Deep Work – by Cal Newport

Deep Work is: “Professional activities performed in a state of distraction free concentration that push your cognitive capacities to the limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate”

Our culture is constantly pushing toward ‘shallow work’ and most are getting stuck and distracted. The good news is that there are massive economic or professional opportunities for the few who can resist this trend and prioritise depth.

Cal Newport will sell you on going deep so you can acquire the type of skills that will make you valuable in the modern economy.

Deep Work Summary

‘Deep Work’ means: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction free concentration that push your cognitive capacities to the limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate. This is a necessary practice to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity. We now know from decades of research in both psychology and neuroscience that the state of mental strain that accompanies deep work is also necessary to improve your abilities.

  The ubiquity of deep work among influential individuals is important to emphasize because it stands in sharp contrast to the behaviour of most modern knowledge workers today – a group that is forgetting the value of going deep. We are losing familiarity with deep work because of the network tools – email, sms, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. A McKinsey study found that the average knowledge worker spends more than 60% of the week engaged in electronic communication and internet searching, with 30% of time dedicated to reading and answering email alone.  This state of fragmented attention cannot accommodate Deep Work.

  ‘Shallow Work’ means: non cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed  whilst distracted. These efforts tend to not create new value in the world and are easy to replicate. 

  To make matters worse for depth, there’s increasing evidence that this shift toward the shallow is not a choice that can be easily reversed. Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity  to perform deep work Our work cultures shift towards the shallow is exposing a massive economic or professional opportunity for the few who recognize the potential of resisting this trend and prioritizing depth.

  We have an information economy that’s dependant on complex systems that changed rapidly. To remain  valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the act of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work, if you don’t cultivate this ability, you’ll fall behind as technology advances. Deep work is not an old fashioned skill falling into irrelevance. It’s a crucial ability for anyone looking to move ahead in a globally competitive information economy that tends to chew up and spit out those who aren’t earning their keep. The real rewards are reserved for those who are not comfortable using Facebook (easy shallow task that can be replicated). Deep Work is the Superpower of the 21st Century.

  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 make it the core of their working life, will thrive.

  High quality work = time spent x intensity of focus

  Deep Work is correlated with a substantial increase in focus and is what will produce high quality work. 

Attention Residue

  When you switch from 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 attention residue concept is telling because it implies that the common habit of working in a state of semi-distraction is potentially devastating to your performance. It might seem harmless to look at your inbox every 10 minutes or so, indeed, many justify this behaviour as better than the old practice of leaving an inbox open at all times. The quick check though, creates a new target for your attention

   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 towards an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner. The problem for many knowledge workers is they want to prove themselves as being productive members of the team earning their keep, but they’re not entirely clear what this goal constitutes. They  have no rack of repaired motorcycles to point to as evidence of their worth. 

  Some Rules: 

  Form a habit: 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. In an ideal world, we’d have access to a Deep Work dungeon. Once it’s routine, you won’t need such willpower to do it.

  Be Lazy: Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice. It is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. It is paradoxically necessary to getting any work done. At the end of a work 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’ll handle the upcoming challenge.

Quit Social Media: We increasingly recognize that these tools fragment our time and reduce our ability to concentrate. These services are engineered to be addictive – robbing time and attention from activities that more directly support your professional and personal goals. Even if you use these tools enough, you’ll arrive at the state of burned out hyper distracted connectivity.

  The deep life of course is not for everybody. It requires hard work and drastic changes to your habits. For many there is comfort in the artificial busyness of rapid email messaging. While the deep life demands that you leave much of that behind.