I just finished reading the book “Deep Work” by Cal Newport. Recently it had become more and more apparent in my daily life that I was being sucked into an endless news feed by my smartphone. The youtube algorithm makes incredibly precise video recommendations that pop up at regular intervals, trying to keep me in a state of shallow work. I don’t use any social media accounts and have silent notifications for chat and email on my phone, so it’s mainly youtube that sticks out. I usually read news at the end of the day on my desktop computer from a custom RSS setup I have to minimize the interrupts I would get if I got them in real time. Even so, it feels like everything is trying to monopolize my attention.
That premise is what led me to click the buy button so quickly on Deep Work when I heard about it. I had heard of famous computer people practicing deep work before–it’s not exactly a new thing. One of the most popular ones is Donald Knuth who gave up email in 1990, saying, “I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.” Then you have Bill Gates and Warren Buffett saying focus was the secret to their success. Famous programmer John Carmak goes on retreats with limited connectivity where he can focus on hard problems. Bill Gates does similar think weeks. I think they both probably went to remote cabins in the woods.
The first chapter is “Deep Work is Valuable,” but you probably already decided that if you bought the book. The second chapter, “Deep Work is Rare,” discusses things like open office plans and the path of least resistance (being connected/interruptible). The third chapter discusses how deep work is meaningful, which, like the first, is probably something you’ve made up your mind about already if you’re reading the book. Do you really need to read another article about how some CEO gave a master class in XYZ by saying these two words?
Part two gives you a couple of rules: work deeply, embrace boredom, quit social media, and drain the shallows (i.e. don’t commit yourself to shallow work). Most of the advice here feels pretty obvious, but one of the points that stood out to me was to treat deep work like a muscle that needs to be exercised. If you rarely do it, you probably won’t be able to do it for long, and if you don’t train it, you’re probably not going to be able to do it for longer in the future.
Another point worth noting, once you have gotten interrupts out of the way, is ways to avoid looping. I’m not sure the author would describe it this way, but let me try to make up some terms: external interrupts (like a phone notification) causing you to lose focus would be a normal distraction, but internal interrupts (your brain coming back to another idea) are called loops. I would guess the key to avoiding looping is to recognize it in the first place, so that you can resolve it so it doesn’t keep coming back.
The embrace boredom chapter has a pretty cool excerpt on “How to Memorize a Deck of Cards with Superhuman Speed.” Probably worth looking up separately. I had no idea about the mental models people used to do this until reading this part. Probably the most interesting part of the boredom chapter.
Quitting social media is a pretty self explanatory rule–the author gives some outline for how to make a decision on whether it’s valuable for you or not. I think you could probably just look it as a shallow distraction, which leads to the final chapter, “Drain the Shallows.” This one starts with talking about a 4 day work week and how that forces people to make cuts to shallow work. The rest of the chapter basically goes through some tips, but nothing you couldn’t come up with on your own if you were thinking about prioritizing deep work. That pretty sums up most of the book in my eyes–if you are already reading it, you probably believe it, and most of the tips are things you would probably come up with yourself if you want to practice it. Hopefully the journey of reading it is what you need to encourage yourself to implement its ideas in your daily routines.