Deep Work:
Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
Cal Newport
Book Summary, Notes & Highlights
The book enforces the idea that if you enter a state of flow and get “so into” your work that this will enable you to unleash your true creativity in the work you do.
Most distractions are the enemy and keep you in a state of shallowness, a good read, especially for academics.
Table of Contents
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
- A look into how the world’s geniuses possibly got things done.
- How to maximise your work by entering a state of flow.
- Deep work can be seen as a super power if done correctly.
🧠 My Thoughts
The book enforces the idea that if you enter a state of flow and get “so into” your work that this will enable you to unleash your true creativity in the work you do. Most distractions are the enemy and keep you in a state of shallowness, a good read, especially for academics.
🥷 Who Should Read It?
Anyone who is interested in the idea of how to immerse yourself into a state of deep work to unlock maximum creativity and productivity.
🪶 My Top 3 Quotes
- If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.
- When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done.
- One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change—not rest, except in sleep.
🔥Top Actionable Take-Aways
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📒 Summary and Notes
Part One: The Idea
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.
Chapter One: Deep Work is Valuable
There is a shift happening in the greater economy, we are relying more on machines to replace jobs not needed by humans anymore. This reality is not driving down all jobs but rather dividing them.
Many people will suffer in this new economy because their abilities can be replaced by machines or sent overseas. But others will not only survive, but prosper. They will be more important and get more rewards than ever before.
Three specific groups have been identified that will fall on the lucrative side of this divide and reap a disproportionate amount of the benefits of the Intelligent Machine Age.
The High-Skilled Workers (those who work well with machines)
Robotics and voice recognition are making it so that many low-skilled jobs are done by machines. But, economists say that new technologies like data visualization, analytics, high-speed communications, and rapid prototyping can help increase the value of these jobs by using abstract and data-driven thinking.
Those who can work with and understand complicated machines will be successful.
The key question will be: are you good at working with intelligent machines or not?”
The Superstars (those best at what they do)
It is no longer reasonable to hire a full-time programmer, rent office space and pay benefits when you can pay one of the world’s best programmers, such as Hansson, for just the amount of time needed to finish the project. This way, you will likely get a better result for less money, and Hansson can serve many more clients in a year, leading to a better outcome for them.
The Owners (those with access to capital)
The last group consists of those with capital to invest in the new technologies that are driving the Great Restructuring.
A venture capitalist today can invest in a company like Instagram, which made a billion dollars with only thirteen employees. This is a huge amount of money for such a small number of people. This means that much of the wealth goes back to the people who invested in the business, which has never happened before in previous times.
How does one join these winners?
How to Become a Winner in the New Economy
Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy
- The ability to quickly master hard things.
- The ability to produce at an elite level in terms of both quality and speed.
These skills alone are not sufficient, you need to be able to turn that latent potential into something tangible results that people value.
If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.
Therefore, the two core abilities just described depend on your ability to perform deep work.
Deep work helps you quickly learn hard things
Learning requires intense concentration.
People of genius were only able to be great by focusing all their energy on the one thing they chose to demonstrate their full potential.
This leads us to ask: What does deliberate practice need? Its main elements are usually listed as (1) you pay close attention to a skill you want to get better at or a concept you want to understand; (2) you get feedback so you can adjust your approach to stay focused on what will help you the most.
Why does deliberate practice work?
Scientists think myelin is part of the answer. Myelin is a layer of fatty tissue that grows around neurons, like insulation. It helps neurons send signals faster and better. To understand how myelin helps with improvement, remember that all skills, physical and mental, come from brain circuits.
As you practice a skill, your brain builds more Myelin layers around the relevant neurons. This helps the corresponding circuit to fire more effortlessly and effectively. The more myelin you have, the better you’ll be at the skill.
By focusing intensely on a specific skill, you’re forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire again and again in isolation. This repetitive use of a specific circuit triggers cells called oligodendrocytes to begin wrapping layers of myelin around the neurons in the circuits—effectively cementing the skill.
Therefore why, it’s so important to focus on the task at hand without distraction because this is the only way to isolate the relevant neural circuit enough to trigger useful myelination.
If you’re trying to learn a difficult new skill (like SQL database management), but you’re not focused (maybe you have your Facebook feed open, too), your brain won’t be able to focus solely on the neurons you need to strengthen.
To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction. To learn, in other words, is an act of deep work.
Deep Work Helps You Produce at an Elite Level
Though Grant’s (an elite professor) productivity depends on many factors, there’s one idea in particular that seems central to his method: the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches.
By consolidating his work into intense and uninterrupted pulses, he’s leveraging the following law of productivity:
High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)
Why is this formula so effective beyond just academia?
We can think of the general term of multitasking.
Sophie Leroy introduced an effect she called attention residue.
When you go from doing one thing (Task A) to something else (Task B), your mind doesn’t instantly switch. Your attention stays partly on Task A and takes a while to move over to Task B. This is especially true if you didn’t finish Task A or if the work was not intense. Even if you finish Task A before switching, your attention is still divided.
A residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task.
The concept of attention residue helps explain why the intensity formula is true and therefore helps explain Grant’s productivity. By working on a single challenging task for a long time without switching, Grant minimizes the negative impact of attention residue from his other obligations, allowing him to maximize performance on this one task.
When Grant is working for days in isolation on a paper, in other words, he’s doing so at a higher level of effectiveness than the standard professor following a more distracted strategy in which the work is repeatedly interrupted by residue-slathering interruptions.
Grant methods suggest that by focusing on one task for a long period of time without interruption, productivity can be maximized. Attention residue, or the negative impact of other obligations, is minimized when working in isolation, allowing for a higher level of effectiveness than if the work was repeatedly interrupted by residue-slathering interruptions.
Even if your in a controlled environment, just the act of glancing at your emails every 10 minutes has residue effects.
To produce at your peak level, you need to work for extended periods with total concentration on a single task free from distraction. Put another way, the type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work.
Chapter Two: Deep Work is Rare
The Principle of Least Resistance
In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviours on the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviours that are easiest at the moment.
The Principle of Least Resistance shields us from the need to plan and focus, even though it costs us long-term happiness and progress in the long run. This principle pushes us to do shallow work in a world that rewards deep work.
Ie. It’s easier to forward emails to people with a simple message of “thoughts” to clear our inbox or instant message, someone for an answer to a question I could probably find myself with a bit of effort.
Busyness as a 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 logic behind depth destroying behaviours. People use busyness as a way to appear productive, and so they engage in behaviours such as sending emails, attending meetings and bouncing ideas off of others in an open office.
Bad for Business. Good for You.
The facts are that deep work is hard and shallow work is easier. If there are no specific goals for a job, the busyness that comes with shallow work will stay, and our culture has come to believe that anything involving the Internet is good, no matter what it does to our ability to make good stuff.
Chapter Three: Deep Work Is Meaningful
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.
A Neurological Argument for Depth
Winifred Gallagher stumbled onto a connection between attention and happiness after an unexpected and terrifying event, a cancer diagnosis.
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 is a concept that challenges the idea that our circumstances dictate our happiness. Instead, it suggests that the small details of how we spend our day are just as important as the larger outcomes, such as promotions or nicer apartments.
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.”
Gallagher’s theory, therefore, predicts that if you spend enough time in this state, your mind will understand your world as rich in meaning and importance.
A Psychological Argument for Depth
Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.
Deep work is something that helps create a flow state. This flow state is described by Csikszentmihalyi with words like pushing your mind to its limits, focusing, and getting lost in an activity – all of which are part of deep work. And we now know that this flow can bring happiness.
Part Two: The Rules
Rule #1 Work Deeply
People fight desires all day long.
The five most common desires that subjects fought in a study include, not surprisingly, eating, sleeping, and sex. But the top five list also included desires for “taking a break from [hard] work… checking e-mail and social networking sites, surfing the web, listening to music, or watching television.” The lure of the Internet and television proved especially strong: The subjects succeeded in resisting these particularly addictive distractions only around half the time.
The truth about willpower: You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.
Your will is not something that you can use without any limit; it’s like a muscle that gets tired.
To create a habit of deep work, you need to do more than just have good intentions. Set up routines and rituals to help you switch into and stay in a state of focused concentration, using as little of your limited willpower as possible.
If you decide out of the blue, like during a day spent on the internet, to focus on something that needs a lot of thought, you’ll need a lot of energy to make yourself stop looking at the cool things online. Chances are, you won’t be able to do it. But, if you have a plan with a certain time and place to do the hard work, you won’t need as much energy to start and keep going. This way, you’ll be more successful in the long run.
These six strategies are like a toolkit of habits and routines created using the science of limited willpower to get the most out of your deep work each day.
Strategy 1 – Decide on Your Depth Philosophy
Be mindful when selecting a strategy that fits your situation. If it’s not the right one, it can prevent your deep work habit from forming.
The Monastic Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling
This idea tries to get the best results by taking away or greatly decreasing unimportant tasks. People who follow this approach usually have a clear and important goal they are working towards, and most of their successes come from doing this one thing really well.
The Bimodal Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling
This philosophy suggests that you divide your time, setting aside some specific times for focused work and leaving the rest open for other activities. During the focused time, the bimodal worker should focus intensely and without interruption.
The bimodal philosophy states that deep work can make you very productive, but only if you dedicate enough time to it. To get the most out of it, the minimum amount of time you need to spend is one full day.
The Rhythmic Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling
This idea suggests that it is best to make deep work a regular part of your routine. This way, you don’t have to spend time deciding when to do deep work. The chain method is a good example of this, as it has a simple scheduling rule (do the work every day) and an easy reminder (marking big red Xs on the calendar).
The Chain Method – Seinfeld had a calendar on his wall. He would mark each day he wrote jokes with a big red X. He said, “Keep writing, and you’ll have a chain of X’s. It’ll get longer each day. You’ll feel great when you have a few weeks of Xs. The only thing to do is make sure you don’t break the chain.”
Another way to do the rhythmic philosophy is to replace the chain method’s visual aid with a regular starting time for deep work. This way, having something to show your work progress can make it easier to go deep. It also helps to not have to make scheduling decisions, like when during the day to do the work.
By setting up strong routines that ensure a bit of work is done consistently, the rhythmic scheduler can usually record more deep hours throughout the year.
The Journalistic Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling
I refer to this strategy, where you put deep work into your schedule whenever you can, as the journalist philosophy. This name is a tribute to journalists like Walter Isaacson, who can quickly switch into writing mode when needed due to the urgent deadlines of their job.
Strategy 2 – Ritualize
This strategy suggests that to get the most out of your deep work sessions, you should create rituals that are as strict and unique as those of great minds in the past.
Their rituals made it easier for them to go deeper and stay there longer. If they had waited for motivation before starting their work, they wouldn’t have achieved as much.
General questions that any effective ritual must address:
- Where you’ll work and for how long?
- How you’ll work once you start to work? Maybe maintain a metric of what you want to get done.
- How you’ll support your work? Have a cup of coffee.
Strategy 3 – Make Grand Gestures
Making a big change to your usual environment, and putting in lots of effort or money to focus on an important task, will make the task seem more important. This will reduce the urge to procrastinate and will give you more energy and motivation.
Ie.
- JK Rowling checked into a very expensive hotel/ castle vibe to writing the rest of her book for Harry Potter.
- Peter Shankman booked a return trip to Tokyo and back to the states all within 30 hours to write his manuscript.
In all of these examples, it’s not just the change of environment or seeking of quiet that enables more depth. The dominant force is the psychology of committing so seriously to the task at hand. To put yourself in an exotic location to focus on a writing project, or to take a week off from work just to think, or to lock yourself in a hotel room until you complete an important invention: These gestures push your deep goal to a level of mental priority that helps unlock the needed mental resources. Sometimes to go deep, you must first go big.
Strategy 4 – Don’t Work Alone
The hub and spoke model
Offices with soundproofing connected to open spaces create a hub-and-spoke structure for creativity. This allows for chance meetings and focused thinking. On one end of the spectrum, a person can be alone and free from distraction. On the other end, a person can collaborate in an open office and be surrounded by inspiration but still have trouble with deep thinking.
The whiteboard effect
For some types of problems, working with someone else on the proverbial shared whiteboard can push you deeper than if you were working alone.
Thinking about deep work, collaboration can help you get better results. But don’t think that working together is always the best thing.
Strategy 5 – Execute Like a Business
The 4 Disciplines of Execution, which built on extensive consulting case studies to describe four “disciplines” (abbreviated, 4DX) for helping companies successfully implement high-level strategies.
I have put together the four parts of the 4DX framework below. For each one, I explain how I made it fit my needs in developing a deep work habit.
Discipline #1: Focus on the Wildly Important
The more you do, the less you get done. Focus on a few really wildly important goals.
This simplicity will help focus an organization’s energy to the point where real results can be achieved.
Spending more time on work that requires deep concentration doesn’t sound very exciting. But if you have a specific goal that will give you real, meaningful benefits in your job, you’ll be much more eager to get to it.
For example, when I first began experimenting with 4DX, I set the specific important goal of publishing five high-quality peer-reviewed papers in the upcoming academic year. This goal was ambitious, as it was more papers than I had been publishing, and there were tangible rewards attached to it (tenure review was looming). Combined, these two properties helped the goal stoke my motivation.
Discipline #2: Act on the Lead Measures
Once you’ve identified a wildly important goal, you need to measure your success. In 4DX, there are two types of metrics for this purpose: lag measures and lead measures.
Lag measures describe the thing you’re ultimately trying to improve.
For example, if your goal is to increase customer satisfaction in your bakery, then the relevant lag measure is your customer satisfaction scores. The problem with lag measures is that they come too late to change your behaviour: “When you receive them, the performance that drove them is already in the past.”
Lead measures, on the other hand, “measure the new behaviours that will drive success on the lag measures.” In the bakery example, a good lead measure might be the number of customers who receive free samples.
In other words, lead measures turn your attention to improving the behaviours you directly control in the near future, which will then have a positive impact on your long-term goals.
For an individual focused on deep work, it’s easy to identify the relevant lead measure: time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal.
Example:
Lag measure = Amount of papers published per year. These measures, however, lacked influence on my day-to-day behaviour because there was nothing I could do in the short term that could immediately generate a noticeable change to this long-term metric.
Lead measure = When I shifted to tracking deep work hours, suddenly, these measures became relevant to my day-to-day: Every hour extra of deep work was immediately reflected in my tally.
Discipline #3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard
People play differently when they’re keeping score.
Cal’s method of keeping score was simple.
This document describes a strategy used to motivate oneself to engage in deep work. It involves creating a scoreboard of hours spent in deep work and circling tally marks when reaching important milestones. This helps to connect the hours spent with tangible results, as well as to calibrate expectations for how many hours are needed for each result.
Discipline #4: Create a Cadence of Accountability
Deep Work is a process of scheduling and reviewing to ensure that goals are met. Through weekly reviews, celebrating good weeks and understanding bad ones, adjustments can be made to the schedule to enable more deep work and ensure a good score for the days ahead.
During this 4DX experiment, the clear purpose and the easy-to-follow feedback from my lead measure scoreboard motivated me to reach a higher level of success than I had ever achieved before.
Strategy 6 – Be Lazy
To produce great work, your mind needs to be released to leisure also.
When you finish your workday, stop thinking about work until the next morning – don’t check emails, don’t replay conversations, and don’t plan how you’ll tackle something. Stop all work thinking.
The science behind the value of downtime.
Reason #1: Downtime Aids Insights
Some decisions are better left to your unconscious mind to untangle.
Attempting to figure out the decisions on your own will result in a worse outcome than gathering the necessary facts and then leaving it for your subconscious mind to think about.
Unconscious thought theory (UTT)—an attempt to understand the different roles conscious and unconscious deliberation play in decision-making.
Your conscious mind is like a computer that can solve specific problems, and your unconscious mind is like Google, which can search through lots of data to find creative answers to tricky questions.
Reason #2: Downtime Helps Recharge the Energy Needed to Work Deeply
To concentrate requires what ART calls directed attention. This resource is finite: If you exhaust it, you’ll struggle to concentrate.
When you walk in nature, you don’t need to focus because there are no obstacles to worry about, like busy street crossings. There is enough to see to keep your mind occupied, so you don’t have to concentrate on anything. This gives your attention resources time to recover.
Working late at night might make you too tired the next day to do your best work, so it’s better to take a break and stop working.
Reason #3: The Work That Evening Downtime Replaces Is Usually Not That Important
Doing work at night won’t help you move your career forward. It’ll just be low-value tasks that you do slowly and with low energy. That means you won’t miss out on much if you don’t work during the evening.
Commit to a shutdown ritual at the end of the day. I personally will try and do this with my bullet journal end-of-day review.
The Zeigarnik Effect is a good reason to incorporate the ritual.
It describes the ability of incomplete tasks to dominate our attention. It tells us that if you simply stop whatever you are doing at five p.m. and declare, “I’m done with work until tomorrow,” you’ll likely struggle to keep your mind clear of professional issues.
When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done.
Rule #2 Embrace Boredom
Deep Work Rule #2 helps to significantly improve concentration ability and overcome the desire for distraction.
The strategies that follow are designed to train the ability to concentrate intensely and help get the most out of the deep work habit.
Don’t Take Breaks from Distraction. Instead, Take Breaks from Focus.
This strategy is based on the idea that just using a distracting service does not make it harder for your brain to focus. It’s when you keep switching between low-stimulus activities that have a lot of value and high-stimulus activities that don’t have much value, even when you’re bored or faced with something hard to think about. This switching weakens the mental muscles that help you pick what to pay attention to.
By limiting the time you spend on the Internet and keeping distractions away, you give your attention-choosing muscles a chance to get stronger.
If you plan to stay off the Internet for 30 minutes starting now, and you’re starting to feel bored, make this 30 minutes a time to focus and exercise your concentration.
To help you succeed, here are three important points to consider.
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.
The point is not to eliminate or even cut down on how much time you waste on activities that take you away from your goals but to give yourself lots of chances during the day to stop yourself from switching to these distractions when you’re feeling bored.
Simply waiting and being bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, it’s incredibly valuable.
To sum it up, to do well with deep work, you need to train your brain to resist distractions. This doesn’t mean you have to stop doing distracting things, just that you won’t let them take over your focus.
Work Like Teddy Roosevelt
As noted, these fragments didn’t usually add up to a large number of total hours, but he would get the most out of them by working only on schoolwork during these periods and doing so with a blistering intensity.
“The amount of time he spent at his desk was comparatively small,” explained Morris, “but his concentration was so intense, and his reading so rapid, that he could afford more time off [from schoolwork] than most.”
This strategy suggests adding a bit of extra effort to your workday. Pick something important that needs a lot of work (deep work) and estimate how long it usually takes. Then give yourself a tight deadline to finish it in less time.
At this point, there should be only one possible way to get the deep task done in time: working with great intensity.
Roosevelt dashes leverage artificial deadlines to help you systematically increase the level you can regularly achieve—providing, in some sense, interval training for the attention centres of your brain.
Meditate Productively
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.
Like any meditation, it requires some practice to stay focused.
The following are two suggestions to aid in the process:
Suggestion #1: Be Wary of Distractions and Looping
When you have a difficult problem, your brain will try to save energy by not thinking too hard about it. It may do this by repeating what you already know instead of looking into the issue more and actively trying to move on to the next step.
Suggestion #2: Structure Your Deep Thinking
In my experience, it’s helpful to have a structure for this type of deep thinking. Start by looking carefully at the factors relevant to solving the problem and keep them in your mind. For example, if you’re creating an outline for a book chapter, the relevant variables might be the main points you want to include.
Once the relevant variables are identified, define the specific next-step question you need to answer using these variables. In the book chapter example, this next-step question might be, “How am I going to open this chapter effectively?
Rule #3 Quite Social Media
The first point is that we increasingly recognize that these tools fragment our time and reduce our ability to concentrate.
Willpower is limited, and therefore the more enticing tools you have pulling at your attention, the harder it’ll be to maintain focus on something important.
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 issue with this way of doing things is that it doesn’t take into consideration any of the bad things that come with using the tools. These services are made to be addictive, taking away time and focus from activities that can help you reach your goals (like deeper work).
Rather follow the approach below.
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.
These strategies that follow will give you direction and help you think about your network tools from different perspectives.
Apply the Law of the Vital Few to Your Internet Habits
The aim of this plan is to give a framework to this idea – a way to make deciding which tools are important to you easier.
The first step of this strategy is to identify the main high-level goals in both your professional and your personal life.
The key is to keep the list limited to what’s most important and to keep the descriptions suitably high-level.
Once you’ve identified these goals, list for each the two or three most important activities that help you satisfy the goal, these activities should be specific enough to allow you to picture doing them clearly.
On the other hand, they should be general enough that they’re not tied to a one-time outcome.
Ie. A good activity in this context would be something like: “regularly reading and understanding the cutting-edge results in my field.”
The next step in this strategy is to consider the network tools you currently use. For each such tool, go through the key activities you identified and asked whether the use of the tool has a substantially positive impact, a substantially negative impact, or little impact on your regular and successful participation in the activity.
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.
It’s true that these activities that aren’t as important don’t help you reach your goal as much as your top one or two, but they can still give you some benefit. So why not still do them? As long as you don’t forget the more important activities, it doesn’t seem like it can do any harm also to do some of the less important ones.
This argument does not see the main idea that all activities use up the same amount of your time and focus. If you do activities that have less importance, you are taking away time that you could be using for higher-importance activities. It’s like a game where you have a limited number of pieces; if you use more pieces for lower-impact activities, you get less reward in the end.
Quite Social Media
Social media gives you personalized info that comes and goes in an unpredictable way – which makes it extremely addictive and can really mess up your plans to focus and do well with any task.
These are just products made by businesses with lots of money. They are marketed well and made to get your info and attention to sell to advertisers. They can be enjoyable, but when it comes to your life and goals, they are minor distractions that could prevent you from achieving something more meaningful.
Don’t Use the Internet to Entertain Yourself
If you keep your mind busy with meaningful activities during the day, you will feel more satisfied and relaxed when the day ends compared to if you spend hours aimlessly browsing the web.
If you don’t want to be pulled in by entertainment sites, give your brain something else (a quality alternative) to focus on. This will help you stay focused and not be distracted.
Rule #4 Drain the Shallows
The importance of deep work is much greater than that of shallow work, but this doesn’t mean you need to aim for a plan where all of your time is spent doing intense work.
Our aim with this rule should be to keep shallow work from taking up too much of our time, not to get rid of it entirely.
Be careful with shallow work because it can cause a lot of harm, and people often think it’s more important than it really is. Shallow work is necessary sometimes, but only to a point where it doesn’t get in the way of more meaningful work. These strategies can help you manage it.
Schedule Every Minute of Your Day
We spend much of our day on autopilot—not giving much thought to what we’re doing with our time. This is a problem.
Schedule every minute of your day.
Create a calendar and block out time (30min intervals so as not to get overwhelmed with noting down micro tasks) for the activities you need to get done. Do this the night before.
Your goal is not to stick to a given schedule at all costs; it’s instead to maintain, at all times, a thoughtful say in what you’re doing with your time going forward—even if these decisions are reworked again and again as the day unfolds.
It’s easy to get stuck in unproductive activities like emails, social media, and web surfing without a plan. This kind of shallow behaviour may give us a sense of satisfaction, but it doesn’t help us be creative. With a plan, you can make sure you have time to brainstorm new ideas, work hard on something difficult, and think up fresh solutions. This kind of commitment makes it more likely that you will be innovative.
The motivation for this strategy is the recognition that a deep work habit requires you to treat your time with respect.
Quantify the Depth of Every Activity
An advantage of scheduling your day is that you can determine how much time you’re actually spending on shallow activities.
Shallow Work: Non-cognitively 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.
The purpose of this strategy is to give you an accurate metric for resolving such ambiguity—providing you with a way to make clear and consistent decisions about where given work tasks fall on the shallow-to-deep scale.
To do so, it asks that you evaluate activities by asking a simple 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?
If it takes our college grad a long time to learn how to do a task, that means it needs their special skills and knowledge. This kind of task is called a ‘deep task’, and it’s good because it brings more value for the time spent and helps them become better at their job. On the other hand, if the college grad can learn the task quickly, it’s called a ‘shallow task’, and it doesn’t need special skills or knowledge.
Finish Your Work by Five Thirty
Fixed-schedule productivity
Set a goal to not work past a certain time, then find ways to be productive and meet this goal.
Nagpal and Cal can both do well in school without too much work. There are two reasons why. First, they manage their time carefully. They focus on important tasks and don’t waste time on unimportant ones. This helps them have more time without reducing the value of what they do. In fact, they can create even more value this way. Second, when they have less time, they think more carefully about how they organize their tasks, which again leads to more value.
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 behaviour that reorients your focus toward the deep, this one should be high on your list of possibilities.
Become Hard to Reach
Tip #1: Make People Who Send You E-mail Do More Work
When people want to email you, pre-set their expectations on which emails you will address.
Tip #2: Do More Work When You Send or Reply to E-mails
An extra two to three minutes you spend at this point will save you many more minutes reading and responding to unnecessary extra messages later. Be process-centric to end the unnecessary emails in between.
Tip #3: Don’t Respond
If it doesn’t propose opportunities for yourself. We often think we are expected to respond to every email.
Conclusion
Living a deep life is not easy. It takes a lot of effort and big changes to your daily routine. Many people like the feeling of staying busy with emails and social media posts rather than facing up to the challenge of creating something great.
It’s easier to talk about how to change the world than actually to try and do it. But if you’re willing to take risks and work hard to create something meaningful, you’ll find that it rewards you with a life that’s full of productivity and meaning.