Deep Work: Book Notes
The most important book for your future?
Hey friend,
Are you someone who …
Feels like you’re missing depth in life?
Fears your job will get automated?
Can’t focus or be productive?
Want to get ahead in life?
Then Deep Work is the book for you.
The Book in 3 Sentences
Concentration is a skill, and there’s ample evidence to suggest that many minor day-to-day distractions significantly impair our abilities to focus, and, therefore, make us less valuable in the knowledge economy.
Many of us make the mistake of instantly adopting the newest high tech tool to be “with the times,” but we instead should be much more nuanced and consider the tradeoffs of these tools on our professional and personal goals.
The ability to concentrate and do Deep Work is valuable, rare, and meaningful and almost everyone could benefit from it, both professionally and in personal life.
What Is Deep Work?
Deep Work: “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capacities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”
Deep Work is a long, focused work session with zero distractions. It’s doing your intellectual work in long, uninterrupted stretches.
The aim is to do 3-4 hours a day, 5 days a week.
This could be writing, coding, solving proofs, or even homework.*
Why Does Deep Work Matter?
The ability to single-task for a few hours every day without distraction is how you will get ahead in the future.
With the growth of technology, outsourcing, and automation, the people who thrive in the future will be the superstars in their field and those who know how to program computers.
To be valuable in the future, you must be able to:
Master new skills fast
Produce lots of high quality work
Deep Work is vital for achieving these two things and getting the most out of your creative output.
“If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.”
Deep Work is also incredibly meaningful, especially in the sense that we humans are happy when we’re striving for something challenging.
Shallow Work
Shallow Work: non cognitively demanding tasks, often performed while distracted (like emails). They’re logistical style tasks that don’t create much value in the world and are easy to replicate.
Deep Work is becoming more valuable and more rare, with businesses trending towards open offices. While these trends favor collaboration in the short run, the long-run impact of distraction can permanently disrupt our ability to concentrate and do Deep Work.
So why do businesses operate like this? Because unlike the industrial economy where you could physically see how much work you accomplished, it’s different today. It’s difficult to measure someone’s direct contribution to a company.
As a result, companies have to rely on “busyness” metrics like emails answered because their employees lack a better way to show their exact value to a company.
Fragmented Attention
Constant attention flipping has been well studied: it rewires your brain permanently, with a negative long-lasting impact. People who multitask can’t filter out irrelevancy, manage their memory, and are chronically distracted.
This is not saying that the Internet and social media alone reduce our ability to focus, but that constant switching at the slightest hint of boredom does.
If you’re used to checking your phone the moment you get understimulated, you won’t be able to achieve the intense focus needed to do Deep Work.
You must learn to be bored again. If you can’t be bored, you can’t do Deep Work and you’ll likely be less valuable and successful in the future.
Training Concentration
Concentration is a muscle, and for most of us, it’s severely atrophied.
Think about the last time you picked up something to read. How long was it until you got the urge to check your phone?
Probably a few minutes. We crave distraction.
The author provides a few solutions to train your concentration:
Don’t schedule productivity. Schedule distraction and make focus and engagement the default in your life. Try scheduling times to use the Internet and be strict about not using it outside those times.
Productive meditation: while you’re occupied physically but not mentally (ie doing a walk), focus and work out a problem. It’s like mindfulness meditation, where once you realize you’re distracted, you return to the problem you’re trying to solve. This is surprisingly productive: I’ve outlined a few Tweets just while walking.
Memorize a deck of cards. This is a lot easier than it seems. Amazingly, elite memory champions don’t have better memories but just better attention spans.
How to Do Deep Work
Everyone has limited willpower. We resist urges all day: food, checking email, watching TV, and much more.
To do our best Deep Work, we must carefully craft our environment, completely free from distractions.
Use smart habits and rituals to minimize the amount of willpower needed to get into a state of deep concentration:
Give yourself time constraints - each session shouldn’t be open ended
Get out of the house and find a quiet workspace to devote to Deep Work
Put your phone on Airplane Mode and put it out of sight
Make your task a daily habit like Jerry Seinfeld
Have a tidy desk (this works really well!)
Work in full screen mode
Getting in an undistracted work session of 3-4 hours is surprisingly difficult to do, with different Shallow Work tasks scattered throughout the day. To get started fitting Deep Work in, schedule every minute of your day, in blocks of time. Batch similar tasks together, like reading all your emails and texts.
The point isn’t to be rigid. You’ll probably need to adjust your schedule many times, which is fine. The goal is to be very thoughtful: structure is what allows us to maximize our brain and human potential and to do Deep Work. Some of the best thinkers (like Darwin) had routines.
“Without structure, it’s easy to allow your time to devolve into the shallow—email, social media, Web surfing. This type of shallow behavior, though satisfying in the moment, is not conducive to creativity.”
Choose Your Social Media Carefully
Many of us use social media because there’s something good about it or it feels like we’re missing out on it if we don’t use it.
You must keep in mind that these tools were designed by the smartest engineers in the world to access your time and attention.
Use the Craftsman Approach to Selecting Tools: “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 impacts”
Here’s how you can apply this:
Identify your main personal and professional high-level goals. These should be a few broad goals. For example, to be a good parent, to be a good friend, or an effective student.
Identify the 2-3 most important activities to help satisfy this goal. Specific, but not one-time things. Activities that are regular. For example, have coffee every Saturday, or do 2 hours of homework every night.
Cost Benefit Analysis: Does the use of this tool have a substantially positive effect, a substantially negative effect, or little impact on my regular and successful participation in an activity?
This largely depends on the person. The question isn’t whether the tool offers some benefits, but enough benefits.
For example, most people want deep relationships and to do good work. So does using TikTok truly help you do that?
For me, the costs of using Tik Tok and Snapchat far outweigh the benefits.
An experiment to consider is deleting all social media for 30 days and telling no one. You get to replace FOMO with reality. It’s hard at first, but it’ll might make something clear: social media really isn't that important in your life.**
Full Rest is Key
Decades of psychology research says that regular rest improves the quality of Deep Work. Be 100% on or 100% off. Even just reading one email at night can ruin the benefits of relaxing.
Here’s the most interesting thing: let’s say you get an email from your boss after hours. Just because she’s cleaning her inbox at night doesn’t mean she respects an immediate response.
Email is one thing that is insidious to the attention of many knowledge workers. Email is everywhere and it’s addressed to you. This creates this underlying assumption that you must always reply and check email, but this is not true. You still have a say in when (and if) you respond. Worst case, provide your phone number if someone really needs you. Understand: you still need email, but don’t let it control you, your time, and your attention.
Get in the habit of letting small bad things happen. If not, you’ll never find time for those life-changing events.
Squeezing more out of your work day at night will reduce your effectiveness and productivity the next day. You need to fully relax at night.
Consider the Zeigarnik Effect: incomplete tasks dominate our attention and will battle you to finish them. There are always things to do, but the best way to handle this is to make a plan for how you would later complete it.
Create a shutdown routine to handle this:
Put your list of things to do in a common task list
Make sure you didn’t miss any big deadlines
Check your emails
Have some default downtime activities that aren’t addictive and aren’t “bad” for you (like scrolling through TikTok). Default to reading, working out, playing an instrument, or something that’s just more fulfilling.
If you don’t have a default or a plan for your leisure activities and you just do what you’ll feel like, you end up with your attention hijacked. It might sound funny, but as I’ve experienced, prescheduling leisure is deeply fulfilling.
Other Strategies You Might Like
Here’s a few other things you can try, from least extreme to most:
Use Do Not Disturb and Airplane Mode during your work sessions
Turn off email notifications and check them on your time. Most emails aren’t an emergency and people don’t need an instant response.
Question if each social media app is truly worth your time. For me, I don’t use Snapchat or Tik Tok. I really only use Twitter.
Consider deleting all social media to see what life is like without it. Spend your time living a life more true to yourself. Go pick up a book or participate in higher quality leisure.
To really focus, turn off all notifications on your phone, and make blocks to check them throughout the day.
Lastly, get a flip phone (just kidding).
A Few More Notes
This book is loaded with actionable advice and well-supported arguments. A lot of which I didn’t even cover here.
Published in 2016, it’s more relevant now than ever as AI and the information economy accelerates.
If you’d like to pick up a copy and best prepare yourself to succeed in the future, click here.
Further Reading You Might Like
How and Why Setting Goals Make You Happy
P.S. If you read this far, thank you! If you liked this, you might enjoy my Twitter feed, where I share most of my ideas.
Footnotes
*In fact, the concept of Deep Work enabled me to get Straight A’s in college while studying as much as a C student. If you’d like to boost your GPA in 30 minutes, click here to book a free tutoring session with me.
**I’m referring to social media use how most people use it: scrolling without purpose or paying attention to people you don’t really know at all. Social media can be a powerful professional tool, and I’m not discounting it’s use for professional success.
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