Newport, Cal. Deep work: Rules for focused success in a distracted world. Hachette UK, 2016.

The notes in Part I focus largely on context and provide definitions (what is Deep Work and why is it meaningful). Part II describes the four rules of Deep Work. If you’re in a rush to start working Deeply, jump straight to Rule 1: Work Deeply for guidance.

Part I

Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limits. These efforts create new value, improve your skills, and are hard to replicate.

Shallow Work: Non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.

The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.

Deliberate Practice: The systematic stretching of your ability for a given skill; an activity required to get better at something.

Deep Work is Valuable

During the Intelligent Machine Age, 3 groups will have a particular advantage: those who work well and creatively with intelligent machines (high-skilled workers), those who are the best at what they do (rock stars), and those with access to capital (owners).

Two core abilities for thriving:

Quickly master hard things
Produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed

These depends on your ability to perform deep work.

To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction (an act of deep work).
To produce at your peak level, you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction (deep work optimizes your performance).

Attention Residue: Attention that remains stuck thinking about a previous task when you switch to the next task, greatly reducing performance on the new task.

Counterexample

If you’re a high-level executive at a major company, you probably don’t need deep work; e.g. asking a CEO to spend hours thinking deeply about a single problem is a waste of what makes them valuable. It’s better to hire three smart employees to think deeply about the problem and then bring their solution to the executive for a final decision. But don’t extrapolate this to your job (even if you’re a manager). E.g. Scrum project management replaces a lot of ad hoc messaging with super efficient meetings, freeing up managerial time for thinking deeply about problems their teams are tackling.

Deep Work is Rare

Many recent trends decrease one’s ability to go deep; e.g. open offices provide opportunities for collaboration, but do so at the cost of massive distraction. These business trends actively decrease people’s ability to perform deep work, even though the benefits promised by these trends (e.g. increased serendipity, faster responses to requests, and more exposure) are arguably dwarfed by the benefits that flow from a commitment to deep work (e.g. the ability to learn hard things fast and produce at an elite level).

Deep work is rare because of flawed thinking combined with the ambiguity and confusion that often define knowledge work:

The Metric Black Hole

Even though we abstractly accept that distraction has costs and depth has value, these impacts are difficult to measure; the metrics fall into an opaque region resistant to easy measurement.

The 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. Examples:

if the work environment is such that you can expect a quick answer to your question, this makes your life easier (in the moment), otherwise you’d have to plan better, be more organized, etc.
the culture of connectivity makes it acceptable to run your day out of your inbox: responding to issues while feeling satisfyingly productive.
regularly occurring meetings for projects, which tend to pile up and fracture your schedule: it’s easier to rely on these meetings for personal organization.

The Principle of Least Resistance, protected from scrutiny by the Metric Black Hole, supports work cultures that save us from the short-term discomfort of concentration and planning, at the expense of long-term satisfaction and the production of real value.

Deep Work is Meaningful

A deep life is not just economically lucrative, but also a life well lived.

Part II

There are four rules to Deep Work:

Work Deeply
Embrace Boredom
Quit Social Media
Drain the Shallows

Work Deeply

You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. To develop a deep work habit, move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the use of willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.

Six strategies designed to maximize the amount of deep work you consistently accomplish in your schedule:

Decide on your depth philosophy
Ritualize
Make grand gestures
Don’t work alone
Execute like a business
Be lazy

Decide on your depth philosophy

Below are 4 philosophies of Deep Work scheduling.

The Monastic Philosophy
- Eliminate/radically minimize shallow obligations, e.g. have no email address
The Bimodal Philosophy
- Divide your time, dedicating clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else
- The minimum unit of time for deep work is at least one full day (a few hours in the morning is too short)
- This philosophy is typically deployed by people who cannot succeed without substantial commitments to non-deep pursuits
The Rhythmic Philosophy
- Schedule daily deep work sessions (at least 90 minute chunks, at the same time every day)
- This pre-scheduled, rhythmic routine eliminates decision making in the moment and helps maintain continuous progress throughout the year
- The Rhythmic Philosophy is therefore the most common among deep workers in the standard office jobs
The Journalistic Philosophy
- Fit deep work wherever you can in your schedule (difficult to pull off)
- Not for a deep work novice; need practice switching into deep work mode and need confidence in your abilities

Ritualize

Build strict and idiosyncratic rituals to make the most out of your deep work sessions. An effective ritual must address:
- Where you’ll work and for how long
- How you’ll work once you start to work (e.g. ban the use of internet, maintain a metric of progress)
- How you’ll support your work (e.g. session starts with a cup of coffee, de-clutter your workspace; but make it something systematic)

Make grand gestures

By leveraging a radical change to your normal environment, you increase the perceived importance of the task

Don’t work alone

The combination of soundproofed offices connected to large common areas yields a hub-and-spoke architecture of innovation in which both serendipitous encounter and isolated deep thinking are supported
The hub-and-spoke setup straddles the spectrum where on one extreme we find the solo thinker, isolated from inspiration but free form distraction, and on the other extreme, we find the fully collaborative thinker in the open office, flush with inspiration but struggling to support the deep thinking needed to build on it

Execute like a business

The 4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX):
1. Focus on the Wildly Important — the more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish; identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue.
2. Act on Lead Measures — lag measures (ultimate long-term goal), lead measures (actions directly in your control that will drive success on lag measures)
3. Keep a Compelling Scoreboard — e.g. tally of deep work hours worked
4. Create a Cadence of Accountability — use a rhythm of regular (short!) meetings for any team that owns a wildly important goal
4DX is based on the premise that execution is more difficult than strategizing

Be lazy

At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning.

Why?
- Downtime aids insight — for decisions that require the application of strict rules, the conscious mind must be involved; for decisions that involve large amounts of information and vague constraints, your unconscious mind is well suited to tackle the issue
- Downtime helps recharge for more Deep Work — you can restore your ability to direct your attention if you give this activity a rest (e.g. take a walk in nature and totally forget about deadlines)
- Evening downtime is more important than evening work — if you’re careful about your schedule, you’ll hit your daily deep work capacity during your workday; evening low-value shallow tasks won’t help you advance your career
How?
- Don’t look at your work email after work, not even for a second
- Have a shutdown ritual, e.g. check your email and to-do list for incomplete tasks and make a plan to address them the next day; next, release work-related thoughts for the rest of the day. The planning frees cognitive resources for other pursuits
- It takes about a week or two for shutdown rituals to stick - they’re annoying - but they’re necessary for systematic idleness; you will notice that resting your brain improves the quality of your deep work

Embrace Boredom

Rule #1 will help you reach the current limit of your concentration ability. This rule will help you significantly improve this limit.

Getting the most out of your deep work habits requires training, and this training must address 2 goals:

Improve your ability to concentrate intensely
Overcome your desire for distraction

Don’t take breaks from distraction, take breaks from focus

If you eat healthy just one day a week, you’re unlikely to lose weight. Similarly, if you spend one day a week resisting distraction, you’re unlikely to diminish your brain’s craving for these stimuli.
To succeed with deep work, you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli. Eliminate the ability of such behaviors to hijack your attention.
For example, schedule blocks of time for using the internet, and avoid it completely outside of these blocks. This could/should also extend to internet use outside of work.

Work like Teddy Roosevelt

Roosevelt was an impossibly energetic freshman with an amazing array of interests. To support his extracurricular exuberance, he severely restricted his available time for his studies at Harvard. During these dedicated time slots, he worked with blistering intensity.
Inject the occasional dash of Rooseveltian intensity into your own workday:
- identify a deep task that’s high on your priority list
- estimate how long you’d normally spend on this type of obligation
- give yourself a deadline that drastically reduces this time
- commit publicly to this deadline or use a countdown timer as motivation
- work with great intensity and concentration (no email, Facebook, repeated coffee trips) to get it done in time
At first, try this experiment no more than once a week, giving yourself practice with intensity, but also adequate rest. Slowly increase the frequency of these Rooseveltian dashes, but make sure to keep your self-imposed deadlines right at the edge of feasibility.

Meditate productively

The goal of productive mediation is to take a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally (e.g. walking, showering, waiting in line) and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem. As with mindfulness meditation, continue to bring your attention back to the problem at had when it wanders or stalls.
Your goal should be to have at least 2 or 3 sessions per week.
Besides productivity, this practice rapidly improves your ability to think deeply. It teaches you to resist distractions and sharpens your concentration.
This mediation requires practice (it can take about a dozen sessions to get real results), but don’t get discouraged, instead:
- Be Wary of Distraction and Looping — if your mind suddenly slips to an email you were meaning to write, gently bring your attention back to the real task. If you catch yourself replaying the preliminary results that you already know, remark to yourself that you are in a loop and redirect your attention toward the next step.
- Structure Your Deep Thinking — start by reviewing the relevant variable for solving your problem, store these variable in working memory, define the next-step question you need to answer using these variables; now you have a specific target for your attention. Assuming you’re able to solve you next-step question, the final step of this structured approach to deep thinking is to consolidate your gains by reviewing the answer you identified.

Memorize a deck of cards

From a 2014 study: “…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.” A side effect of memory training, then, is an improvement in your general ability to concentrate, which can be fruitfully applied to deep work.
Memory athletes never use rote memorization (looking at information over and over again and repeating it in their heads); we’re not wired to internalize abstract information, instead we are really good at remembering scenes. E.g. we can remember some scenes vividly, even though we didn’t make a special effort to do so at the time.
To memorize a deck of cards, you need 2 advance steps: (1) cement in your mind the mental image of walking through 5 rooms in your home and, in each room, establish an order of 10 items to look at; add 2 more items in your yard. (2) associate a memorable person or thing with each card. Pick up the deck, begin your mental walk-through; as you encounter each item, look at the next card and imagine the memorable person/thing near or interacting with the item.
Note: there’s nothing special about card memorization; any structured though process that requires unwavering attention can have a similar effect, e.g. learning the guitar part of a song by ear. The key to this strategy is that your ability to concentrate is only as strong as your commitment to train it.

Accept that social media tools are not inherently evil, and that some might be vital to your success and happiness, but at the same time also accept that the threshold for allowing a site regular access to your time and attention (and personal data) should be much more stringent. You must fight to get to a middle ground between hyper-connectedness and quitting the internet altogether.

Decision process for network tool selection

Don’t apply the “any-benefit” approach (i.e. justifying using a network tool if you can identify any possible to its use, or anything you might miss out on if you don’t use it). Instead, 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 outweigh its negative impacts.

Identify the main high-level goals in both your professional and personal life (e.g. being an effective mentor to my graduate students).
- Keep the descriptions suitably high-level, and keep the list limited to what’s most important.
List 2 or 3 of the most important activities that help you satisfy each goal (e.g. regularly read and understand the cutting-edge results in my field).
- Keep the activities specific enough to allow you to picture doing them, but general enough so that they’re not tied to a onetime outcome.
Consider the network tools you currently use. For each tool, go through the key activities you identified and ask whether the use of the tool has a substantially positive impact, a substantially negative impact, or little impact on your regular and successful participation in the activity.
Decide to keep the tool only if you concluded that it has substantial positive impacts and that these outweigh the negative impacts.

The above approach is not cut-and-dry; rather, it requires practice and experimentation. The following strategies can provide some structure.

Apply the Law of the Vital Few to your internet habits

(Pareto’s Rule): In many settings, 80% of a given effect is due to just 20% of the possible causes.
Applying this rule to the important goals in your life, a vital few activities provide the bulk of the benefit when it comes to succeeding with these goals.
This is why you would focus on the top 2 or 3 key activities; spending time and attention on low-impact activities will lower your overall benefit in this zero-sum game.

Social media services offer personalized information at an unpredictable intermittent schedule, making them addictive and capable of damaging your attempts to schedule and succeed with concentration.
Companies have convinced our culture that if you don’t use their products you might miss out.
Spend a month without these services and you can replace your fear of missing out with a dose of reality: they’re not really that important in your life.

Don’t use the internet to entertain yourself

You can and should make deliberate use of your time outside of work. Put more thought into your leisure time.
Sites like Reddit and Buzzed are especially harmful after the workday is over, when freedom in your schedule enables them to attract your attention and provide a cognitive crush to eliminate any boredom.
It’s crucial to figure out in advance what you’ll do in your evening and weekends. Structured hobbies and relaxation will help you feel fulfilled and begin the next day relaxed.
In summary, to eliminate the addictive pull of entertainment sites, give your brain a quality alternative.

Drain the Shallows

The shallow work that increasingly dominates the time and attention of knowledge workers is less vital than it often seems. Replacing this time with more of the deep alternative will make you and your business successful. This rule asks youth apply these insights to your personal work life, and the following strategies will help you drain the shallows.

Here are five things you can do to decrease the shallow work in your life:

Schedule every minute of your day
Quantify the depth of every activity
Ask your boss for a shallow work budget
Finish your work by five thirty
Become hard to reach

Schedule every minute of your day

We spend too much of our day on autopilot, allowing trivial activities to creep into our schedule.
Use a calendar to schedule (minimum 30 minute blocks) your entire day. Feel free to revise the schedule throughout the day (when estimates are wrong or things come up); your goal is not to stick to a given schedule, but to be thoughtful about your time. Feel free to schedule overflow conditional blocks (in case you finish something early, have extra tasks within that window).
Allow spontaneity in your schedule when an innovative idea arises; the schedule is about thoughtfulness, not rigidity.

Quantify the depth of every activity

Using the scheduling system, facilitates tracking the amount of time spent in shallow activities. Consequently, try to bias your scheduled time toward deeper tasks.
To determine where a task falls on the shallow-to-deep scale, ask yourself: “how many months would it take to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task?”

Ask your boss for a shallow work budget

For most non-entry knowledge workers, 30% to 50% of time will be spent on shallow work.
Obeying this budget will require you to change your behavior
- Say no to projects infused with shallow work
- Reduce shallowness from current project
- Spend mornings in communication isolation
- Drop weekly status meetings for results-driven reporting — “let me know when you’ve made significant progress and we’ll talk”
At the end of the day, the business’s goal is to generate value, not to make employee’s lives as easy as possible (i.e. if you become less available, for example).

Finish your work by five thirty

Fixed-schedule productivity: have a firm cutoff time for work, and work backwards from that time to find productivity strategies to satisfy this commitment.
The limits on time and schedule lead to cutting more shallow tasks and improving organizational skills.
Fixed-schedule productivity is a meta-habit that should be high on your list of behaviors; it’s simple to adopt but broad in its impact.

Become hard to reach

Make people who send you email do more work: create a sender filter (i.e. ask your correspondents to filter themselves before contacting you by creating questions/barriers/expectations).
Do more work when you send or reply to emails: reduce the number of back & forth emails by closing the loop with a good response. Use the prompt: “what is the project represented by this message, and what the most efficient process for bringing this project to a successful conclusion?” In your response, describe this process, point out the current step, and emphasize the next step.
Don’t respond: don’t respond to vague emails or group emails that include someone whose response is more critical.

Note: There’s a limit to anti-shallow thinking

a nontrivial amount of shallow for is needed to maintain most knowledge work jobs (e.g. email is unavoidable in some jobs, so tame the shallow footprint, rather than eliminate it)
cognitive capacity is limited (for newbies: 1 hour per day of deep work, for pros: 4 hours per day).