Takeaways from 'Deep Work'

I have recently read Cal Newport’s book “Deep Work” (2016). Overall, it is a short but engaging read discussing his tips for how to spend more time doing intellectually focused and engaging work in a society whose attention and focus is ever more divided. Below are my takeways from the book.

The Big Picture

The book focuses on what Newport calls 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.

He defines “deep work” as

Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concetration that push your cognitive capabilities to the limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

This is in contrast to “shallow work”, which he describes as

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.

Overall, he splits the book into two parts. The first describes what he considers to be “deep work” by illustration with various examples. This is coupled with an explanation for why he thinks deep work is valuable, rare, and meaningful, with a chapter dedicated to each of these three topics. In the second part of the book he lists his four major rules for accomplishing an increasing amount of deep work.

Part 1 of the book struck me as the weakest, but that may be based on my background. The first chapter prepares a good definition of what Cal means by “deep work” and why it is increasingly valuable in our modern economy. His chapter showing deep work is rare will likely not come as a surprise to most. The key insight here is that while productivity is all the rage these days, most people are actually merely “busy,” but not productive. His chapter tying deep work to the good life should be familiar to all with even rudimentary exposure to philosophy.

Here is a brief summary of his four rules:

• Rule #1: Work Deeply. His first rule is a bit of a catch-all, describing several different methods of deep work at different levels, but the heart of it is the idea that deep work requires deliberate effort, planning, and ritual.
• Rule #2: Embrace Boredom. The theme of his chapter reminds me a lot of Sir Bertrand Russell and his wonderful book The Conquest of Happiness, in which boredom plays a prominent role. In essence, we are hurting ourselves by our constant efforts to escape the feeling of boredom. By embracing the idea that boredom is not inherently bad, we can relearn proper focus which aids in deep work.
• Rule #3: Quit Social Media. Here he focuses on one particular source of distraction in our world - social media. The essence of the chapter is that as a society, we are not sufficiently skeptical of the benefit social media consumption offers compared to its pitfalls.
• Rule #4: Drain the Shallows. Part of what keeps us from doing deep work is the distraction of shallow work. This chapter centers around a few different tips for reducing the shallow work load, thereby making time for more deep work. Specifically, he suggests using proper time management, saying no to taking on additional but unnecessary obligations, and restructuring one’s email habits.

Table of Contents

Part 1 - The Idea

Deep work is Valuable

This chapter is largely a reflection of the economic import of deep work for knowledge workers. Our economy is shifting and even prior to COVID, regional limitations on finding workers have started to become less meaningful. That means that knowledge workers compete with an increasing amount of other knowledge workers. At the same time, technological advances make technological skill and adaptability ever more important.

Newport identifies two core abilities for thriving in our 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 quantity.”

Learning hard things quickly is identified with deep work.

To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction. To learn, in other words, is an act of deep work. If you’re comfortable going deep, you’ll be comfortable mastering the increasingly complex systems and skills needed to thrive in our economy. If you instead remain one of the many for whom depth is uncomfortable and distraction ubiquitous, you shouldn’t expect these systems and skills to come easily to you.

Improving your skill requires deliberate practice, whose two key components he lists as

1. focusing your attention tightly on a specifc skill you are attempting to improve, and
2. receiving feedback that allows for correction without loss of attention.

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.

Many knowledge workers struggle with being productive. This is despite exhibiting external signs of “productivity:”

Knowledge workers, I’m arguing, are tending toward increasingly visible busyness because they lack a better way to demonstrate their value. Let’s give this tendency a name. 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.

The problem he identifies is that it is difficult for a knowledge worker to demonstrate their value, and that modern society has developed a “productivity-fetish” for lack of better term. Everything should be measured and quantified and be “efficient.” The difficulty with this is that knowledge-work is inherently different from the type of labor many of these productivity measures are derived from.

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.

All this amounts to actual productivity, which is ascribed to deep work, being rare.

Deep Work is Meaningful

The previous chapters provided external motivation for deep work. In this chapter, Cal argues that deep work is “meaningful,” in the sense of being part of living “the good life.”

The goal of this chapter is to convince you that deep work can generate as much satisfaction in an information economy as it so clearly does in a craft economy. […] The thesis of this final chapter in Part 1, therefore, is that a deep life is not just economically lucrative, but also a life well lived.

He points out research concerning the effects of deliberate attention in general, and how we allocate deliberate attention. “Skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.”

Deep work aids a person in achieving happiness in two ways. One, it provides distraction that keeps us from noticing the “many smaller and less pleasant things that unavoidably and persistently populate our lives:”

Our brains instead construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to. If you focus on a cancer diagnosis, you and your life become unhappy and dark, but if you focus instead on an evening martini, you and your life become more pleasant—even though the circumstances in both scenarios are the same. As Gallagher summarizes: “Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love — is the sum of what you focus on.”

Second, being engaged in deep work is connected to flow:

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).

Since flow has been shown to generate happiness, deep work is argued to generate happiness as well.

Part 2 - The Rules

Rule #1: Work Deeply

Cal lists four main methods, or “philosophies,” for practicing deep work:

1. The monastic philosophy. What is sounds like. Isolate yourself completely from shallow work for extended periods of time. Same famous examples are cited, but Cal notes this is not realistic for most workers. You can imagine your employer not taking kindly to not being able to reach you at all for a few weeks at a time because you are secluded into a deep work state.

2. The bimodal philosophy. Exemplified in the book by Carl Jung. Divide your time into clearly defined stretches of deep-work, at least a full day but preferably several days a week. During these stretches of time you essentially act monastically. This method is substantially more realistic for most workers, particularly for academics like Cal. As an example, you could set aside Thursdays/Fridays for deep work. During these days, you wouldn’t be checking email, be on Teams/Slack, you would have no meetings, etc. You just focus on whatever deep work project you are working on. During the rest of the week on the other hand, you’d act like a regular worker with meetings, email checking, etc.

3. The rhythmic philosophy. This method focuses most heavily on routines. Create a regular deep work routine during each work day. Create a consistent block of time set aside for deep work, each and every day. While you don’t have the same amount of time to dig as “deep” as in the previous methods, “by supporting deep work with rock-solid routines that make sure a little bit gets done on a regular basis, the rhythmic scheduler will often log a larger total number of deep hours per year.” This method is also being pushed into more office worker’s consciousness with Microsoft’s Viva Insights. Now integrated into Outlook, it suggests automatically scheduling “focus hours” for you, helping you get a head start with this method.

4. The journalistic philophy. Basically switch between deep and shallow work in undefined blocks, perhaps multiple times a day. Not recommended as most people are not able to do this, and even if they can they do so only with substantial training.

Overall, the rhythmic and bimodal philosphies seem to be most achievable for most workers. He gives further support for the rhythmic philosophy by noting research that suggests a person can only engage in deep work for about one to four hours a day, depending on the level of training they have.

Cal thoroughly stresses the need for routines in helping someone get into a deep work state of mind.

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.

There is a popular notion that artists work from inspiration—that there is some strike or bolt or bubbling up of creative mojo from who knows where… but I hope [my work] makes clear that waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan. In fact, perhaps the single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration. In a New York Times column on the topic, David Brooks summarizes this reality more bluntly: “[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. There’s a good reason for this mimicry. Great minds like Caro and Darwin didn’t deploy rituals to be weird; they did so because success in their work depended on their ability to go deep, again and again—there’s no way to win a Pulitzer Prize or conceive a grand theory without pushing your brain to its limit.

This means you have to plan your deep work sessions ahead of time. Decide

1. Where you’ll work and for how long.
2. How you’ll work once you start to work.
3. How you’ll support your work.

He discusses the 4DX framework, originally idented for businesses, and adapts it to personal deep work. The 4DX framework is built up of four key disciplines:

1. Focus on the Wildly Important
2. Act on the Lead Measures
3. Keep a Compelling Scoreboard
4. Create a Cadence of Accountability

Lastly, he argues for the importrance of “injecting regular and substantial freedom from professional concerns into your day, providing you with the idleness paradoxically required to get (deep) work done.” This is discussed in the context of attention restoration theory. The basic idea is that concentration, or “directed attention,” is a finite resource that can get exhausted. For this reason, he argues to keep all work strictly confined to the work day. This way, you can spend your time outside of work hours recharging. This in turn helps you be more productive while working. To facilitate this move away from work and towards attention restoring activities, he argues for a commitment to a strict shutdown ritual. This is Cal’s description:

In more detail, this 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 (to end my own ritual, I say, “Shutdown complete”). This final step sounds cheesy, but it provides a simple cue to your mind that it’s safe to release work-related thoughts for the rest of the day. […] The concept of a shutdown ritual might at first seem extreme, but there’s a good reason for it: the Zeigarnik effect.

Rule #2: Embrace Boredom

The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained.

Deep work requires focus, and sometimes this focus can be difficult and uncomfortable. In our society we are accustomed to constantly available, on-demand distraction that can keep us from having to have uncomfortable moments where we are left alone with our thoughts. These distractions keep us from being bored. But this comes with a downside: the more accustomed we are to the easy availability of distraction, the harder it becomes to focus when we need to. This problem is particularly pronounced in individuals who frequently multitask:

People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand… they’re pretty much mental wrecks. […] Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction, Nass discovered, it’s hard to shake the addiction even when you want to concentrate. To put this more concretely: If every moment of potential boredom in your life—say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives—is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the “mental wrecks” in Nass’s research, it’s not ready for deep work—even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.

To counteract this, you need to train yourself with two goals in mind: “improving your ability to concentrate intensely and overcoming your desire for distraction.” As part of this training, Cal suggests a type of intermittent “internet Sabbath.” The intent is to schedule a break from focus where you’re allowed to give in to distraction.

With these rough categorizations established, the strategy works as follows: Schedule in advance when you’ll use the Internet, and then avoid it altogether outside these times. I suggest that you keep a notepad near your computer at work. On this pad, record the next time you’re allowed to use the Internet. Until you arrive at that time, absolutely no network connectivity is allowed—no matter how tempting.

He emphasizes the need to rigoursly stick to this schedule and really, completely avoid the internet during the scheduled focus time. For best results, he suggests restricting internet use at home as well as at work. This further helps train yourself to use the internet as an intentional tool, as opposed to as an escape mechanism from potential boredom.

To summarize, to succeed with deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli. This doesn’t mean that you have to eliminate distracting behaviors; it’s sufficient that you instead eliminate the ability of such behaviors to hijack your attention. The simple strategy proposed here of scheduling Internet blocks goes a long way toward helping you regain this attention autonomy.

He also suggests taking up what he calls productive meditation. Essentially, taking a time where you are physically but not mentally occupied (e.g., walking, jogging, driving) and focusing on a single, well-defined problem. This activity helps practice focusing and makes productive use of these times we might otherwise wast by distracting ourselves with things like podcasts.

Lastly, he suggets practicing memorization. He gives the example of learning how to memorize a deck of cards. The point here is not the party-trick of being able to quickly memorize a deck of cards, but rather to provide a workout for the mind.

Rule #3: Quit Social Media

This chapter focuses on one particular source of distraction - social media. He lists sites like FaceBook, Twitter and Instagram (the book was written prior to TikTok). Most people are signed up for several of these services, despite them offering limited benefits in Cal’s view. He proposes the following root-cause of this:

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 it. 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).

He repeatedly emphasizes that there are legitimate benefits to social media; his point is not that they are morally “bad” or “useless,” but rather that they are attention robbing while providing limited benefit. In other words, we can spend our time more profitably by doing something else with it rather than scrolling through FaceBook or TikTok feeds. Our days are short and we only have limited time. Spending time on social media typically is either (1) a distraction, filling otherwise empty space (see his rule #2 above), or (2) a suboptimal use of our free time.

Cal proposes the following alternative:

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.

He suggests writing a list of high-level gaols of what’s most important in your personal and professional life, then listing the two or three most important activities that can help you satisfy that goal. If a networking tool doesn’t fit with your goals, it might be more of a distraction than a useful tool. We might worry about missing out if we eliminate some or all of our social media, but

Stuff accumulates in people’s lives, in part, because when faced with a specific act of elimination it’s easy to worry, “What if I need this one day?,”and then use this worry as an excuse to keep the item in question sitting around. Nicodemus’s packing party provided him with definitive evidence that most of his stuff was not something he needed, and it therefore supported his quest to simplify.

Cal suggests cold-quitting the use of all social media for 30 days, without announcing it. Note that he suggests quitting the use, not shutting the services. Re-evaluate your use of the services after these 30 days. Overall, Cal argues that we deserve to put more thought into our leisure activities, and shouldn’t just default to whatever is easily available at the moment. Even if the torrent of funny, short videos is funny.

To summarize, if you want to eliminate the addictive pull of entertainment sites on your time and attention, give your brain a quality alternative. Not only will this preserve your ability to resist distraction and concentrate, but you might even fulfill Arnold Bennett’s ambitious goal of experiencing, perhaps for the first time, what it means to live, and not just exist.

Rule #4: Drain the Shallows

This chapter focuses on how to make more room for deep work by reducing the amount of low-value shallow work. He acknowledges that some shallow work is necessary, so he doesn’t encourage us to “quixotically pursue a schedule in which all of [our] time is invested in depth.” Nevertheless, he argues much shallow work can be eliminated without loss since it’s value is frequently overestimated.

Part of his advice is to utilize block-scheduling as a time management routine.

Here’s my suggestion: At the beginning of each workday, turn to a new page of lined paper in a notebook you dedicate to this purpose. Down the left-hand side of the page, mark every other line with an hour of the day, covering the full set of hours you typically work. Now comes the important part: Divide the hours of your workday into blocks and assign activities to the blocks. For example, you might block off nine a.m. to eleven a.m. for writing a client’s press release. To do so, actually draw a box that covers the lines corresponding to these hours, then write “press release”inside the box. Not every block need be dedicated to a work task. There might be time blocks for lunch or relaxation breaks. To keep things reasonably clean, the minimum length of a block should be thirty minutes (i.e., one line on your page). This means, for example, that instead of having a unique small box for each small task on your plate for the day—respond to boss’s e-mail, submit reimbursement form, ask Carl about report—you can batch similar things into more generic task blocks.

He advises not to stick too rigidly to these blocks, but instead use them to make sure you use your time intentionally instead of haphazardly. He also advises scheduling more time than you think you need at first, until you are used to the method and have a better sense of being able to gauge how long tasks will actually take when you give them your full attention.

To summarize, the motivation for this strategy is the recognition that a deep work habit requires you to treat your time with respect. A good first step toward this respectful handling is the advice outlined here: Decide in advance what you’re going to do with every minute of your workday. It’s natural, at first, to resist this idea, as it’s undoubtedly easier to continue to allow the twin forces of internal whim and external requests to drive your schedule. But you must overcome this distrust of structure if you want to approach your true potential as someone who creates things that matter.

When deciding on a task schedule, quantify the depth of every activity. This can help in both prioritization and in figuring out what is actually shallow work masquerading as deep work. He advocates the following heuristic in judging where an activity falls on the shallow-depth continuum:

evaluate activities by asking a simple (but surprisingly illuminating) question: 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?

The shorter the amount of time, the more shallow the task. Conversely, the longer it would take, the more important that task is for you as an individual since it utilizes the skills you have acquired and puts you to “best use.”

Expanding on a topic brought up in rule #1, he advocates for what he terms fixed-schedule productivity. In essence: fix a time of day that ends your work day (he suggests 5:30 PM). From there, work backwards into making your day’s work fit that schedule. This way you are guaranteed to be done with work and available to engage in attention restoration and living your life outside of work, while at the same time nudging yourself to use the now more limited work time to the best of your ability.

Since you will have more limited time in your workday, this motivates you to start saying no to potential commitments that don’t actually further your professional goals significantly. He brings up his own example of earning tenure and that of a colleague to show that even though we might think we need to say “yes” to all opportunities and work all hours of the day in order to succeed, we may not need to do either if we use our time productively.

To summarize these observations, Nagpal and I can both succeed in academia without Tom-style overload due to two reasons. First, we’re asymmetric in the culling forced by our fixed-schedule commitment. By ruthlessly reducing the shallow while preserving the deep, this strategy frees up our time without diminishing the amount of new value we generate. Indeed, I would go so far as to argue that the reduction in shallow frees up more energy for the deep alternative, allowing us to produce more than if we had defaulted to a more typical crowded schedule. Second, the limits to our time necessitate more careful thinking about our organizational habits, also leading to more value produced as compared to longer but less organized schedules. The key claim of this strategy is that these same benefits hold for most knowledge work fields.

This observation definitely matches up with my own personal observations of academic life. An incredible amount of time is wasted there at various levels.

His final piece of advice is mostly related to email - “become hard to reach.” Email sucks up a large amount of time in many workers' day. And if we really think about it, many emails are not effective uses of our time. He offers three tips for reducing the impact of this potential time waster:

1. Make People Who Send You E-mail Do More Work. Set people up with the expectation that you won’t reply unless it is actually worth your time. It is common for people to expect replies to something as mundane and pointless as a forwarded email with the single line “what are your thougths?” prefixed to it. Start to make clear that you won’t respond to emails of this type. Raise the expectation that people need to communicate to you why you ought to reply to the email in the first place. This can be done by using a sender filter. On your website, where you list your email, you could communicate that you won’t respond unless the message fits your schedule and interests. By communicating what you will respond to ahead of time, you can reset people’s expectation.

2. Do More Work When You Send or Reply to E-mails. This is related to the above. Just as you won’t reply to pointless emails, don’t write pointless emails. But also think ahead and make sure your emails include all of the necessary information. This avoids short, chat-style back-and-forths. As a particular example, this goes with one of my pet peeves: people sending meeting requests with absolutely no indication of what times they might be available. Don’t do that. If you want to meet with somebody, include why you want to meet and give several time windows. If your organization uses Outlook and basic calendar sharing, take a look at the other parties calenders and make sure to only suggest times that aren’t already blocked off on their calendars. That way, finding a meeting time can happen in two or three emails as opposed to five. In more detail, he writes:

pause a moment before replying [to an email] and take the time to answer the following key prompt: 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 a successful conclusion? Once you’ve answered this question for yourself, replace a quick response with one that takes the time to describe the process you identified, points out the current step, and emphasizes the step that comes next. I call this the process-centric approach to e-mail, and it’s designed to minimize both the number of e-mails you receive and the amount of mental clutter they generate.

3. Just don’t respond. You can use this technique as a heuristic for gauging when to not respond to an email:

Professorial E-mail Sorting: Do not reply to an e-mail message if any of the following applies:

• It’s ambiguous or otherwise makes it hard for you to generate a reasonable response.

• It’s not a question or proposal that interests you.

• Nothing really good would happen if you did respond and nothing really bad would happen if you didn’t.

Reference

Newport, C. (2016), Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, New York, NY: Grand Central Publishing.