rohanverma.net/content/blog/2019-08-04.md

+++ author = “Rohan Verma” categories = [“notes”] date = “2019-06-26T07:30:00+00:00” draft = true tags = [“books”] title = “Deep Work by Cal Newport- A summary” type = “” url = “blog/2019/06/26/deep-work-a-summary”

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I recently read the book Deep Work by Cal Newport. Here are some important key notes from the book I liked.

• In this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively
• 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
• we’ve been spoiled by the intuitive and drop-dead-simple user experience of many consumer-facing technologies,
• If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.
• depth is uncomfortable and distraction ubiquitous,
• it’s built on an unstable foundation and can be easily dismissed once you decide to cultivate a deep
• We should not, therefore, expect the bottom-line impact of depth-destroying behaviors to be easily detected.
• In Morozov’s critique, we’ve made “the Internet” synonymous with the revolutionary future of
• We tend to place a lot of emphasis on our circumstances, assuming that what happens to us (or
• As Gallagher summarizes: “Who you are, what you think, feel,
• Gallagher teaches us that this is a foolhardy way to go about your day, as it ensures that your mind
• Gallagher concludes in her book. “I’ll choose my targets with
• “The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind
• Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have
• Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.
• To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep
• Your work is craft, and if you hone your ability and apply it with respect and care, then like the skilled
• The meaning uncovered by such efforts is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in craftsmanship—not
• “I’ll live the focused life, because it’s the best kind
• 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
• Ritualize An often-overlooked
• it’s not just the change of environment or seeking of quiet that enables more depth. The dominant force
• The presence of the other party waiting for your next insight—be it someone physically in the same
• Christensen walked through the basics of disruption: entrenched companies are often unexpectedly dethroned
• What I needed was help figuring out how to execute this strategy.
• execution should be aimed at a small number of “wildly important goals.”
• lead measures turn your attention to improving the behaviors you directly control in the near future
• it was not so much the intensity of my deep work periods that increased, but instead their regularity.
• Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin
• The implication of this line of research is that providing your conscious brain time to rest enables
• attention restoration theory (ART), which claims that spending time in nature can improve your ability
• regularly resting your brain improves the quality of your deep work. When you work, work hard. When you’re
• it’s common to treat undistracted concentration as a habit like flossing—something that
• If every moment of potential boredom in your life—say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone
• once we see the distraction problem in terms of brain wiring, it becomes clear that an Internet
• instead schedule the occasional break from focus to give in to distraction.
• you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli. This doesn’t mean that
• We found that one of the biggest differences between memory athletes and the rest of us is in a cognitive
• any-benefit mind-set, as it identifies any possible benefit as sufficient justification for using
• they’re tools, no different from a blacksmith’s hammer or an artist’s brush, used by skilled laborers
• The notion that identifying some benefit is sufficient to invest money, time, and attention
• It’s a zero-sum game. And because your time returns substantially more rewards when invested in high-impact
• This fear that you might miss out has obvious parallels to Nicodemus’s fear that the voluminous stuff
• earning people’s attention online is hard, hard work.
• You “like” my status update and I’ll “like” yours. This agreement gives everyone a simulacrum
• They’re just products, developed by private companies, funded lavishly, marketed carefully, and designed
• the logical foundation of his proposal, that you both should and can make deliberate
• when it comes to your relaxation, don’t default to whatever catches your attention at the moment, but
• If you give your mind something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you’ll
• The value of deep work vastly outweighs the value of shallow, but this doesn’t mean that you must quixotically
• lazy. By instead picking and sticking with a shallow-to-deep ratio, you can replace this guilt-driven
• Marshall McLuhan declared that “the medium is the message,”
• Deep work is important, in other words, not because distraction is evil, but because it enabled Bill
• * The studies I cite are looking at the activity of deliberate practice—which substantially (but