Artsy Shot: Shine Bright like a Diamond in the Sky (© Alexander Weis Photography)
Date first published: January 24, 2021
Date last edited: January 24, 2021
Estimated reading time: 10 min
[NB: This is my personal summary of the book Deep Work by Cal Newport; that is, if you have not read the actual book, parts of this summary might be incomprehensible, confusing, disturbing or even fatal, which is why I highly recommend reading the book in full to everyone.]
About the Book (borrowed from Amazon.de)
One of the most valuable skills in our economy is becoming increasingly rare.
‘Deep work’ is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. Coined by the author on his popular blog Study Hacks, deep work will make you better at what you do, achieve more in less time and provide the sense of true fulfilment that comes from mastery of a skill. In short, deep work is like a superpower in our increasingly competitive economy.
And yet most people, whether knowledge workers in noisy open-plan offices or creatives struggling to sharpen their vision, have lost the ability to go deep – spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realising there’s a better way.
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 to Tokyo to write a book free from distraction in the air – and surprising suggestions, such as the claim that most professionals should quit social media and that everyone should practise being bored. Deep Work will point the way to anyone seeking focused success in a distracted world.
Introduction
Definition: Deep work are professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to your limit. These efforts will create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.
Definition: Shallow work are cognitively 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.
Theorem: The deep work hypothesis states that the ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.
Part 1
Chapter 1: Deep Work is Valuable
Learn and produce. That’s pretty much the key to success.
In order to achieve mastery at something, you need to perform deliberate practice.
Email as well as any and all kind of disturbing notifications are toxic for you productivity. In that sense: get rid of them. All of them.
Chapter 2: Deep Work is Rare
Open offices, instant messaging, and social media suck. What makes life even more complicated is that it’s hardly possible to measure either their costs or benefits.
CC’d emails suck; living out of your inbox sucks; notifications suck; and meetings suck. That is, go offline more often and turn off all kinds of notifications.
Busyness as proxy for productivity: in the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner (like sending as many emails as possible), which benefits no one.
Chapter 3: Deep Work is Meaningful
Our brains construct a worldview based on what we pay attention to. If you focus on a cancer diagnosis, you and your life become unhappy and dark, but if you focus instead on an evening martini, you and your life become more pleasant – even though the circumstances are the same. Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love – is the sum of what you focus on (“you create your own reality”).
Frequently checking your inbox ensures that your mind will construct an understanding of your working life that’s dominated by stress, irritation, frustration, and triviality. The world represented by your inbox, in other words, isn’t a pleasant world to inhabit. A workday driven by the shallow, from a neurological perspective, is likely to be a draining and upsetting day, even if most of the shallow things that capture your attention seem harmless or fun.
Part 2
Rule #1: Work Deeply
You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. There are four types of deep work scheduling: the monastic philosophy (“I don’t have email”), the bimodal philosophy (“I lock myself away for days to work deeply”), the rhythmic philosophy (“I plan chunks of time to get deep work done”), and the journalistic philosophy (“I get deep work done whenever I got a spare minute”).
Rituals help you to get the most out of your deep work sessions: where you’ll work and for how long (“close the office door”); how you’ll work once you start to work (“no internet during deep work”); and how you’ll support your work (“start with a cup of coffee or whatever”).
Make grand gestures: “J. K. Rowling rented herself a room in a luxury hotel to finish the final Harry Potter book.”
Be lazy. At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning; that is no after dinner email check, no mental replays of conversations, and no scheming about how to handle an upcoming challenge; shut down work thinking completely. If you need more time, then extend your workday, but once you shut down, your mind must be left free to encounter leisure.
Why is that so?
- Downtime aids insights. By means of unconscious thinking huge problems can be solved.
- Downtime helps recharge the energy needed to work deeply. To concentrate requires directed attention. This resource is finite: if you exhaust it, you struggle to concentrate. This is called attention fatigue. It is very important to have a mental respite like having a casual conversation with a friend, listening to music while making dinner or going for a run; the types of activities that will fill your time in the evening if you can force a work shutdown; they play the same attention restoring role as walking in nature. On the other hand, if you keep interrupting your evening to check and respond to email, or put aside a few hours after dinner to catch up on an approaching deadline, you are robbing your directed attention centers of the uninterrupted rest they need for restoration. Even if these work dashes consume only small amount of time, they prevent you from reaching the levels of deeper relaxation in which the tension restoration cannot occur. Only the confidence that you are done with work until the next day with your brain to downshift to level where can begin to recharge for the next day to follow. Put another way, trying to squeeze a little more work out a few evenings might reduce your effectiveness the next day enough that you end up getting less done but if you had instead respected a shutdown.
- The work the evening downtime replaces is usually not that important. By deferring evening work, in other words, you are not missing out on much of importance.
Once your workday shuts down, you cannot allow even the smallest intrusion of professional concerns into your field of attention. This includes, crucially, checking email, as well as browsing work related websites. In both cases, even a brief introduction of work can generate a self-reinforcing stream of distraction that impedes the shutdown advantages described earlier for a long time to follow. Furthermore, it is very important to support your commitment to shutting down with a strict shut down ritual that you use at the end of the workday to maximize the probability to succeed. The process should be a series of steps you always conduct, one after another. When you’re done have a set phrase you say that indicates completion like “shutdown complete”.
When you work, work hard. When you are done, be done. Your average email response time might suffer some, but you will more than make up for this with the sheer volume truly important work produced during the day and your refreshed ability to dive deeper than you exhausted peers.
Rule #2: Embrace Boredom
People who multitask all the time can’t manage a working memory. They are chronically distracted. They are pretty much mental wrecks. If every moment of potential boredom in life – say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in the restaurant until a friend arrives – is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the mental wrecks, it’s not ready for deep work, even if you regularly scheduled time to practice this concentration.
Don’t take breaks from the distraction, instead take breaks from focus: schedule offline and internet blocks and make sure you are strict about them. Do the same out of work, that is stop using your smartphone all the time. Instead, force yourself to celebrate boredom, even if it’s hard in the beginning (imagine waiting in a line without your phone).
The Roosevelt strategy: set yourself deadlines for work that require you to finish your work in much less time that usually takes you. This should, of course, be realistic but doing this requires you to really concentrate and not be distracted in order to finish the task at hand on time.
Make use of productive meditation, that is taking a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally – walking, jogging, driving, – and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem.
Rule #3: Quit Social Media
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 impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impact.
The Pareto principle is important to bear in mind, too. Focus on the 20% of the tasks that help you achieve 80% your goal as the remaining 80% contribute less and consume just as much of your time and energy.
Rule #4: Drain the Shallows
Schedule every minute of your day: to summarize, the motivation for the strategy is the recognition that a deep work habit requires you to treat your time with respect. A good first step toward this respectful handling the advice outlined here: decide in advance what you’re going to do with every minute of your workday. It’s natural, at first, 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. But you must overcome this distrust of structure if you want to approach your true potential as someone who creates things that matter.
Quantify the depth of every activity: for every task you do, ask yourself how long it would take a smart recent university graduate to do the task for you. Then tilt your work time to the tasks for which it would take long to replace you.
Ask your boss for a shallow work budget: after tracking down how much time you spend on each and every of your tasks, try to aim at a proportion of 30 to 50% of shallow work as opposed to deep work. Before doing that, it could be wise to talk to your boss.
Finish your work by some fixed time of day: fixed-schedule productivity is simple but has a broad impact. In essence, the idea is that artificial limits on your workday can make you more successful.
Tip #1: Become hard to reach; that is, make people who send you email do more work. (AW: That is supposed to mean that you should make it harder for them to reach you but overloading people who send you emails with work could also be rather effective.) Install “sender filters” to all the places where your email address is such that i) people think twice before emailing and ii) they don’t mind receiving no answer.
Tip #2: Do more work when you send or reply to emails. When someone sends you a message that is obviously gonna result in a lot of back and forth, apply a process-centric approach in order to minimize the number of emails received and the amount of mental clutter they generate. The way to get this done is by thinking about the “implied project” of an email, summarize it and describe all the steps necessary for its completion. That also means that you should not reply as quickly as possible just “to get something out of your way” as this will lead to much more work in total.
Tip #3: Don’t respond. Do not respond if nothing really good would happen if you did respond and nothing really bad would happen if you didn’t.
Conclusion
You should probably start tracking your workdays for a month to find out what you are doing and for how long. This is most def going to make you realize how scattered your work is.
[AW: The rest of the conclusion focuses mostly on how smart Cal Newport is; I spare you that.]