Deep Work

I recently read Cal Newport’s Deep Work and absolutely loved it. It perfectly accompanies my recent obsession with Stoicism, the importance of focusing on meaningful work, and ignoring the pointless distractions of modern life. It’s a perfect mixture of actionable advice, case studies, and scientific references.

The two main concepts defined early in the book are deep work (as the title suggests), and shallow work. Cal defines these as follows:

• Deep work: 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.
• Shallow work: 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.

It’s becoming increasingly harder to focus on the deep and getting sucked into spending most of your time in the shallow zone for the modern knowledge worker (I’m looking at you Slack, emails, notifications). I’ve especially felt this as I’ve moved from being an individual contributor (IC) to becoming more of a team lead. This is something that I’m constantly trying to improve personally on the day to day, by blocking off focused blocks in my calendar, being deliberately slow to answer some types of questions, and encouraging people to explore before they ask to name a few. This book gave me plenty of good ideas about new things to try out, and it also makes a compelling argument for why you should be trying to spend more of your time on deep work and less on the shallow. Here are a few things that stood out for me:

Deep work is necessary in the ever changing technology industry

In the technology industry, things change constantly. It is, therefore, vital to master the skill of learning complicated things quickly. Without this skill you are likely to fall behind and become irrelevant as technology advances. If you can’t learn, you can’t thrive. But in order to learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction. That’s where deep work comes in.

Knowledge work is not an assembly line

The modern knowledge worker is not set up for success when it comes to doing meaningful deep work. What’s good for business is bad for you. With all the constant interruptions that involve a day-to-day for the typical knowledge worker such as Slack, meetings, and emails, it is important to be deliberate and schedule deep working hours. Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output. It’s important to remember that knowledge work is not an assembly line, and abstracting value from information is often at odds with business and long hours.

Breaks and rest improves your ability to focus and perform meaningful work

Backed by scientific research, it turns out that taking breaks and resting is actually good for your mental ability (shocker). We only have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as we use it. It’s important to be comfortable of being bored and letting your brain make the questions while you do less demanding activities. Nietzsche has a great quote: “It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth”.

Wrap-up

Deep work is an excellent book for everyone that wants to get ideas on how to spend your time on more meaningful work, and how to avoid the pointless interruptions of the modern workplace. It’s backed by research and has a ton of good case studies from great thinkers and doers, and how they use deep work to achieve big and meaningful things.