Deep Work

I recently finished reading Cal Newport‘s latest book ‘Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World’. I had come across Newport’s work previously via various podcasts that I listen to and had read some of his blog posts covering the same content but I found the book to be a much more satisfying and useful experience.

Cal Newport is a professor in Computer Science at Georgetown University and so, in theory, his work should share many characteristics with mine. However, he is clearly driven to pursue his research much more than I have ever been and I guess this is why he has worked so much more fiercely to develop approaches to working that build and protect time for Deep Work (which he defines as ‘professional activities performed in a state of distraction-fee concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate’).

A central tenet of Newport’s book is that just at the time when Deep Work is becoming so necessary (and valuable) it is become increasingly rare and so those who practical the skill of Deep Work are in a fantastic position to leverage their skill to reap great rewards. Amongst the things that Newport suggests are deliberately build in time to practice Deep Work, to learn to become comfortable with boredom (and so not seek distraction so readily), to quit social media (perhaps the key source of distraction in the modern world) and to ruthlessly eliminate Shallow Work.

For me, one of the most valuable aspects of reading Newport’s book was that re-energised a desire to produce the kind of outputs that would likely come from Deep Work (not necessarily research papers but anything that requires a significant amount of creation in its generation). I think I had lost that to some extent.

Over the last couple of weeks I have been trying out some practices inspired by the book. I have been blocking out sizeable (multi-hour) chunks of time to work on the tougher kind of problems that tend to get pushed back and in these time periods I have been stealing myself against distractions as much as I can. I have generally been trying not to fill small empty spaces of time with a circuit of website or email checking. I have culled the people and accounts that I follow on Facebook and Twitter, almost to vanishing point. I have set aside regular time each day to ruthlessly attack smaller tasks, and because of this I have felt more secure at other times thatchings are not being forgotten. So far, the results have been excellent. Not only do I feel I have worked more productively and made good progress on deeper tasks, but I have also found that I have enjoyed working this way.

There are a lot of books about ‘productivity’ out there and I have read a fair few, but I sense that Newport’s Deep Work is one that will likely make a lasting impact in my life.