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Review

Should you read Deep Work?

If your job requires or benefits from long blocks of uninterrupted thinking, working, and/or problem-solving, you should read Deep Work. As a software engineer, this book is probably one of the most important books I have read so far in my life. If, however, your job does not require long blocks of problem-solving, for example, a car salesperson, or a truck driver, or many other types of jobs I’m sure, then this book may not be useful for you. It’s also important to note that if your job does not allow you to get distracted, for example a lot of trade jobs, then Deep Work will not be useful for you. You may already work deeply every day, and have no issue getting into deep work. For me, I have no issue working deeply when it comes to woodworking. However, in my professional career as a software engineer, I often struggle to stay productive and often find myself procrastinating by browsing Reddit or watching YouTube when I should be working. Deep Work is for the types of jobs that benefit from solving hard problems. It’s for jobs that you can, and do, get distracted from. If you struggle with starting your work, or struggle with procrastinating, this book may help you.

If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive, no matter how skilled or talented you are.

How does Deep Work differ from the “Flow State”?

In the book, Cal Newport says: “Deep work is an activity well suited to generate a flow state”. The flow state defined as: “The mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.” As a software engineer, I was naturally familiar with the flow state. Once I reached the flow state, usually when trying to solve a complicated problem, there was never a question in my mind if I should stop in the middle of my work to do something else. There was only one option in my mind, continue working. The goal of Deep Work is to help you enter the Flow State as easily as possible. Once you enter the flow state, you will no longer have any problem with procrastinating, and as long as you remove distraction, you will be able to stay in the flow state for longer. Deep Work and the Flow State go hand-in-hand.

Do you really need Deep Work? Can’t you just “willpower yourself into working” when you really need to get something done?

The idea that you can just “willpower” yourself into working isn’t wrong by itself, but Cal Newport says that willpower is finite. While I don’t fully agree with Cal Newport on that, I do agree that it’s better to not have to use willpower when you don’t have to. Willpower is complicated, but when you can make getting work done easier and more friction-less, you should. If you want to read more about my opinions on willpower, I would recommend reading this paper by Veronika Job, Carol S. Dweck, and Gregory M. Walton. The TL;DR is

Recent research suggests that willpower—the capacity to exert self-control—is a limited resource that is depleted after exertion. We propose that whether depletion takes place or not depends on a person’s belief about whether willpower is a limited resource. Study 1 found that individual differences in lay theories about willpower moderate ego-depletion effects: People who viewed the capacity for self-control as not limited did not show diminished self-control after a depleting experience.

Are social media and entertainment sites really even that bad?

In my opinion, one of the most important points in Cal Newport’s book is Attention Residue: The idea that thoughts about a task persist and intrude while performing another task. A quick glacé at your inbox (or Discord, Twitter, Snapchat, etc.), may only take 10 seconds, but it leaves a long-lasting impact and leads to poor work for an extended period of time (say 30 minutes). The impact is worse if you leave something “unfinished”, for example an email you have not responded to, or if you’re waiting for a response to a message you sent someone. It could be as simple as wondering if they found the meme you sent them funny, or waiting to see if your friends want to hang out over the weekend. Anything that isn’t clearly defined as “finished” will negatively impact your work until it is “finished”. So while you might only check Discord a few times throughout the day, it may be causing the quality of your work to suffer much more than you think.

Deep Work is not perfect, but it’s still a great book.

There are for sure a few contradicting points in the book, such as Cal Newport preaching about how important it is to not multitask (good advice), but then at the same time casually mentioning that on average he is reading three to five books at a time. Or when he talks about how we shouldn’t be thinking of “the day” as the time between “10 – 6” while ignoring the 10 hours before and the 6 hours after. While that is true, it’s a bit disingenuous considering we need to spend 8 of those sleeping and most people will spend an hour commuting, another hour eating, 30 minutes to shower, etc. Usually this leaves about 4 or 5 hours in a day, so thinking about “10 – 6” (more commonly 9 to 5) as “the day” is a perfectly reasonable thing, and you can hardly fault most people for it. Another thing Cal Newport talks about is the 4-day work week, and he also mentions that there is a “limit” of 4 hours of Deep Work per day (which I disagree with). With those two things noted, though, it is interesting why he never suggests five six-hour work days instead of four eight-hour work days, in order to maximize the Deep Work opportunity in the week. The reason most likely being that he could not find the proper studies to support this idea. I think it is much more likely that the benefit from the 4-day work week had little to do with Deep Work as a whole, and I’m just not sure if it made sense to include that section in the book. Overall, these are relatively small issues I have with the book, but I needed something to complain about.

Deep Work is not for everyone, but if you don’t want to be like everyone, you’ll probably need deep work.

If you don’t read the entire book, I would recommend you at least read my summary of Deep Work.

Summary

What Is Deep Work?

Directly from the book; Deep work is:

“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.”

On the contrary, Shallow Work: non-cognitively 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.

Why does it matter: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare and valuable in the Knowledge Economy.

To become a superstar in your field of work, you need to be able to quickly master hard things and produce at an elite level (in terms of both quality and speed).

To work deeply:

Schedule deep work blocks
Decide where and how you’ll perform Deep Work
Prepare for your Deep Work by taking care of Shallow Work necessary to facilitate your Deep Work before you begin
Begin your task and go with the flow

How to become a Deep Worker:

Embrace boredom
Quit all social media (including infotainment sites)
Minimize shallow work

The Deep Work Hypothesis

The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare and valuable in the Knowledge Economy.

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

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.

Busyness as 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.

How to Work Deeply

To make Deep Work a habit, make it a routine.

Scheduling deep work blocks into your calendar drastically lowers the amount of willpower required to begin your Deep Work.

To build your Deep Work routine, decide:

Where you’ll work (and if needed, for how long)
What you’ll work on once you start to work
How you’ll support your work (energy, exercise, minimize friction, etc.)

Embrace Boredom

You’ll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom.

With the recent increase in constant distraction through social media and smartphones, our brains have been rewired to expect constant stimulation. As a result, the moment we feel we are about to experience boredom, we take out our phone, and open Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc…

Don’t take breaks from distraction, but instead take breaks from focus:

Don’t use the internet for entertainment. It may be a drastic change from how you live your life right now, but if you are serious about living a productive life, you must not rely on the internet for entertainment.
Practice productive meditation. This is 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 (and entertainment sites like Reddit, YouTube, etc.)

To summarize, if you want to eliminate the addictive pull of entertainment sites on your time and attention, give your brain a quality alternative. Not only will this preserve your ability to resist distraction and concentrate, but you might even fulfill Arnold Bennetts goal of experiencing, perhaps for the first time, what it means to live, and not just exist.

Social Media reduces our ability to concentrate, making it impossible to work deeply.

If you spend 1 hour on social media or entertainment sites, you’re not just losing 1 hour, but you’re also making it harder to concentrate later when you try to work deeply, making the actual cost of that 1 hour on social media much more than it may seem in the moment.

Do a test run: without deactivating your accounts, block your browser from all social media and entertainment sites for 30 days. You should also delete the apps from your phone. If you need to use any of them (lets say you Google something and the first result is from Reddit, or your friend sends you a YouTube video to explain something), don’t unblock the site, but open it in an incognito window. After 30 days, evaluate:

Was it impossible for you to stay away, or were you greatly inconvenienced by not being able to use these sites?
Did anyone care that you didn’t post, comment, like their posts, etc.?

If you want to eliminate the addictive pull of entertainment sites on your time and attention, give your brain a quality alternative. Remember, thoughts about a task persist and intrude while performing other tasks. You may only spend 15 minutes browsing Reddit and making 2 or 3 comments on your lunch break, but it will intrude for hours and reduce your focus for the rest of the day. It is not worth it.

Drain the Shallows

Most people’s typical workday is fragmented, making Deep Work hard. To take control, schedule every minute of your day:

Divide the hours of the day into 30 minute blocks and assign activities to the blocks
List out the tasks you plan to accomplish in that block
Use this schedule to guide your workday

Not every block needs to be dedicated to work. You should have time blocks scheduled for lunch and breaks, etc…

If your schedule is disrupted, no big deal, just take a moment to revise it.

You can see Cal Newport’s blog for more information on how he schedules his time: here and here

Don’t fall for the “Any Benefit” mindset: 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. Just because it provides a benefit doesn’t mean it’s worth it. There is much more to consider, remember, there are only 24 hours in your day.

Actionable Advice

Make Deep Work a routine. Decide where you’ll work, what you’ll work on, and how you’ll support your work.
Build a system where you can remove distractions. That could be leaving your phone and computer in another room, or it could be disconnecting the internet, or it could be using a plugin to block sites you shouldn’t be using.
Create a workspace you take pride in, dedicated to working deeply.
Remove the constant stimulation (quit social media and entertainment sites). Consider a “Dopamine Detox”. Don’t use the internet for entertainment.
Use deadlines strategically: Try to set a goal for the day. Make it hard, so you have to put effort into it, but not impossible, so you can actually finish it. “When you have fewer hours, you usually spend them more wisely.“
Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. List for each the two or three most important activities that help you satisfy the goal.
Minimize shallow work. Make it hard for people to reach you by email, offer alternatives (make them read FAQ’s, etc.).
Schedule your day: Divide the day into 30 minute blocks, list out tasks you want to accomplish in each block. Use this schedule to guide your day, adjust as needed and as plans change.