“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.”
If you’re at all into productivity-hacking, self-improvement, or in general maximizing your life, you’ve probably heard of “deep work”, a term popularized by Cal Newport in his book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.
It was the natural book to kick off my goal to dive deeply into my work, hobbies, and life in 2018.
My verdict?
Great concepts; extraneous book. Unless you are new to the ideas in it, all you really need is a decent essay summarizing the key points. And since you, dear reader, are already convinced that getting rid of distraction and living your one-and-only life deeply are important, I’m going to save you the hours that reading the book would deduct from your life.
Deep Work is divided into two sections: The Idea and The Rules.
The Idea starts with the claim that there are “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”. The answer to cultivating both abilities: deep work.
The book then goes on to say that deep work is rarely prioritized because it’s hard to develop metrics around knowledge work, and busyness has become a proxy for productivity.
There’s more in here about why you should believe deep work is important, and plenty of stories about well-off white dudes who’ve used deep work to get to where they are; but you’re already convinced of deep work’s importance, so we’ll skip ahead.
The Idea ends with a section discussing the importance of meaning in our work and our lives, and deep work is meaningful, therefore we should strive for deep work. The quote I wrote down was:
“The meaning uncovered… is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in craftsmanship — not the outcome of their work. Put another way, a wooden wheel is not noble, but its shaping can be.”
Overall, if you were going to read this book looking for practical tips, I think “The Idea” could be skipped.
Part two, The Rules, is divided into four sections. Are the section titles the eponymous rules? Who knows? They are:
1) Work Deeply (title seems a bit self-evident, but okay),
2) Embrace Boredom (I like it),
3) Quit Social Media (Newport rants a lot about social media), and
4) Drain the Shallows.
- Work Deeply
The first stage of working deeply is deciding your “depth philosophy”, aka how you are going to get your deep work time. Are you going to retreat from the rest of the world for long periods? That’s monastic. Are you going to divide your year or months into time “in the world” and time for deep work? That’s bimodal. Are you going to schedule chunks of deep work and chunks of shallow work in a regular way every day? That’s rhythmic. Are you going to grab minutes and hours of deep work anytime and anywhere you can? That’s journalistic.
There’s a lot of overlap between deep work and flow state (I can’t recall if Newport touches on that, but if he does, it’s briefly), and invoking both easily and quickly can be aided by the use of rituals. When building a ritual, you should decide:
1) Where you’ll work and for how long (eliminating interruptions)
2) How you’ll work once you start (Newport suggests banning internet use and measuring words produced per 20 minutes or using other metrics)
3) How you’ll support your ability to do work (taking a walk right before starting, having coffee on hand, making sure you’ve eaten, etc)
He points out that grand gestures can help you feel committed, whether that’s buying an expensive journal or creating a special work space for yourself. He also discusses the fact that having the right kind of people, energy, and collaborative possibility in your life aids deep work, while having the wrong kinds of distraction are fatal.
This is the longest section of the book, and the second half of it is dedicated to discussing the four disciplines of execution, developed by Clayton Christensen in a book of the same name, and on the importance of quitting work and taking downtime. Newport’s research indicates deep work n00bs may max their brains out after an hour, while even experienced people rarely produce more than four hours of deep work a day.
The 4 disciplines of execution, per Clayton Christensen, are:
1 ) Focus on the wildly important. “Say ‘yes’ to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else.” — David Brooks, The Art of Focus
2 ) Act on lead measures. By the time you get downstream metrics, it’s too late.
3 ) Keep a compelling scoreboard. Newport tracks total “deep work” hours with tally marks on an index card.
4 ) Create a cadence for accountability.
Regarding downtime, Newport says:
1 ) Downtime aids insights.
2) Downtime helps recharge the energy needed to work deeply.
3) The work that evening downtime replaces is usually not that important.
2. Embrace Boredom
The next stage in working deeply is apparently to embrace boredom! I’m all about it, actually. By striving to busy our minds constantly, we distract ourselves from everything important. So, says Newport, don’t take breaks from distraction. Instead take breaks from focus.
Newport suggests scheduling “internet blocks” throughout your day where you’re allowed to use the internet. The time outside the blocks is kept absolutely free from internet use. If your job requires lots of internet use, you might have more blocks or longer blocks; that’s fine. What’s key is having internet-free time where you absolutely and 100% resist the temptation to go online for any reason. This builds willpower and mindfulness and other great skillz.
Another way to embrace boredom is to meditate productively, meaning you create time and space for yourself to think about work problems, whether that’s while walking or driving or in the shower.
And the last part of this section suggests learning a memorization technique, like memorizing a deck of cards. I’m not 100% sure what this has to do with embracing boredom (unless memorization is presumed to be inherently boring?) but honestly a lot of the book’s organization felt a bit haphazard to me. Anyway, working on intense memorization sharpens your brain and pays off in many areas besides just remembering things.
3. Quit Social Media
Newport loves to argue against social media, and I was most bored by those parts of the book. It’s not news that we humans waste lots of time on social media, and I think he missed the boat on why even productive people can value social media and what use social media can have even in a deeply lived life. (That’ll be another post.) The gist of his argument is that the negatives of using social media outweigh the positives for most people, and the positives aren’t positive enough.
To convince yourself to get rid of social media, Newport suggests an exercise to identify your high level goals. An example for me would be “to write great books that change the world”. Then write a few key activities that support that goal. Then ask yourself if your other habits (social media, for example) support your high level goal.
4. Drain the Shallows
The final section or rule or chapter—whichever—is “Drain the Shallows”. This means you look at what work is deep and what work is shallow, and you get rid of as much of the shallow work as possible.
Ways you can do this:
1) Schedule every minute of your day.
2) Quantify the depth of every activity.
3) Set (or ask your boss to set) a shallow work budget (i.e. 30% shallow work to 70% deep work).
4) Finish your work by 5:30 or some other set time.
5) Become hard to reach; do more work when you reply to emails (process-centric replies) and reply less often; replying to every email is less important than you think.
There you go—that’s the gist of the book. The two most useful concepts in book for me were:
1- Adopt a scarcity mindset when it comes to your time.
As someone who’s been trying to get rid of scarcity mindsets in my life, this one actually felt like a transformative idea in the way it struck me. Love is not finite; passion is not finite. But time is. The idea that time may be the one place where we should cultivate a scarcity mindset is powerful and interesting. I’ll be pondering that one for a while.
2- Use a shut-down ritual.
Newport spends time discussing the fact that unresolved tasks hang around in the back of your mind, pulling you out of the depth where you could be working. To avoid unfinished business nibbling away at your brain like those little fish that nibble your feet, he suggests a daily “shutdown ritual” to wind down your work day. A final check of the email inbox; a review of task lists; a plan for the next day.
Again, if you’re very new to these ideas or still not convinced that deep work is important, you may want to give the book a read. I think it’s a bit bloated, and I blame the book industry’s concepts of what length a book “needs” to be in order to be a Real Book. If you’re already on the way to a more deep and productive life, this review should suffice.
Stay tuned for the apps and hacks I’ve used to improve my deep work habits!
Have you read Deep Work? Let me know if you think my review missed anything important!
