Chapter One - Deep work is valuable:
Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy
- The ability to quickly master hard things.
- The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.
Deep Work Helps You Quickly Learn Hard Things
1 | Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converging rays of attention; let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea. -- Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges |
Deliberate practice
- your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you’re trying to improve or an idea you’re trying to master;
- you receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it’s most productive.
Deep Work Helps You Produce at an Elite Level
High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)
Chapter Two - Deep work is rare:
1 | 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. -- 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.
Deep work is at a servere disadvantage in a technopoly because it builds on values like
quality, craftsmanship, and mastery that are decidedly old-fashioned and nontechnological.
Even worse, to support deep work often requires the rejection of much of what is new and high-tech.
Deep work is exiled in favor of more distracting high-tech behaviors.
Chapter Three - Deep Work Is Meaningful
A Neurological Argument for Depth
Your world is the outcome of what you pay attention to, so consider for a moment the type of mental world constructed when you dedicate significant time to deep endeavors. There’s gravity and snese of imprortance inherent in deep work.
The idle mind is the devil’s workshop. When you lose focus, your mind tends to fix on what could be wrong with your life instead of what’s right.
A workday driven by the shallow, from a neurological perspective, is likely to be a draining and upsetting day, even if most of the shallow things that capture your attention seem harmless or fun.
A Pssychological Argument for Depth
Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.
A Philosophical Argument for Depth
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.
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.
Chapter Four - 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 amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.
warning: You must be careful to choose a philosophy that fits your specific circumstances.
The monastic Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling
This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations.
The Bimodal Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling
This philosophy asks that you divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined staretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else.
The Rhythmic Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling
This philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit. The goal, in other words, is to generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you’re going to go deep. The chain method is a good example of the rhythmic philosophy of deep work scheduling because it combines a simple scheduling euristic, with an easy way to remind yourself to do the work: the big red Xs on the calendar.
The Jourualistic Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling
I call this approach, in which you fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule, the journalist philosophy.
This approach is not for the deep work novice. As I established in the opening to this rule, the ability to rapidly switch your mind from shallow to deep mode doesn’t come naturally. Without practice, such switches can seriously deplete your finite willpower reserves. This habit also requires a sense of confidence in your abilities.
Deep work ritual
Where you’ll work and for how long. Your ritual needs to specify a location for your deep work efforts.
How you’ll work once you start to work. Your ritual needs rules and processes to keep your efforts structured.
How you’ll support you work. Your ritual needs to ensure your brain gets the support it needs to keep operating at a high level of depth.
Make Grand Gestures
The concept is simple: 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.
The 4 disciplines of excution
- Discipline 1: Focus on the wildly important
“The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.” execution should be aimed at a small number of “wildly important goals.” This simplicity will help focus an organization’s energy to a sufficient intensity to ignite real results.
For an individual focused on deep work, the implication is that 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.
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 compilling scoreboard.
Discipline 4: Create a cadence of accountability.
Why a shutdown will be proftable to your ability to produce valuable output.
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.
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 limiit of your concentration ability.
Rule 2: will help you significantly improve this limit. The starategies that follow are motivated by the key idea that getting the most out of your deep work habit requires training, and as clarified previously, this training must address two goals:
- improving your ability to concentrate intensely and
- overcoming your desire for distraction
- Don’t take breaks from distraction, instead take breaks from focus.
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 those blocks absolutely free from internet use.
point 3: scheduling internet use at home as well as at work can further improve your concentration traning.