Deep Work by Cal Newport
Hey friends,
This week we shall talk about this amazing book I've read recently – Deep Work by Cal Newport.
This book was one of the few books that provided me with a whole new understanding of a certain thing, which, in this case, is work. I reckon this is potentially a life-changing book, although probably on a small scale.
I am convinced most of us should read it, especially those who "work" 10 hours a day and have little done, or "study" 5 hours a day and remember little at the end of the day. The general rule of thumb is that those who "work" while distracted and without much effort should definitely try this book.
Deep Work Summary
According to the author 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.”
Shallow Work: "Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.”
Deep Work Is Valuable
If you don't produce, you won't thrive – no matter how skilled or talented you are.
Two core abilities for thriving in the new economy are 1) the ability to quickly master things, and 2) the ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.
To achieve those, you first need the foundational ability to perform deep work, where you focus intensely on a specific subject without distraction.
The type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work.
Enemy: Attention Residue
"When you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task. This residue gets especially thick if your work on Task A was unbounded and of low intensity before you switched, but even if you finish Task A before moving on, your attention remains divided for a while."
The more intense the residue, the more poor the performance is on the next task.
Deep Work Is Rare
With the rise of network tools and social media, our personal and professional lives are fragmenting our attention.
Enemy: 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 in the moment.
In such a way, this principle drives us towards shallow work in an economy that increasingly rewards depth.
Enemy: 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.
If you send and answer e-mails at all hours, if you schedule and attend meetings constantly — all of these behaviors make you seem busy in a public manner. If you’re using busyness as a proxy for productivity, then these behaviors can seem crucial for convincing yourself and others that you’re doing your job well.
This mindset provides another explanation for the popularity of many depth-destroying behaviors.
Enemy: Technopoly
We were, he noted, no longer discussing the trade-offs surrounding new technologies, balancing the new efficiencies against the new problems introduced. If it’s high-tech, we began to instead assume, then it’s good. Case closed. He called such a culture a technopoly, and he didn’t mince words in warning against it.
Technopoly: the cultural state of mind that assumes technology is always positive and of value
Deep Work Is Meaningful
By promoting deep work in our life, we are also reinforcing meaning and depth in our daily routines and naturally eliminating shallow activities.
“Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love — is the sum of what you focus on.”
Practicing deep work is also a stepping stone into a flow state, a source of great satisfaction and value.
Finally, deep work is the gateway towards extracting meaning out of a seemingly boring task. It elevates the job to a craft that can be mastered.
“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.” - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
"I'll live the focused life, because it's the best kind there is."
Enemy: Romanticising Relaxation
Most people assumed (and still do) that relaxation makes them happy. We want to work less and spend more time in the hammock.
“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.”
When measured empirically, people were happier at work and less happy relaxing than they suspected.
Enemy: Willpower Depletion
You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.
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.
Enemy: Expecting Inspiration
There is a popular notion that artists work from inspiration—that there is some strike or bolt or bubbling up of creative mojo from who knows where… but I hope [my work] makes clear that waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan. In fact, perhaps the single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration. – Mason Currey, who spent half a decade cataloging the habits of famous thinkers and writers.
"Great creative minds think like artists but work like accountants." – David Brooks in a New York Times column.
How to Work Deeply
To make Deep Work a habit, add routines. This reduces the willpower necessary to transition into a state of unbroken concentration. The 4 Deep Work Philosophies are:
Monastic: isolate yourself for long periods of time without distractions; no shallow work allowed
Bimodal: reserve a few consecutive days when you will be working like a monastic (you need at least one day a week)
Rhythmic: take 3-4 hours every day to perform deep work on your project
Journalistic: alternate your day between deep and shallow work as it fits your blocks of time (not recommended to try out first)
Commit to scheduling deep work blocks into your calendar and sticking to them (time blocking). Scheduling a specific time of the day in advance takes away the need to use willpower.
Execute Like a Business
“The 4 Disciplines of Execution – 4DX” applied to Deep Work:
Focus on the Wildly Important: identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours
Act on the Lead Measures: time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal
Keep a Compelling Scoreboard: track the hours spent in deep work that week with a simple tally of tick marks in that week’s row
Create a Cadence of Accountability: use weekly reviews to celebrate good weeks, understand what led to bad weeks, and figure out how to ensure a good score for the days ahead
Implement a Shutdown Ritual
At the end of the day, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning – no after-dinner email check, no mental replays of conversations, and no scheming about how you will handle an upcoming challenge. The reasons why downtime is crucial are
Aids insights
Helps recharge the energy needed to work deeply
The work that evening downtime replaces is usually not that important
Your mind should be released from its duty to keep track of these obligations at every moment – your shutdown ritual shall take over that responsibility.
Embrace Boredom
Due to our fast-paced lives, our brains have been rewired and expect and crave distraction. As a result, we check our smartphones at any moment of "potential boredom" – having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives.
Don't take breaks from distraction, but instead take breaks from focus:
Schedule in advance when you'll use the internet, and avoid it altogether outside these times, both at and outside of work.
Practice productive meditation – 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.
Quit Social Media
Social Media fragment our time and reduce our ability to concentrate, making it difficult to improve your ability to work deeply.
Do a test run: without deactivating, stay off consciously from your social media of choice for 30 days. After 30 days, evaluate:
Was it impossible for you to stay away or were you greatly inconvenienced?
Did anyone care?
Put more thought into your leisure time. In other words, this strategy suggests that when it comes to your relaxation, don’t default to whatever catches your attention at the moment, but instead dedicate some advance thinking to the question of how you want to spend your “day within a day”.
If you want to eliminate the addictive pull of entertainment sites on your time and attention, give your brain a quality alternative.
Drain the Shallows
The typical knowledge workday is easily and very fragmented, making it hard to introduce large amounts of depth. To take control, schedule every minute of your day in a notebook:
At the beginning of each workday, turn to a new page.
On the left, mark every other line with an hour of your workday.
Divide the hours into 30min blocks and assign activities to the blocks – batch similar tasks into one if necessary.
On the right, list out the full set of small tasks you plan to accomplish in that block
Use this schedule to guide your workday.
Not every block needs to be dedicated to a work task. There might be time blocks for lunch or relaxation breaks.
Try using overflow conditional blocks – additional blocks with a split purpose: finish the preceding activity if it needed more time than scheduled, or use it for some non-urgent tasks.
If your schedule is disrupted, take a few minutes to create a revised schedule for the time that remains in the day.
Let Small Bad Things Happen
“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 Ferris
With so many things to do in our modern world, we simply cannot do everything, even if we ruthlessly prioritize. Instead of getting anxious of this reality, get comfortable letting small bad things happen. When you give yourself the freedom to do this, you can find the time to focus on the big things that matter.
I have never written a proper summary really. This is just a collection of different chunks from the book, ordered in a way that I would have liked, were I to look for one online.
Personal Stuff
This week, I gave an attempt at a social media ad design, but primarily with illustrations rather than photos. My immediate thinking process was I had to choose a product that would be somewhat easy for a flat illustration (that'd look nice), and there I chose the product mobile phones.
I tried illustrating the phones using the fill color, making a solid block, but it just looked off (when we are so used to the photos). And I concluded it would be foolish of me to use the fill colors since inserting photos would be much easier and would turn out much more beautiful. I decided to use only the outline strokes and try to make it look nice in some way.
It later turned out amongst the iPhone colors including red, black, and white, pink, it was hard to find one solid complementary color to make those look contrasting/ popping. Any gradient made the overall image looked cheaper or non-luxurious. I stuck with a solid color.
The same goes with texts – I tried making fancy text effects/ appearances but it just didn't give off the "iPhone" or the luxurious vibes. I stuck with the original San Francisco font.
Below is how it turned out. I guess I didn't try to make more creative illustrations when there are so many products out there. I intend to practice more for this haha.
Have I bored you so much you are yawning? Haha
I am still struggling with what I can write about, and doubting if I can provide some nice value to you. I guess I believe in the process and am trying to show up consistently in such early stages.
I will actively make efforts to deliver better content to you, that I can say.
Thanks so much for reading. It means a lot to me.
I hope you have a nice day and an even nicer week ahead.
Please take care of yourself, and reach out to your friends as well.
Kaung. xo