastic periods and normal periods on a range of time scales - but the minimum unit you should spend on deep work is one day
• Vs The rhythmic philosophy of deep work scheduling
  • The chain method
    • I.e. maintaining a streak
• Vs the journalistic approach
  • Whenever you have a free moment, dive into deep work directly

Ritualize

• Build strict routines into your workday, like Darwin, Caro
• Inspiration is a myth - “[great creative minds] think like artists and work like accountants” -David Brooks
• You’ll need to decide:
  • Where you’ll work and for how long
  • How you’ll work - eg maintaining a certain number of words per 20 minutes
  • How you’ll support your work - hydrate, exercise…

Make grand gestures

Don’t work alone

• Bell Labs, MIT’s building 20 both provided spaces for isolated deep work and hubs (hallways) for serendipitous encounters
• The whiteboard effect - for some tasks, working with one other person is the most effective way to push one to develop insights.

Execute like a business

• Discipline 1 -focus on the wildly important
  • Have specific, compelling goals, not general “do deep work”
• Discipline 2 - act on lead measures (vs lag measures)
  • Ie. focus on measures of process, not measures of product
• Discipline 3 - keep a compelling scorecard
  • Keep track of lead measures in a tangible, compelling way.
• Discipline 4 - Create a Cadence of accountability
  • Eg. Do weekly reviews
  • Maybe pair with a partner to look over each other’s scorecard

Be lazy

• Cultivate downtime from work tasks. Don’t check emails outside of that time, etc.
• Downtime is important because:
  • The unconscious mind can lead to insights
  • Downtime recharges energy required for deep work
  • Attention restoration theory - you have a limited amount of directed attention cf. willpower
  • Once you’ve done your deep work for the day, the tasks you’ll have energy for will not be important ones (this would be a time for doing shallow but necessary things, yes?)
• An expert can do about 4 hours of focussed work a day; a novice, about 1.
• Develop a shutdown ritual - be sure any work that remains will be dealt with
• Zeigarnik effect - incomplete tasks can dominate attention if you’re not careful. But As long as you have a plan for how you’ll complete the task, it won’t dominate your attention

Rule 2 - Embrace Boredom

• Clifford Nass - people who go to distractions rather than experience boredom have decreased ability to concentrate deeply

Don’t take breaks from distraction - take breaks from focus

• Suggestion: schedule times for internet/social media, and don’t check outside those times
• I don’t agree with Newport’s concentration idea - I thought concentration/willpower was a limited resource…
• If you need to go online during a no-internet block, change your schedule, but wait at least 5 minutes before allowing yourself to switch to the internet
• Still follow internet blocking during your off-time

Work like Teddy Roosevelt

• Considered 8:30-4:30. Removed classes, athletic training and lunch, then spent the remaining time doing only schoolwork.
• Set timers for the completion of work, just at the edge of feasibility - “Roosevelt sprints”

Meditate productively

• spend time where your body is busy but your mind is free
  • Work on a specific professional problem during that time
• Suggestions: avoid looping over known material, beware off topic thoughts

Memorize a deck of cards

• Memorization exercises lead to an increase in Attentional Control- the ability to concentrate
• Newport suggests learning a guitar part by ear as another way to develop attentional control

Quit social media

• just because a tool provides some benefit doesn’t mean you should use it. - the benefit must outweigh the cost cf. utility costs
• Craftsman approach to tool selection: look at big picture goals when selecting tools, not small isolated effects

Apply the law of the vital few to your internet habits

• Consider a large-scale professional goal. Consider the tools you use. Does each tool have a large positive impact? A large negative impact? A marginal one? Then, keep only those tools that have a large positive impact.
• The 80/20 rule - 20 percent of the causes lead to 80 percent of the effect
  • Avoid the 80% of tools that provide slight returns on the investment of time and energy - application of time and energy is a zero sum game

Rule 3 - Quit social media

• nowadays, people build audiences by saying “I’ll pay attention to your thing if you pay attention to mine, regardless of its value” cf. kakonomics

Don’t use the internet to entertain yourself

• put thought into your leisure time - plan ahead
• your attention doesn’t need rest, it needs change

Rule 4 - Drain the shallows

• Newport suggests scheduling one’s entire day, so we reduce time wasted on autopilot
  • Be ready to reschedule, but be sure to reschedule rather than abandoning
  • You can schedule in overflow conditional blocks, or simply be very liberal with how much time you assign to a task
  • If there’s a really good insight/task that presents itself, it’s perfectly alright to depart from the schedule

Ask your boss for a shallow work budget

• It’s worth thinking about what ratio of your work time you want to spend on shallow vs deep tasks

Finish your work by five thirty

• Practice fixed-schedule productivity

Become hard to reach

• Respond to emails in such a way that you minimize the amount of new messages generated
• If there’s a request for your time that is vague and not important, don’t answer