Deep Work – Book Notes

Reading Time: 9 minutes

Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

by Cal Newport

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Main Takeaways

  1. The Law of Productivity:
    • High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)
      • Track your deep work hours (see this article) to influence the time spent variable.
      • Follow the rules in this book and other tricks to increase the intensity of focus variable.
      • High-quality output is ultimately something you can’t control. Trust the proccess. Focus on lead meausres.
  2. It is crucial to choose a deep work philosophy that feels true to you (Monastic, bimodal, rythmic, journalistic). I fall in the rythmic and bimodal camps. This ensures I log steady deep work hours witha learning-bout first thing in the morning. I can also go rogue for a few days to focus on a project.
  3. Ditch the Any Benefit Minset approach to tool selection. Only take on tools with benefits that vastly outweight the down sides. Be careful of the shiny new toy syndrome.
  4. Make sure to shut down at the end of the day. The Zeigarnik Effect says that incomplete tasks will occupy mental real estate. Close the loops at the end of each day with you shut down ritual. This will allow your mind to rest and your subconscious to go to work.
  5. Decide on a fixed work schedule. You’ll find ways to get the important things done within your fixed schedule. Otherwise, you will find yourself constantly “working” (see Parkinson’s Law).
  6. There’s only so much deep work (deliberate practice) someone can do in a day. Be satisfied with one to four 90-minutes bouts of focus. The rest of your day is extra. Be careful of attention residue. It is almost impossible to go deep in the hour between two meetings.

Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converging rays of attention; let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea.

The Intellectual Life – Antonin-Dalmance Sertillanges

Book Notes

Introduction

  • “When Carl Jung wanted to revolutionize the field of psychiatry, he built a retreat in the woods. Jung’s Bollingen Tower became a place where he could maintain his ability to think deeply and then apply the skill to produce work of such stunning originality that it changed the world. In the pages ahead, I’ll try to convince you to join me in the effort to build our own personal Bollingen Towers; to cultivate an ability to produce real value in an increasingly distracted world; and to recognize a truth embraced by the most productive and important personalities of generations past: A deep life is a good life.”

Part 1 – The Idea

Chapter One – Deep Work is Valuable

  • “In this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital.”
    • The high-skilled workers (extract valuable insights from complex machines).
    • The superstars (remote work = less local hiring).
    • The owners (access to capital ==> investing).
  • “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.”
    • Note that both of these depend on your ability to perform deep work.
  • “Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converging rays of attention; let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea.” – The Intellectual Life – Antonin-Dlamance Sertillanges
  • Adam Grant uses batching to be hyper productive.
    • Teaches all courses in the fall (highest rated teacher.
    • Research only in spring and summer.
      • “He typically divides the writing of a scholarly paper into three discrete tasks: analyzing the data, writing a full draft, and editing the draft into something publishable.”
      • “During these periods, which can last up to three or four days, he’ll often put an out-of-office auto-responder on his e-mail so correspondents will know not to expect a response. “It sometimes confuses my colleagues, he told me. “They say, You’re not out of office, I see you in your office right now!’”
  • High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)

Chapter Two- Deep Work is Rare

  • “Big trends in business today actively decrease people’s ability to perform deep work, even though the benefits promised by these trends (e.g., increased serendipity, faster responses to requests, and more exposure) are arguably dwarfed by the benefits that flow from a commitment to deep work (e.g., the ability to learn hard things fast and produce at an elite level).”
  • Richard Feynman bragged about being irresponsible. He said no to all committee work.
    • “To do real good physics work, you do need absolute solid lengths of time… it needs a lot of concentration… if you have a job administrating anything, you don’t have the time. So I have invented another myth for myself: that I’m irresponsible. I’m actively irresponsible. I tell everyone I don’t do anything. If anyone asks me to be on a committee for admissions, no, I tell them: I’m irresponsible.”
  • Being busy is the new proxy to measure productivity.

Chapter Three – Deep Work is Meaningful

  • “Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.” – Winifred Gallagher
  • Emails are the new widgets. It’s difficult to measure the productivity of a day of research when you didn’t crank out anything.
  • “These elderly subjects were not happier because their life circumstances were better than those of the young subjects; they were instead happier because they had rewired their brains to ignore the negative and savor the positive.”
  • Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi used experience sampling method (ESM pagers) to conclude that:
    • “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.” – Definition of flow
  • “Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater ef ort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.”
  • The default mode network usually focuses on the negatives and prepares us for the future. Flow and deep work result in less default mode network time.
  • “As Dreyfus and Kelly explain, such sacredness is common to craftsmanship. The task of a craftsman, they conclude, “is not to generate meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill of discerning the meanings that are already there. This frees the craftsman of the nihilism of autonomous individualism, providing an ordered world of meaning.”
    • “You don’t need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work.”

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

Cal Newport – Deep Work

Part 2 – The Rules

Rule #1 – Work Deeply

  • “You must be careful to choose a philosophy that fits your specific circumstances, as a mismatch here can derail your deep work habit before it has a chance to solidify.”
    1. Monastic Philosophy
      • “Maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations.”
    2. Bimodal approach
      • Adam Grant & Carl Jung
      • Can happen at different time sclaes but needs to be at least 1 day.
    1. Rhythmic Philosophy
      • Pay yourself first every day. Build a habit. Guilt free after you’re done. Set the bar low.
      • Less intense perhaps than bimodal or monastic approach but probs log more deep work hours.
    1. Journalistic Philosophy
      • Squeeze it out when you can.
      • More realistic for parents.
      • Only for the deep work experts.
  • “[Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.”” – David Brooks
  • Making grand gestures can help with deep work.
    • Bill Gates thik weeks. JK Rowling hotel. Michael Pollan Writing Cabin.
  • The whiteboard effect.
    • “For some types of problems, working with someone else at the proverbial shared whiteboard can push you deeper than if you were working alone. The presence of the other party waiting for your next insight —be it someone physically in the same room or collaborating with you virtually—can short-circuit the natural instinct to avoid depth.”
  • The four disciplines (abbreviated, 4DX) for helping companies successfully implement high-level strategies (How > What).
    1. Discipline #1: Focus on the Wildly Important. 80/20 Rule
    2. Discipline #2: Act on the Lead Measures. Track and only focus on deep work hours. The results will lag behind.
    3. Discipline #3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard. Track number of deep work hours and keep a weekly scoreboard.
    4. Discipline #4: Create a Cadence of Accountability. Conduct a weekly review.
  • “The implication of this line of research is that providing your conscious brain time to rest enables your unconscious mind to take a shift sorting through your most complex professional challenges. A shutdown habit, therefore, is not necessarily reducing the amount of time you’re engaged in productive work, but is instead diversifying the type of work you deploy.”
  • “The implication of these results is that your capacity for deep work in a given day is limited. If you’re careful about your schedule (using, for example, the type of productivity strategies described in Rule #4), you should hit your daily deep work capacity during your workday. It follows, therefore, that by evening, you’re beyond the point where you can continue to effectively work deeply. Any work you do fit into the night, therefore, won’t be the type of high-value activities that really advance your career; your efforts will instead likely be confined to low-value shallow tasks (executed at a slow, low-energy pace). By deferring evening work, in other words, you’re not missing out on much of importance.”
    • Andrew Huberman says we only have a few 90-minute bouts of focus. Ultradian cycle.
  • Create a shut down ritual.
    • “The first thing I do is take a final look at my e-mail inbox to ensure that there’s nothing requiring an urgent response before the day ends. The next thing I do is transfer any new tasks that are on my mind or were scribbled down earlier in the day into my official task lists. (I use Google Docs for storing my task lists, as I like the ability to access them from any computer—but the technology here isn’t really relevant.) Once I have these task lists open, I quickly skim every task in every list, and then look at the next few days on my calendar. These two actions ensure that there’s nothing urgent I’m forgetting or any important deadlines or appointments sneaking up on me. I have, at this point, reviewed everything that’s on my professional plate. To end the ritual, I use this information to make a rough plan for the next day. Once the plan is created, I say, “Shutdown complete,” and my work thoughts are done for the day.”
    • Zeigarnik Effect: Incomplete task steal your attention. Make sure to close the loops.
    • “When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done.”

Rule #2 – Embrace Boredom

  • Insight Walking:
    • “The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally—walking, jogging, driving, showering—and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem. Depending on your profession, this problem might be outlining an article, writing a talk, making progress on a proof, or attempting to sharpen a business strategy. As in mindfulness meditation, you must continue to bring your attention back to the problem at hand when it wanders or stalls.”
    • Suggestion #1: Be Wary of Distractions and Looping.
    • Suggestion #2: Structure Your Deep Thinking.

Rule #3 – Quit Social Media

  • The Any-Benefit Approach to 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.”
    • “Throughout history, skilled laborers have applied sophistication and skepticism to their encounters with new tools and their decisions about whether to adopt them.”
  • 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.”
  • Try a 30-day Social Media Fast (Packing Party)
    • Define what you want to get out of each technology.
    • Systematically reintroduce each technology like you would with an elimination diet.
    • “After thirty days of this self-imposed network isolation, ask yourself the following two questions about each of the services you temporarily quit: 1. Would the last thirty days have been notably better if I had been able to use this service? 2. Did people care that I wasn’t using this service? If your answer is no to both questions, quit the service permanently. If your answer was a clear yes, then return to using the service. If your answers are qualified or ambiguous, it’s up to you whether you return to the service, though I would encourage you to lean toward quitting. (You can always rejoin later.)”

Rule #4 – Drain the Shallows

  • “How can we afford to put our business on hold for a month to ‘mess around’ with new ideas?” Fried asked rhetorically. “How can we afford not to?”
  • Schedule every minute of your day
    • “In other words, I not only allow spontaneity in my schedule; I encourage it. Joseph’s critique is driven by the mistaken idea that the goal of a schedule is to force your behavior into a rigid plan. This type of scheduling, however, isn’t about constraint—it’s instead about thoughtfulness. It’s a simple habit that forces you to continually take a moment throughout your day and ask: “What makes sense for me to do with the time that remains?” It’s the habit of asking that returns results, not your unyielding fidelity to the answer.”
  • Quantify the depth of an activity.
    • “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?”
    • Can be measured in hours.
    • You can estimate a depth-sufrace ratio.
  • “Here’s an important question that’s rarely asked: What percentage of my time should be spent on shallow work? This strategy suggests that you ask it.”
  • “I call this commitment fixed-schedule productivity, as I fix the firm goal of not working past a certain time, then work backward to find productivity strategies that allow me to satisfy this declaration.”
    • “Fixed-schedule productivity, in other words, is a meta-habit that’s simple to adopt but broad in its impact. If you have to choose just one behavior that reorients your focus toward the deep, this one should be high on your list of possibilities.”
  • Emails:
    1. Make the people who send you email do more work. (Sender Filter)
    2. Do more work when you send or reply to emails.
      • process-centric approach to e-mail. Include if then statements to minimize total number of emails.
      • “Second, to steal terminology from David Allen, a good process-centric message immediately “closes the loop” with respect to the project at hand. When a project is initiated by an e-mail that you send or receive, it squats in your mental landscape— becoming something that’s “on your plate” in the sense that it has been brought to your attention and eventually needs to be addressed. This method closes this open loop as soon as it forms. By working through the whole process, adding to your task lists and calendar any relevant commitments on your part, and bringing the other party up to speed, your mind can reclaim the mental real estate the project once demanded. Less mental clutter means more mental resources available for deep thinking.”
    3. Don’t respond.

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