Deep Work (Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World) by Cal Newport

 Deep Work (Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World) by Cal Newport

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.

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.

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.

“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.” - Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges, a Dominican friar and professor of moral philosophy

High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)

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 at the moment.

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.

"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 effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed". - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

As Christensen later explained, this division between what and how is crucial but is overlooked in the professional world. It’s often straightforward to identify a strategy needed to achieve a goal, but what trips up companies is figuring out how to execute the strategy once identified.

Rule 1 - Work Deeply

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. With this in mind, the six strategies that follow can be understood as an arsenal of routines and rituals designed with the science of limited willpower in mind to maximize the amount of deep work you consistently accomplish in your schedule

• Decide on Your Depth Philosophy

• The Monastic Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling

• The Rhythmic Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling

• The Journalistic Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling

• Ritualize

• Make Grand Gestures

• Don’t Work Alone (The hub-and-spoke model & the whiteboard effect)

• Execute Like a Business

• Be Lazy

• • Reason #1: Downtime Aids Insights

  • Reason #2: Downtime Helps Recharge the Energy Needed to Work Deeply

  • Reason #3: The Work That Evening Downtime Replaces Is Usually Not That Important

Discipline #1: Focus on the Wildly Important

Discipline #2: Act on the Lead Measures

Discipline #3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard

Discipline #4: Create a Cadence of Accountability

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Rule 2 - Embrace Boredom

Don’t Take Breaks from Distraction. Instead, Take Breaks from Focus.

• Point #1: This strategy works even if your job requires lots of Internet use and/or prompt e-mail replies.

• Point #2: Regardless of how you schedule your Internet blocks, you must keep the time outside these blocks absolutely free from Internet use.

• Point #3: Scheduling Internet use at home as well as at work can further improve your concentration training

To help accelerate this ramp-up process, however, I have two specific suggestions to offer.

• Suggestion #1: Be Wary of Distractions and Looping

• Suggestion #2: Structure Your Deep Thinking

Rule 3 - Quit social media

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 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.

Apply the Law of the Vital Few to Your Internet Habits

The Law of the Vital Few*: In many settings, 80 percent of a given effect is due to just 20 percent of the possible causes

Don’t Use the Internet to Entertain Yourself

Rule 4 - Drain the shallows

Quantify the Depth of Every Activity

Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.

Tip #1: Make People Who Send You E-mail Do More Work

Tip #2: Do More Work When You Send or Reply to E-mails

(E-mail #2: “We should get back to the research problem we discussed during my last visit. Remind me where we are with that?”

E-mail #3: “I took a stab at that article we discussed. It’s attached. Thoughts?”)

Tip #3: Don’t Respond