Deep Work

The Idea

Deep Work is Valuable

With machines being increasingly able to replace works, including knowledge workers, the economy is turning into a “winner takes all” kind of game. Three type of people stand out as particularly successful in this setting.

1. The High Skilled Workers, since they are compelling hires for the thriving companies
2. The Superstars, who managed to build an incredible reputation thanks to their hard work
3. The Owners, who have capital to invest and that can yield increasingly high returns on investments as the cost of labor diminishes

How to Become a Winner in the New Economy

While it’s difficult to become an Owner, it’s possible to become a High Skilled worker or a Superstar through hardwork, and more particularly thanks to two qualities

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

Deep Work Helps You Quickly Learn Hard Things

K. Anders Ericsson, a professor at Florida State University published a paper opening with

We deny that these differences [between expert performers and normal adults] are immutable… Instead, we argue that the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.

The core components of deliberate practice are

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.

Some scientists believe that the more a same set of neuron are used in isolation, the more myelin grows around them, the cleaner and faster the signal can propagate. Focusing on a skill forces a same circuit to fire. Being distracted brings other neurons in the mix, preventing the myelin from growing.

Deep Work Helps You Produce at an Elite Level

There is a formula to highlight the importance of focus:

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

Sophie Leroy, a business professor at the University of Minnesota, published a paper in 2009 introducing the concept of attention residue. When switching from Task A to Task B, a residue of your attention remains to Task A. It’s thicker if Task A is unfinished, but still exists even if Task A is finished.

What About Jack Dorsey?

Jack Dorsey founded both Twitter and Square, two highly valuable companies that made him rich. He strongly believes in serendipitous availability and makes himself available for interruption/

Dorsey is a CEO, and CEOs don’t provide most value when engaging in deep work themselves but by having several people doing deep work on several topics, and this is not true for most workers.

There are also some jobs where depth does not provide a lot of value, such as in sales or lobbying, who provide more value by being constantly connected and available.

Deep Work is Rare

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

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Busyness as a proxy for productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner

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That is true, but also misses nuance

In my experience it is true that in the absence of clear indicators we tend to favor visible work as opposed to deep, invisible work.

This book focuses on “deep” work and considers all “shallow” work as undesirable. I would have liked more nuance. In my experience, deep work is important, but making it visible matters too.

It would have been helpful to talk about how a manager and a team member can work together so the former makes the latter’s work visible.

Deep Work is Meaningful

A Neurological Argument for Depth

Our brains instead construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to.

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[Frequently checking your inbox] ensures that your mind will construct an understanding of your working life that’s dominated by stress, irritation, frustration and triviality. The world represented by your inbox, in other words, is not a pleasant world to inhabit.

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This was an eye opener

I have already expressed that social media affect me more than I thought. This section resonates with my experience. It made me reconsider the kind of news I read and what I decided to focus on.

A Psychological Argument for Depth

The results from Csikszentmihalyi’s ESM studies reveal that […] when measured empirically, people were happier at work and less happy relaxing than they suspected. And as the ESM studies confirmed, the more such flow experiences that occur in a given week, the higher the subject’s life satisfaction.

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I hadn’t conscientized it

I had already figured that my days of focus switching were more draining than the rest, and that I enjoyed much more when I could immerse myself into an activity for long stretches of time.

I extrapolated this to how I relaxed: doom scrolling and YouTube videos are short, shallow activities that are actually exhausting. This is the section that incentivized me to put my phone down as much as possible.

A Philosophical Argument for Depth

In a post-Enlightenment world we have tasked ourselves to identify what is meaningful and what’s not, an exercise that can seem arbitrary and induce a creeping nihilism.

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Throughout most of human history, to be a blacksmith or a wheelwright wasn’t glamorous. But this doesn’t matter, as the specifics of the work are irrelevant. […] You don’t need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work.

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A slap in the face, that could again use more nuance

I am an absurdist. I think the universe is meaningless and we are responsible for finding meaning in our lives. Being focused on the product of my work made this search for meaning frustrating. Re-focusing on the satisfaction of working well and growing my skills in doing so is much more sustainable.

However, the above is true if you can work your craft like a craftsman from before the industrial revolution. In some workplaces, management forces the engineering teams to ship code with tech debt.

The Rules

Rule #1: Work Deeply

You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. […] 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 amont of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration

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Decide on Your Depth Philosophy

Newport established 4 kinds of ways to schedule time for deep work

1. The Monastic Philosophy, in which people almost sever all ties with the rest of the world. They want to be absolutely isolated from mundanities, including correspondance.
2. The Bimodal Philosophy, in which people alternate between complete isolation and “normal” life in chunks of one or several days.
3. The Rhythmic Philosophy, in which people schedule hours-long periods of isolation each day, and build a habit out of it.
4. The Journalist Philosophy, in which people try to find focus time whenever possible.

This chapter felt like a filler

Newport creates 4 arbitrary categories, whose only distinction is the amount of time they are willing to allocate to deep work and to communication. I didn’t see a lot of added value to it.

Ritualize

Build a ritual for deep work sessions that addresses:

• Where you’ll work and for how long
• How you’ll work once you start to work (metrics to track to know you’re actually deep working)
• How you’ll support your work (eg starting with a cup of coffee, or walking to keep the mind clear)

It’s surprisingly useful

I found ritualizing work sessions to be helpful with focus rapidly. I immediately saw benefits to having a clear cut between what is focused work and the rest. To my great surprise, it even made attention-switching tasks more irritating.

Make Grand Gestures

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.

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I’m not sure I agree

I think making grand gestures like these would put too much pressure on me and consume my attention. I guess it just doesn’t work for me.

Don’t Work Alone

Working in a hub-and-spoke environment allows both deep work and serendipitous creativity to happen.

Additionally, working synchronously with a peer can pressure us into deep work and short circuit our natural tendency to avoid depth.

Hub-and-spoke is ideal

This section was pleasant to read, because the author acknowledges that there is value in socializing and making your work visible. He even provides strategies to preserve the deep work and allow serendipity to happen.

Execute Like A Business

Sometimes you identify what we need to do but we don’t know how to do it. The 4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX) can help you achieve it.

1. Focus on the Wildly Important. “The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.” “If you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to say ‘no’ to the trivial distractions […]; try to say ‘yes’ to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd everything else.”
2. Act on the Lead Measures. Lag measures describe what you’re trying to improve, but track past performance. Lead measure describe what will drive success in the lag measure and are actionable in the near future. In the context of deep work, lag measures are the expected output, lead measures are the number of hours spent deep working.
3. Keep a Compelling Scoreboard, a physical object that keeps track of lead measures. It creates a sense of (self-)competition, drives focus on the lead measures, and provides a reinforcing source of motivation to perpetuate performance.
4. Create a Cadence of Accountability. A weekly review helps hold oneself accountable of progress, and devise strategies to improve performance by planning for the week ahead.

Tracking how to make it, not just if you made it, is a game changer

The distinction between lead and lag measures was extremely useful to me. One of my frustration has regularly been to only have lag measures. I couldn’t put my finger on why they were only helpful to know if you achieved an objective, not to work toward it.

Lag vs lead measures are key, and lead measures can be very motivating!

Be Lazy

We need downtime and idleness to be able to work more efficiently. There are three reasons why work should be time boxed to the workday, with a strict endpoint.

1. Downtime aids insight. The conscious mind is useful to execute precise instructions. The unconscious mind would be useful to sort out vaguely laid out problems. A shutdown habit would only diversify what the brain works on.
2. Downtime Helps Recharge the Energy Needed to Work Deeply. Attention Restoration Theory (ART) claims that to concentrate requires directed attention, a finite resource that is replenished when doing pleasant, low focus activities that we typically do outside of work. Trying to squeeze a little more work in the evening might make us less effective the next day, able to do less work.
3. The Work That Evening Downtime Replaces Is Usually Not That Important. Novices can focus for one hour a day, and experts for up to four but rarely more. By the evening, we will have depleted that focus time, and will likely only tackle shallow tasks at a slower pace.

A proper shutdown ritual prevents work from leaking into downtime. It consists of making sure that for each unfinished item we have either a plan for it or that it’s captured in a place where it can revisited when the time is right.

Not overworking yourself makes you more efficient

I often struggle to stop working. I hadn’t realized that not having a clear end of day encouraged me to let unimportant tasks creep in, and that working in the evenings made me less efficient the next day.

This has been one of the most important chapters in the book for me and for my mental and physical health.

Rule #2: Embrace Boredom

The more you’re used to multi-tasking or being easily distracted, the more difficult it is to focus deeply on something. Focus is like a muscle, it must be trained. Some strategies can help training it.

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

Taking a single day away from networks doesn’t train our focus muscles. We need to focus regularly, and only take occasional distractions. That often means resisting Internet-centric activities by scheduling time when we allow ourselves to use the Internet.

There are three important points to bear in mind

1. This strategy works even if your job requires lots of Internet use and/or prompt e-mail replies. You can schedule smaller and more numerous Internet blocks, which is fine as long as the offline blocks remain intact.
2. Regardless of how you schedule your Internet blocks, you must keep the time outside these blocks absolutely free from Internet use, or exceptions will become the norm.
3. Scheduling Internet use at home as well as at work can further improve your concentration training.

This helps me get much more done

I’ve found myself easily distracted by technology. Setting up Internet blocks made me realize that I actually had much more time than I thought both in my professional and personal life.

To my surprise this helped me get more chores done at home. I don’t have “better things do to,” I just wanted to get a lower-effort / higher-reward activity.

Work Like Teddy Roosevelt

Use realistic but tight artificial deadlines to pressure yourself into deep work.

This section felt like a filler

Meditate Productively

You can take advantage of workouts or walks to think about a problem deeply.

The mind tends to wander, and it takes practice to bring it back to a problem. Another common pitfall is “looping”: mulling over the premises of a problem instead of moving it forward.

It can be useful to structure your deep thinking as

1. Identify the variables for solving the problem (e.g. the main points you want to make in an article).
2. Identify the next step question to answer using these variables.

It only works with moderate exercise

When walking or going for a light jog, it’s possible to think about problems. When going for higher intensity exercise I find it extremely difficult to think at all.

I also want to leave some room in my day for non-intellectual activities. Feeling the wind that blows on my face as I cycle through the streets is an amazing feeling. I want to let my mind wander when doing exercise, because I feel more refreshed and ready to tackle more demanding tasks afterward.

This section felt like it conflicted severely with the “Be Lazy” one.

Memorize a Deck of Cards

Memory training (used for example to memorize the order of cards in a deck) actually increases attentional control, a very useful skill for deep work.

This section also felt a bit like a filler

Rule #3: Quit Social Media

Social media are very distracting but can still be useful for professional success if used intentionally.

Social media don’t always bring significant benefit to their users, and a common pitfall is the any-benefit approach that ignores all the negatives that come along with social media.

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.

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It is opposed to the more nuanced craftsman approach that acknowledges that tools require tradeoffs

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 outweighs its negative impacts.

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Several strategies can help using the craftsman approach, through practice and experimentation.

Apply the Law of the Vital Few to Your Internet Habits

It’s amazing how overly accessible people are. There’s a lot of communication in my life that’s not enriching, it’s impoverishing.

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1. Identify the main high level goals in both your professional and your personal life.
2. List for each the two or three most important activities that help you satisfy the goal.
3. Consider the network tools you currently use. For each such tool, go through the key activities identified and ask whether the use of the tool has a substantially positive, negative or little impact on your regular and successful participation in the activity.

According to the Law of the Vital Few, 80% of our success comes from 20% of our activities. Since your time is a finite resource, it only makes sense to focus it on the 20% that yield the highest benefit.

The Law of the Vital Few aka the 80/20 rule, Pareto’s principle, or the principle of factor sparsity: In many settings, 80 percent of a given effect is due to just 20 percent of the possible causes.

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It’s all about tradeoffs

Here again I liked that the author focuses on nuance. All tools can bring something, but they can also suck time and energy. I liked the author’s approach to curating the tools that suck your time.

Quit Social Media

We get an artificially inflated sense of self-importance from social media, that’s has more to do with social convention than actual interest from our peers. Leaving social media for 30 days is a good experiment to assess how much of an impact we have on others via these platforms and whether they missed us there or not.

I did it, I agree

I did that experiment prior to reading the book, and I mostly agree with the conclusion. A lot of the interactions on social media are about etiquette more than genuine interest. LinkedIn is by far the worst offender.

Don’t Use the Internet to Entertain Yourself

There’s actually a lot of free time outside of work and parental duties within a day. Addictive websites like Reddit undo all your focus training.

Contrary to popular belief, we are more relaxed when we have something different to focus on than when we don’t focus on anything at all.

It’s consistent with previous sections

The point of this section is to make you avoid websites like Buzzfeed or Reddit, but it’s of course plenty fine to use the Internet to watch a long video or a podcast.

Rule #4: Drain the Shallows

Experiments like the 4 days work week show that a typical work week is full of shallow work. While the empirical daily limit of deep work is four hours, shallow work can still accumulate quickly. Here are rules to prevent that from happening.

Schedule Every Minute of Your Day

Having a fully scheduled day of intentional use of every hour helps prevent shallow work from creeping too much into your workday.

Start the day by scheduling every hour of your work day. It’s okay to fail an estimate or to have a new obligation take priority: update the schedule for the rest of the day as soon as realistically possible. It’s also possible to use buffer blocks to get wiggle room and let important activities overflow.

The point is not to have an inflexible schedule, but to be intentional about your use of time.

It seems rigid but can work

I was pleasantly surprised that the author acknowledged that we can make mistakes when estimating time blocks, or that our priorities can be reshuffled.

I like that it’s about “planning the rest of your day” to make intentional use of it, and not have a rigid schedule for the sake of it.

Quantify the Depth of Every Activity

To prioritize and schedule tasks, quantify their depth with the following rule

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?

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The larger the number of months, the deeper the task, the higher the priority.

It sounds a lot of overhead in practice

Ask Your Boss for a Shallow Work Budget

Asking your boss “What percentage of my time should be spent on shallow work?” is a useful tactic to support you in your efforts to reduce shallow work, especially since that means you have to be less serviceable to others and can grind some gears.

Similarly, it sounds like a theoretical scenario more than a battle-tested strategy

Finish Your Work by Five Thirty

Having a fixed schedule provides a scarcity mindset: every distraction becomes expensive, your default answer is no, and you’re much more conservative about your time to get things done.

Be clear in your refusal, but ambiguous about the reasons, so the person asking for your time can’t “counter” it. Don’t give consolation prizes either (eg “I can’t commit to what you asked, but I’ll be happy to…”)

It’s consistent with the “Be Lazy” section

It’s probably going to be difficult to manoeuvre in some rigid environments, but it’s a very sound strategy nontheless.

Become Hard to Reach

Email is not a fait accompli. You can still push back and resist having to reply to every email as soon as they make it to your inbox.

1. Make People Who Send You E-Mail Do More Work. You can redirect them to a FAQ or set the expectation that you will only reply if their email matches criteria. It’s up to them to do the work and they will only be pleasantly surprised if you do reply.
2. Do More Work When You Send or Reply to E-Mails. Identify the project the email is about and what is the most efficient process for bringing it so a successful conclusion. Then reply with it. This closes the mental loop and gets it out of your mind.
3. Dont Respond. It’s up to the sender to make their request worth a reply. Don’t respond if the email is ambiguous. Don’t respond if it’s not a question or proposal that interests you. Don’t respond if nothing good would happen if nothing really good would happen if you did respond and nothing really bad would happen if you didn’t.

I absolutely love this strategy

I’m a firm believer that e-mail and digital communications are taking a huge toll on our attention, and I personally call notifications “interruptions.” The strategies listed might appear rude, but I like the idea of enforcing “my inbox is not a todo list you can add items to.”

Conclusion

The methodology described in the book helped the author become much more productive.

More evidence would be welcome

The conclusion is mostly about how the author succeeded with this strategy, and its fine. It’s just a little awkward to read as a conclusion.

Since this is a late edition (I bought it in 2025 and the book was released in 2016) I would have enjoyed success stories from people who applied this specific method, rather than hearing about Bill Gates who is known for focusing deeply (and betraying several rules of this book).