Deep Work Book (Photo Credit: Google Photo)
Book introduction
“Deep Work” by Cal Newport, a classical book published in 2016, is a book about how to become a deep worker by doing work deeply.
After publishing the book, it becomes popular day by day for its philosophy and contents. This book is an indispensable guide to anyone seeking focused success in a distracted world. It presents its readers with the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. The book presents a rigorous training regimen, presented as a series of four “rules,” for transforming your mind and habits to support this skill.
About Author
Calvin C. Newport is an American nonfiction author and an assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown University. He runs the popular website Study Hacks: Decoding Patterns of Success. He is also the author of many famous and popular books outside of Deep Work.
High-level Overview
This book starts with describing what deep work and shallow work mean and tries to draw a comparison. Then gradually try to establish the value of deep work in our day-to-day life. How shallow work is less effective than deep work, and in modern work, all the modern things are how they distract us from performing deep work.
The author tries to break down the book into two parts. The first part tries to draw attention to why deep work is valuable by mentioning real-life examples and the work styles of some well-known people. The second part is all about the rules and tips that anyone can follow and perform deep work in his life.
Insights and Learning
👉 What is deep work?
Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.
In a word, the type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work.
👉 What is shallow work?
Non-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.
In a word, shallow work is the type of work that is done in distracted mode and just done with a low performance.
👉 Deep work hypothesis?
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.
👉 Why is deep work needed?
In this modern competitive world, to remain valuable and become a winner in our economy, we need:
- The ability to quickly master hard things.
- The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.
And that’s why deep work comes in light. Because deep work helps you:
- Quickly learn hard things.
- Produce at an elite level.
- Speed up your work and ensure quality.
👉 Barriers to deep work?
To do deep work, you need to be able to concentrate intensely without distraction for long stretches of time. The barriers to doing this are:
- Having so many shallow work (low-value) obligations that you have little or no time for deep work
- A schedule that doesn’t have long stretches of time free to focus on one task
- An environment full of external distractions such as noisy neighbors or email notifications
- An inability to concentrate without interruption from internal distractions, such as the urge to check your phone
Follows are strategies to help you overcome these barriers
👉 The Principle of Least Resistance
In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors on the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviors that are easiest in that moment.
👉 Rules and Tips to achieve deep work
🚀 Work deeply means distraction-free.
🚀 Prioritize your work and focus on the wildly important one first.
🚀Being lazy means taking a break when needed. That is making a work-life balance.
🚀Schedule your deep work timeline. It means setting a goal and timeline for focus work to achieve that goal.
🚀 Embrace the boredom because the ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained.
🚀 Don’t take breaks from distractions; take breaks from focus.
🚀 Minimize your internet and social media use and make sure the use is only for good and not for distraction of your focus (deep work).
🚀 Quantify all the work and drain the shallow work.
🚀Schedule your day and work at the beginning of your day.
Conclusion
To survive in the modern world, your work needs to be productive and speedy. To achieve what the world demands from us, we need deep work. And by following rules, tips, and practice, we can do deep work.
Though this book suggests some points about quitting social media, emails, and messages for a period of time for distraction-free work, in reality, in our office, we just can’t practice those for our job nature. Yeah, but we can minimize for sure.
Always remember, “A deep life is a good life.”