# Deep Work

## Cal Newport

These notes are specific to me, I have cherry picked the points that I find most important. Thus, it is an incomplete summary of Deep work. It is however, thorough enough for me. I would suggest reading the book and making your own notes before going through mine.

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**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.

Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity.

**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.

**The 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.

**How to Become a Winner in the New Economy**

Two groups that are poised to thrive and are accessible: those who can work creatively with intelligent machines and those who are stars in their field.

Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy

1. The ability to quickly master hard things.
2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

The two core abilities just described depend on your ability to perform deep work.

- Deep Work Helps You Quickly Learn Hard Things.
- Deep Work Helps You Produce at an Elite Level.

(1) your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you're trying to improve or an idea you're trying to master;

(2) you receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it's most productive

High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)

The type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work.

Deep work is not the only skill valuable in our economy, and it's possible to do well without fostering this ability, but the niches where this is advisable are increasingly rare. Unless you have strong evidence that distraction is important for your specific profession, you're best served, for the reasons argued earlier in this chapter, by giving serious consideration to depth.

**The Principle of Least Resistance**: In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment.

> To do real good physics work, you do need absolute solid lengths of time... it needs a lot of concentration... if you have a job administrating anything, you don’t have the time. So I have invented another myth for myself: that I’m irresponsible. I’m actively irresponsible. I tell everyone I don’t do anything. If anyone asks me to be on a committee for admissions, “no,” I tell them: I’m irresponsible. - *Richard Feynman*

**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.

> Beautiful code is short and concise, so if you were to give that code to another programmer they would say, “oh, that's well written code.” It's much like as if you were writing a poem. - Santiago Gonzalez

> Those who cut stones must always be envisioning cathedrals.
>
> Within the overall structure of a project there is always room for individuality and craftsmanship... One hundred years from now, our engineering may seem as archaic as the techniques used by medieval cathedral builders seem to today's civil engineers, while our craftsmanship will still be honored. -  The Pragmatic Programmer

People fight desires all day long.

You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it's instead like a muscle that tires.

The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.

> There is a popular notion that artists work from inspiration—that there is some strike or bolt or bubbling up of creative mojo from who knows where... but I hope [my work] makes clear that waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan. In fact, perhaps the single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration. - Mason Curry

There’s no one *correct* deep work ritual—the right fit depends on both the person and the type of project pursued. But there are some general questions that any effective ritual must address:

**Where you’ll work and for how long.**

Your ritual needs to specify a location for your deep work efforts. This location can be as simple as your normal office with the door shut and desk cleaned off (a colleague of mine likes to put a hotel-style “do not disturb” sign on his office door when he’s tackling something difficult). If it’s
possible to identify a location used only for depth—for instance, a conference room or quiet library—the positive effect can be even greater. (If you work in an open office plan, this need to find a deep work retreat becomes particularly important.) Regardless of where you work, be sure to also give yourself a specific time frame to keep the session a discrete challenge and not an open-ended slog.

**How you’ll work once you start to work.**

Your ritual needs rules and processes to keep your efforts structured. For example, you might institute a ban on any Internet use, or maintain a metric such as words produced per twenty-minute interval to keep your concentration honed. Without this structure, you’ll have to mentally litigate again and again what you should and should not be doing during these sessions and keep trying to assess whether you’re working sufficiently hard. These are unnecessary drains on your willpower reserves.

**How you’ll support your work.**

Your ritual needs to ensure your brain gets the support it needs to keep operating at a high level of depth. For example, the ritual might specify that you start with a cup of good coffee, or make sure you have access to enough food of the right type to maintain energy, or integrate light exercise such as walking to help keep the mind clear. (As Nietzsche said: “It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.”) This support might also include environmental factors, such as organizing the raw materials of your work to minimize energy-dissipating friction (as we saw with Caro’s example). To maximize your success, you need to support your efforts to go deep. At the same time, this support needs to be systematized so that you don’t waste mental energy figuring out what you need in the moment.

These questions will help you get started in crafting your deep work ritual. But keep in mind that finding a ritual that sticks might require experimentation, so be willing to work at it. I assure you that the effort’s worth it: Once you’ve evolved something that feels right, the impact can be significant. To work deeply is a big deal and should not be an activity undertaken lightly. Surrounding such efforts with a complicated (and perhaps, to the outside world, quite strange) ritual accepts this reality—providing your mind with the structure and commitment it needs to slip into the state of focus where you can begin to create things that matter.

**The Grand Gesture**: By leveraging a radical change to your normal environment, coupled perhaps with a significant investment of effort or money, all dedicated toward supporting a deep work task, you increase the perceived importance of the task. This boost in importance reduces your mind’s instinct to procrastinate and delivers an injection of motivation and energy.

Brattain and Bardeen worked together during this period in a small lab, often sideby side, pushing each other toward better and more effective designs. Brattain would concentrate intensely to engineer an experimental design that could exploit Bardeen’s latest theoretical insight; then Bardeen would concentrate intensely to make sense of what Brattain’s latest experiments revealed, trying to expand his theoretical framework to match the observations. This back-and-forth represents a collaborative form of deep work (common in academic circles) that leverages *the whiteboard effect*. For some types of problems, working with someone else at the proverbial shared whiteboard can push you deeper than if you were working alone. The presence of the other party waiting for your next insight — be it someone physically in the same room or collaborating with you virtually — can short-circuit the natural instinct to avoid depth.

Grove asked him during a break in this meeting, “How do I do this?” Christensen responded with a discussion of business strategy, explaining how Grove could set up a new business unit and so on. Grove cut him off with a gruff reply: *“You are such a naïve academic. I asked you how to do it, and you told me what I should do. I know what I need to do. I just don’t know how to do it.”*

It’s often straightforward to identify a strategy needed to achieve a goal, but what trips up companies is figuring out how to execute the strategy once identified.

**Discipline #1: Focus on the Wildly Important**

For an individual focused on deep work, you should identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours.

**Discipline #2: Act on the Lead Measures**

Once you’ve identified a wildly important goal, you need to measure your success. In 4DX, there are two types of metrics for this purpose: lag measures and lead measures. Lag measures describe the thing you’re ultimately trying to improve. Lead measures, on the other hand, “measure the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures.” For an individual focused on deep work, it’s easy to identify the relevant lead measure: time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal.

**Discipline #3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard**

“People play differently when they’re keeping score,” This scoreboard creates a sense of competition that drives them to focus on these measures, even when other demands vie for their attention. It also provides a reinforcing source of motivation. The individual’s scoreboard should be a physical artifact in the workspace that displays the individual’s current deep work hour count.

**Discipline #4: Create a Cadence of Accountability**

The final step to help maintain a focus on lead measures is to put in place “a rhythm of regular and frequent meetings of any team that owns a wildly important goal.” For an individual focused on his or her own deep work habit, there’s likely no team to meet with, but this doesn’t exempt you from the need for regular accountability. In multiple places throughout this book I discuss and recommend the habit of a weekly review in which you make a plan for the workweek ahead (see Rule #4).

> Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets... it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. - *Tim Kreider*

**Reason #1**: Downtime Aids Insights

**Reason #2**: Downtime Helps Recharge the Energy Needed to Work Deeply

**Reason #3**: The Work That Evening Downtime Replaces Is Usually Not That Important

To succeed with this strategy, you must first accept the commitment that once your workday shuts down, you cannot allow even the smallest incursion of professional concerns into your field of attention.

Another key commitment for succeeding with this strategy is to support your commitment to shutting down with a strict shutdown ritual that you use at the end of the workday to maximize the probability that you succeed. In more detail, this ritual should ensure that every incomplete task, goal, or project has been reviewed and that for each you have confirmed that either (1) you have a plan you trust for its completion, or (2) it’s captured in a place where it will be revisited when the time is right. The process should be an algorithm: a series of steps you always conduct, one after another. When you’re done, have a set phrase you say that indicates completion (to end my own ritual, I say, “Shutdown complete”). This final step sounds cheesy, but
it provides a simple cue to your mind that it’s safe to release work-related thoughts for the rest of the day.

“Committing to a specific plan for a goal may therefore not only facilitate attainment of the goal but may also free cognitive resources for other pursuits.”

The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained.

Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.

So we have scales that allow us to divide up people into people who multitask all the time and people who rarely do, and the differences are remarkable. People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand... they’re pretty much mental wrecks.

The people we talk with continually said, “look, when I really have to concentrate, I turn off everything and I am laser-focused.” And unfortunately, they’ve developed habits of mind that make it impossible for them to be laser-focused. They’re suckers for irrelevancy. They just can’t keep on task. [emphasis mine]

Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction, Nass discovered, it’s hard to shake the addiction even when you want to concentrate. To put this more concretely: If every moment of potential boredom in your life—say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a 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” in Nass’s research, it’s not ready for deep work—even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.

Don’t Take Breaks from Distraction. Instead Take Breaks from Focus.

Once you’re wired for distraction, you crave it.

Instead of scheduling the occasional break from distraction so you can focus, you should instead schedule the occasional break from focus to give in to distraction.

Schedule in advance when you’ll use the Internet, and then avoid it altogether outside these times. I suggest that you keep a notepad near your computer at work. On this pad,record the next time you’re allowed to use the Internet. Until you arrive at that time, absolutely no network connectivity is allowed—no matter how tempting.

The idea motivating this strategy is that the use of a distracting service does not, by itself, reduce your brain’s ability to focus. It’s instead the constant switching from low-stimuli/high-value activities to high-stimuli/low-value activities, at the slightest
hint of boredom or cognitive challenge, that teaches your mind to never tolerate an absence of novelty.

**Point #1**: This strategy works even if your job requires lots of Internet use and/or prompt e-mail replies.

**Point #2**: Regardless of how you schedule your Internet blocks, you must keep the time outside these blocks absolutely free from Internet use.

**Point #3**: Scheduling Internet use at home as well as at work can further improve your concentration training.

One place where this strategy becomes particularly difficult outside work is when you’re forced to wait (for example, standing in line at a store). It’s crucial in these situations that if you’re in an offline block, you simply gird yourself for the temporary boredom, and fight through it with only the company of your thoughts. To simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, it’s incredibly valuable.

To summarize, to succeed with deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli. This doesn’t mean that you have to eliminate distracting behaviors; it’s sufficient that you instead eliminate the ability of such behaviors to hijack your attention.

“The amount of time he spent at his desk was comparatively small,” explained Morris, “but his concentration was so intense, and his reading so rapid, that he could afford more time off [from schoolwork] than most.”

Estimate how long you’d normally put aside for a task, then give yourself a hard deadline that drastically reduces this time. If possible, commit publicly to the deadline. If this isn’t possible (or if it puts your job in jeopardy), then motivate yourself by
setting a countdown timer. At this point, there should be only one possible way to get the deep task done in time: *working with great intensity*.

Attack the task with every free neuron until it gives way under your unwavering barrage of concentration.

The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally—walking, jogging, driving, showering—and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem.

Suggestion #1: Be Wary of Distractions and Looping

As a novice, when you begin a productive meditation session, your mind’s first act of rebellion will be to offer unrelated but seemingly more interesting thoughts. When you notice your attention slipping away from the problem at hand, gently remind yourself that you can return to that thought later, then redirect your attention back.

Suggestion #2: Structure Your Deep Thinking

I suggest starting with a careful review of the relevant variables for solving the problem and then storing these values in your working memory. Once the relevant variables are identified, define the specific next-step question you need to answer using these
variables. With the relevant variables stored and the next-step question identified, you now have a specific target for your attention. the final step of this structured approach to deep thinking is to consolidate your gains by reviewing clearly the answer you identified.

**The Any-Benefit Approach to Network Tool Selection**: You’re justified in using a network tool if you can identify any possible benefit to its use, or anything you might possibly miss out on if you don’t use it.

**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 impacts.

Even though the craftsman approach rejects the simplicity of the any-benefit approach, it doesn’t ignore the benefits that currently drive people to network tools, or make any advance proclamations about what’s “good” or “bad” technology: It simply asks that you give any particular network tool the same type of measured, nuanced accounting that tools in other trades have been subjected to throughout the history of skilled labor.

Apply the Law of the Vital Few to Your Internet Habits

The first step of this strategy is to identify the main high-level goals in both your professional and your personal life.

Once you’ve identified these goals, list for each the two or three most important activities that help you satisfy the goal. These activities should be specific enough to allow you to clearly picture doing them. On the other hand, they should be general enough that they’re not tied to a onetime outcome.

For each such tool, go through the key activities you identified and ask whether the use of the tool has *a substantially positive impact, a substantially negative impact, or little impact* on your regular and successful participation in the activity. Now comes the important decision: Keep using this tool only if you concluded that it has substantial positive impacts and that these outweigh the negative impacts.

Of course Facebook offers benefits to your social life, but none are important enough to what really matters to you in this area to justify giving it access to your time and attention.

**The Law of the Vital Few**: In many settings, 80 percent of a given effect is due to just 20 percent of the possible causes.

You’ll ban yourself from using Social Media Services for thirty days. All of them: Facebook, Instagram, Google+, Twitter, Snapchat, Vine—or whatever other services have risen to popularity since I first wrote these words. Don’t formally deactivate these services,
and (this is important) don’t mention online that you’ll be signing off: Just stop using them, cold turkey. If someone reaches out to you by other means and asks why your activity on a particular service has fallen off, you can explain, but don’t go out of your
way to tell people.

After thirty days of this self-imposed network isolation, ask yourself the following two questions about each of the services you temporarily quit:

1. Would the last thirty days have been notably better if I had been able to use this service?
2. Did people care that I wasn’t using this service?

If your answer is “no” to both questions, quit the service permanently. If your answer was a clear “yes,” then return to using the service. If your answers are qualified or ambiguous, it’s up to you whether you return to the service, though I would encourage you to lean toward quitting. (You can always rejoin later.)

*I’ll pay attention to what you say if you pay attention to what I say—regardless of its value. You “like” my status update and I’ll “like” yours.*

Don’t Use the Internet to Entertain Yourself

Put more though into your leisure time. In other words, this strategy suggests that when it comes to your relaxation, don’t default to whatever catches your attention at the moment, but instead dedicate some advance thinking to the question of how you want to spend your “day within a day.”

> What? You say that full energy given to those sixteen hours will lessen the value of the business eight? Not so. On the contrary, it will assuredly increase the value of the business eight. One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change—not rest, except in sleep. - *Arnold Bennet*

When you have fewer hours you usually spend them more wisely.

Deep work is exhausting because it pushes you toward the limit of your abilities. For someone new to such practice an hour a day is a reasonable limit. For those familiar with the rigors of such activities, the limit expands to something like four hours, but rarely more. The implication is that once you’ve hit your deep work limit in a given day, you’ll experience diminishing rewards if you try to cram in more.

We spend much of our day on autopilot — not giving much thought to what we’re doing with our time. This is a problem. It’s difficult to prevent the trivial from creeping into every corner of your schedule if you don’t face, without flinching, your current balance between deep and shallow work, and then adopt the habit of pausing before action and asking, “What makes the most sense right now?”

Schedule every minute of your day.

Divide the hours of your workday into blocks and assign activities to the blocks. When you’re done scheduling your day, every minute should be part of a block. You have, in effect, given every minute of your workday a job. Now as you go through your day, use this schedule to guide you.

If your schedule is disrupted, you should, at the next available moment, take a few minutes to create a revised schedule for the time that remains in the day. Your goal is not to stick to a given schedule at all costs; it’s instead to maintain, at all times, a thoughtful say in what you’re doing with your time going forward—even if these decisions are reworked again and again as the day unfolds.

Decide in advance what you’re going to do with every minute of your workday.

To answer whether a work is shallow or deep, try answering the question:

> 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?

If our hypothetical college graduate requires many months of training to replicate a task, then this indicates that the task leverages hard-won expertise. As argued earlier, tasks that leverage your expertise tend to be deep tasks and they can therefore provide a double benefit: They return more value per time spent, and they stretch your abilities, leading to improvement. On the other hand, a task that our hypothetical college graduate can pick up quickly is one that does not leverage expertise, and therefore it can be understood as shallow.

What percentage of my time should be spent on shallow work? This strategy suggests that you ask it. If you have a boss, in other words, have a conversation about this question. If you work for yourself, ask yourself this question. In both cases, settle on a specific answer. Then — and this is the important part — try to stick to this budget.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that when you ask this question the answer is stark. No boss will explicitly answer, “One hundred percent of your time should be shallow!”, but a boss might reply, in so many words, “as much shallow work as is needed for you to promptly do whatever we need from you at the moment.” In this case, the answer is still useful, as it tells you that this isn’t a job that supports deep work, and a job that doesn’t support deep work is not a job that can help you succeed in our current information economy. You should, in this case, thank the boss for the feedback, and then promptly start planning how you can transition into a new position that values depth.

Finish Your Work by Five Thirty

Become Hard to Reach

**Tip #1**: Make People Who Send You E-mail Do More Work

**Tip #2**: Do More Work When You Send or Reply to E-mails

Interrogative e-mails generate an initial instinct to dash off the quickest possible response that will clear the message — temporarily — out of your inbox. The right strategy when faced with a question of this type is to pause a moment before replying and take the time to answer the following key prompt:

*What is the project represented by this message, and what is the most efficient (in terms of messages generated) process for bringing this project to a successful conclusion?*

The important point to remember is that the extra two to three minutes you spend at this point will save you many more minutes reading and responding to unnecessary extra messages later.

**Tip #3**: Don’t Respond

**Professorial E-mail Sorting**: Do not reply to an e-mail message if any of the following applies:

- It’s ambiguous or otherwise makes it hard for you to generate a reasonable response.
- It’s not a question or proposal that interests you.
- Nothing really good would happen if you did respond and nothing really bad would happen if you didn’t.

Replies are assumed, regardless of the relevance or appropriateness of the message. There’s also no way to avoid that some bad things will happen if you take this approach. At the minimum, some people might get confused or upset—especially if they’ve never seen standard e-mail conventions questioned or ignored. Here’s the thing: This is okay. As the author Tim Ferriss once wrote: “Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things.”

A commitment to deep work is not a moral stance and it’s not a philosophical statement — it is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that *gets valuable things done*.

> “I’ll live the focused life, because it’s the best kind there is.” - Winifred Gallagher