Deep Work

Author: Cal Newport

Notes By: Venkatesh Jayaraman (Twitter: @EWFA_)

Note to Readers
• This work covers is the notes from my reading of the book Deep Work
• The notes cover only aspects which I saw was important or wished to implement in my
life – If you need all details, kindly read the full book
• Any ideas you disagree, please feel free to connect with the Author and not me
• This Notes can NEVER substitute the benefit of reading the full book
• Not every idea can be readily implementable for everyone in every situation – You need to
put your thoughts to tailor these ideas to “Your Reality”

Terms for Use of this Document

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• If you wish to use it in your websites or any presentation, DO check with me.

Contents
Introduction ................................................................................................................................................................ 1
Chapter 1 – Deep work is valuable ........................................................................................................................... 2
Chapter 2 – Deep Work is Rare ................................................................................................................................ 5
Chapter 3 – Deep Work is Meaningful .................................................................................................................... 6
Rule 1: Work Deeply .................................................................................................................................................. 8
Rule 1: Embrace Boredom .......................................................................................................................................16
Rule 3: Quit Social Media .........................................................................................................................................21
Rule 4: Drain The Shallows .................................................................................................................................... 26

Introduction
What is deep work?
Term coined by Cal Newport
• Professional activities performed in a state of distraction free concentration that push your
cognitive capabilities to their limits

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 • These efforts create new value, improve your skill and are hard to replicate
• This is necessary to wring out every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity
• Knowledge workers do not go deep because of network tools, which fragment attention
• Fragmented attention cannot accommodate deep work which requires long period of
uninterrupted thinking
• Learning complex topic or cognitively demanding topics like computer programming
requires intense uninterrupted concentration
• This is a skill which has a great value today, due to two reasons: (1) Learning and (2) Creates
something useful
o To remain valuable in economy, you must master the art of quickly learning
complicated things – This task needs deep work
o XX Page 13
• In information economy, deep work is the key currency for knowledge workers
• In this economy the rewards are for those who can deep task, which is hard to replicate
• The ability to deep work is becoming increasingly rate and at the same time it is becoming
increasingly valuable in our economy – Those who cultivate this skill can thrive
Shallow work
• Noncognitive demanding, logistical style tasks, often performed while distracted
• Does not add much new value to the world and can be easily replicated
• Spend enough time in a state of shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to
perform deep work

Chapter 1 – Deep work is valuable

Three groups of works
1. The High Skilled Workers: Good at working with intelligent machines
2. The Super Stars: Best at what they do
3. The Owners: Invest capital in new technologies and drive “Great Restructuring”. By use of
digital technology, the proportion of rewards who own intelligent machines is growing.
Two core abilities for thriving in New Economy
1. The ability to quickly master hard things
2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of quality and speed
High Skilled workers – Need to master hard things
• Intelligent machines: These are complicated and hard to master.
• To join this group of working well with machines you need to hone your ability master hard
things.

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 • These technologies change rapidly and hence the process of mastering hard things never
ends: you must be able to do it quickly again and again
• If you cannot learn you cannot thrive
Super Stars – Need to produce at elite level
• Master skill and transform to a output that produces value
• If you do not produce, you do not thrive, no matter how skilled or talented you are

How to cultivate these core capabilities? Depends on your ability to do Deep Work. If you have not
mastered this foundation skill of deep work it would be hard for your master hard things and
produce at elite level.

Deep work helps to quickly learn hard things

Deliberate practise
1. Your attention is focussed tightly on a specific skill you are trying to improve or an idea you
are trying to master
• This need uninterrupted concentration and cannot exist along side of distraction
• Diffused attention is opposite to focussed attention needed for deliberate practise
2. You receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where
it is productive

Notes from Talent Code relating to deliberate practise

• Myelin a layer of fatty tissue around the neurons, act like an insulator that helps the neurons
to fire faster and cleaner
• Skills be it intellectual or physical eventually reduce down to brain circuits
• To get better in a skill, one must develop more Myelin around the relevant neurons
• This allows the corresponding circuits to fire more effortlessly and effectively
• By focussing intensely on a skill, you are forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire, again and
again
• The repetitive use of a specific circuit triggers cells called as oligodendrocytes to begin
wrapping layers of myelin around the neurons in the circuit – Thereby effectively cementing
the skill
• This is the important reason to focus intensely on the task in hand while distraction as that
is the only way to isolate the relevant circuit enough to trigger useful myelination.

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 • If you are learning a new skill with distraction say social media, you are firing too many
circuits haphazardly to isolate the group of neurons you actually want to strengthen

If you are comfortable going deep, you are comfortable mastering the increasingly complex systems
and skills needed to thrive in our economy.

Deep work helps to produce at an Elite Level

Grant (The professor in the example) productivity depends on one main idea: The batching of hard
but important intellectual work with long, uninterrupted stretches. He also batches his attention on
a smaller time scale. There are periods where be completely isolates himself to focus without
distraction on a single task. He prepares paper by (1) Analysing the data, (2) Writing a draft and (3)
Editing for making it publishable. He sometimes puts OOO and works in library. By consolidating
his work in to intense and uninterrupted pulses, he is leveraging the below law of productivy
High – Quality work = Time Spent x Intensity of focus
By maximising his intensity he maximises the amount of work produced in unit time.
Attention Residue
• Relates to multitasking – when we switch from task A to B, we switch attention
• But attention does not immediately follow – A residue of attention remains struck thinking
about the original task
• People experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor
performance on the next task
• This concept of attention residue helps explain why the intensity formula is true and
therefore explains higher productivity
• By working on a single hard task for a long time without switching, you minimize the
negative impact of attention residue
• It might seem harmless to take a quick glance at your inbox every 10 minutes or so – But
such checks introduce new target for attention
• Sometimes you may not be able to return to the original task – The attention residue left by
such unresolved switches dampens your performance

Conclusion
To produce at your peak you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single
task free from distraction. The ability to deep work gives you a competitive advantage. Do not be

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too hasty to label your job as necessarily non-deep. Just because your current habits making deep
work difficult does not mean that this lack of depth is fundamental to doing your job well.

Chapter 2 – Deep Work is Rare

The following three big trends in work place bring down the ability of the employees to do deep
work.
• Open workspace – Creates opportunities for collaboration but comes at the cost of massive
distraction
• Instant messaging – Emails can distract only when you choose to open, but messengers
systems are meant to be active, which magnifies the impact of interruption.
• Social media presence, mainly for content creators
One side we understand that deep work is valuable than before in our shifting economy. If true,
then deep work must be promoted not only by ambitious individuals but also by organisations
hoping to get most out of their employees. Instead of this, the other ideas (Similar to the three
trends) are getting promoted. These trends actively decrease the ability for one to go deep.
Black hole metric
• For a knowledge worker, it is difficult to measure the value of individual efforts
• It is not easy to measure individuals contribution to a firm’s output
• None of these behaviours would survive long if it was clear that they were hurting the bottom
line, but the metric black hole prevents this clarity and allows the shift towards distraction
we increasingly encounter in the professional world
The principle of least resistance
• Professionals sit in front of email believing that they have to answer any email within a hour
of its arrival
• The principle is that the in a business setting without clear feedback on the impact of various
behaviours to the bottom line, we will tend towards behaviours that are easiest at the
moment
• Why culture of connectivity persists? Two reasons
o If you are in a environment where you can get answer to a question or a specific piece
of information when the need arises, it makes your life easier. If this was not possible,
then you have to do more advance planning for your work, be organized and turn
your attention harder during the waiting period. This would make life harder, while
it is good for long term. Email might take a hour to get a reply, while instant
messaging would do the same under 1 minute.
o Messaging helps to run a life out of emails, giving a satisfaction of productivity

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 • Standing meetings: instead of trying to manage their time and obligations themselves, they
let the impending meeting each week force them to take some actions on a given project and
more generally provide a high visible simulacrum of progress
• Emails with one words “Thoughts” command huge amount of time and attention for the
recipient. – This is easier from sender’s perspective, as it clears something out of their inbox,
atleast temporarily with minimum amount of energy invested
The principle of least resistance with metric black hole, supports work culture that safe us from
short term discomfort of concentration and planning, at the expense of long term satisfaction and
production of real value. By this we move to shallow work in an economy that rewards depth.

Busyness as a Proxy for Productivity

o Knowledge workers want to prove that they are productive members of the team, but they
are not extremely clear of what their goal constitutes
o To overcome this gap, they are turning back to the industrial age productivity
o In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs,
many knowledge works turn back to industrial age indicator of productivity: Doing lot of
things in a visible manner
o This leads to frequent emails responses, schedule and attend meetings constantly, and any
other behaviours that make you seem busy in a public manner

Conclusion
Deep work is hard and shallow work is easier.

Chapter 3 – Deep Work is Meaningful

o There is muddying connection between depth in knowledge work is to convince them to
spend more time engaged in shallow activities
o We live in a era where anything related to internet is by default seen as innovative and
necessary
o Depth destroying behaviours such as immediate emails and active social media presence is
lauded while avoidance of those trends generates suspicion
Neurological Perspective
We tend to place a lot of emphasis on our circumstances, assuming that what happens to us (or fails
to happen) determine how we feel. From this perspective, small scale details of how you spend your

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day is not important. What matter is large scale outcomes, such as whether you get a promotion or
move to a larger apartment.
Subjects were given positive and negative imagery:
o Younger subjects: The Amygdala (Center for emotion) fired for both images
o Elderly subjects: The Amygdala fired only for positive images – Reason, Elders have trained
the prefrontal cortex to inhibit Amygdala in the presence of negative stimuli
The world is an outcome of what you pay attention to. The world represented by your inbox is not
a pleasant world to inhabit. Mihaly emphasises the advantage of having intense concentration that
there is no attention to think anything irrelevant or worry about problems. A work day driven by
shallow, in a neurological perspective is likely to be a draining and upsetting day, even if most of the
shallow things that capture your attention seems harmless or fun.
In knowledge work to increase the time in dept is to leverage the complex machinery of human
brain in a way maximises the meaning and satisfaction associated with working life.
Psychological Perspective
Mihaly did a few experiments and the outcome was that “The best moments occur when a person’s
body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and
worthwhile. This mental state is called as “Flow”.
Contrary to the belief that relaxation brings in happiness, Mihaly says that Free time is unstructured,
and required much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed. In his
experiments, people were happy at work then relaxing. Human beings are at their best when they
are immersed deeply into something challenging.
The content that we focus on matters. If we give rapt attention to important things and ignore
shallow negative things, we would experience our working life as more important and positive.
Mihaly says that our mind likes challenge regardless of the subject.

Connection between “Flow” and “Deep Work”

• Flow is a state used by Mihaly to describe notions of stretching your mind to its limits,
concentrating and losing yourself in the activity. All these descriptions fit well for deep work
as well.
• Deep work in an activity well suited to generate a flow state
• In the previous argument we saw that flow generates happiness
• Combining these two ideas we see a powerful support from Psychology in favour of depth
• The act of going deep orders the consciousness in a way that makes the life worthwhile
• Individual must learn to seek out opportunities for flow

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 • Build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven
path to deep satisfaction

Philosophical Perspective
• Whether you are a writer, marketer, consultant or lawyer: your work is your craft
• If you hone your ability and apply it with respect and care, then you can generate meaning
in daily efforts in your professional life
• Similar potential for craftmanship can be found in skilled jobs in the information economy
• The potential argument is that these kind of job is mundane – Correct, but you do not need
a rarified job, but need a rarified approach to your work
• Deep work is necessary to hone skills and to then apply them at an elite level
• Deep work therefore is the key to extracting meaning from your profession
• Embrace deep work in your career and direct it towards cultivating your skill, is an effort
that can transform a knowledge work job from a distracted, draining obligation into
something satisfying

Conclusion:
• In the first two chapters we saw that deep work is increasingly becoming valuable and at the
same time is also becoming increasing rare
• This represents a classic market mismatch: If you cultivate this skill, you will thrive
professionally
• The transition is deep work is difficult, and as with many such efforts, well reasoned,
pragmatic arguments can motivate only to a certain point
• Eventually the goal you pursue must resonate at a more human level

Rule 1: Work Deeply

Hypothetical case: A machine Eudaimonia. Deep work chamber to allow for total focus and
uninterrupted work flow. Spend 90 minute inside, take a 90 minutes break and repeat it 2 to 3 times
a day. At this point your brain will have achieved the limits of concentration for the day.
Current reality: Open offices, inboxes cannot be neglected and meetings are one after the other.
Replacing distraction with focus is not simple. One of the main obstacles to going deep: the urge to
turn your attention towards something more superficial. Most people recognize that this urge can
complicate efforts to concentrate on hard things, but most underestimate is regularity & strength.

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People fight desires all day long. The most common desires are eating, sleeping and sex. Others
include the desire to take break from work, checking email, social media sites, surfing the web,
listening to music or watch television. The subjects could succeed in resisting these addictive
distractions only around half the time. This is a bad news for cultivating deep work habit. You are
expected to be bombarded with the desire to do anything but work deeply throughout the day and
the competing desires will often win out. You might respond that having understood the importance
of depth you will therefore be more rigorous in your will to remain concentrated. But there is a
bigger aspect missing the eye.
You have a finite amount of will power that becomes depleted as you use it. – Findings by Roy
Baumeister.
This bring us to a few important conclusions.
• Your will is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit
• It is like a muscle that gets tired
• Distractions drain the finite pool of willpower until you can no longer resist
So the motivating idea for strategy to support deep work:
• Add routines & rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of limited will
power necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration
• If you suddenly decide on a heavily distracted afternoon i.e. Web browsing, to switch to a
cognitively demanding task, you draw heavily from your willpower to wrest your attention
away online activity – Such attempts fail
• To overcome this, deploy smart routines and rituals: Perhaps a set time, quite location –
Such an arrangement needs lesser willpower to start and keep going
• The 6 strategies discussed further is around the idea of routines and rituals designed around
the science of limited willpower in mind to maximise the amount of deep work you
consistently in your schedules
• Commit for a particular pattern of scheduling deep work and develop rituals to sharpen your
concentration before starting each session
• Some strategies will deploy simple heuristics to hijack your brain motivation centre while
others are designed to recharge your willpower reserves at the fastest possible rate
Using these strategies will help you succeed in making deep work a crucial part of your professional
life.
Decide on your Depth Philosophy
• Monasticism – Prioritizes deep work by trying to eliminate or minimize all other types of
work
• Rhythmic strategy – Work for the same hours every week day morning without exception
before his normal workday which is punched with distractions.

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Both of the work but not universally. The Monastic approach will be useful when the primarily
professional obligation is big thoughts. You need your philosophy for integrating deep work into
your professional life. Choose a philosophy that fits your specific circumstances. Because a mismatch
can derail your deep work habits. Take the time to analyse the four strategies that makes sense for
you.

The Monastic Philosophy

• Aims to maximise deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations
• Practitioners of this strategy have a well defined and highly valued professional goal and bulk
of their success in professional success comes from doing this one thing exceptionally well
• This clarity helps to eliminate the thicket of shallow concerns
• Here comes the problems for knowledge workers i.e., Lack of clarity
• The pool of people to whom this approach work is very limited
Stephenson (A author) has two mutually exclusive options: (1) Write good novels at regular rate or
(2) Answer emails, attend conferences and as a result produce lower quality novel at a slower rate.
To do the former he has to avoid as much as possible all the shallow work.

The Bimodal Philosophy

• Carl Jung approach is what I call the bimodal philosophy of deep work
• You divide your time dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving
the rest open to everything else
• During the deep time, the bimodal worker will act monastically seeking intense and
uninterrupted concentration
• During shallow time, focus is not prioritized
• The division of time between deep and shallow shall happen in multiple scales: Week, year
etc.
• This philosophy believes that deep work can produce extreme productivity, but only if the
subject dedicates enough time to such endeavours to reach maximum cognitive intensity, the
state in which real breakthroughs occur
• The minimum unit of time for deep work in this philosophy is atleast 1 day
• A few hours in the morning is too short to count as deep work
• Those who deploy this approach admire the productivity of monastics but also respect the
value they perceive from the shallow behaviours of working life
• The biggest obstacle of this philosophy is that even short periods of deep work require a
flexibility that many fear they lack in their current positions

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 • Even a hour away from your inbox makes you uncomfortable, then certainly the idea of
disappearing for a day or more at a time will be impossible
The Rhythmic Philosophy
• The chain method is a hit among writer and fitness enthusiast – Communities that thrive on
the ability to do hard things consistently.
• According to this philosophy the easiest way to consistently start deep work session is to
transform them into a single regular habit
• The goal is to generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need for you to invest energy
in deciding if and when you are going to go deep
• This combines a simples scheduling heuristic, with the easy way to remind yourself to do the
work
• Have a set start time, for deep work everyday – By eliminating even the simplest scheduling
decisions, such as when during the day to do the work, also reduces this barrier
• This philosophy is a interesting contrast to the bimodal philosophy – It fails to achieve the
most intense levels of deep thinking in the day long concentration sessions of a bimodalist
• But by supporting deep work with rock-solid routines that make sure a little bit gets done
on a regular basis, the rhythmic scheduler will often log a larger total number of deep hours
a year
• The decision between Rhythmic and bimodal can come down to your self control in
scheduling matters and the requirement in hand
o If something is urgent then use Bimodal
o If there is no pressure and necessary to maintain progress use Rhythmic philosophy
The Journalistic Philosophy
• Any time you find some free time, switch into a deep work mode
• You fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule
• This approach is not for the deep work novice – As the ability to rapidly switch your mind
from shallow to deep work does not come naturally
• Without practice, such switches can seriously deplete your finite willpower reserves
• This habit also needs a sense of confidence in your abilities
• Face each week as it arrives and do your best to squeeze out much depth as possible
• The Author wrote this book with this methodology only – Whenever he got time he would
go deep / If meeting is cancelled, he would sit in library and go deep
• Decide the deep work for every week and refine the decisions every day
• By reducing the need to make decisions about deep work moment by moment, we can
preserve more mental energy for the deep thinking itself

Ritualize
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 • To make the most out of deep work sessions, build rituals at the same level of strictness and
idiosyncrasy (Meaning: Habit)
• Rituals reduce the friction for transition to depth, allowing them to go deep more easily and
stay in that state longer
• There is no one right correct deep work ritual – It depends on the person and the type of
project pursued.
A effective ritual will address
• Where you will work and how long – Specify location like office with the door shut and
desk cleaned off. Provide a specific time frame to keep the sessions a discrete challenge and
not a open slog.
• How will you work, once you start to work – Ban internet, metrics of specific words to
produce or pages to read, per 20 minute interval and have your concentration honed.
Without this structure, you will mentally litigate again and again what you should and should
not be doing during these sessions and keep trying to assess whether you are working
sufficiently hard. These are unwanted drains on your willpower reserves.
• How you will support your work – Rituals to ensure your brain gets support to keep
operating at a high level of depth i.e. Enough food, light exercise, have all the needed material
near you. This support need to be ritualized not to waste mental energy figuring out what
you need at the moment.
Finding a ritual needs a bit of experimentation. To work deep is a big deal and should not be an
activity undertaken lightly.

Make Grand Gestures

By leveraging a radical change to normal environment, coupled perhaps with a significant
investment of efforts or money, all dedicated towards supporting a deep work task, you increase the
perceived importance of the task. This book in importance reduces your mind instinct to
procrastinate and delivers an injection of motivation and energy. One person had actually made a
two and fro flight to have deep work at 36,000 feet. The dominant force here is the psychology of
committing so seriously to the task on hand. Take a leave from office, or lock yourself in a room to
seek a different location.

4 Disciplines of Execution
Discipline 1 – Focus on the wildly important
• The execution should focus on small number of “Wildly important goals”

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 • This simplicity will help focus on organization energy to a sufficient intensity to ignite and
give results
• Identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to focus during deep work hours
Discipline 2 – Act on the Lead Measures
• Two types of measures: Lag and lead measures
o Lag: Describes the thing that you are ultimately trying to improve. They come too
late to change our behaviour
o Lead: Measures the new behaviours that will drive success on the lag measures
• Lead measures turn your attention to improving the behaviours you directly control in the
near future that will then have a positive impact on your long term goals.
• In deep work, the lead measure is the time spent in a state of deep work dedicated towards
your wildly important goal.
• Example: The author used to see the number of papers published a year, which where lag
measures and had little to do with his day to day behaviours. But on tracking deep work
hours, suddenly these measures became relevant to my day-to-day; every extra hour of deep
work was immediately reflected in my tally.
Discipline 3 – Keep a compelling score board
• People play differently when they have a score board
• Such scores provide reinforcing source of motivation
• Have a physical artifice that displays the individual’s current deep work hour count
• Maximize the motivation to indicate any milestones achieved
• This serves two purpose
• At a visceral level know the accumulated deep work hours and tangible results
• Help calibrate my expectations of number of deep hours needed per result.
• Such a reality helps to squeeze more hours into each week.
Discipline 4 – Create a cadence of accountability
• This works week in team work, but for individual in team work do weekly review against
plans and what you achieved
• This will help to understand what led to bad weeks, and more important, figure out how to
ensure a good score for the days ahead
4DX framework is on the premise that execution is more difficult than strategizing.

Be Lazy
• Inject regular and substantial freedom from your professional concerns into your day,
providing you with the idleness paradoxically required to get (deep) work done.

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 • At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next
morning – No after dinner email check, no mental replays of conversion and no planning of
handling a upcoming challenge
• If you need more time, extend your day, but once you close it, your mind must be let free
We will see the science behind this downtime
Reason 1 – Downtime aids insights
• Some decisions are best left to your unconscious mind to untangle
• Trying to work actively through these decisions will lead to a worse outcome than loading
up the relevant information and then moving on to something else will let the subconscious
layers of your mind to work on it
• Unconscious thought theory (UTT) – Different roles conscious and unconscious mind play
in a decision
• Conscious mind involved in decisions that requires application of strict rules i.e.
Mathematical calculation
• Unconscious mind involved in decisions that involve large amount of information, vague,
conflicting, with many constraints etc
• The hypothesis for this theory is the brain has more neuronal bandwidth available, allowing
them to move around information and sift through more potential solution than you
conscious centers of thinking.
• According to this theory, conscious mind is like home computer that you can run written
programs, and unconscious mind is like Google data centers in which statistical algorithms
sift through terabytes of unstructured information, teasing out surprising useful solution to
difficult questions
• The implication of this research is that providing your conscious brain time to rest enables
your subconscious mind to take a shift sorting through your most complex professional
challenges
Reason 2 – Downtime helps recharge the energy needed to work deeply
• Attention restoration theory – Spending time with nature can improve your ability to
concentrate
• To concentrate one needs directed attention, which is a finite resource
• If you exhaust it you will struggle to concentrate
• Walking through a busy city street requires you to use directed attention, as you must
navigate complicated task like figuring out when to cross the street
• After just 50 minutes of such focussed navigation our directed attention gets low
• Walking through nature, exposes you to inherently fascinating stimuli, i.e. Sunset (Marc
Berman)

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 • This stimuli involves attention modestly, allowing focussed attention mechanism a chance
to replenish
• When walking through the woods you are freed to direct your attention as there are few
challenges to navigate and experience enough interesting stimuli to keep your mind
sufficient occupied to avoid the need to actively aim your attention – This state allows your
directed attention resources time to replenish
• After 50 minutes of such replenishment, you enjoy a boost in your concentration
• The core mechanism of this theory is the idea that you can restore your ability to direct your
attention if you give this activity a rest
• Walking in nature provide such a mental respite, but so, is many number of relaxing
activities so long as they provide similar “inherently fascinating stimuli” and freedom from
directed concentration
• Casual conversation with a friend, listening to music while making dinner, playing a game
with your kids, going for a run – Other type of activities that play the same attention restoring
role as in walking in nature
• On the other hand, if you keep interrupting your evening in checking mails or use a few
hours after dinner to catch up on an approaching deadline, then you are robbing your
directed attention centers of the uninterrupted rest they need for restoration
• Even if these work dashes are for small amount of time, the prevent you from reaching the
levels of deeper relaxation in which attention restoration can occur
• Only the confidence that you have done with work until the next day can convince your brain
to downshift to the level where it can begin to recharge for the next day to follow
• Put another way, trying to squeeze a little more work in your evening might reduce your
effectiveness the next day enough that you end up getting less done than if you had instead
respected a shut down
Reason 3 – The work that evening downtime replaces is usually not that important
• The capacity of an individual to do deep work in a given day is limited
• If you are careful about scheduling (Based on strategies of Rule 4), you should hit your daily
deep work capacity during your workday.
• By evening you are beyond a point where you can continue to work deeply
• Any work that you fit into in this time would not be type of high-value activities that really
advance your career; but confined to low-value shallow tasks that are executed slowly at low
energy levels
• By deferring evening work, in either words, you are not missing out on much of importance
• To do all the above you must have a strict end point to your workday – You must accept the
commitment that once your workday shuts down, you cannot allow even the smallest
incursion of professional concerns into your field of attention

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 • Even a brief intrusion of work can generate a self-reinforcing stream for distraction that
impedes the shut down advantages described earlier for a for a long time to follow
• The author takes a example of some alarming email on a Saturday morning which can haunt
your attention or the whole week end
• This can be successful only with a strict shutdown ritual at the end of the day work
• This ritual should ensure that every incomplete task, goal has been reviewed and that you
have either (1) You have a plan for execution or (2) Captured in a place where it will be
revisited when the time is right.
• The process has to be a algorithm: a series of steps you always conduct, one after another
• When done, say a set phrase “Shut down complete”, which indicates completion
• This final step as small it could be…is a simple cue to your mind that it is safe to release the
work related thoughts for the rest of the day
• The ritual of Cal Newport
o Final look at the email to ensure that no urgent response is needed before the day
ends
o Transfer pending tasks in my mind to a task list
o These above two actions ensure that there is nothing urgent that I am forgetting or
any important deadline that is getting missed
o To end the ritual, I make a rough plan for the next day
o Once it is created, I say “Shutdown complete”
• Though a shut down ritual sounds extreme, by simply stopping your work your mind is not
clear on incomplete or unresolved obligations due to Zeirgarnik effect
• Instead of need to complete a task to get it off our minds, but it is enough if you make a plan
to complete the incomplete task later
• Committing to a specific plan for a goal may therefore not only facilitate attainment of the
goal but may also free cognitive resources for other pursuits.
• The shut down ritual leverages the above tact to battle the Zeigarnik effect
• This ritual ensures that no task will be forgotten: Each will be reviewed daily and tacked
when the time is appropriate
• Your mind is released of its duty to keep track of these obligations at every moement
• Shut down rituals can be annoying as they take nearly 10 minutes extra, but is needed to
reap the rewards of systematic idleness
• Practise it for 2 week till it becomes a habit, but once it sticks to you, skipping the routine
makes you feel uneasy

Rule 1: Embrace Boredom

• The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained

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 • It is common to treat undistracted concentration to flossing – YOu know how to do, it is
good for you, but neglect it due to lack of motivation
• This mindset is appealing because it implies you can transform your working life from
distractd to focussed overnight if you can simply muster enough motivation
• But this understanding ignores the difficulty of focus and the hours of practise necessary to
strengthen your mental muscle.
Findings from a research: People who multitask all the time cannot filter our irrelevancy. They
cannot manager a working memory. They are chronically distracted. They initiate much larger
parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task in hand… Thye are pretty much mental wrecks.
Such people insist that if they have to concentrate, they turn off everything and are laser focussed.
But once you have become accustomed to on-demand distraction, it is hard to shake the addiction
even when you want to concentrate.
If every moment of potential boredom (having to wait 5 minutes or sit alone in a restaurant, until
friend arrives) is used for a quick glance on the mobile, then your brain has been rewired to the
point where your brain is not ready for deep work – Even if you regularly schedule time to
practise concentration
To Sum up
• Rule 1 taught you how to integrate deep work into your schedule and support it with
routines and rituals designed to help you and consistently reach the current limit of your
concentration ability
• Rule 2 will help you significantly improve this limit.
Deep work needs training and this training must address two goals: (1) improving your ability to
concentrate intensely and (2) Overcoming your desire for distraction.

Do not take breaks from distraction, instead take Breaks from Focus
• Many assume that they can switch between a state of distraction and concentration as
needed
• But this is more optimistic, because once you are wired for distraction you crave it
• A lot of advice for the problem of distraction follows this general template of finding
occasional time to get away from the clatter i.e. One day a week or few hours a day – But
tis not a cure to distracted brain
• By eating healthy food for just one day a week, one will not lose weight
• Similarly, you are unlikely to diminish your brain craving for these stimuli as most of your
time is till spend giving it to it
• Alternative is to schedule occasional breaks from focus to give it to distraction

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 • Schedule in advance when you will use the internet (This choosen in the example as other
forms of distractions are easy to resist) – Write a time on a notepad and until that time
comes no network connectivity is allowed
• The idea motivating this strategy is that the use of distracting service does not by itself
reduce your brains ability to focus
• It is instead the constant switching between low stimuli/high value added activities to the
high stimuli/low value add activities at the slightest hint of boredom or cognitive
challenges
• This constant switching weakens the mental muscles responsible for organizing the many
sources vying for your attention
• By segregating internet use (and therefore segregate distractions) you are minimising the
number of times you give in to distractions, and by doing so you let these attention
selecting muscles strengthen
• Example: You have scheduled your next internet usage after 30 minutes and if you feel
bored and crave distraction, the next 30 minutes of resistance becomes a session of
concentration aerobics.
Point 1 – This strategy works even if your job needs lot of internet or Email use
• You need to have lot of internet blocks
• The total number of duration of such blocks does not matter nearly as much as making sure
that the integrity of your offline blocks remains intact
• This works out to be a large amount of concentration training that is achieved without
requiring you to sacrifice too much connectivity
Point 2 – Regardless of how you schedule our internet blocks, you must keep the time outside these
blocks absolutely free from internet use
• This is easy to stay and trick in the messy reality of the standard workday
• One situation that comes up is in the offline block there is a crucial piece of online
information need to retrieve to continue making progress on your current task
• If your next internet block does not start for a while, you might end up struck
• The temptation in this situation is to quickly given in, look up the information, then return
to your offline block – Resist this temptation
• The internet is seductive, you may think you are just retrieving a single key e-mail from your
inbox, but you will find it hard to not glance at the other “Urgent” messages that have
recently arrived
• By giving in you make the barrier between internet and offline blocks as permeable
diminishing the benefits of this strategy
• Try to switch to another offline activity for the remainder period (Or relax)
• If this is infeasible, then the correct response is to change your schedule so that your next
internet block begins sooner
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Point 3 – Scheduling Internet use at home as well as at work can further improve your concentration
training
• If you are glued to smartphone or laptop through out your evening and weekends, then it is
likely that your behaviour outside of work is undoing many of your attempts during the work
day to rewire your brain
• In this case, schedule internet usage even after the workday is over
• When in offline block, put your phone away, ignore text and refrain from internet usage
• Have plenty of internet blocks scheduled – The key is not to avoid or even to reduce the total
amount of time you spend engaging in distracting behaviour, but is instead to give yourself
plenty of opportunities your evening to resist switching to these distractions at the slightest
hint of boredom
• This strategy is helpful when you are forced to wait – In line in a store, fight this boredom in
company of your thoughts
• To simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the
perspective of concentration training, it is incredibly valuable
To Summarize
To succeed in deep work, you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli.
This does not mean that you have to eliminate distracting behaviours; it is sufficient that you instead
eliminate the ability of such behaviours to hijack our attention.
Tips for deep work
• Identify a deep task (that requires deep work to complete) that high on your priority list
• Estimate how long you normally put aside for an obligation of this type, then give yourself a
hard deadline that drastically reduces this time
• Publicly commit the deadline if possible
• Now you have only one possible way to get the deep task done in time: Work with great
intensity, no emails, no breaks and no day dreaming
• Attack the task with every neuron until it gives way under your unwavering barrage of
concentration
• Try this experiment no more than once a week at first – Giving your brain practise with
intensity with intensity, but also giving time to rest in between
• Gradually increase the frequency once you feel confident on your ability
• Deep work requires levels of concentration well beyond where most knowledge works are
comfortable
• Have artificial deadlines to help you systematically increase the level you can regularly
achieve, providing in some sense, interval training for the attention centers in your brain
• The more you practise to resist urges, the easier is your resistance

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 • After a few months of deploying this strategy, your understanding of what it means to focus
will likely be transformed as you reach levels of intensity stronger than anything you have
experienced before
Meditate Productively
• Goal is to take a period in which you are occupied physically but not mentally i.e. Walking,
jogging, driving, showering-and focus your attention on a single well defined professional
problem
• It may be writing a talk, making progress in proof etc
• As in mindfulness meditation, you must continue to bring your attention back to the problem
at hand when it wanders or stalls
• Have atleast 2 – 3 sessions a week
• Good aspect: Finding time for this strategy is easy, as it takes advantage of periods that would
otherwise be waster and if done right, can actually increase your professional productivity
instead of taking time away from your work.
• The idea is not for productivity improvement by improve our ability to think deeply
• You are forcing yourself to resist distraction and return your attention repeated to a well-
defined problem, it helps strengthen your distraction resisting muscle
• By forcing yourself to push your focus deeper and deeper on a single problem, it sharpens
your concentration
• This need good practise – It took dozen sessions before I began to experience real results /
Patience is needed
Two suggestions to do this better
Suggestion 1 – Be Wary of Distractions and Looping
• Your mind becomes rebellious and offer unrelated but seemingly more interesting thoughts
• When you notice your attention slipping away from the problem in hand, gently remind
yourself that you can return to that thought later, then redirect your attention back
• Distrations is the obvious enemy to defeat in developing a productive meditating habit –
Looping is equally adversary
• When faced with a hard problem, your mind will attempt to avoid excess expenditure of
energy when possible
• One way it attempts to sidestep this expenditure is by avoiding diving deeper into the
problem by instead looping over and over again on what you already know about it
• Be on guard for looping as it subverts an entire productive meditation sessin
• Once you notice you are in loop, redirect your attention towards the next step

Suggestion 2 – Structure your Deep Thinking

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 • “Thinking deeply” about a problem seems like a self-evident activity, but in reality it is not.
• When faced with a distraction-free mental landscape, a hard problem and time to think, the
next steps can become non obvious
• It is better to have some structure for this deep thinking process
• Carefully review the relevant variable for solving the problem, store it in your working
memory
• Example you are working on a book: The variables could be main points for a book chapter
• Once the relevant variables are identified, define the specific next-step question you need to
answer using these variables (How am I going to effectively open this chapter?)
• With the relevant variables stored and the next-step question identified, you now have a
specific target for your attention
• Assuming that you were able to solve your next-step question, the final step of this structured
approach to deep thinking is to consolidate your gains by reviewing clearly the answer you
identified
• At this point, you can push yourself to the next level of depth by starting the process over
• This cycle of storing variables, identifying and tacking the next-step question, then
consolidating your gains is like an intense workout routine for your concentration ability
• This will help you get more out of your productive meditation sessions and accelerate the
pace at which you improve your ability to go deep

Rule 3: Quit Social Media

First aspect about our culture’s current relation with social media
1. We increasingly recognize that these tools fragment our time and reduce our ability to
concentrate – We all recognise this, but the problem starts when we attempt to improve our
ability to work deeply. Will power is limited, and therefore the more enticing tools you have
pulling at your attention, the harder it will be to maintain focus on something important. To
master the art of deep work, therefore you must take back control of your time and attention
from the many diversions that attempt to steal them. However before fighting back the
distractions, one must better understand the battlefield.
2. The impotence with which knowledge workers currently discuss this problem of network
tools and attention – The only option was a temporary shut down of internet
The problem with this binary response to this issue is that these two choices are much too crude to
be useful. The notion to quit the internet is infeasible. Because once you quit and come back, you
are back in the fragmented state, where you started! The other alternative is accepting our current
distracted state of inevitable.
The third option: accepting that these tools are not inherently evil, and that some of them might be
quite vital to your success and happiness, but at the same time accepting that the threshold for

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allowing a site regular access to your time and attention (Not to mention your personal data) should
be much more stringent, and that most people should therefore be suing many fewer such tools.

How do we justify the use of social media? Entertainment, make friends, connect with Alumini etc.
Was a person suffering from severe deficit of entertainment options before signing up for social
media? FB added one more entertainment option to many that already existed. The friend ships are
light weighted on sending short messages back and forth on a network. These are not useful for a
user’s social life. The benefits are minor and random. If one can find some extra benefit in using this
service, then why not use it? – any-benefit mind-set
More on this mindset: Justify using a network tool if you can identify any possible benefit to its use,
or anything you might possibly miss out on you not using it. The problem with this approach is that
it ignore all negatives that come along with the tool. The services are engineered to be addictive,
robbing time and attention from activities that more directly support your professional and personal
goals (Like deep work). By using these tools enough, you arrive at the state of burned out, hyper
distracted connectivity.
The network tools are tools, which are no different from a blacksmith hammer. Historically, skilled
labors are skeptic to their encounter about new tools and their decisions about whether to adopt
them. There is no reason why they cannot do it when it comes to internet.
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 positive impact on these factors substantially outweigh its negative
impact. The three strategies that follow in this rule are designed to growth your comfort with
abandoning the any-benefit mindset and instead applying the more thoughtful craftsman method
in curating the tools that lay claim your time and attention.
Identify what matters most in your life, and then attempting to assess the impacts of various tools
on these factors – So does not reduce to a simple formula and this task needs practise and
experimentation.

Apply the Law of the Vital Few to Your Internet Habits

• First identify the main high level goals in both your professional and your personal life.
• The key is have the list limited to whats most important and to keep the descriptions suitably
high-level
• List 2 or 3 actions needed to satisfy the goal – These activities should be specific enough
• Example: Regularly read and understand the cutting-edge results in my field

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 • For each network tool you use, go through the above key activities and ask yourself if use of
the tool has a substantial positive impact, or substantially negative impact or little/No
imkpact
• Now comes the important part of the decision: Keep using this tool only if you concluded
that it has substantial positive impacts and that these outweigh the negative impact
• A author need not focus on twitter for marketing purpose; They must apply their
productivity to the goal or writing the best possible book instead trying to squeeze out a few
extra sales through inefficient author driven means.
• Is Twitter offers enough benefits to offset its drag in your time and attention (Two resources
that are especially valuable to a writer)
Instead of using facebook to connect with friends and relatives, other key activities that support this
goal are:
• Regularly take the time for meaningful connection with those who are most important to me
(Long talk, a meal, joint activity etc)
• Give of myself to those who are most important to me (E.g. Make nontrivial sacrifices that
improve their lives)
Facebook would have many benefits in your social life; why would one abandon it just because it
does not happen to help the small number of activities that we judged most important?
The benefits from social media must justify the time and attention you give to it.
The law of vital few: In many settings, 80% of given effect is due to just 20% of the possible causes.
This law holds good in our life important goals too. Many different activities can contribute to your
achieving these goals. The law of the vital few, however, reminds us that the most important 20 or
so of these activities provide the bulk of the benefit. Assuming that you could probably list
somewhere between 10 – 15 distinct and potentially beneficial activities for each of your life goals,
this law says that it is the top two or three such activities, that this strategy ask you to focus on.
Even if you accept this result, you will argue that you should not ignore the other 80% of possible
beneficial activities. It is true that these less important activities do not nearly contribute as much to
your goal as your top one or two, but they can surely provide some benefits. So why not keep them
in the mix? As long as you do not ignore the most (or more) important activities, it seems like it
cannot hurt to also support some of the less important alternatives.
The key argument that misses the point is that all activities, regardless of their importance, consume
your same limited source of time and attention. By giving your time to low impact activities, you are
taking away time you could spend on high impact activities. It is a Zero sum game. Because your
time returns substantially more rewards when invested in high impact activities than when invested
in low-impact activities, the more of it you shift to the later, the lower will be your overall benefit.

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The business world understand that maths. It is uncommon got see a company fire unproductive
client. If 80% of their profits come from 20% of their clients, then they make more money by
redirecting the energy from low revenue client to better service the small number of lucrative
contracts-each hour spend on the later returns more revenue than each hour spent on the former.
The same hold goods for professional and personal goals. By taking the time consumed on low
impact activities like finding friends in facebook and reinvesting in high impact activities like taking
a good friend out to lunch, you end up more successful in your goal.
Redirect your time on Twitter to more fruitful activities, then you are more successful.
Quit Social media
Ryan Nicodemus decided to simplify his life. He put all his belongings into a few boxes, as if he was
about to move. A packing party! Next week he did his normal routine It he needed something, he
would unpack it and put it back where it used to go. At the end of the week, he noticed that the vast
majority of his stuff remained untouched in its boxes. The key thought process is that we all think,
“What if we need this one day?” and this worry is an excuse to keep the item in question sitting
around.
Use a similar approach for Social Media. Stop using it for the next 30 days. If someone asks just
explain, but do not go your way to tell people. After 30 days of self imposed isolation ask yourself
the following two questions:
• Would the last 30 days have been notably better if I had been able to use this service?
• Did people care that I was not using this service?
If the answer is No to both, quit the service permanently. These services offer personalized
information arriving on an unpredictable intermittent schedule-making them massively addictive
and therefore capable of severely damaging your attempts to schedule and succeed with any act of
concentration. The companies that profit from your attention have succeeded with a masterful
marketing coup: convincing our culture that if you do not use their products you might miss out.
Quitting this services will free yourself from marketing message surrounding these tool. They are
not really all that important in your life. When you know that more than 200 people have
volunteered to hear what you have to say, it easy to begin to believe that our activities on these
services are important. This is a powerfully addictive feeling.
Study hacks: The blog by the author, has a handful of readers. Learnt that earning people attention
online is hard work. But in today social media, the idea is “I will pay attention to what you say if you
pay attention to what I say – Regardless of the value”. You like my content, I will like yours.
For many this 30 day experiment would be difficult and generate a lot of issues. The sad news is
that outside our closes friends and family, none would even notice that you sign off. Social media
are not necessarily as advertised, the lifeblood of our modern connected world.

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They are just products, developed by private companies, funded lavishly, marketed carefully, and
designed ultimately to capture then sell your personal information and attention to advertisers.
They might be fun, but in the scheme of your life and what you want to accomplish, they are light
weight whimsy, unimportant distraction among many threatening to derail you from something
deeper.
Do not use Internet to Entertain Yourself
In hours apart from working hours, one must engage themselves in rigorous self improvement –
Bennett in his book, How to live 24 hours a day. The least common denominator of today’s leisure
time is digital entertainment. Entertainment focussed website designed to capture and hold your
attention for as long as possible. These sites use carefully crafted titles, easy digestible contents, often
honed by algorithms to be maximally attention catching. One you read one article, you are tempted
to click on the next. Every available trick of human psychology, from listing titles as “Popular” or
“Trending” to the use of arresting photos, is used to keep you engaged. These sits are especially
harmful after the work day is over, where the freedom in your schedule enables them to become
central to your leisure time. If you are waiting in a line, they provide cognitive crutch to ensure you
eliminate any chance of boredom. As discussed in rule 2, such behaviour is dangerous, as it weakens
your mind’s general ability to resist distraction, making deep work difficult later when you really
want to concentrate. To make matters worse, even if one quits social media it is just a click away.
Put more thoughts on what you do in leisure time. In other words, this strategy suggests that when
it comes to your relaxation, don’t default to whatever catches your attention by instead dedicate
some advance thinking to the question of how you want to spend your “day within a day”. If you did
not plan you leisure time, then these addictive website take over. By giving your time to something
more quality, their grip on your attention will loosen.
So it is crucial to figure out in advance what you are going to do with your evening and weekends
before they begin. Structured hobbies are good as they generate specific actions with specific goals
to fill your time. Reading is another good option. Many have a contra view that adding structure to
your relaxation will defeat the purpose of relaxation, which many believe needs complete freedom
from plans and obligations. Wont a structured evening leave you exhausted, not refreshed for next
day work? Bennett has handled in his book as:
You say that full energy given to those 16 hours will lessen the value of the business 8 hours? Not
so, on the contrary, it will assuredly increase the value of the business 8 hours. One of the chief
things which a typical man has to learn is that the mental facilities are capable of continuous hard
activity: They do not need rest like arm or a leg. All they wanted to change-not rest except in sleep.
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. It gives you feel of living life and not just exist.

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Rule 4: Drain The Shallows
The shallow work that increasingly dominates the times and attention of knowledge workers is less
vital than it often seems in the moment. For most businesses, if you eliminated significant amounts
of this shallowness, their bottom line would be unaffected. The strategies that follow are designed
to help you ruthlessly identify the shallowness in your current schedule, then cull it down to
minimum levels – Leaving more time for the deep efforts that ultimately matter most.
You might be able to avoid checking your e-mail every ten minutes, but you wont likely last long if
you never respond to important messages. In this sense, we should see the goal of this rule as taming
shallow work’s foot print in your schedule and not eliminating it.
The next issue is the limits of cognitive capacity. Deep work is exhausting because it pushes you
towards the limit of your abilities. Anders Ericson has identified that the limit expands to something
like four hours, but rarely more. The implication is that once you have hit your deep work limit in a
given day, you will experience diminishing rewards if you try to cram in more. A typical work day
is 8 hours and most adept deep thinker cannot spend more than 4 hours in true depth. It follows
that you can safely spend half the day wallowing in the shallows without effect. The danger missed
in this analysis is how easily this amount of time can be consumed, especially once you consider the
impact of meeting, appointment, calls etc.
To Sum up: Treat shallow work with suspicious because its damager is often vastly underestimated
and its importance vastly overestimated.
Schedule every minute of your day
• We spend much of our day in auto-pilot / Not giving much thought to what we are doing to
our time
• It is difficult to prevent the trivial from creeping into every corner of your schedule if you do
not face without flinching, your current balance between deep and shallow work, and then
adopt the habit of pausing before action and asking “What make the most sense right now?”
• The idea seem to be extreme, but is needed in your question to take full advantage of the
value of deep work – So Schedule every minute of your day
• One idea is to have a book, and every page dedicated for a day with hours filled on the left
corner (Cover the full set of your working hours)
• Divide these hours into blocks and assign activities to these blocks – The minimum length of
a block can be 30 minutes
• In effect you have given every minute of your workday a job – Use this as a guide as you go
through your day
Two things happen once you start to implement
1. Your estimates are proven wrong i.e. A one hour work becomes 2 hour

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 2. Interruptions come and new obligations appear unexpected on the plate causing to deviate
from the schedule
Solution
• Revise the schedule for the remaining day
• Erase and modify your blocks / Cross out blocks or create new blocks
The goal is not to stick to schedule, but instead have a thoughtful say of what you are doing with
your time going forward. Overcome the problem of underestimating the work. Not a error, but we
consider a best case scenario. Over time you should be able to make an effort to accurately predict
the time required for the tasks. Another strategy is to have buffer blocks, if you are not sure how
long a activity will consume. These if unused can be given to other tasks.
Entertain spontaneity in your schedule. This is not about constraints, but instead give
thoughtfulness. It is a simple habit that forces you continually take a moment throughout your day
and ask: What makes sense for me to do with the time that remains?
The combination of comprehensive scheduling and willingness to adapt or modify the plan as
needed will likely experience more creative insights than someone who adopts a more spontaneous
and unstructured day in work. Without a structure, it is easy to lose time to email, social media and
web browsing. Though this is satisfying it is not conductive to creativity. With structure, you ensure
that you regularly schedule blocks to grabble with a new idea, or work deeply on something
challenging, or brain storm for a fixed period.
To Sum up: The motivation of this strategy is recognition that a deep work habit requires you to
treat your time with respect. Decide in advance of what you are going to do in each minute of the
day. It is natural to resist the idea, as it is undoubtedly easier to continue to allow the twin forces of
internal whim and external requests to drive your schedule.
Quantify the Depth of Every Activity
Another advantage of scheduling your day is know how much of time I spend on shallow work. To
help gathering insights, let us be clear on what is shallow work.
Shallow work: Noncognitive demanding, logistical style tasks, often performed with distraction.
These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.
Evaluate each activities by asking a simple (But surprising illuminating) question:
How long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized
training in my field to complete this task? Is it 50 weeks or 1 month or 1 week?
The answer to this question will help you objectively quantify the shallowness or depth of various
activities. More the time, it take… the activity can be suitable for deep work (These are tasks that
leverage your expertise).

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How to use this strategy? Once you know your activities are shallow or deep, give more time to deep
activities.
More Tips
• Reduce the shallowness in existing projects
• Say no to projects that are shallow
• Instead of weekly status meeting, have results driven meeting
• Not every mails need to be responded quickly to every mail that you are CCed
Finish your work by 5.30
• Do not send emails after 5:30 – This is called as fixed schedule priority. This can have
powerful benefits
• It is difficult in the moment to turn down a shallow commitment that seems harmless in
isolation i.e. Invitation for a coffee
• A commitment to fixed schedule priority brings in a scarcity mindset. Any obligation beyond
your deepest effort is suspect and seen potentially disruptive.
• This is a meta habit, that is simple to adopt but broad in its impact
• This can be one behaviour which can reorient your focus
Other aspects:
• By ruthlessly reducing the shallow activities while preserving the deep frees up time without
diminishing the amount of new value we generate.
• Infact reducing shallow frees up more energy for the deep alternative
• Due to the limits of time, a careful thinking is needed about our habits, which will lead to
more value produced as compared to longer but less organized schedules.
Become Hard to Reach
Tip #1: Make people who send you E-mail do more work
• Have a sender filter. Ask the correspondents to filter themselves before attempting to contact
you. You mention that you would reply on these conditions.
• The sender filter sets the right expectations of whether they can expect a reply or on what
conditions can a reply be expected
• A long list of unread message generates a sense of obligation – Ignore all, nothing would
happen this would also be psychologically freeing
• To do more work ask people to refer the FAQ which as response to most of the questions
and who passes it over them, Herbert makes to fill a form and also pay a small fee for
communicating with him
• This fee is not about making extra money, but it is instead about selecting for individuals
who are serious about receiving and acting on advice

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 • Another approach is ask for promises: (1) Not asking response to questions that one can find
in Google (2) No spamming and (3) Promise to do a good deed to a stranger if the response
was within 23 hours / Only after checking all these does the message box to type the email
appears
Inbox is heterogenous to the extend that all messages regardless of purpose or sender arrive in the
same undifferentiated inbox, and there is an expectation that every messages deserves a timely
response. A sender filter is a small but useful step to reclaim some control over your time and
attention.
Tip #2: Do More Work when you send or Reply to E-mails
Common emails: It was great to meet you last week. I would love to follow up on some of the issues
we discussed. Do you want to grab coffee?
• Interrogative emails generate an initial instinct to dash off the quickest possible response
that will clear the message, temporarily out of your inbox
• Quick response only give minor relief and it comes back to the sender court again – There
are back and forth emails draining your time and energy
• Take a pause a moment before replying and take the time to reply: what is this project and
what best reply or process for bringing this project to a successful completion – Process
centric approach to email
• This is designed to minimize both the number of emails you receive and the mental chatter
they generate
Sample response:
List location and few time options.
Email everything about our discussion / Once received I will add it with points from my own
memory of the discussion. I will highlight the two or three most important promising next steps.
We can the connect to discuss on these steps sometimes next week.
Benefits of this approach
• Reduce the number of emails in your inbox. In turn reduces the time spend in your inbox
and reduces the brainpower you must expend when you process them.
• A good response immediately closes the loop. A mail you send or receive is like a squats in
your mental landscape, like something on your plate. Gives a sense that it is brought to your
attention and eventually needs to be addressed. Bring other party to speed, and less mental
clutter. This increases the mental resources for deep thinking.
This is not something natural for us. Spend more time in thinking before replying. It might look
that you are spending more time on em-mail. But this extra minutes spend will save more minutes
reading and responding to unnecessary extra messages later.

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Tip #3: Do not respond
Default response is not to respond. It is the sender’s responsibility to convince me that a reply is
worthwhile
I love to stop by sometime to talk about Topic X, are you available?
This is very vague and will generate a series of communications. Available – When? To expect a
reply try to be more precise like below.
I am working in Project X. Is it ok that I stop in the last 15 minutes of office hours this Thursday to
explain the challenges in details and also see if it might complement your current project.
This minimises the effort needed from responder end.

Professional Email Sorting

Do not reply to an email message if any of the following applies
• It is ambiguous or otherwise makes it hard for you to generate a reasonable response
• It is not a question or proposal that interests you
• Nothing really good would happen if you respond and nothing really bad would happen if
you do not respond
This can be uncomfortable to start with because it will cause you to break a key convention currently
surrounding emails: replies are assumed. Some people might be confused at most. That fact that
you did not quickly reply to their email is not a central one in their life. Once you get past the
discomfort of this approach you will begin to experience its rewards.
The approach here is to reduce the number of emails and also ignore those that are not easy to
process.

Conclusion
• A commitment to deep work is not a moral stance and is not a philosophical statement
• It is a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate in a skill that gets things done
• Deep life is of course not for everybody – It requires many hard work and drastic change in
your habits
• Sidestep comforts and fears, and instead struggle to deploy your mind to its fullest capacity
to create things that matter

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