Deep Work by Cal Newport

This book summary doesn’t require a lengthy preamble. This pretty much sums it up:
Make the space for deep work - in that space is where the real work gets done.

Deep work might look like creation.
It might look like contemplation.
It might even look like conversation.
But it always calls for concentration.

Writing this newsletter requires all of the above. The true value drivers of my profession do as well. So, I'm deeply grateful to Mr. Newport for inspiring me to prioritize depth.

Now, when I sit down to work, it's as if I have a positive coach whispering in my ear:
"Minimize distractions¹. Resist the temptation to divert to shallow tasks². And just get to work!³"

<sup>1. "No Trent, another snack isn't going to improve your productivity. No, the content of that Breaking News alert isn't going to impact your life right now (or maybe ever). And no, calling Chris to catch up is not the highest & best use of time at the moment."
2. "Email, Teams, & texting will still be there after your concentration fades. Then, you can batch reply to everything at once."
3. "Just do it" - Shia LaBeouf (and some shoe company)</sup>

• Book: https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted/dp/1455586692

• Author's website: https://calnewport.com/

• Intro

  • Neal Stephenson: "If I can organize my time into a series of long uninterrupted blocks, then I can write novels. If I let myself get distracted, then all I’ll have to show for my work at the end of my life is a series of email messages to individual people."

  • Bill Gates reserves time for "Think Weeks"

  • The deep work hypothesis is that deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time that it’s becoming increasingly valuable in our economy

  • A deep life is a good life

• Chapter 1: Deep Work is Important

  • "Great Restructuring": as managers evaluate whether they should hire machines or humans, to have a place in this new economy, you need to prove:

    • Can you work with machines?

    • Can you do complex thinking?

  • Measurement of an elite worker in the new economy

    • Ability to do complex work

    • Ability to produce at an elite level on the basis of quality and speed

  • Learning

    • To learn is an act of deep work

    • Strengthens the pathways of your firing neurons. Distraction causes too many neurons to fire at once

  • Adam Grant as an example of an elite producer

    • Published 60 peer-reviewed publications + Give & Take book by the time he got full professorship in 2014

    • Batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted periods

      • Teaching in Fall semester. Research in Spring & Summer

      • Extreme isolation. Alternates between open and closed door policy for students and colleagues. Uses OOO auto-responder even if he’s in the office to minimize distraction

    • High quality work produced = time spent * intensity of focus

      • By increasing the intensity when you work, you can maximize your output on the time you spend working. Thus, you can optimize whether you want to work less hours or produce more high quality work

  • Attention residue

    • Content switching or working in state of semi-distraction has devastating effects to overall productivity

  • Jack Dorsey as an example of a seemingly distracted executive, yet highly "productive" individual

    • Difficult to compare oneself to Jack because:

      • CEO job is basically a hard-to-automate decision engine. Sees the whole landscape of info then makes decisions from that vantage point

      • The inputs to this engine are email, communications from the team, and meetings. So role is essentially being distracted

      • Goes deep in interactions / meetings

• Chapter 2: Deep Work is Rare

  • Trends making deep work harder:

    • Open floor plans

      • Counterpoint: increases serendipitous interaction

    • Instant messaging (Slack, Teams)

      • Counterpoint: increases response time

    • Emphasis on social media presence

      • Counterpoint: increases exposure (i.e., journalists publishing on Twitter)

  • Busyness as a proxy for productivity

    • In the absence of clear priorities, one embraces visible busyness. It’s a self-preservation tactic due to the Metric Black Hole

      • Metric Black Hole: no good way to measure work impact in knowledge worker fields

    • Principle of Least Resistance: "without the ability to measure the impact on the bottom line of a task, employees will revert to the easiest task. The task of least resistance."

      • That’s why there’s a desire for answering email or instant messages. It’s because it’s hard work to determine what task should take priority in the moment. It's easiest to respond to the one that's right in front of you

• Chapter 3: Deep Work is Meaningful

  • Our quality of life and happiness is dictated by what we choose to focus our attention on

    • We so often focus on our circumstances that are happening to us (external factors) and surrender our choice of what to focus on. Our circumstances are objective, but the quality of our life is subjective

  • "A distracted mind is the devil's workshop"

    • When we get distracted, we tend to focus on what's wrong in our lives

  • Can enjoy flow state when engaging in deep work

  • Parable of brick layers

    • "Brick layers were commissioned to rebuild St Paul’s Cathedral in London after the great fire of 1666. Five years into the massive project, an architect stopped to pose a simple question to three brick layers. “What are you doing?” he asked. The first replied, “I am a brick layer, working hard to feed my family,” The second offered, “I am a builder. I am building the walls of a church.” The third answered, “I am a cathedral builder. I am a part of building a Kingdom.”

    • Their physical task was the same but their perspective was vastly different

• Rule #1: Work Deeply

  • 4 types of deep work philosophies:

    • Monastic scheduling

      • Rejection of ALL shallow tasks

      • Stephenson: "All of my time and attention are spoken for. Please do not ask for them."

    • Bi-modal scheduling

      • Carl Jung had clinical clients then did deep work only at his retreats, where he adopted monastic philosophy

      • Could be on time scale of a week or month or year. A day is often too short to get extended deep work time

      • Adam Grant as example

        • Schedules in 2-4 days per month for purely deep work

        • Rest of time he is famously available to students (I can attest to this)

        • Alternates between being fully available vs fully shut off

    • Rhythmic scheduling

      • Habit of starting at the same time every day

        • Remove the need to decide if & when to set aside time for deep work

      • Daily habit: Seinfeld crossed off his calendar with an “X” every day that he wrote a joke

    • Journalistic scheduling

      • Opportunistic approach

      • Write when you get free time or are inspired

      • Use rituals to drop into your process and decrease the friction to get going

      • "Best creative workers think like artists and work like accountants"

  • Make grand gestures

    • Authors building writing houses in their backyards

    • J. K. Rowling spent $1K per night on a suite near a castle to finish the last Harry Potter books

    • Writer bought round-trip ticket to Japan just to create the space to write on the plane

  • Don't work alone to promote "serendipitous creativity"

    • Hub-and-spoke model of collaboration

      • MIT innovation building has shared common areas for serendipity, but then professors also requested soundproof offices for isolated thinking time

  • 4DX Method

    • 1 - focus on the "wildly important"

      • The more you try to do, the less you will accomplish

    • 2 - focus on the lead measures (not the lag measures)

      • Goal is to change behavior, so focus on behaviors, rather than outcomes

      • Like "leading indicators" in SaaS sales

    • 3 - create a compelling scoreboard

      • "If you're not keeping score, then you're just practicing"

    • 4 - create a regular cadence of accountability

  • Shut off from work at the end of the work day

    • Attention Restoration Theory (ART)

      • Nature has the capacity to renew attention after exerting mental energy

    • Important to fully shut down at the end of a work day. Need to even avoid checking email briefly. Without full shut down, your mind doesn't get full restoration which can lead to decreased productivity the next day

    • Create a shutdown ritual

      • Newport checks schedule for tomorrow then vocally says "shutdown complete" to mark the end of the work day 

      • "When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done."

• Rule #2: Embrace Boredom

  • Concentration is a muscle

  • Build it with intense sprints of focus

    • Set timer to require focus during specific time block

    • Promise task completion to manager by end of week to require focus throughout the week

  • Productive meditation to think while moving the body in another way

    • Commuting

    • Walking

• Rule #3: Quit Social Media

  • “Any benefit mindset”: justifying the use of a tool if it generates any benefit whatsoever, but ignoring the costs of using the tool

    • Justification for TikTok / Instagram / Facebook:

      • "Entertainment" - but do you not have other forms of entertainment that might be higher quality (i.e., Netflix or HBO)?

      • "Reconnecting with friends" - but do these new connections actually bring deep value to your life? Why were you not engaged with them previously? Once you've reconnected on Facebook, do you have other means of communicating with them?

  • Craftsman approach to evaluating tools: if a tool contributes more happiness than its cost, then add it to your life. If not, then subtract it

    • Step 1 - identify your main, high-level goals in Work and Personal life

    • Step 2 - identify highest value activities that lead to those goals

    • Step 3 - consider tools you use

      • For each tool, evaluate whether the tools have a substantially positive impact or substantially negative impact on each of the activities you identified

      • Only use a tool that has substantial positive impacts AND these positive impacts outweigh the negative impacts

  • Power Law, 80/20, Rule of the Vital Few

    • Bennett: 8 working hours are what we have become accustomed to calling our “day”. The remaining 16 hours is the prologue or epilogue to this "day." Rather than defaulting to whatever catches our attention pre- and post-work, we should structure those 16 hours

    • Concerns that adding this structure will make us exhausted

      • Bennett rebuttal: mental faculties of humans do not tire. All they want is change, not rest (except in sleep)

• Rule #4: Drain The Shallows

  • Basecamp's 4-day work week eliminated shallow tasks and distractions

  • Cognitive limit of deep work

    • Children max out at ~1 hour

    • Most advanced deep work practitioners max out at ~4 hours

      • That leaves 4 hours in your "work day" for shallow work

  • Schedule every minute of your day

    • "Otherwise you'll adhere to the twin forces of internal whim and external request to drive your schedule"

    • Create time blocks

      • Reserve time for lunch, relaxation, exercise

    • Include task blocks

      • Have the task block point to the RHS of a page where you’ve ordered your tasks you want to accomplish in this block, then work through the prioritized list

      • Make them longer for tasks planned in the morning to avoid full schedule disruption

      • Include them throughout the day to let you catch up on tasks that pop up

    • Disruptions to your schedule caused by:

      • Bad time estimation (wishful thinking)

      • Interruptions and requests for other tasks

    • If you are off-schedule, just cross out and re-write the rest of the day

      • More important to maintain a thoughtful say in what you’re doing with your time going forward

    • Newport’s rule on creative inspiration: If I arrive at an important insight, then I give myself permission to get fully lost in it. I will clear my schedule. Then when the spark fades, I’ll reconfigure my schedule going forward

  • Quantify the "depth" of every activity by evaluating how long it would take to train a bright, recent college grad to do the task

  • Shallow work budget

    • Purpose of a business is to create value, not make the lives of employees easier (by answering shallow requests quickly)

    • Unless it’s an entry-level role. If you're in one, then it’s incumbent upon you to build skills and prove the value of your deep work capacities

  • Finish your work by 5:30pm

    • Fixed schedule productivity - setting a fixed end time for work, then working backwards to see what are the most important things to get done before then

  • Create a process-driven approach to email

    • Include action items and next steps in your initial reply to any email outreach (if you decide to reply)

    • When not to reply:

      • Is it ambiguous?

      • Is this a question or proposal that interests me?

      • Will anything noticeably good happen if I do reply or noticeably bad happen if I don't reply?

    • "Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things." - Tim Ferriss

• Conclusion

  • Leave the distracted masses to join the focused few

  • Deep work can be cognitively draining. Approach it with balance and moderation, but recognize that it’s how all important work gets done