Deep work

by Cal Newport

8/10

Key Ideas:

Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task.
The ability to perform deep work is increasingly rare and increasingly valuable. The few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.
The key to developing a deep work habit is to add routines to your working life designed to minimize the willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.

Other interesting notes:

We tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment.
To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction.
Receive feedback to correct your approach and keep your attention exactly where it’s most productive.
Don’t multitask. Task switching has immense costs on the ability to concentrate and do deep work.
It takes 20-30 minutes just to ‘load up’ the information before making meaningful progress.
At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning.
Monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling: eliminate or radically minimize shallow obligations.
Productive meditation: go for a walk, and focus your attention on a single well-defined problem.
Rewire your brain: embrace boredom, quit social media, turn off the internet while working.
4 Disciplines of Execution – Focus on 1-2 wildly important goals; block out focused time; measure the time spent; review at the end of the week.
Neal Stephenson: “If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. If I instead get interrupted a lot, what replaces it? A bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons”.

Thoughts on the book:

Great reminder to ‘turn off’ autopilot and doomscrolling to really focus.
Mandatory reading for knowledge workers, but I’d skip the book and just read the summaries below.

Longer summary/notes: DS, Sivers, SD, Cal’s deep work video

If you like this, you’ll probably like: Zen to done, 4DX, Atomic habits, Do it tomorrow, So good they can’t ignore you, Cal’s blog and podcast, books