Deep Work by Cal Newport: summary

We have a lot to do in our daily routines, but some people manage to do more. In this world, those who succeed to do more things daily, tend to thrive. Work well and be rewarded.

Shallow and deep work

A shallow one is when we do something in a mostly automatic rhythm, not concentrating enough. Such kind of work doesn’t require a stable focus and thinking. The deep work is about a strong thinking process and solid concentration. While doing the shallow kind of work, we tend to distract and manage to do much less, than while working deeply.

Concentration is key

It helps to solidify brain cells connections and keep them neat. Concentrating is difficult for our brain, it demands more energy. That’s why we like the shallow doings, they’re simpler. It’s easier to get distracted, but it’s hard to recall where we were at when doing B after C.

Learn some memorization techniques. Or do other things that help to enhance concentration skills.

High-quality work produced = (Time spent) x (Intensity of focus)

Tip: taking a walk in nature is more helpful than walking on city streets for a reason that we get distracted less. While walking in a city we switch our attention frequently to many details such as vehicles flow, people, signs, shop titles and glass cases, etc.

Attention residue

We have a limited amount of attention and willpower per specific time until we get a rest. If we work, then answer emails for 2 mins, then check how many likes on Twitter we have for the last 20 mins, it drains our attention levels. So after doing 6 hours of “work”, we may feel like we can’t do anything meaningful more. And that’s merely an illusion of productivity. Don’t get distracted if you plan to concentrate. Routines help to reduce willpower usage as we know exactly what to do next and for how long.

Limit the use of it or quit completely. Do you need it? Getting likes feels good but it doesn’t give us something useful.

Deadlines are your friend

Without them, we tend to expand the work time.

Once everyone has less time to get their stuff done, they respect that time even more.

Having a schedule helps. Thus, we see a plan and how much time allocation we have for each task. Give yourself specific time frames: when you can work deeply when you can relax when you can do shallow work.

Inspiration doesn’t often come when we roam over the Internet with a thought of what to do. Habits and rituals help. Prefer habits over casual inspiration.

Rhythmic deep work sessions

Doing more than 4 hours of highly focused work is laborious. For this reason, we may split it into sessions. Thus, we help ourselves to relax and give a brain to ponder and analyse thoughts in the background between the sessions.

Shutdown ritual

Set a time when you can finish working. Otherwise, your attention will try to think about the work stuff while you try to do the next task. It affects focus, so it makes the task more difficult to embrace. And if it’s a planned relaxed session, then thoughts about unfinished work reduce the possibility to collect willpower and mental strength for the next work session.

Distraction training

Some people are more distraction addicts than others, e.g. they can’t withstand a queue in a store without looking at their smartphone. For those, there is a possibility to enhance their focus skills and to be better at doing deep work sessions. Practice the sessions more. For the first time, you may have 10 mins work session without distracting at anything at all. Plan a time, choose an environment(e.g. a location without noise). Then increase the time per session.

RULE ONE: WORK DEEPLYDepth Philosophies

Monastic: practitioners have a well-defined, highly valued, and individualized (or small team) professional goal which the bulk of their success depends on. Example: cutting edge research, writing novels, etc. Practitioners basically live their life as monks of deep work. Not so good for managers or people who don’t necessarily have a tangible product they can point to or are working on.
Bimodal: Dividing the year (or month, or week) into stretches (at least one day) of deep work isolation while spending the rest of your time in more shallow spaces, networking, attending conferences, teaching, etc. Usually pursued by those who would be monastic but can’t succeed without substantial commitments to non-deep pursuits. For example: Jung working in his tower for months at a time but then coming back to Zurich to earn money as a teacher and networking in coffeehouses. Cal states more people can make use of this philosophy than one might think.
Rhythmic: Have a daily depth ritual (e.g. 1-2 hours in the morning) or otherwise schedule it into your day every day. Good for deep work beginners and for people who definitely can’t step away to work in isolation.
Journalistic: Essentially fitting deep work in whenever you can (e.g. even if you only have thirty minutes free, hop on the computer and switch to deep work mode). This has the advantage of incredible flexibility while maintaining productivity BUT it is only for advanced/disciplined deep work practitioners. Switching your mind to deep mode is pretty taxing for a novice.

Ritualize

Put in regular work and don’t wait for inspiration. Decide…

Where you’ll work and for how long. Use the location only for depth and try to keep the time slot regular if possible.
How you’ll work once you start to work. Might have a ban on internet/phone use, or maintain a metric such as words written per unit of time, etc. You’ll need this structure so you have something to measure against regarding the question of whether you’re working an adequate amount.
How you’ll support your work. Maximize your energy (water, nutritious food, exercise and sleep). Also smart breaks — drinking water, sitting quietly, meditating. Basically anything that doesn’t involve your mind, especially things like internet distractions.

Make Grand Gestures

Example: J.K. Rowling renting a room in a luxury hotel to afford the isolation for completing a novel, Bill Gates taking Think Weeks in a cabin in the woods, etc. By leveraging a radical change to your normal environment, coupled perhaps with a significant investment of effort or money, all dedicated toward supporting a deep work task, you increase the perceived importance of the task. This reduces your mind’s instinct to procrastinate and delivers motivation.

Idea: When starting a new project/initiative, take a week off from work to really immerse yourself in that project totally, so that when you return to a normal schedule the project is part of who you are and putting it into your schedule is much more natural.4DX (Four Disciplines of Execution) applied to deep work

Focus on the wildly important. Identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours. Example: Cal’s goal was to publish five papers per year. This is both necessary for tenure and a higher rate of work than he was used to, which provided the pressure to achieve that goal.
Act on the lead measures. Two metrics to consider – lag measures and lead measures. Lag measures actually tell you how well you’re doing (e.g. projects completed per year) lead measures are the ones you can actually iterate on during the process (e.g. time spent in deep work dedicated to the goal).
Keep a compelling scoreboard. Track the progress of your lead measures in a visible area. Example: A physical note card with the number of deep work hours per day. Cal used this to track both hours spent AND milestones accomplished (e.g. circling the hour tally on which he solved a key proof) so that he would be motivated as well as develop a sense of how much deep work is necessary (and therefore how much he should schedule per week)
Create a cadence of accountability. For a team project, this would be a regular sync up. For solo work, this could be an honest weekly review of how you did.

Be Lazy

Anders Ericsson – novices can manage about an hour of intense concentration per day, whereas experts can usually manage up to four hours (but rarely more).

Retreating from work (especially deep work) is necessary to attack the next chunk of work with fresh energy. Not to mention, taking downtime after deep work is necessary to let your subconscious process the problem (which oftentimes is more effective than your conscious mind). At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning.

This will probably require a shutdown ritual (see the Zeigarnik effect) in which every outstanding task has been reviewed and has a plan for its completion or its revisiting at a later date. Remember to have a strict algorithm, preferably with a verbal declaration of you being done to release your mind.

Cal’s example: Check email inbox for anything urgent, transfer any new tasks that were in his mind or scribbled down into his task lists, skim review the task lists and the next few days on his calendar to make sure he’s not forgetting anything and he has a plan for everything. Make a rough plan for the next day (this part is necessary to avoid your mind dwelling on the unfinished work). Say “shutdown complete” and close the computer.

Baumeister & Masicampo – “Commiting to a specific plan for a goal [even if it didn’t get completed] may therefore not only facilitate attainment of the goal but may also free cognitive resources for other pursuits.”

Shutdown rituals can become annoying but they’re necessary – Cal estimates it takes about a week or two before the habit sticks (i.e. your mind actually trusts you that you’ll actually get the work done so it can relax after the ritual).RULE TWO: EMBRACE BOREDOM

The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained. It’s not a habit like flossing (i.e. something that you know how to do but may neglect sometimes). There’s difficulty in training yourself to focus and so you must practice. And these efforts to train will wither if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind off of a dependence on distraction (like actually resting on your rest days when working out).

If your mind is wired to always expect constant cheap inputs (say while waiting in a line or on the toilet) it’ll be impossible for you to shut down the mental chattering and focus on one thing.Don’t Take Breaks From Distraction, Take Breaks from Focus

Once you’re wired for distraction, you crave it. A conventional approach is to take an “Internet Sabbath” or short disconnect, but to use an example from physical health, eating healthy one day a week will not make any progress that isn’t immediately overridden. Instead, you should create times where you allow yourself to be distracted (i.e. breaks from focus) with the default time going to focus.

Example Strategy: Schedule in advance when you’ll use the web. Note that…

This strategy works even if your job requires lots of web use (you’ll just have more frequent web use blocks).
Regardless of how you schedule your web blocks, you must keep the time outside these blocks absolutely free from web use. Something that will inevitably happen is that your block will end, you’ll need some crucial piece of information from the web, and you’ll be tempted to break the rule to quickly retrieve the info and return to your offline block. Resist this temptation! The internet is seductive and on multiple occasions you can be lured away into looking at something else. It doesn’t take many of these “exceptions” before your mind treats the offline blocks as less serious. If you must get the current project done promptly, then reschedule the next internet block closer to the present, but still leave at least a five minute window.
Scheduling internet use at home as well as at work can further improve your concentration training. If you’re glued to the phone or laptop on evenings and weekends, it’ll undo your mental progress. However you’re allowed to do time-sensitive communication in your offline blocks (texting plans, logistics for an event, etc). You can even give yourself long internet blocks if you want – but the point is to always schedule this so you empower yourself to avoid internet usage when you’ve decided to put it away. One of the hardest times will be when you’re waiting for something, but it’s crucial not to check the web during these times if you’re in an offline block.

Work Like Teddy Roosevelt

Use what Cal calls “Roosevelt dashes,” where you identify a deep task that’s high on your priority list, estimate how long it would normally take you to complete, and then drastically reduce that time frame to a deadline you force yourself to complete (by publicly committing to it, setting up a countdown timer on your phone, etc).

At this point you will have to work intensely with little to no breaks (as if you were forging to meet a deadline without diminishing the quality of your work).

Use Roosevelt dashes sparingly at first (once a week or so) until you get a sense of projects/deadline that work for this type of dash (you should be able to just barely finish on time) and over time you gain the ability to trade intensity for working time.

Along a similar vein: The Most Dangerous Writing App.Meditate Productively

The goal of physical meditation is to take a period where you’re occupied physically but not mentally (e.g. walking, driving, showering) and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem. Nietzsche: “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.”

The problem might be outlining an article, writing a talk, making progress on a proof, sharpening a business strategy, etc. As in mindfulness meditation, you focus on that one problem and bring you mind back to it when it wanders.

Cal recommends 2-3 sessions in a typical week. But this practice is not so much for productivity benefits as it is to improve your ability to think deeply (i.e. you’re both turning away from distraction and towards concentrating on a point of focus). This will take practice, so Cal suggests:

Be wary of distractions and looping. When you notice your attention slipping away, gently guide yourself back. And when you are rehashing the same concepts over and over, notice you are in a loop and delineate the next step.
Structure your deep thinking. It’s non-trivial to decide how exactly you should “think deeply” about your problem. So break down the abstract problem into concrete variables and store the values in your working memory. Then build the solution around those variables. Example: For the a book chapter, the variables might be the points you want to make. For a mathematics proof, it might be your axioms/lemmas. For an engineering design problem, it might be your constraints and tools. Then once the values are identified, define the *next-step question* you need to answer using those variables (e.g. how am I going to open this chapter, what can go wrong if this axiom doesn’t hold, what is the most sensible code-path, etc). Then consolidate the gains from tackling this question, and repeat the process. This is like an intense workout for your concentration and analytical skills.

Memorize a Deck of Cards

A powerful side effect of memory training is an improvement in your general ability to concentrate (which is obviously a necessity for deep work). The technique is not passive retention (which works poorly) but the method of loci or “memory palace.”

Step One: Mentally walk through five rooms in your house and conjure a clear image of what you see. Fix in your mind a collection of ten large/noticeable items in each room (plus two more for fifty-two cards in total) and establish an order in which you look at each of these items in each room. Practice this mental exercise of walking through the rooms and looking at the items in their set order.

Step Two: Associate each card with some image (it helps to try to think of a relationship between the card and the image, e.g. Donald Trump <–> The King of Diamonds). Practice these associations until you can pull a card randomly from the deck and immediately recall the associated image.

Now you have a set (of items) for which you know the order well, and a mapping (of images to cards) for which you know the associations well. These parameters can now be leveraged to memorize any random deck (or some other collection of information) by ordering the images like the items and thus knowing the order of the cards. To do this, begin your mental walk through your house. For each item draw a card and visually map its associated image to the item (for example if the first item is a doormat and the first card is the King of Diamonds, you could imagine Trump wiping his shoes at the doormat). Proceed carefully through the rooms, linking the items and images, and repeat the process if necessary. Then when you’re ready to recall, walk through the memory palace and recite the cards in the order of their images.

This is a powerful technique for improving memorizing skills and concentration. You can use it alone or in conjunction with Roosevelt Dashes and/or Productive Meditation to increase your capacity for focus.RULE THREE: QUIT SOCIAL MEDIA

One must conceive of social media as network tools, services offered by tech/media companies that take some time/attention/data from you in the promise return of some benefit. In this way we avoid the popular (and false) notions that social media is a ubiquitous public forum that one must participate in or risk sabotaging themselves, or, on the other hand, social media is uniquely evil and the only solution requires a complete disconnect. We must simply evaluate the costs and benefits as we would do with anything else, and be honest about what exactly we get out of our use of various network tools.

As we’ll probably find however, the benefits of network tools are generally pretty minor and the distraction they provide generally pretty powerful. This is especially true over the long term, which leads to…

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.

Identifying what matters in life and then attempting to assess the concomitant value of every tool (network or otherwise) that comes your way is not easy. The following strategies help with this. Apply the Law of the Vital Few to Your Internet Habits

Identify the main high level goals in your professional and personal (religious, social, etc.) life. Make sure they’re high level, e.g. “be a better software engineer”, not “make senior engineer within five years.”

Once you’ve identified those goals, list the 2-3 most important activities that will help you satisfy the goal. These activities should be specific enough that you can describe what they look like in practice, but general enough that they’re not tied to a onetime outcome. For example, “produce high quality projects” is too general, “produce a project by next month” is too specific, “regularly work on a new project or read a book on a software engineering topic” is just right.

The next step in this strategy is to go through each of your network tools and ask whether it has a substantially positive, neutral, or substantially negative impact on each of your activities (professional and personal). Only keep the network tool if the positive outweigh the negative.

It may be the case that things like network tools provide some benefit to your goals, but we want to ruthlessly prioritize the top few activities because of the Law of the Vital Few: ~80% of a given effect is due to ~20% of the causes. Assuming you could list 10-20 ways to say, improve your social life, just doing the top 2-3 of those would give you the majority of the results, while going beyond that will have diminishing returns but a lot of distraction and time-commitment.Quit Social Media

Try an experiment – quit a network tool for thirty days, then after that period ask yourself 1) would the last thirty days have been noticeably better if I was on the service, and 2) did people care that I wasn’t using this service. Be skeptical, and rejoin the service only if the answers are “yes.”

This experiment addresses the fear of missing out on a tool like TikTok with a dose of reality — does not using TikTok really make a negative impact on the things that matter to me?Don’t Use the Internet to Entertain Yourself

You both should and can make deliberate use of your time outside work, rather than have it suckered up by the path of least resistance. A common path of least resistance is the suite of entertainment sites like Reddit; specifically designed to have you clicking through multiple links, reading comments, etc. These sites are especially harmful after the workday is over, where the freedom in your schedule enables them to become central in your leisure time. If you succumb to these, it weakens your mind’s ability to resist distraction, making deep work difficult later when you really want to concentrate.

The solution: put more thought into your leisure time – think about how you will spend it in advance. Addictive websites thrive in a vacuum of having free time with nothing planned. Structured hobbies, reading books, spending time with people, etc. are all good options. A common fear might be that you won’t ever actually get to relax during your “leisure hours.” This misses the point. As Arnold Benett says:

One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change — not rest, except in sleep.

If you give your mind something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you’ll end the day more fulfilled, and begin the next one more relaxed, than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in semiconscious and unstructured Web surfing.

Cal’s update to this rule, and on our relationship to social media in general RULE FOUR: DRAIN THE SHALLOWS

Specifically, ruthlessly identify the shallow work in your current schedule, then cull it down to minimum levels – leaving more time for the deep efforts that ultimately matter most. Recall that Ericsson et al. estimated that a novice can probably manage one hour a day of deliberate practice, while an expert can do up to four hours but rarely more. It may seem that, within an eight hour work day, that leaves us with at least four hours of shallow work. But this is overly optimistic given the impact of meetings, etc. and how easily they consume the workday. The following strategies help to act within this context.Schedule every minute of your day

Across populations, when people are measured on their work/leisure/sleep habits, they work noticeably less and sleep/play noticeably more than they self-report. We spend most of our days on auto-pilot and our self-assessments of our time usage is significantly warped to assuage our ego. This is a problem. For those not able to follow the journalistic philosophy of deep work (i.e. the vast majority of people) it is therefore imperative to schedule your day to avoid falling into the shallows.

At the beginning of each work day, block your day off for everything that needs to be done. Schedule the most important things first, and the shallow stuff after. Block off everything – breaks, meals, commute, etc. To keep things clean, the minimum length of a block is 30 minutes, and you can batch smaller tasks like responding to emails, scheduling appointments, etc.

Two things are to be expected: 1) some blocks end up being too short or too long for their assigned tasks, and 2) new tasks come up. For the former, simply adjust the rest of the day’s schedule on the fly. For new tasks, note them down and try to table them for a future day unless they must be addressed today (in which case adjust your schedule). Don’t despair if you have to rewrite your schedule a lot. The point is to have a thoughtful say in what you’re doing with your time going forward rather than falling into autopilot.

Cal notes that early on you will underestimate the time it takes to complete certain things, overflow blocks (blocks that optionally can be used for the preceding or succeeding activity) can be useful, and that you should use generic task blocks liberally (for things like online communication, etc).

Note again that this scheduling isn’t about constraints on your time, but thoughtfulness about how you’re spending it. If Cal comes up with an important insight that he needs to work on beyond the allocated block, he will simply run with with the work as long as possible (given there’s no other necessary obligations) and adjust his schedule after the fact.Quantify the Depth of Every Activity

Once you’re scheduling your day you can quantify how much deep work you’re doing. For a given activity, a useful heuristic to gauge its “depth” is to ask how many months it would take a new college hire to complete this task (e.g. advance this project, be useful at this meeting, etc). My (software engineer’s) ranges based on Cal’s examples – less than two months or so is probably on the shallow end, greater than three months or so is probably on the deeper end.Ask Your Boss for a Shallow Work Budget

Have a conversation with your boss how much time you should be spending on shallow work. The answer will probably be in the 30-50% range. Once you budget it down (and have the accountability to stick to the budget), you’ll almost certainly end up forced into saying no to projects infused with shallowness while reducing shallowness in existing projects. You may drop weekly status meetings for results-driven reporting, spend more mornings in communication isolation and chunk your online communication into one or two intervals throughout the day.

This strategy provides accountability to stick to your deep work and cover when you need to turn down shallow work projects.Finish Your Work by Five Thirty

Personally, I found this to be the most useful practice in the book.

Cal recommends fixed-schedule productivity – set the time you’ll be done with work (or number of hours you’ll work within the week), and work backwards to create a productive schedule within that time frame.

Because of the Damoclean cap on the day’s time, you cannot afford to allow a large deadline to creep up on you, or a morning to be wasted on something trivial, and you have to always be planning your day and cutting away the shallow work.

In this way fixed-schedule productivity is a meta-habit that leads to other deep work habits and is therefore one of the best strategies for implementing deep work.Become Hard to Reach

Tip 1 – Make people who send you email do more work. If you’re going to list a public email address, specify for what reasons you want to be contacted and state you’ll only respond to emails that fit those reasons. Cal’s example: “If you have an offer, opportunity, or introduction that might make my life more interesting, email me at…”

Tip 2 – Do more work when you send or respond to emails. What is the “project” represented by this conversation and what is the most efficient process (in terms of messages exchanged) to bring this project to a successful conclusion?

When a “project” is initiated by an email that you send or recieve, it becomes something that’s on your plate and needs to be addressed. By focusing on the whole process, adding to your task lists and calendar any relevant commitment on your part, and bringing the other party up to speed, your mind can reclaim the mental real estate the project once demanded.

Tip 3 – Don’t respond. A mode of high level professors is that it’s the initial sender’s responsibility to convince the receiver that a reply is worthwile. If you didn’t make a convincing case and sufficiently minimize the effort required by the professor to respond, you don’t get a response. In this spirit, don’t respond to an email if

It’s ambiguous or makes it hard to generate a reasonable response,
It’s not a question or proposal that interests you,
Or nothing good will happen from your response and nothing bad will happen from your lack thereof.