Deep Work by Cal Newport — Required reading for all knowledge workers

Deepwork a term coined by Cal Newport is referenced multiple times by Lex Fridman in his podcast. In fact, one of the youtube videos where Lex Fridman is explaining his daily routine, it is clear that Deepwork is central to his day. I admire Lex Fridman for his philosophical outlook on life, the knowledge that he conveys to the world through his podcast and his love centered worldview. So I picked up Cal Newport’s Deepwork and took some notes to share with friends and family. Cal Newport is a seminal and authentic thinker — his philosophy towards work and learning is laid out in the series of books he has produced.

TL;DR

The idea:

• Deepwork is valuable
• Deepwork is rare
• Deepwork is meaningful

The rules

• Work Deeply
• Embrace Boredom
• Quit Social Media
• Drain the shallows

In the first part of the book Cal lays out the foundations of why working deeply is becoming more and more important in today’s world. Most people today are bombarded by information and distractions making the ability to focus a rare skill. We also know that creating value that the market rewards requires focused work. This creates a unique opportunity for folks who are able to focus.

Hypothesis

“The ability to perform deepwork is becoming increasingly rare at the exact 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.”

What is 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

What is deep work?

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

There are some corollaries between the outcomes of Deep work and what Naval Ravikant defines as specific knowledge. (Naval Ravikant is a phenom in the Tech and Investing world who is openly philosophic. Listening to his conversations often requires pausing, reflecting and noting down quotes for the sheer amount of practical wisdom he shares). Specific knowledge paraphrasing Naval is any piece of knowledge that is acquired by experience overtime, is highly context specific, applied in a particular situation and cannot be taught by a book. Naval also says that instead of hours, iterating 10,000 times can lead you to develop specific knowledge in a particular domain. Society rewards specific knowledge.

Some examples of popular figures that engaged in Deep work:

• Carl Jung — one of the most important figures in psychology in the past century moved to an isolated place because of the hard theoretical work he had to do to develop his theories against Sigmund Freud — his ex-mentor.
• Peter Higgs — theoretical physicist who couldn’t be found when his Nobel Prize was announced.
• Bill Gates — is famous for taking “think weeks” in isolation where he is in a cabin with books (and Coca Cola).

Another Anecdote mentioned in the book is Jason Benn who was a financial consultant who realized that most of his work could be automated by a “kludged together Excel script”. He decided to quit his job and become a computer programmer. He needed to learn a hard skill and had to do it fast.

Here he ran into a problem that holds most knowledge workers from navigating into more explosive career trajectories — learning something complex like computer programming requires intense and uninterrupted concentration on cognitively demanding concepts. This is an act of deep work.

Unfortunately, most knowledge workers have lost this ability to focus. Jason’s solution was that he locked himself in a room without a computer and read text books (18 of them) for five more more hours at a time. He proceeded to finish a Dev book camp (100 hours a week crash course) and in the end landed a job in a startup making 2x his previous salary. He did all this in roughly two months..

Finally Cal relates the ability to perform deepwork to our current economic environment. He argues that the intelligent machine age will yield benefits disproportionately. Again I would like to add something from Naval that this is the age of infinite leverage. This leverage is created by the fact that the marginal cost to get the next consumer for your piece of media content or software program is near zero. But it doesn’t mean that its easy. Some subset of people who will benefit most in this age are:

• High Skilled workers: working with intelligent machines (think data visualization, analytics, rapid prototyping, machine learning / AI)
• Super stars: Best in the world at what they do. Remote work means the competition is with the whole world. Typical industries where we already see this are consulting, marketing, writing, design and more. The post covid popularization of remote work has further fueled this.
• The Owners: Folks with capital to invest in technologies and own equity.

If you are not already in the groups above, you need to be able to do the following to thrive in the new economy

• The ability to quickly master hard things
• The ability to produce at an elite level both in terms of quality and speed

The second part of the book deals with practical rules you can apply towards your quest of deepwork.

#1 WORK DEEPLY

The first rule is that you start deepwork. How?

1. Set up cadence: You only do deep work which means you ignore everything menial that is not contributing towards producing high quality output OR you set up a few months every year where you perform deepwork activities in isolation OR couple of days every month OR consecutive hours every day.
2. Ritualize: Quirky, weird, personal start of the day e.g. having coffee, journaling or exercise to get in the zone. Try and avoid the internet and email.
3. Execute like a Business : 4DX Focus on the wildly important, act on lead measures, keep a compelling score card, create a cadence of accountability
4. Be Lazy : Down time aides insight and helps recharge, work in the evening is not that important.

#2 EMBRACE BOREDOM

The second rule focuses more on how to get better at deep work.

1. Don’t take breaks from distraction, instead take breaks from Focus. This means that you have scheduled “blocks” where you focus and in those blocks you completely avoid distraction — try to keep internet or email use outside of these focus blocks. Even if your job requires a lot fo email check — your frequency could be higher (smaller focus blocks) but stick to it — it is more about training the muscle of focus than to keep you away from internet or email.
2. Focus Intensely: Set deadlines in a way that you barely make it with all your focus — this is another dimension to building the focus muscle.
3. Meditate Productively: Take a walk with a complex problem — like meditation you avoid distraction, focus on the problem. Every time you get distracted, you come back to the problem. You also should watch for thought loops that are avoiding you to go deeper.
4. Memorize a deck of card

#3 QUIT SOCIAL MEDIA

1. Take a craftsman approach : The craftsman approach to tool selection. Identify the 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. Do not take the “any benefit” approach. The social media tools are designed by the best minds in the world to keep your attention hostage. Unless you make time, you will have no time for deep work.
2. Remember 80/20: Of all the tools you use, which are the 20% that yield the most benefits and contribute to your professional and personal happiness — keep them.
3. Pre-plan your evenings: Don’t default to mindless consumption on the internet or on the TV (Discipline = Freedom)

#4 DRAIN THE SHALLOWS

We cannot get rid of all that’s shallow, we have to keep our jobs. However, we overestimate the importance of shallow work which typically include meetings, emails etc. Some researches cited in the book state that most adept deep thinkers cannot sustain the intense focus for more than 4 hours. This means that even the most focused deep thinkers can afford half a day of shallow work. Again a reminder of what shallow work is:

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

How to drain the shallows?

1. Schedule your day : don’t be on autopilot. Try to schedule blocks for lunch, day-off, exercise as well.
2. Quantify the depth of your activities: Ask yourself “How long would it take a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task?” This will help you put the activity on the Deep-Shallow scale.
3. Shallow work budget: Ask your manager / project manager — what percentage of your time should be spent on shallow work?
4. Finish your work by 5:30 PM
5. Become hard to reach (on email)

• Make people who send you Email do more work e.g. state objectives, outcomes.
• Do more work when you send a reply to Email — try to minimize back and forth that starts a conversation. If a decision needs to be made present all options with considerations that will help make a decision.
• Don’t respond (if it is unclear what the email is about)

Other books by Cal Newport:

Digital Minimalism

A World Without Email

So Good They Can't Ignore You

Jawad Khan

With Jawad Khan's blog, I am working towards creating a Self Improvement Platform. I am dedicated to curating and providing you the best of Self Improvement content, with a focus on themes like productivity and improving your mental, physical, and spiritual wellbeing. I want to turn my passion for Education and Self Improvement into a booming online website. I hope you enjoy my content as much as we enjoy offering them to you. You can also check out my Linktree for more content and information.