DEEP WORK REVIEW

Cal Newport

Link of book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsbI-Cwu-jQ&ab_channel=1Digital137

What have I learnt?

 Focusing on the things that matter brings success.

 Deepening your time towards activities that matter and ignoring shallow distractions will
increase your productivity and efficiency of work done
 Try to disconnect from social media
 Try to eliminate distractions and shallow (“stupid”) activities that do not bring value

Quotes:

 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 then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.
 (1) your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you’re trying to improve or an idea you’re
trying to master; (2) you receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your
attention exactly where it’s most productive
 The type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work.
 Assuming the trends outlined here continue, depth will become increasingly rare and therefore
increasingly valuable.
 Our brains instead construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to.
 The bimodal philosophy believes that deep work can produce extreme productivity, but only if
the subject dedicates enough time to such endeavors to reach maximum cognitive intensity—
the state in which real breakthroughs occur.
 As I established in the opening to this rule, the ability to rapidly switch your mind from shallow
to deep mode doesn’t come naturally. Without practice, such switches can seriously deplete
your finite willpower reserves. This habit also requires a sense of confidence in your abilities— a
conviction that what you’re doing is important and will succeed. This type of conviction is
typically built on a foundation of existing professional accomplishment.
 Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.
 Sometimes to go deep, you must first go big.
 When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done.
 One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are
capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is
change—not rest, except in sleep.
 “What makes sense for me to do with the time that remains?”
Models:

 3 groups that thrive in economy:

o High skilled workers (those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines)
o Superstars (those who are the best at what they do)
o Owners (those with access to capital)

 Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy

o 1. The ability to quickly master hard things.
o 2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

 High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)

 Deep Work is Rare
 General questions that any effective ritual should address:
o Where you’ll work and for how long.
o How you’ll work once you start to work.
o How you’ll support your work.

 Grand Gesture
o 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 boost in importance
reduces your mind’s instinct to procrastinate and delivers an injection of motivation and
energy.

 4 Disciplines of Execution (4Dx):

o Discipline #1: Focus on the Wildly Important
o Discipline #2: Act on the Lead Measures
o Discipline #3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard
o Discipline #4: Create a Cadence of Accountability

 Value of downtime
o Reason #1: Downtime Aids Insights
o Reason #2: Downtime Helps Recharge the Energy Needed to Work Deeply
o Reason #3: The Work That Evening Downtime Replaces Is Usually Not That Important

 Shallow Work:
o Non cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted.
These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.

 Fixed-schedule productivity, in other words, is a meta-habit that’s simple to adopt but broad in
its impact. An artificial limit on your workday can make you more successful.