DEEP WORK by CAL NEWPORT

 

Part One

Chapter one

The rise of digital technology is transforming our labor markets unexpectedly. Advancement in technology has provided us with new machines to replace humans. Now, because of that, there are three people who are very valuable to our present economy also known as the "Great Restructuring". These groups are; The high skilled, The owners, and The Superstars.  

To join this group of people, you need two core abilities; the first is the ability to master hard things, while the second is the ability to produce at top speed and quality.

How does one cultivate those core abilities? That is when the values of deep work come in. The two core abilities just described depends on your ability to perform deep work. Deep work helps you quickly learn things. 

High-quality work produced=(Time spent)×(intensity of focus).

This formula above is what deep work produces. Increase in focus during hours of uninterrupted work.

Chapter Two

Deep Work is Rare

 People's ability to perform deep work is dwarfed by the culture of big trends today. Although, the benefits promised by these trends are short circuitry by benefits that flow from a commitment to deep work. The reason why we embrace distractions is more arbitrary. Some of them are:

The metric black hole: As knowledge work makes more complex demands of the labor force, it becomes harder to measure the value of an individual's efforts. It isn't expected that the bottom-line impact of depth destroying behaviors should be easily detected. Such metrics fall into an Opaque region resistant to easy measurement (a region called the metric black hole).

The Principle of least Resistance: In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behavior that is easiest at the moment. There are two big reasons why this is true. 

The first concern is responsiveness to your needs. If you work in an environment where you can get an answer to a question or a specific piece of information, immediately when the need arises, this makes life easier at least, at the moment. 

The second reason is that a culture of connectivity makes life easier is that it creates an environment where it becomes acceptable to run your inbox responding to the latest massive with alacrity while others pile up behind it, all the while feeling satisfying productive.

Busyness as a Proxy for Productivity:  In the absence of clear indicators, many workers turn back toward industrial indicator productivity doing lots of stuff in an invisible manner to measure productivity which is not really valid.

The Cult of the internet: why are knowledge workers urged to regularly interrupt this necessarily deep work to provide for free, shallow content to a service run by an unrelated media company? And why does this behavior seem so normal to most people? He noticed that there were no long discussions on the trade-offs surrounding new technologies, balancing the new efficiencies against the new problems introduced.

If it's high-tech, we begin to assume it is good. Case closed. He called such a technopoly. "Technopoly" gets rid of all other options part from itself according to Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. It neither makes them illegal not unpopular. It just results in their invisibility and therefore is irrelevant." Deep Work often requires the rejection of much of what is new and high-tech. 

Bad for Business Good for you: Deep work is clearly not a priority in today's business climate. The claim is simply that deep work is hard and shallow work is easier, that in the absence of clear goals for your job, the visible busyness that surrounds shallow work becomes self-preserving and that our culture has developed a belief that if a behavior relates to the "internet" then it is good, regardless of its impact on your ability to produce valuable things.

Chapter Three

Deep Work is Meaningful

 Deep work can satisfy many people in this information economy. There are three arguments to support this claim.

A Neurological Argument for Depth

The science writer Winfred Gallagher set out to understand the role of attention, What you think, feel and do, what you are, what you love- is the sum of what you focus on". According to Gallagher's theory, spending enough time in this state will bring an understanding of your world, rich in meaning and importance

In work (especially knowledge work), to increase the time you spend in a state of depth is to use the human brain in a way that it makes great use of the meaning and satisfaction one would associate with his working life.

A Psychological Argument for Depth

Csikszentmihalyi's work with the (ESM) Experience Sampling Method helped validate a theory he had been developing over the proceeding decade: "The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile". Mihalyi calls this mental state flow. 

The connection between deep workflow should be clear. Deep work helps to generate a flow state (the phrase used by Mihaly, 'to generate a flow state', includes millions of stretching your mind to its limit and focusing on the whole of yourself in an activity- which are all definitions of deep work). 

All these ideas validate an argument from psychology that talks about going deep and ordering one's consciousness in a way that makes life worthwhile. This is why we must quit entanglements in meaningless chatter and be engrossed in activities that bring depth and satisfaction.

A Philosophical Argument for Depth

In this argument, knowledge work is compared to craftsmanship. The philosophers noted that a Craftsman doesn't decide arbitrarily which virtues of the material he works are valuable and which are not; this value is inherent in the material and the task it's meant to perform. 

Now to connect craftsmanship to deep work; any pursuit - be it physical or cognitive that supports high levels of skill can also generate a sense of sacredness (meaning). Your work is a craft and if you have your ability and apply it with respect you can generate meaning in the daily efforts of your profession. Therefore, being skilled is necessary for your deep work.

Homo Sapien Deepens

It is as if our species have evolved into one that flourishes in-depth and wallows in shallowness becoming what we might call Homo sapien Deepensis.

Part Two

The Rules

Work Deeply(Rule 1)

  According to this rule, 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.

Strategies:

1. Decide on your depth philosophy:

(a)The Monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling: This has to do with the complete elimination of distraction and shallowness from your personal life.

(b)The Bimodal Philosophy of deep work scheduling, which allows you to divide your time between the long stretches of deep work and something else.

(c) The rhythmic philosophy of deep work: This philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into simple regular habits.

(d) The Journalistic Philosophy of deep work scheduling: In this approach, you can fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule. This approach requires the ability to switch the mind from shallow to deep mode.

2. Ritualize

3. Make grand gestures: Changing your normal environment in a radical way helps to increase the perceived importance of the task.

4. Don't work alone

5. Execute like a business:  There are 4 disciplines of execution which are: 

a. Focus on the wildly important

b. Act on the lead measure: Lead measures, measure the new behaviors that will drive success on the thing you are ultimately trying to improve. 

c. Keep a compelling scoreboard.

d. Create a cadence of accountability.

6. Be lazy: This strategy argues that you should inject regular and substantial freedom professional concerns into your day, providing you with the idleness paradoxically required to get (deep) work done.

Reasons why a shutdown will be profitable to your ability.

1. Downtime aids insight.

2. Downtime helps refire you for some deep work.

3. The work that evening downtime replace is usually not important.

Rule 2

Embrace Boredom

 Rule #1 taught you how to integrate deep work into your schedule and support it with routines and rituals designed to help you consistently reach the current limit of your concern ratio ability. Rule #2 will help you significantly improve this limit. The strategies that show how you can Improve those limits.

1. Don't take breaks from distraction, instead take breaks from focus. To succeed with this strategy, there are three points to consider:

(a) This strategy works even if your job requires lots of internet use and/or prompt email replies.

(b) Regardless of how you describe your internet blocks, you must keep the time assigned to these blocks absolutely free from internet use.

(c) Scheduling internet use at home as well as at work can further improve your concentration training.

2. Work like Teddy Roosevelt. Pick a high priority task on the list, estimate how long you would normally put aside for an obligation of this type, then give yourself a hard deadline that drastically reduces this time.

3. Meditate productively:  when you begin a productive meditation session there are two suggestions to consider:

(a) Be wary of distraction and looping.

(b) structure your deep thinking

4. Memorize a deck of cards: This strategy asks you to learn a standard bit quite an impressive skill in the repertoire of most mental athletes: the ability to memorize a shuffled deck of cards.

Rule #3

Quit social media

This rule attempts to break us out by proposing third options accepting that network tools are not inherently evil and some of them are quite vital to your success, but at the same time accepting that the threshold for your time and time attention should be much more stringent and that most people should, therefore, be using many fewer such tools.

Approaches to Network tool selection.

(a) The Any-benefits 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.

(b) The Craftsman Approach to tool selection: Identify the love factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impact on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.

The three strategies that follow this rule:

1. Apply the law of the vital few to your internet habits: The law of vital few states 80 percent of a given effect is due to just 20 percent of possible Causes.

2. Quit social media: This strategy asks that you perform the equivalent a packing party on the social media service that you currently use for 30 days and within that 30 days anyone of these tools that isn't important should be quit permanently.

3. Don't use the internet to entertain yourself: If you eliminate the addictive pull of entertainment sites on your time and attention, give your brain a quality alternative. Not only will this preserve your ability to resist distraction and concentrate, but you might even fulfill the goal of experiencing what it means to live and not just to exist.

Rule #4

Drain the Shallows

Jason Fried, the cofounder of 37signals company had his people do this when he reduced the number of weekly working days from five to four. This reduction gave the workers the consciousness of not enough time and therefore the need to reduce unnecessary and shallow work.

But it doesn't mean all shallow work should be avoided, it just means it should be given very little time. Shallow work should be treated with less attention because it's disastrous. And to effectively do this, there is a need to Schedule every minute of your day into block and create space for the overflow of conditional blocks- such tasks that will take more hours than the ones you've previously outlined.

To drain shallow works, it is also important to:

• Quantify the depth of every activity
• Ask your boss for a shallow work budget
• Finish your work by five-thirty
• Become hard to reach by making people who send you mail do more work, doing more work yourself by sending a message that concludes a particular matter at your end, and not responding to mails

Conclusion 

Bill Gates is an example of a deep worker. Paul Allen would later describe him as a man who when working on the BASIC programming language for the Altair computer would be so intense in the two-month work that he would collapse on the keyboard in the middle of a line, sleep for an hour or two and wake up to continue the job. Cal, himself applied this technique many times in his life, so much that he became deep work machinery.

Photo credit: calnewport.com

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