Book Review: Deep Work

Book info

• Title: Deep Work
• Author: Cal Newport
• Link: goodreads

Most of us are aware that digital devices have changed our lives in the past 20 years. We frequently check messages on WeChat or Facebook or Email and spend hours a day watching short videos on Douyin or Tiktok. The Internet has made it easier for us to connect with each other, but it has also made it harder for us to concentrate on our work. We know we need to think deeply and work efficiently, but we find it harder to do than before.

The book Deep Work tries to help us solve this problem, or say help us identify this kind of state of us clearly and help us come back to deep work.

When we talk about deep work we talk two parts about it to give us a more comprehensive view of it. First, it is why we need to do deep work. We all know it is necessary and we have some reasons, but they can’t become the core force to support us do deep work continuously. For example, we say deep work helps us finish work more efficiently. However, we don’t know why it is this and how it works. So we can say our points are a little superficial. Second, we talk about the methods, that is how to achieve deep work. It includes many methods to go into deep work, it also corrects some common wrong methods that are not really useful to work effectively.

The Ideas

01 Deep work is valuable

First, let’s distinguish deep work and shallow work.

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

Shallow Work: Noncognitively 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.

We can compare two types of work using the following table to quickly identify them.

Deep work helps us finish difficult works and create something valuable and special.

The notes from the book are:

We need two core abilities for thriving in the new economy, that is:

1. The ability to quickly master hard things
2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed

If we want to possess the two abilities, we can use deep work. It is applicable.

First, to quickly master hard things, we can leverage deliberate practice.

Its core components are usually identified as follows:

1. your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you’re trying to improve or an idea you’re trying to master;
2. you receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it’s most productive.

Second, to produce at an elite level, there is a formula.

High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)

Time Spent is easy to control, as for intensity of focus, we should avoid to be interrupted and be distracted. Every time we switch the tasks we are working on, we shift our attention from the previous task to the next. If these attentions are not related, we need to expend extra energy and attention to align them. That is attention residue.

By working on a single hard task for a long time without switching, we can minimize the negative impact of attention residue from other tasks, allowing us to maximize performance on this one task.

02 Why do we prefer shallow work?

First, it’s the principle of least resistance. Shallow work is easier to do than deep work. When there are two tasks to do, we tend to choose the one that is easier to do.

Second, it’s the addiction to the Internet. The Internet has reduced the difficulty of getting dopamine. We surf the Internet and browse new contents, and even check messages and emails from phone to anticipate something fresh will happen. Frankly, the Internet helps improve the quality of our lives, like communication is easier and informations are interconnected. But fewer and fewer people are noticing the negative impact of it on our lives.

Third, we see busyness as proxy for productivity. As mentioned in the first reason, most of time deep work is hard to do and life is hard, we would like to make our lives easier. We pretend that we are busy by doing trivial works to escape doing difficult one. Also we can find a reason we have too many trivia to do so that we don’t have time to do really important things.

03 Deep work is meaningful

I want to separate deep work from simple tools. I think they are very different at many aspects. We get happiness and tranquil through thinking hard. Deep work facilitates we come into this kind of state. Meanwhile, it makes us get focused. Deep work is the best strategy to apply in life. I illustrate the meaning of deep work from three aspects following.

First, our feeling actually is closely tied to what we pay attention to. We often say that achieving something makes us happy, while experiencing misfortune makes us sad. But for one thing that we acclaim it is bad sometimes is good when comparing it to a worse thing. Result of one thing is just fact which isn’t with good part and bad part. Actually the feeling comes from our reaction. For instance, the feelings of someone facing a meal will differ greatly between someone who is hungry and someone who is already full. When we pay attention to the positive side, we feel better. Deep work reduces the possibility of considering the negative side. We just focus on one thing that is positive.

Second, the feeling of going depth is interesting and fantastic. The flow state is a terminology in psychology. When we do one thing that is challengeable but is not very hard to finish, we come into this state. We forget the existence of time and do it more and more better over time. During the process of doing the thing, we are focused and feel energized.

Third, focus on the process rather than the result. Steve Jobs said, “the journey is the reward.” The reason of why we need to do in this way is we are consequent, but the result is discrete. Results are connected by processes. When we just jump between these points of result, we can’t get their meanings. We fall into the trap of achieving one and one goals tiredly. Deep work gets us isolate from distractions to do one thing in a long time period.

The Methods

This part is about the practices of deep work. It changes the perspective of we perceiving work.

01 Work Deeply

Choose the appropriate philosophy of deep work scheduling

This section introduces how to work deeply. Deep work is about how to finish hard work. There are four philosophies of deep work scheduling.

1. The monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling. That is getting rid of interference from trivia and desires. This state is difficult to reach but it is necessary to achieve big goals.
2. The bimodal philosophy of deep work scheduling. This philosophy separate two periods from time. One is for working and living in a reclusive state, and one is working and living in society. This philosophy thinks the news and information from society is helpful to do work better when working in isolating state.
3. The rhythmic philosophy of deep work scheduling. This is about habit and ritualize. People who apply this philosophy live in society. But they have a fixed time period to work without distraction.
4. The journalist philosophy of deep work scheduling. That is when one is free, they will go to work. This is a really focused state that is paying attention to one thing until it gets done.

We can select the appropriate philosophy of deep work scheduling according to our conditions. If our work require to respond quickly, we can apply the rhythmic philosophy or the journalist philosophy. If we really need a period to think hard and make important decisions, we can choose the bimodal philosophy.

❤️Ritualize

We often think inspirations of artists is from occasions. That’s not true. Actually the inspiration comes from rituals. That is there is a fixed period every day to do their works. I think it belongs to the rhythmic philosophy of deep work scheduling. Depending on the continuous deep thinking and dedicating work, they make great achievements.

There are three necessary questions we need to answer if we want to apply this approach.

1. Where to do deep work and how long
2. Decide what to do before the ritualize
3. Prepare enough resources for maintaining the quality of work

I have tried this method many times. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I find I can apply it more and more better over time. This article that is going to finish is in the process applying this method.

❤️Execute Like a Business: 4DX

4DX is the abbreviation of 4 Disciplines from the book 4 Disciplines of Execution. It is about how to execute in business, however it is also suitable to deep work.

1. Discipline #1: Focus on the wildly important. We must identify the most important thing in our works. But it’s really hard to finish, because it seems there are some works that all are important for us in one moment. I think we still can prioritize them. We can use this strategy, “if you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to say ’no’ to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say ‘yes’ to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else.”
2. Discipline #2: Act on the lead measures. There are two types of metrics to measure our success. They are lag measures and lead measures. Lag measures is about our final result. But lead measures is what we have done to achieve final results. “The problem with lag measures is that they come too late to change your behavior.” We use lag measures drive us.
3. Discipline #3: Keep a compelling scoreboard. Scoreboard makes us pay attention to it. When we put a scoreboard in a noticeable place, we care about how much we have done to finish our goals, so that we are more engaged to work.
4. Discipline #4: Create a cadence of accountability. Our lead measures sometimes is not in the right path to arrive our final results. We can use the habit of a weekly review to figure out how to ensure a good score.

Some insightful themes:

1. Make grand gestures
2. Don’t work alone
3. Be lazy: downtime is ok and necessary

02 Embrace Boredom

Take my current condition as an example, I have to say my efficiency of work isn’t very high. At the first two days of workday, I can schedule my time in block. But steadily, I become distracted especially in Friday. Deep work is really hard to keep frankly. Today, I go on finishing my last review. After I read over this chapter again, I recognize deep work needs practice. We just remember some key points, but we skipped many details about how to keep this state.

Deep work is similar to concentration in many aspects. Also, shallow work is relevant to distraction. Scientific research from professor Clifford Nass indicates we can switch from concentration to distraction quickly, but reversing order is not easy to do. So we must be cautious of switching to distraction frequently. Meanwhile, coming into concentration is a skill that needs to practice.

Actually concentration exists levels. Someone can concentrate quickly and work with high efficiency, but another people need a period of time to come into this state and are low-resisted to temptation. This chapter addresses two goals: 1) improving your ability to concentrate intensely. 2) overcoming your desire for distraction.

Don’t Take Breaks from Distraction. Instead Take Breaks from Focus.

Scheduling breaks from distractions is we make a time period think ourselves. That indicates we are in a distracted environment. Although it is helpful for our life and work, the help is limited. When we are in distraction excluding the breaks, we still work in distracted state. So, let’s change the perspective, we should take breaks from focus. We can be distracted when taking breaks.

There are three key points that is helpful to do this:

1. Scale up/down the cycle length of focus and take breaks. When our work requires we response coworkers, customers quickly(maybe 15 minutes), we can set the schedule time length is 20 minutes. 15 minutes for focus, 5 minutes for response. If there are rare emails or messages to us, we can scale up the schedule length.
2. Focus time cannot be separated. When we are in focus time, it’s common that we desire to look up our phone for messages or think of one thing which needs to send a message to somebody. We must resist this temptation. To do it until focus time is end. If one thing is real urgent, then stop the focus time to come into breaks time and be sure breaks time comes to end.
3. Use this strategy at home. We become addict to social media or short video more easily when we are at home. This maybe will undo our attempts to schedule time in work to train our brain. We also can apply this strategy at home.

Practice to Complete Work within a Limited Time

Always being in comfortable zone won’t help us improve our concentration limitation. We must practice to work outside our work limit regularly. That is working with great intensity. Set a deadline of one work and commit it to your friends or coworkers, let ourselves work in high pressure situation. The bigger the project of our work we have set the deadline is, the more anxious we will be, and also the more improvement we get.

Meditate Productively

The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally, walking, jogging, driving, showering, and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem.

This is a kind of practice way. It is helpful to focus and it has been proved by the author himself.

There are two suggestions:

1. Be wary of distractions and looping: when we are thinking, we may be distracted by other motivations, pull back ourselves to go on the meditation. When we reach the boundary of one thinking, we shouldn’t think about it again and again, instead think deeper.
2. Structure your deep thinking: when we are walking, we can think of many things easily. When we are decide to come into productive meditation, we should avoid wandering. Focus on one problem, after solve it, think next one based on it. Step by step. We should follow the structure of thinking.

Quit Social Media

We are becoming more aware that we can’t cut off the connection with social media. It is useful to connect people, but it also grasps our attention firmly. We have found two realities:

1. We increasingly recognize that social media applications fragment our time and reduce our ability to concentrate.
2. We are impotent to the influence they have made to us.

The main reason we can’t get rid of social media is we still think they are helpful to our lives, but it really has side-effects. What can we do to handle them?

First, let’s introduce two concepts:

The Any-Benefit Approach to Network Tool Selection: You’re justified in using a network tool if you can identify any possible benefit to its use, or anything you might possibly miss out on if you don’t use it. The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: 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.

Most of tools have pros and cons. We often select tools based on their pros and cons. If the pros of one tool outweigh its cons, we use it. But actually we just are supposed we have applied this strategy sometimes. We often depend on one tool’s benefits to select it, even if its cost is obvious and outweigh its positive impacts. The benefits are so tempting that we ignore its expensive outcome for us.

Many problems can be solved as long as we seek feasible solutions with more attention and attempts. There are three strategies the author offer to us to select network tool more objectively.

Apply the Law of the Vital Few to Your Internet Habits

The strategy is:

1. Identify the main high-level goals in both your professional and your personal life.
2. List for each the two or three most important activities that help you satisfy the goal. These activities should be specific enough to allow you to clearly picture doing them. On the other hand, they should be general enough that they’re not tied to a onetime outcome.

Find what we want to do is not difficult, we can list a few. Then, we look for some key activities to help us reach the goal. Then, ask ourselves whether or not our selected network tools can satisfy the requirements of these activities. If the answer is no, drop the consideration of the tool. If you find there are other conditions you need to use it, list the goal you use it, apply the above strategy again. After doing it some times, the truly useful tools will be retained.

If you complain why we just decide basing the two or three activities, the reason is the law of the vital few. That is the 80/20 rule. The two activities play the biggest role in finish our goal.

Quit Social Media Temporarily to Evaluate its Usefulness

We can make an experiment: quit social media temporarily for 30 days and after that ask ourselves whether our lives become better or worse.

We can list the changes in these 30 days to evaluate the influence of social media absence. Maybe we find there are less fragments in our lives, or we have missed some important news and informations. Everyone’s answer is different. The answer results in some people decide to go on using social media because it is more useful. At this time, it is not social media that steals our time and this is truly we are using this tool.

Don’t Use the Internet to Entertain Yourself

We have long working time that is from ten to nine or from nine to six. After working time, we may do some entertainment activities. Arnold Bennett advices people to put more thought in to your leisure time.

During those sixteen hours (outside working time) he is free; he is not a wage-earner; he is not preoccupied with monetary cares; he is just as good as a man with a private income. Accordingly, the typical man should instead use this as an aristocrat would: to perform rigorous self-improvement — a task that, according to Bennett, involves, primarily, reading great literature and poetry.

That is we should and can deliberate use of our 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.

How do we do it?

It’s crucial, therefore, that you figure out in advance what you are going to do with your evenings and weekends before they begin. Structured hobbies provide good fodder for these hours, as they generate specific actions with specific goals to fill your time.

And actually, doing in this way won’t defeat our relaxation:

One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change—not rest, except in sleep.

Drain the Shallows

In this chapter, we declare war on shallow works. The shallow work that increasingly dominates the time and attention of knowledge workers is less vital than it often seems in the moment. Accordingly, we can reduce the time of shallow work in life. The value of deep work vastly outweigh 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. Because we need shallow work. It helps us handle daily affairs. Also, deep work is exhausting. We can’t always keep in the state of deep work. For those familiar with the focus time, the limit expands to something like four hours, but rarely more.

Schedule Every Minute of Your Day

There is a problem that is we spend much of our day on autopilot—not giving much thought to what we’re doing with our time. We think we just spend 30 minutes on watching short videos, but actually we spend one hour on it. This is common in our lives. To make a most valid plan, we must: Schedule every minute of your day.

First, we set time block in our work time. The unit of time block can be one hour and to keep things reasonably clean, the minimum length of a block should be thirty minutes. For trivial things, we can batch similar things into generic task block.

Second, we may meet some problems when operating. The first is that your estimating will prove wrong. The second problem is that you’ll be interrupted and new obligations will unexpectedly appear on your plate. For these problems, our core principle is be pragmatic. When we are interrupted, we can reschedule our time after the interruption gets done. When we make wrong evaluation, we adjust one thing’s time. However, we should make our evaluation more accurate next time.

Quantify the Depth of Every Activity

This strategy is aimed at prioritizing our daily activities. We know one thing is important, but we don’t know how important it is. The strategy is ask ourselves:

How long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task?

The longer it takes, the more important it is.

Finish Your Work by Five Thirty

There is one method that can take our productivity to a high degree, that is fixed-schedule productivity. At the beginning, it is hard to follow the schedule. After many times of practice, we would find we become more productive. When we apply this method, we say more ’no’ to others. It results in we have more time do our own works in deep state. Meanwhile, the limits to our time necessitate more careful thinking about our organizational habits, also leading to more value produced as compared to longer but less organized schedules.

Also, fixed-schedule productivity is a meta-habit, that’s simple to adopt but broad in its impact.

Become Hard to Reach

This chapter is subject to how we response to others’ message, especially e-mail. There are three tips we can use.

1. Make people who send your e-mail do more work. We set our requirements of responding one e-mail, like an important/interesting interview, a profession-relevant problem. If the e-mail we receives doesn’t satisfy this requirement, we won’t respond.
2. Do more work when you send or reply to e-mails. We can apply this template to do: What is the project represented by this message, and what is the most efficient (in terms of messages generated) process for bringing this project to a successful conclusion? That is the process-centric approach. This tip can save our communicating time.
3. Don’t respond. Remember this: when it comes to e-mail, it’s the sender’s responsibility to convince the receiver that a reply is worthwhile.

Conclusions

I spent about 20 hours writing this review/note. I know there are many weird grammars and expressions that don’t make sense. But it is more valuable to me, compared to you, who are reading this note. It proves I can write a long english article and I have carefully dissected the knowledge in this book.

The reason I write this note is I think it’s really helpful to me. Many strategies the author advised have been applying for me. Many arguments also changed my mind. As The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People mentioned:

If you want to make minor improvements, change your behavior. But if you want to make quantum improvements, change your paradigm.

I think it’s time to change my paradigm to follow deep work model that can get valuable things done.