Deep Work by by Cal Newport

Rules for focused success in a distracted world.

Deep Work Summary and Quotes

Do you use your intellectualistic capacity to its absolute bursting? Cal Newport says that to do this Deep Work is absolutely imperative. A distraction-free focus on what you're going to do and doing it at its absolute perfection is the need of the hour he mentions.

 First, he persuades us why deep work is essential, precious, rare but meaningful. Also he gives us the rules that when followed lead to intensive focus like how to work deeply, its varied style and strategies, and why we should embrace weariness and not fleetly jump to checking our phones and social media. Also, he talks about quitting social media and tapping out shallow work from our routines.

Is Deep Work a good book?

Cal Newport convinces you of the power of acute focus and attention and its needfulness in the present's social media- hung-up world. And for you to apply it in your life he offers an actionable frame. A must-read if you're looking to better yourself to produce impeccable and redeeming work.

What is meant by Deep Work?

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.

By working on a single hard task for a long time without switching, you minimize the negative impact of attention residue from your other obligations, allowing you to maximize performance on this one task. The type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work.

Deep Work by Cal Newport

Published in 2016 by Little Brown Book Group

Pages: 304

What are the four rules of Deep Work?

Rule #1 – Work Deeply

The Monastic Philosophy of Deep Work –

It maximizes deep work by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations.

The Bimodal Philosophy of Deep Work

Asks that you divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else.

The Rhythmic Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling

Argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit. 

In the Journalistic Philosophy you try for deep work wherever you can into your schedule.

Isolation is not required for deep work.

Collaborative deep work can also yield profitable results.

Rule #2 – Embrace Boredom

Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.

Don’t take breaks from distraction instead take breaks from focus?

The idea is that the use of a distractive service by itself does not reduce your brain’s ability to focus. Its instead the constant switching from low stimuli/high value activities to high-stimuli/low-value activities, at the slightest hint of boredom or cognitive challenge that teaches your mind to never tolerate an absence of novelty.

In your deep work training adopt productive meditation – its goal is to take a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally – walking, jogging, driving, and showering – and focus attention on a single well-defined professional problem.

Rule #3 – Quit Social Media

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.

If you want to eliminate the addictive pull of entertainment sites on your time and attention, give your brain a quality alternative.  

Rule #4 – Drain the Shallows

On the other hand, non-cognitively demanding, logistical style tasks, often performed while distracted is termed as shallow work. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.

Treat shallow work with suspicion because its damage is often vastly underestimated and its importance vastly overestimated. This type of work is inevitable, but you must keep it confined to a point where it doesn’t impede your ability to take full advantage of the deeper efforts that ultimately determine your impact.

How to achieve of Deep Work?

The 4DX framework for deep work –

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 Accountability

At the end of a workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning.

Downtime aids insights.

Downtime helps recharge the energy needed to work deeply

The work that evening downtime replaces is usually not that important.

What are the benefits of Deep Work?

Deep work is so important that we must consider it the super power of the 21^st century. To thrive in the new economy we need two core abilities –

• The ability to quickly master hard things. – For this deep work is required. 
• The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed – A task that requires deep work.

17 Popular Quotes from Deep Work by Cal Newport

1. “If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.”

2. “Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.”

3. “Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.”

4. “What we choose to focus on and what we choose to ignore—plays in defining the quality of our life.”

5. “If you can’t learn, you can’t thrive.”

6. “To simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, it’s incredibly valuable.”

7. “Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.”

8. “Less mental clutter means more mental resources available for deep thinking.”

9. “Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.”

10. “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.”

11. “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.”

12. “Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it’s instead like a muscle that tires.”

13. “If you service low-impact activities, therefore, you're taking away time you could be spending on higher-impact activities. It's a zero-sum game.”

14. “[Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.”

15. “A side effect of memory training, in other words, is an improvement in your general ability to concentrate. This ability can then be fruitfully applied to any task demanding deep work.”

16. “To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work. If you don’t cultivate this ability, you’re likely to fall behind as technology advances.

 17. “This, ultimately, is the lesson to come away with from our brief foray into the world of experimental psychology: To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction.”

Further Reading...