Deep Work

Cal Newport

Book Overview from the Publisher

One of the most valuable skills in our economy is becoming increasingly rare. If you master this skill,
you'll achieve extraordinary results.

Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It's a skill that
allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work
will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from
craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first
century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep-spending their days instead in a
frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there's a better way.

In DEEP WORK, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age.
Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite. Dividing this book
into two parts, he first makes the case that in almost any profession, cultivating a deep work ethic will
produce massive benefits. He then presents a rigorous training regimen, presented as a series of four
"rules," for transforming your mind and habits to support this skill.

A mix of cultural criticism and actionable advice, DEEP WORK takes the reader on a journey through
memorable stories -- from Carl Jung building a stone tower in the woods to focus his mind, to a social
media pioneer buying a round-trip business class ticket to Tokyo to write a book free from distraction in
the air -- and no-nonsense advice, such as the claim that most serious professionals should quit social
media and that you should practice being bored. DEEP WORK is an indispensable guide to anyone
seeking focused success in a distracted world.

KEY POINTS COVERED IN THIS SUMMARY:

1. Myelination ​- What’s actually taking place in our brain when we
focus on one thing (and otherwise)
2. Embrace Boredom ​- How boredom is helping us and how we can
retrain our brain to create this free space
3. 4 Modes -​ Learn the 4 modes of thinking to get to deep work
4. Disconnect Fully ​- How disconnecting benefits you and how to
create your own shutdown ritual
5. Create Rituals ​- Define your own systems in order to do deep work
6. Prevent Attention Residue ​- How we get attention residue and how
it’s preventing us from doing deep work

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 7. Work Output ​- 2 factors that are major players in the work output
equation
8. Plan Your Leisure - How to plan your leisure time in ways that
would benefit you the most

Deep work is state wherein you’re focusing without distraction on a cognitively demanding
task.

Here are 8 key points from the book.

1) Myelination

From a very high level brain chemistry point of view, there are billions of neurons in our brain.
When we are thinking about one thing, focusing on one thing, these neuronal connections are
firing in isolation again and again.

Neuronal connections fire again and again when we’re focusing on one thing to the exclusion of
everything else. What happens is that a sheath of insulation (called myelin) forms around that
circuit, allowing that circuit to fire much faster, much easier, and much more consistently in the
future. This process is called m​ yelination​.

The effect of myelination:

● Allows us to get better at that one thing (we are focusing on) much faster
● Then we can move on to the next one and the next one and make each of these
connections faster and deeper

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When myelination does not happen:
● If we are not focused
● If we are spraying our attention all over the place
● We're never getting any long-term value out of our work

2) Embrace Boredom

To be able to do deep work and high-quality work, we have to embrace boredom.

This means we have to train our brain so that it's not constantly addicted to things that are
taking us away from our highest quality work. These include: addiction to novelty, distractions,
and attention switches.

Examples of that constant urge for novelty:

● Social media
● Email
● Checking your phone

What these urges do:

● Causes our brain to constantly delve into attention switches
● Distracting us from what is important to us
● Doesn't give our brain the time and the space to think on what is really important

Only when we shut down all this distraction and attention-switching and only when we retrain
our brain can we have that free time to think cleanly.

When we embrace boredom -

● We actually allow our brain to be able to think clearly on the important things that are
under the surface.
● Our unconscious now has the space to be able to think deeply on stuff that is important.

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You may not be consciously aware of this, but every time you switch to a new task or just check
Facebook or Twitter or email or phone or whatever it is, you’re taking yourself away from that
clean attention space that you created for your important work.

Action Item: Schedule internet time

● Don’t make internet time available on your calendar all the time but in stricter schedule
● Set internet time only for a certain period of time in the calendar during the day and
that's it. That’s the only time you will check your social media or email or news or any
other distracting sites.
● Doing this trains your brain to embrace the free time that is available to you rather than
just constantly use it for novelty, distractions, and attention switches.

3) 4 Modes of Deep Work

There are various modes of thinking that can get yourself in to practice deep work.

1. Monastic
○ Focusing on one thing for extended periods of time - weeks or even
months.
○ One of the most difficult ones, almost being like a monk
○ You minimize all external obligations
○ Everything else does not matter except for the most important work that
you're doing
○ You just focus on that deep work thing, you are dedicated to it

2. Bimodal
○ Oscillating between Days of Deep Work and days of Non-Deep Work
○ A work pattern that you can design for yourself. Example: 4 four days of
deep work and 3 days of Non-deep Work, Shallow work or Weekend.

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 ○ Example: Microsoft CEO Bill Gates goes on a think week, where he does
not do any office work and is just focused on his reading and thinking
○ Other examples:
■ Work 1 week on, 1 week off
■ Do one kind of work for one month and then do another kind of
work for another month’s period of time

● Rhythmic
○ Probably the most consistent one in all 4 modes
○ Have a routine, ritual, or process where you’ll just start at ​a certain time
every given day​ and follow through. You have a routine.
○ Or you start with ​a certain trigger ​and you do deep work every day as a
result of that trigger. You have a routine.
○ You minimize the need for your willpower and you follow through
without any interruptions

● Journalistic
○ A lot of times when we are running a business or any project, it's possible
we will get many interruptions from the external world. So we may not
be able to keep a rhythmic or bimodal or monastic mode going.
○ In the journalistic mode, you just take chunks of time whenever they
become available to you and you work on deep work
○ Identify chunks of time (30 Minutes + ) when you will work on your deep
work and then let the other times be used for any other work.
○ Just look at your calendar and find the times where you can do that deep
work and block it out so you could keep going back to your deep work
whenever you have time available for it.

4) Disconnect Fully

A counterintuitive strategy to deep work is to disconnect fully after you've done your day's
worth of work.

Here’s how you do it.

● You stop at a certain time of the day
● You don't look back at work again until the next morning
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 ● Allow yourself to rest and recuperate and recharge your brain

Only when you allow yourself to disconnect fully do you give your unconscious ​brain the space
to think about those ideas that you've been trying to figure out.

The unconscious ​will come up with solutions that you couldn't have come up with just your
conscious thinking. Therefore:

● Allow your conscious thinking to shut down for a while

● Don’t think about that problem you were working on
● Don’t distract yourself with the shallow stuff

The counterintuitive thing about this whole thing is that you might think your overall output will
decrease, ​but the truth is when you disconnect completely, ​your work output actually goes up​.

This is because you have a ​limited amount of time in which you need to do work on any given
day.

● You are allowing your subconscious to work on stuff that your conscious is not able to
find solutions for.
● You are deeply engaged
● This allows you to get your most powerful work done.

Action Item: Have a shutdown ritual

○ Identify at what time you will shut down for the day
○ Create a shutdown ritual as to how you will stop working any given day
○ Cal Newport likes to say to himself, “​shutdown complete”​, and that's when he
stops. No more conscious thinking on any work at that point.

5) Create Rituals

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If you want to do quality work, if you want to create something great, then you must create
rituals around that great work that you need to do the most.

Why rituals?
● Willpower is a very limited resource. A lot of people bank on this, and they shouldn’t.
● Good intentions don't work as well because intentions are here today, gone tomorrow.
● Same goes with motivation

The key is to say that we use the willpower and all its attributes (good intentions and
motivation) to create rituals, to create systems, to create routines.

Now you can create rituals around the specific time of the day or on specific triggers.

EXAMPLES - You say to yourself:

● Every morning at 7:00 AM I sit down to create my content for 5 hours or 4 hours or 2
hours, whatever it might be.
● Whenever I wake up and I'm done with my meditation, I sit down to work for two hours,
no matter what.
● Another system that I'm trying out right now is that I do not eat until I get my most
important work done. This usually means 6-8 hours in the morning after I wake up. I
don't eat because I have to get the most important work done. Now that is a really
defined ritual, a well-defined routine and well-defined system. It’s a sacrifice I have to
make in order to do something great.

Define your own rituals, your own systems, to create deep work, but realize you cannot bank on
willpower, on good intentions, or motivation to get it done.

6) Attention Residue

One of the fundamental problems with time management is the fact that people are constantly
switching from task to task to another task and so on.
● They think that somehow their brains are able to cut cleanly from one task to another
without any loss in productivity.
● The problem is, when we switch from task A to B to C to D, the brain is still chewing on
the previous task that you were working on.
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The result: ​attention residue​ from the previous task

And when we keep switching between tasks, we have a lot of attention residue from each of
these tasks. In effect, we cannot do any high-quality work if we keep accumulating attention
residue from other tasks. Instead, we're constantly creating a big mess.

Action Item: The only way to create high quality work

● Be very deliberate about what you're going to focus on
● Kill that attention residue by working on only one thing at a time for an extended period
of time
● Then switch onto the next thing that avoids any attention residue and gives you the
highest productivity possible.

7. Work Output = Time x Focus

Most people believe that their work output is just a function of the amount of time they put into
any work, but the truth is:

Your work output is a function of the ​time ​you put x

​ ​ the i​ ntensity of your focus​.

Work = Time x Intensity of Focus

Therefore, ​the higher your focus on that task, the more productive you will be.

In fact, the key to being highly productive is to increase your focus, increase your concentration,
and that is what deep work is really all about.

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We cannot increase time beyond a certain amount because we only have 24 hours a day, but
we could certainly increase the focus, the concentration, the intensity we bring to any task.

8) Plan Your Leisure Time

Another counterintuitive idea to deep work is to actually be very deliberate about your leisure
time.

Action Item: How to plan your leisure time:

● Put blocks of time into your calendar for fun stuff
● Be very thorough with it. Think through what you're going to do.
● Things to include could be
○ a hobby
○ hanging out with certain people
○ Cooking
○ working out
○ being out in nature
● There are so many different ways you can plan your leisure activities, whatever it might
be. Just make it a point to enjoy them thoroughly.

Most people just default to what is available, what is in front of them. They don't plan their
leisure time, so they will just default to some sort of social media, email, television, their tablet,
their phone, whatever it might be.

These can threaten deep work capabilities.

So our job is to make sure we plan our leisure time in such a way that
● We put thought into it
● We enjoy it thoroughly
● We’re fully engaged

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● We're giving it our best rather than living in a gray zone where we're just checking
some social media or checking some online website and then going back to work and
back and forth
● We get to enjoy our time with people, hobbies, nature and all that matters to us

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