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 = “post” url = “blog/2019/06/26/deep-work-a-summary”

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I recently read the book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport. Here are some important key notes from the book I liked. These are quotes from the book followed by some of my notes.

In this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital.

Cal Newport begins with telling us that there are certain groups with a few advantages over others in the new economy that is emerging. He then tells us that

those who can work creatively with intelligent machines and those who are stars in their field

are more likely to thrive even without the advantages.

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.

In essence, he states above that productivity is the key element of thriving in this new world.

Although, there are a few key challenges one must conquer before being able to increase their own productivity.

we’ve been spoiled by the intuitive and drop-dead-simple user experience of many consumer-facing technologies,

Yes, we are using the best consumer facing products with the cleanest UI/UX making our cognitive burden to learn complexity minimal.

Further on, he postulates that,

If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.

The above may sound contentious but his books thesis is well explained further.

He comments,

depth is uncomfortable and distraction ubiquitous,

But he states that even though it is very dificult to avoid distractions and focus deeply, these conventions of the modern world,

are built on an unstable foundation and can be easily dismissed once you decide to cultivate a deep work ethic.

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In Morozov’s critique, we’ve made “the Internet” synonymous with the revolutionary future of business and government.

We tend to place a lot of emphasis on our circumstances, assuming that what happens to us (or fails to happen) determines how we feel. From this perspective, the small-scale details of how you spend your day aren’t that important, because what matters are the large-scale outcomes, such as whether or not you get a promotion or move to that nicer apartment.

As Gallagher summarizes: “Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.”

Gallagher teaches us that this is a foolhardy way to go about your day, as it 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, isn’t a pleasant world to inhabit.

Gallagher concludes in her book. “I’ll choose my targets with care … then give them my rapt attention. In short, I’ll live the focused life, because it’s the best kind there is.” We’d be wise to follow her lead.

“The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” Csikszentmihalyi calls this mental state flow (a term he popularized with a 1990 book of the same title).

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.

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 satisfaction.

Your work is craft, and if you hone your ability and apply it with respect and care, then like the skilled wheelwright you can generate meaning in the daily efforts of your professional life.

The meaning uncovered by such efforts is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in craftsmanship—not the outcomes of their work. Put another way, a wooden wheel is not noble, but its shaping can be. The same applies to knowledge work. You don’t need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work.

“I’ll live the focused life, because it’s the best kind there is.”

You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it’s instead like a muscle that tires.

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.

it’s not just the change of environment or seeking of quiet that enables more depth. The dominant force is the psychology of committing so seriously to the task at hand. To put yourself in an exotic location to focus on a writing project, or to take a week off from work just to think, or to lock yourself in a hotel room until you complete an important invention: These gestures push your deep goal to a level of mental priority that helps unlock the needed mental resources. Sometimes to go deep, you must first go big.

The presence of the other party waiting for your next insight—be it someone physically in the same room or collaborating with you virtually—can short-circuit the natural instinct to avoid depth.

Christensen walked through the basics of disruption: entrenched companies are often unexpectedly dethroned by start-ups that begin with cheap offerings at the low end of the market, but then, over time, improve their cheap products just enough to begin to steal high-end market share.

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 that will then have a positive impact on your long-term goals.

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 D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets … it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.

The implication of this line of research is that providing your conscious brain time to rest enables your unconscious mind to take a shift sorting through your most complex professional challenges.

attention restoration theory (ART), which claims that spending time in nature can improve your ability to concentrate.

regularly resting your brain improves the quality of your deep work. When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done. Your average e-mail response time might suffer some, but you’ll more than make up for this with the sheer volume of truly important work produced during the day by your refreshed ability to dive deeper than your exhausted peers.

it’s common to treat undistracted concentration as a habit like flossing—something that you know how to do and know is good for you, but that you’ve been neglecting due to a lack of motivation.

If every moment of potential boredom in your life—say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives—is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the “mental wrecks” in Nass’s research, it’s not ready for deep work—even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.

once we see the distraction problem in terms of brain wiring, it becomes clear that an Internet Sabbath cannot by itself cure a distracted brain.

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 you have to eliminate distracting behaviors; it’s sufficient that you instead eliminate the ability of such behaviors to hijack your attention.

We found that one of the biggest differences between memory athletes and the rest of us is in a cognitive ability that’s not a direct measure of memory at all but of attention,”

any-benefit mind-set, as it identifies any possible benefit as sufficient justification for using a network tool.

they’re tools, no different from a blacksmith’s hammer or an artist’s brush, used by skilled laborers to do their jobs better

The notion that identifying some benefit is sufficient to invest money, time, and attention in a tool is near laughable to people in his trade.

It’s a zero-sum game. And because your time returns substantially more rewards when invested in high-impact activities than when invested in low-impact activities, the more of it you shift to the latter, the lower your overall benefit.

This fear that you might miss out has obvious parallels to Nicodemus’s fear that the voluminous stuff in his closets might one day prove useful, which is why I’m suggesting a corrective strategy that parallels his packing party.

earning people’s attention online is hard, hard work. Except now it’s not.

You “like” my status update and I’ll “like” yours. This agreement gives everyone a simulacrum of importance without requiring much effort in return.

They’re just products, developed by private companies, funded lavishly, marketed carefully, and designed ultimately to capture then sell your personal information and attention to advertisers.

the logical foundation of his proposal, that you both should and can make deliberate use of your time outside work, remains relevant today—especially with respect to the goal of this rule, which is to reduce the impact of network tools on your ability to perform deep work.

when it comes to your relaxation, don’t default to whatever catches your attention at the moment, but instead dedicate some advance thinking to the question of how you want to spend your “day within a day.”

If you give your mind something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you’ll end the day more fulfilled, and begin the next one more relaxed, than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in semiconscious and unstructured Web surfing.

The value of deep work vastly outweighs the value of shallow, but this doesn’t mean that you must quixotically pursue a schedule in which all of your time is invested in depth.

lazy. By instead picking and sticking with a shallow-to-deep ratio, you can replace this guilt-driven unconditional acceptance with the more healthy habit of trying to get the most out of the time you put aside for shallow work (therefore still exposing yourself to many opportunities), but keeping these efforts constrained to a small enough fraction of your time and attention to enable the deep work that ultimately drives your business forward.

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 Gates to start a billion-dollar industry in less than a semester.