Deep Work

Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

by Cal NewPort

Number of pages: 304

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

BBB Library: Personal Success

ISBN: 978-1455586691



About the Author

Cal Newport is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University, who specializes in the theory of distributed algorithms. He previously earned his Ph.D. from MIT in 2009 and graduated from Dartmouth College in 2004. In addition to studying the theoretical foundations of our digital age as a professor, Newport also writes about the impact of these technologies on the world of work.

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Editorial Review

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. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep-spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there's a better way. In Deep Work, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite.

Book Reviews

“As a presence on the page, Newport is exceptional in the realm of self-help authors. He is not an obvious ­maniac. His writing isn’t befouled by stylistic abuses. He has not granted himself a job title featuring the word “guru” or “maven.” Partly for these reasons and partly because his diagnoses rang true, I bought into ‘Deep Work.’” The New York Times

“Newport’s disarming self-awareness—‘Deep work is not some nostalgic affectation of writers and early-20th-century philosophers’—and emphasis on a meaningful work practice that’s ‘rich with productivity and meaning’ makes for an excellent lesson in focusing on quality rather than quantity at work.” Publishers Weekly

“If you want to stop being so easily distracted and reach greater heights in meaningful personal productivity and new depths of insight that you’ve only dreamed of, you need to read this book!” Rockstar Finance

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Wisdom to Share

If you’re willing to struggle to deploy your mind to its fullest capacity to create things that matter, then you’ll discover that depth generates a life rich with productivity and meaning.

Deep work is way more powerful than most people understand. It’s commitment to this skill that allowed people like Bill Gates to make the most of an unexpected opportunity to create a new industry. To leave the distracted masses to join the focused few is a transformative experience.

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 anyone can pick up quickly is one that doesn’t leverage expertise, and therefore it can be understood as shallow.

It’s difficult to prevent the trivial from creeping into every corner of your schedule if you don’t face 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?”

For most businesses, if you eliminated significant amounts of this shallowness, their bottom line would likely remain unaffected. If you not only eliminate shallow work but also replace this recovered time with more deeper alternative, not only will the business continue to function; but it can also become more successful.

Addictive websites thrive in a vacuum: if you haven’t given yourself something to do in a given moment, they’ll always beckon as an appealing option.

To master the art of deep work you must take back control of your time and attention from the many diversions that attempt to steal them.

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

The use of a distracting service does not, by itself, reduce your brain’s ability to focus. Instead, it’s 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.

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