Deep work - Rules for Focused Success In a Distracted World

By Cal Newport

Last Read: July 2023

Summary

A life of depth generates a life rich with productivity and meaning. The deep life requires hard work and drastic changes to one’s habits.

For many, there’s a comfort in the artificial busyness of rapid email, slack and other internet shallow activities. The deep life requires that you focus your attention elsewhere to be able to produce real things of value.

Definitions

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

Shallow work: Non-connotatively 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.

The principle of least resistance: In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors on the bottom line, we will tend towards behaviors that are the easiest at the moment.

Busyness as a Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indications of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back towards and industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.

Internet-centrism: We no longer see Internet tools as products released by for-profit companies, funded by investors hoping to make a return and run by twentysomethings who are often making things up as they go along. We instead are quick to idolize these digital doodads as a signifier of progress.

The Any-Benefit Approach To Tool Selection: You’re justified in using a tool if you can identify any possible benefit to its use, or anything you might possibly miss out on if you don’t use it.

The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its possible impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.

The Law of the Vital Few: In many settings, 80% of a given effect is due to just 20% of the possible causes

Top TakeAways

1. Deep work is valuable

The core abilities for thriving in today’s careers:
1. The ability to quickly master hard things
2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.
Learning = Creating New Pathways in your Brain: When you’re learning something new → you’re actually forming new connections in your brain. These new circuits eventually allow your brain to process & act more seamlessly in the new dimension.
People who work deeply: DHH, Adam Grant, Cal Newport. They all produce significantly more high quality output than those that don’t work deeply, while maintaining their sanity.
Deliberate practice requires attention & feedback:
1. Your attention is focussed tightly on a specific skill you’re trying to improve or an idea you’re trying to master
2. You receive feedback as you do the activity so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it’s most productive
Best talent ⇒ Significantly better results → “Hearing many mediocre singers does not equal one outstanding performance”
- The best talent are able to focus to produce results. The best students don’t actually study more, they usually just study with more focus & less distractions.
- High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)

2. Deep work is Meaningful

Our brains construct our worldview based upon what we pay attention to:
- “The skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.”
- This concept goes against prevailing common thought which tends to place a greater emphasis on our circumstances, assuming that what happens to use determines how we feel.
- The elderly are often happier because they have re-wired their minds to focus on positive things vs. negative things - not because their circumstances were particularly better.
Days spent in deep work cause us to feel happy for 3 reasons:
1. The focus causes us to understand our world as rich and meaningful since they are focussed on pushing the envelope and using all our abilities
2. The focus hyjacks our attention from focussing on many of the smaller & less pleasant things that populate our lives
3. Days spent in deep work bring out the craftsperson in us: Focus on how do the best we can do on a given project really gives us the freedom to give our all to it.
Days spend in shallow activities are unsatisfying:
- Mind tends to focus on wrong things: “The idle mind is the devil’s workshop’ - when you lose focus, your mind tends to fix on what could be wrong with life instead of what is right”. A workday driven by shallow, from a neurological perspective, is likely to be draining and upsetting day, even if most of the shallow things that capture your attention seem fun or harmless.
- Flow perspective: “The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”
- Csikszentmihalyi: “Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because they have built in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.“
- The more flow experiences that occur in a given week, the higher the subject’s life satisfaction.
- Free time is often not satisfying: In the 1990s - people were happier at work and less happy relaxing than they suspected. Human beings it seems are at our best when immersed in something challenging.
The world constructed by our inboxes are not the best world to live in.
- Many of the things being asked of us, we don’t have enough context into to make an informed comment or decision
- The subjects being discussed at often dis-jointed and not at all connected to each other.
We need rules to ignore the shallow to focus on the deep
- When you’re looking at what to do next, things that are cognitively non-demanding are more tempting because they require less focus to get into. So they are so seductive to us.
- Broadly → people are losing their ability to work deeply because of network tools → shallow services that facilitate instant communication and shallow attention grabbers.
- Our minds can’t compete with such attention grabbers & we easily rabbit hole. Having inboxes (slack, email, SMS) that are open to everyone, access to look up anything (web searches) and a feeling that we need to respond to people quickly has made it really hard for people to focus on the things that matter.
- One reason that startups can actually compete with bigger companies is when you have fewer people, you generally just spend dramatically less time in communication. More people = more meetings, more slack, more email.

3. Work Deeply

Ritualize working deeply in blocks of days or hours.
- Strategy: Add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of limited willpower necessary to transition into a state of concentration
  - Deep works works best in blocks of time where 2-4 hours
  - Deep work requires intense focus with blocks of time entirely focussed on the activity at hand & nothing else.
  - Switching from Task A to Task B carries a residue from Task A to Task B carried a “residue” from the tasks. Your brain isn’t so good and just jumping between things. If you want the most focus, don’t switch between tasks.
  - Deep work builds on values like quality, craftsmanship, and mastery
- Preserve Willpower:
  - We all have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as we use it. It is like a muscle that tires after use.
  - Our willpower is a limited resource & people are fighting desire all day long. Desire is our norm, not the exception in our days. Top desires for people in a day: eating, sleeping, sex, taking a break from work, checking email, listening to music, watching TV.
  - The draw of internet & TV are particularly strong. People only succeed in ignoring those desires half of the time
  - You can expect to be bombarded with the desire to do anything but work deeply in a given day. Most of the time, these desires will win out.
- Example: In the middle of a distracted afternoon spent web browsing, to switch your attention to a cognitively demanding task, you’ll draw heavily on your finite willpower to wrest your attention away from online foolery & such attempts will frequently fail.
Decide on your depth philosophy
- Option 1 - Monastic Philosophy: Eliminate or radically minimize shallow obligations eg. not being accessible via email, text, slack, etc in favor of working deeply.
  - eg. Neal Stevenson. Turned off email, had others collect letters for him & was just unaccessible so he could focus all of his time on writing.
- Option 2: Bimodal Philosophy: Have clearly defined stretches of time for deep work; the rest of the time is open to everything else.
  - eg. Carl Jung. Worked deeply on retreats; the rest of the time he was very accessible
  - eg2. Adam Grant. Puts all his courses he teaches into 1 semester, the other for deep work. During his deep work semester would take 2 weeks a month to go completely radio silent to everyone else (shut his door, out of the office on email & work on research uninterrupted). Rest of the time he was famously open and accessible.
- Option 3: Rhythmic Philosophy - Make deep work a regular habit that removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you’re going to go deep. Make this at a particular time of day so that it’s habitual.
  - eg1. Jerry Seinfeld. Wrote jokes every day while maintaining a touring schedule. He keeps a calendar on his wall. Every day that he writes a joke he crosses out an X on the calendar with a big red X. After a few days in the chain, the momentum of the chain keeps you going because of the momentum you’ve created.
  - eg2. Brian Chappell. Phd Candidate with a full time job working on his disertation. He woke up & would start working at 5:30AM each morning & would work until 7AM. Then he worked a 9-5 job. Working this way, allowed him to produce 4-5 pages of academic prose each day.
  - Pros: Most natural thing to do for people who have other requirements on them & requirements of their job that don’t allow them the flexibility to be offline to others.
  - Con: Can’t go quite as deep when whole days are focussed to the task at hand.
- Option 4: Journalistic Approach - Go deep when required; Otherwise be accessible
  - eg. Walter Isaacson - Any time he could find some free time, he would switch into a deep work mode and hammer away at the book. This was crafted by years of working on a deadline as a reporter.
  - eg2. Cal Newport - Since his schedule doesn’t allow ritualizing things - he schedules deep work on his calendar in blocks of time. The rest of his time, he’s normally accessible.
  - Pros: The most flexible and can happen on almost anyone’s calendar
  - Cons: Most people can’t pull this off. It requires already having being habituated to deep work such that you’re able to deeply focus at will.
Hacks your deep work

Ritualize deep work: People who produce things of value usually have ritualized their work habits

“There is a popular notion that artists work from inspiration - that there is some strike or bolt or bubbling up of creative mojo from who knows where.. but I hope my work makes it clear that waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan. In fact, perhaps the best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration.” (Mason Currey - who spent 50 years studying the habits of famous thinkers and writers)

“Great creative minds think like artists but work like accountants” (David Brooks)

Map out details
- Location: ideal if the location is only used for depth. Eg. a conference room or a quiet library.
- Time: start and the end point of the work so that it’s not an endless slog.
- How you’ll work: Mentally litigate what you should be doing during these sessions.
  - Is internet allowed?
  - Are bathroom breaks allowed?
  - What is the main goal of these sessions?
Change environment when necessary
- Strategy: Change your physical environment to only focus on the thing you want to do in that environment.
- eg 1 - Think weeks at Microsoft. BillG would hide away for a week in a cabin with no internet connection and a stack of papers to read
- eg 2 - JK Rolling locked herself up in a 5 star hotel in Scotland to finish book 7 of Harry Potter.

4. Work with Others

The best model for collaboration embraces both focussed deep individual work & collaboration with others.
1. Exposure: Discussing and listening to others who have a broad range of specialties. This is especially important when coming up with new ideas.
2. Collaboration: White-boarding with others on the same problem and on things that you’ve been thinking about. Collaboration can push you to deeper levels of depth & towards generating more valuable output than working alone.
3. Individual Focus: Shutting yourself off in an office to work deeply on something. (Distraction is a destroyer of depth)
Work-place design:
- Open office: great for exposure; horrible for individual focus
- Closed office: great for focus; bad for exposure & collaboration
- Hub & Spoke: Great for focus, great for exposure; great for collaboration
- Remote: Didn’t discuss it. I imagine it’s great for focus; bad for collaboration & exposure
- Analysis: it’s interesting that wrapbook (the idea) came from in-person work that then transitioned to remote work. Might not have worked the other way around.
Good life Info:
- Relations at work motivate us: Achievement is most meaningful when it is relational. When what we do matters to other people, it matters more to us.
- Positive Colleagues → Happier people: The people we work with matter. Positive relationships with colleagues at work make us happier. Positive relationships at work lead to lower stress levels, healthier workers, and fewer days when we come home upset.
- Work = Major Source of Connection: “Change the nature of work, and you change the nature of life.”
- Remote work: detaches us from the important social contact of the workplace. This can be profound.
- Retirement:
  - Social: Those who fare best in retirement find ways to replace the social connections that sustained them in the workplace
  - Mattering: For many of us, work is where we feel that we matter to others - to workmates, to our customers and even to our families. When that sense of mattering is gone, we have to find new ways of mattering to others. New ways to be part of something bigger than ourselves.

Work like a business (from 4DX)
1. Focus on the Wildly Important: Execution should be focussed on a small number of wildly important goals.
  “The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.”
  - The goal of just spending more hours working deeply doesn’t spark a lot of enthusiasm. You need a deeper specific goal that would return tangible and substantial professional benefits to give you enthusiasm.
  - Eg. his goal was to publish 5 papers - more than he had ever done
2. Act on Leading Measures: Focus your attention on the measures you directly control.
  - For an individual focussed on deep work a relevant leading measure is time spent in a state of deep work dedicated towards your wildly important goal.
3. Keep a Scoreboard: Have a public place to record and track leading measures.
  “People play differently when they’re keeping score”
  - Recommendation for a physical calendar that displays your current deep work hour count.
4. Create an Cadence of Reflection & Accountability: Regular meeting to confront the scoreboard & commit to specific action before the next meeting.
  - Recommends a weekly review to look over the score-board; celebrate the wins and understand what went wrong & figure out how to ensure a good score in the days ahead.
Shutdown in the evenings, weekends & take vacations

Idleness is not a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is an indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mention affliction as disfiguring as rickets… it is necessary to getting any work done.

Reason 1: Downtime Aids Insights: Our unconscious mind works by connecting disconnected pieces of information together. This only happens during downtime. It’s why we have insights while brushing our teeth or in the shower.
Reason 2: Downtime Helps Recharge Your Energy: People who spend time in nature are able to concentrate better the next day.
Reason 3: The Work That Evening-time Downtime Replaces is Usually Not Important
- We have limited capacity: Generally people are only able to be in a state of deliberate practice for 1 - 3.5 hours a day.
- You’ll have hit that limit during your workday
- By evening time, your time will be constrained to shallow activities anyway.

Rules:
1. Have a shutdown ritual: End your workday with a ritual that has you actually finish your day. In it, ensure that everything incomplete you have a plan for completing it & it’s captured in a place that you can pick it up again. At the end of it, say something verbal to indicate you’re done like “Shutdown complete”
2. Don’t look: Don’t ‘do anything related to work at all during downtime. It includes slack, IM, Internet, etc.
3. Accept that there are always tasks left incomplete: The idea that you can ever reach a point where all your obligations are handled is a fantasy.

4. Some Rules To Succeed At Deep Work

View the Ability to Concentrate is a Skill That Must Be Trained
- “We’re evolved for scarcity but live in abundance”. Living in this abundance requires training on how to live within it.
- In studies, they have found that people who regularly multi-task have lost their ability to focus at all. When they try to focus, their brains actually crave distraction and they can’t keep on task. People who multi-task all the time, can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted. They’re pretty much mental wrecks.
- Effort to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.
Turn off the internet and Schedule All Internet Use @ Work & @ Home
- Schedule in advance when you’ll use the Internet, and then avoid it altogether outside these times. He suggests writing on a notepad the next time you can use the internet; until that time arrives - absolutely no network connectivity
- Logic: The internet is filled with distracting low cognitively demanding things. They suck you in & before you know it, you’ve spent much of your time on them making you distracted. View the Internet as Synonymous with seeking distracting stimuli.
- He suggests maintaining this strategy of scheduling internet use even after the workday is over. The exception is time sensitive information like looking up a map or texting about immediate plans. This can be done through the focus setting on the phone that blocks out communication from everyone except a certain group of people.
- If you’re not in a block that allows internet time, simply wait. Focus on something else, put away your phone & develop the skill of being bored which is a novel thing today.
Schedule out your whole day into blocks of time (Work & Home)
- Why: Deep work habit requires you to treat your time with respect. In order to do this you need to be deliberate about how you’re actually spending your time & not spend it haphazardly.
- Plan your days in blocks:
  - At the beginning of each work week - on a piece of paper plan out your week in blocks of time.
  - Be liberal with your blocks of time - make them longer than is required to handle the tasks you plan
  - When people are new to this habit - they tend to use their schedule as wishful thinking. A best case scenario for their day. Over time you should make an effort to conservatively predict the time tasks will require.
  - Use overflow blocks to handle things that you’re not sure how long they will take. If you have extra time - you do other work, if you don’t then you have extra time to finish things up.
  - Re-work the schedule liberally as new things come up. The idea is not that this schedule should be fixed in place but just that you are being deliberate about what you’re focussing on.
Don’t Take Breaks From Distraction; Take Breaks From Focus
- Our willpower is a limited resource. A day that has been 90% spent on distracting and shallow activities will have a hard time being pulls away to focus.
- So your default in the day should be using the time that is available to you & then taking breaks from focus for distraction that is neccessary to be a functional human being
Quantity Each Activity’s Depth
- A good rule of thumb is to ask: “How long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college grad to do this task?
- You should orient your activities to do the things that would require the most training first since they are the things that will provide the most value in the world.
- (Also should probably think about how to eliminate or give it to somebody else how to complete the other tasks)
Take breaks from focus to meditate (Naysawn’s note)
- When you’re mentally tired for so much focus, the best break is closing your eyes and focussing on your breath.
- Stressing your brain and pushing it to its limits is like pushing your muscles to their limits in the gym. Rest allows it to reset & be ready to go again.
Adopt a craftsperson’s mindset to tool selection
- Definition: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its possible impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.
- Any benefit: This is very different than the any benefit approach that many people tout. All tools have both upsides and downsides. And many have downsides that outweigh their upsides.
- Eg. Facebook & Instagram - upside seeing updates from large social network. Downside - clickbatey content which is cognitively junk food.
Quit Tools That Don’t Fit the Craftsperson’s Mindset
- 80/20 Rule - Spending time on these tools that don’t serve your purpose take away from 20% of things that will actually support your purpose.
- Think first and foremost about what you want to do professionally and personally. Only adopt tools that facilitate these goals.
- Social media needs critical thought about if their upsides outweigh their downsides.
  - Example: Facebook
    - Personal goal - maintain close and rewarding friendships with a group of people who are important to me.
    - Key activities:
      1. Regularly take time for meaningful connections with those who are more important to me (long walk, a meal, a joint activity).
      2. Give of myself to those who are most important to me (eg. making non-trivial sacrifices that improve their lives)
    - Analysis: Will Facebook assist with this goal? Of course it’ll help with maintaining a connection with many people, but it will fail in the goal of growing a close connection.
    - Discussion: This analysis may be different for somebody with a different goal who for example may be using Facebook to find new groups to connect with & interact with.
- Other internet media also require analysis as well:
Don’t use the Internet To Entertain Yourself
- Reddit, OneFootball, YouTube: These tools all have carefully crafted titles and easily digestible content, often honed by algorithms to be maximally attention grabbing.
- Once you’ve landed on one article or video on these sites, they keep feeding you more and more articles of clickbatey titles to keep clicking on more & keep you engaged.
Put More Thought Into Your Leisure Time
- It’s crucial to decide in advance what you’re going to do with your evenings and weekends before they begin.
- Structured hobbies are great for these hours since they have a defined goals
- Reading is great
Get Your Boss on Board With This
- Ask them how much of your time should you spend on shallow work (slack, email, meetings, etc) vs. high impact work.
- Give them a breakdown of your schedule and the amount of time spent in shallow work activities and ask them for an approval of the ratio.
- Then help them to structure your calendar so that you can focus on high impact work.
Other tips
- Become hard to reach:
  - Send fewer emails & ignore the ones that aren’t easy to process.
  - For the emails that you do send; make them longer & structure them in a way that requires less communication for the person coming back to you.
  - For those that access you, they should have to do more work to expect that you’re just going to write them back
  - Don’t respond: A lot of famous academics receive plenty of email but just don’t respond.
- Tim Ferris: “Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things.”
- Be careful with saying “Yes”: Be very careful about committing to anything new. It takes Cal a lot of work to get him to commit to doing anything shallow that’s new.
- Finish work by 5:30 & Become In-Accessible
  - Work backwards from your goal to figure out how this can be possible
  - Once 5:30 hits, you should plan to be offline & resting your mind so that the next

5. Deep work is rare - Ignore the Norm

In the age of the internet, the norm is for people to be distracted and spend their days unproductively in things that don’t lead them to their goals. Ignore them & focus on living the life you want to live.

Deep work is rare

Most people just look for people to be busy vs. doing things of value
In 2012, the average knowledge worker spends 60% of their day in web searches & in electronic communication. 30% of that in email alone!
Embracing deep work often requires the rejection of much of what is new and high tech.

People aren’t sure how they spend their time

Typical 25 - 34 year old in Britain watches 28 hours of TV a week.
People who say they work 75 hours a week, typically only work 55 hours a week
People typically report spending 7 hours asleep a night, when in reality they spend 8.6 hours (i question this)

We probably need training & tools to better facilitate deep work. But that’s a discussion for another day.