Deep Work - Cal Newport

Deep Wok by Cal Newport; emphasis Winifred Gallagher's says " I'll live the focused life, because it's the best kind there is"

Part I: The Idea - Is to convene that the deep work hypothesis is true.

1) Valuable: Two core abilities for thriving in the New Economy, which would depend on your ability to perform deep work are:

i. The ability to quickly master hard things. - If you can't learn, you can't thrive.

As mentioned by Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges who penned 'The intellectual life' -"Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converging rays of attention. Let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea."

To be great at something is to be well myelinated. The core components usually identified for the deliberate practice actually required are:
a. Focusing attention tightly on a specific skill you're trying to improve or an idea you're trying to master;
b. Receive feedback, to correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it's most productive.

ii. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

One method is batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches.
High-quality work produced = (Time spent)*(Intensity of Focus)

The type of work that optimize your performance is deep work. Unless there is a strong evidence that distraction is important , we need to give serious consideration to depth.

2) Rare: With so many trends prioritized, they are like adding insult to injury, decreasing one's ability to go deep.
i. Facebook in Silicon Valley, encourage people to stay out in the open because they believe in serendipity - and people walking by each other teaching new things.
ii. Instant messaging has become the way of communication, even important.
iii. Need to maintain a social media presence. With the cult of internet, there is a culture of technopoly, where as Aldous Huxley outlined in his book 'Brave New World' - "It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant.

Deep work is build on values like quality, craftsmanship and mastery that are decidedly old-fashioned and non technological.

3) Meaningful: Deep life is not only economically lucrative, but also a life well lived. There are Neurological, Psychological and philosophical arguments for depth in work. Deep work is increasingly valuable in our economy, at the same time it is also becoming rare; this represents a classic market mismatch. Therefore if your cultivate this skill, you'll thrive professionally. A deep life is a good life, anyway you look at it.


Part 2: The Rules - Teaches how to take advantage of this reality by training brain, and transforming work habits to place deep work at the core of professional life. Will help simulate the effect of Deep work, in otherwise distracted world.

1) Work Deeply : Become a disciple of depth in a shallow world. It is tough to replace distraction with focus, there is always an urge to turn attention to things superficial. With great regularity and strength it complicates efforts to concentrate on hard things. Desire turn out to be the norm, not an exception - like eating, sleeping, sex, emails, social networking sites, surfing web, listening to music, watching television. The depth philosophy can be monastic (eliminate or minimise shallow obligations), bimodal (divide time, dedicate clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits, and leave rest open to everything else), rhythmic (transform it, into simple regular habit), Journalistic (where you fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule). There is no on correct deep work ritual - it would depend on both the person and the type of project pursued. An effective ritual must address questions like: Where you'll work and for how long?; How you'll work once you start to work; How you'll support your work? Sometimes to go deep, your must first go big : Don't work alone working with someone will help push each other toward deeper level of depth, execute like a business. The 4 disciplines of execution known as 4DX are: Focus on the wildly important, act on the lead measures, keep a compelling scoreboard, create a cadence of accountability. At times it is good to be lazy, because, downtime aids insight, it helps recharge the energy needed to work deeply, the work that evening downtime replaces is usually not that important, - the three reasons support the general strategy of maintaining a strict endpoint to workday. Once workday shut's down, you cannot allow even the smallest incursion of professional concerns into your field of attention; have a shut down ritual ensuring that every incomplete task goal or project has been reviewed and for each you have plan, and it's captured. Committing to a specific plan for a goal may not only facilitate attainment of the goal, but may also free cognitive resources for other pursuits. Regularly resting your brain improves the quality of your deep work. When you work, work hard. When you're done, be done. You'r email response time might suffer, but your volume of work will go up.

To summaries Rule 1 tells us how to integrate deep work into schedule and support it with routines and rituals designed to help consistently reach current limit of concentration ability.

Rule 2 to 4 present among other things, strategies for training your concentration ability and fighting back encroaching distractions.

2) Embrace Boredom : This will help you significantly improve the limits. The strategies that follow are motivated by the key idea that getting the most out of your deep work habit requires training and it must address two goals viz. improving your ability to concentrate intensely and overcoming your desire for distraction. You don't take break from distractions, eliminate it; take breaks from focus. Three important points to consider are: i) This strategy works even if your job requires lots of internet use and/or prompt e-mail replies. ii) Regardless of how you schedule your internet blocks, you must keep the time outside these blocks absolutely free from internet use. iii) Scheduling internet use at home as well as at work can further improve your concentration training. Meditate productively, be wary of distractions and loopings, structure your deep thinking.

3) Quit Social Media

4) Drain the Shallows :Don't autopilot, schedule every minute of your day. At first you would not know how much time you would require for most things, block expected time with additional block that has a split purpose. Be liberal with your use of task blocks. Combination of comprehensive scheduling and a willingness to adapt or modify the plan as needed will likely experience more creative insights than someone who adopts a more traditionally spontaneous approach where the day is left open and unstructured. Without sturcture it is easy to allow your time to devolve inot the shallow - email, social media, web surfing. This type of shallow behavior, though satisfying in the moment, is not conducive to creativity. With structure, on the other hand, you can ensure that you regularly schedule blocks to grapple with a new idea, or work deeply on the type of commitment more likely to instigate innovation. Treat your time with respect. Shallow work are non cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate. When you have multiple task, to priorities, ask 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. Quantifying the depth of every activity helps. To accomplish tricky goals, ask your boss for a shallow work budget, finish your work by 5.30, have fixed schedule productivity, become hard to reach. Resistance is not futile, you have more control over your electronic communication than you might at first assume. Three tips to regain authority are : 1) Make people who send you email do more work, 2) Do more work when you send or reply to email. The process centric approach will help reduce the number of emails in your inbox, thereby reducing time and brainpower using Inbox and will help 'Close the loop' easily. 3) Don't respond.

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.

Indeed "Deep Work is an indispensable guide to anyone seeking focused success in a distracted world."