# Deep Work

> Source: https://ollybritton.com/notes/books/deep-work/ · Updated: 2024-10-04 · Tags: notes, book, safe-to-post-online

![deep-work.jpg](https://ollybritton.com/assets/attachments/img/deep-work.jpg)

> Famous book by Cal Newport on "deep work", working for an extended amount of time with an intense focus.

## Notes
### Introduction
* What is deep work? Spending a long amount of time alone and working hard on a problem.
* People have made big progress on important things in isolation.
* Jung had a tower that he worked in while trying to beat Freud' theories.
* Bill Gates has think weeks where he'd spend 2 weeks with no technology, just reading and thinking "big thoughts".
* A knowledge worker is someone who's job requires them to think for a living: programmers, doctors, scientists, lawyers, academics.
* An estimated 60% of knowledge worker's time is spent online and communicating with others.
* What is shallow work? Repetitive, undemanding work that is performed while distracted.
* Nowadays, hard tasks get split into distracted dashes that mean the work is of lower quality.
* Networked tools like social media are making our work more shallow.
* This shift is creating an economic gap where people who prioritise deep work are rewarded.
* Hard things, like learning something complex or creating something new, require bouts of uninterrupted concentration.
* The irony is strong: I was listening to the audio book whilst also using Snapchat, whilst also on a run.
* Two reasons why deep work is needed:
	* Learning hard things quickly is an important and valuable skill.
	* You need to be able to make really good things.
* The deep work hypothesis: deep work is becoming increasingly rare at the same time as it is becoming increasingly valuable.

##### What is deep work??
Spending a lot of time alone and working hard on a problem.

##### What is the deep work hypothesis??
Deep work is becoming increasingly rare at the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable.

##### What is the opposite of deep work??
Shallow work.

##### You've just checked your phone. That means that the work you're doing at the moment is likely...??
Shallow work.

### Part I
#### Chapter 1: Deep Work is Valuable
* Economy is changing. The three groups of people who will thrive:
	* The highly skilled people (i.e. good at working with intelligent machines)
	* The super stars (i.e. famous people in the industry, the best at what they do)
	* The owners (i.e. people with capital invest)
* Make money by joining these people!
* The skills needed to become "highly skilled" or "the super stars" are:
	* The ability to learn hard things quickly.
	* The ability to produce work of the highest quality and at speed.
* If you can't learn, you can't thrive.
* If you don't produce, you won't thrive.
* These abilities depend on your ability to deep work.
* F: "Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converging rays of attention; let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea."
* To learn requires intense concentration.
* F: Deliberate practice shows up again, like it did in [Body By Science](https://ollybritton.com/notes/books/body-by-science/).
* People aren't always prodigies, they can make it to expert level through deliberate practice.
* Attention needs to be focused tightly.
* Feedback keeps attention where it is most effective.
* Some biology:
	* Ability reduces down to the efficiency of the brain circuitry that perform the activity (the amount of myelin sheaths around a nerve cells measure this).
	* Distracted practice doesn't isolate the corresponding circuits well enough to make quick, efficient progress (like working with a Facebook feed open).
* To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intently and without distraction.
* I should read that paper about deliberate practice.
* You should model productivity as a scientific process to be optimised; this sounds similar to the later episodes of [Replacing Guilt](https://ollybritton.com/notes/books/replacing-guilt/).
* Stack hard things into continuous blocks of intention.
* F: Enforce strict isolation until you've completed the task at hand.
* F: $$\text{quality of work produced} = \text{time spent} \times \text{intensity of focus}$$
* You can increase your concentration to decrease the amount of time you spend working.
* Context switching diminishes focus.
* The type of work that optimises your performance is deep work.
* Some people have lots of shallow attention while still being valuable -- this is necessary for their type of work, like executives. This also feels a bit like Newport trying to explain away the anomalies in his theories.

##### "Let your mind become a lens..."??
"...thanks to the converging rays of attention; let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea."

##### What is deliberate practice??
A special type of practice that is purposeful and systematic.

##### What's one way of quickly increasing your focus on things??
Enforce strict isolation until you've completed the task at hand.

##### What is the $\text{quality of work produced}$ equation??
$$
\text{quality of work produced} = \text{time spent} \times \text{intensity of focus}
$$

#### Chapter 2: Deep Work is Rare
* Modern technologies like Slack supposedly increase communication and serendipity but undermine these benefits by preventing deep work.
* It's hard to measure some aspects of businesses, which explains why constant email has proliferated despite being harmful. People rely on how it feels in the moment.
* One study (of one group, hmmm) found more job satisfaction and a better team when email was turned off one day a week.
* The principle of least resistance: in a business setting without clear feedback on impacts to the bottom line, people will tend towards behaviours that are easier in the moment.
* Email is easier in the moment but worse for the bottom line.
* F: People use busyness as a proxy for productivity, pain is not the unit of effort.
* The H-index is a formula for measuring your impact on a field using citations and papers written, so academics have a better idea of how activities affect their bottom line.
* Admin tasks destroy productivity -- Feynman used to claim that he was irresponsible so that he didn't end up on any committee.
* Solid goals with concrete indications of completion, like having a motorbike drive out of a show after being repaired, are better than the loose ones of modern work.
* In the absence of clear indications of what is means to be productive, many workers turn to a more industrial "busyness" as a proxy for their measure of value.
* This means they do lots of stuff visibly in hopes that it makes them look good.
* Deep work is at odds to this -- you're not trying to make yourself visible.
* Deep work is exiled and instead swapped with new distracting behaviours like the professional use of social media.
* There's nothing fundamentally necessary about the shallow work associated with the modern internet.
* Deep work is getting rarer, and more valuable. If it does no harm, why not exploit the gap in the market by doing deep work.

##### What idea connects busyness and productivity??
Doing lots of shallow work visibly and using busyness as a proxy to productivity.

##### How did Feynman used to get out of admin work??
He claimed he was very irresponsible.

#### Chapter 3: Deep Work is Meaningful
* Blacksmithing is cool; it creates a strong Flow experience.
* Knowledge work has less well defined boundaries than blacksmithing or motorbike work.
* Shallow work is the normal, deep work is frowned upon.
* Our emotions depend on what we focus on:
	* If we think about a cancer diagnosis the whole time, or something bad that happened a couple days ago, then we will feel sad.
	* If we focus on positive things, like 6:30 martinis, then we'll be happier.
* F: "Who you are is the sum of what you focus on."
* Skillful "thinking on the bright side" leads to better outcomes.
* Deep work helps you focus on the meaningful things.
* Deep work means honing concentration so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant or to worry about problems.
* F: There's a "buffet of distraction" in knowledge work.
* F: Flow: The mental state where a person is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement and enjoyment in the process of an activity.
* Deep work helps you create a flow state.
* Meaning has gone after the enlightenment as we have to make our own goals rather than rely on divine judgement; there aren't many sources of meaning outside the individual.
* Suggestion of "the pragmatic programmer" book.
* Deep work helps work feel meaningful.

##### How can you relate personal identity and focus??
Who you are is the sum of what you focus on.

##### I'm thinking about something negative. How can I make myself happier??
Think about something that you're looking forward to or excited about instead.

##### What's a nice metaphor for all the different ways you can get distracted on the modern internet??
There's a buffet of distraction, you don't spend all day eating at buffets.

##### What is flow??
A mental state where you're fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement and enjoyment in the process of an activity.

### Part II
#### Rule #1: Work Deeply
* Suggestion of the finite willpower model; skeptical about this since it's been criticised recently: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion#Criticism>
* While working hard or trying to focus, you're bombarded with desires to do other things.
* It's better to set up habits and routines that minimise the amount of effort you have to put in to working deeply than to make it a big deal which makes it harder to get started.
* Committing to a schedule can help this.
* A few deep work philosophies:
	* Monastic -- radically minimize shallow obligations. Donald Knuth is an example.
	* Bimodal -- Divide your time (i.e. 4 days on, 3 days off or 2 seasons on, 2 seasons off) and be monastic during one of those periods.
	* Rhythmic -- Transform deep work into a scheduled, repeated daily work. Think one hour in the morning or similar. Use a set starting time to minimise effort.
	* Journalistic -- Do work whenever you can, 20 minutes here and there; difficult because of context switching.
* Make sure if you're doing monastic or bimodal deep work that you make sure that these times are well defined and well advertised.
* __"Great creative minds work like artists but think like accountants".__
* Build strict rituals, when will you work and when?
* Find a deep work retreat, like a cabin in the woods or a spot in the library.
* Give it a time frame so that it isn't open-ended.
* Create hard and fast rules like no internet whatsoever.
* Use a grand gesture; make a big change in order to increase motivation and energy (like checking into a hotel).
* Need a combination of sole thinking (like Carl Jung's stone tower) and collaborative efforts; spaces that facilitate both ends of the spectrum are better.
* __Feedback loops between individuals can improve things.__
* Working on a shared whiteboard is good.
* People rave about serendipity but its better to keep serendipitous pursuits separate from efforts to think deeply.
* __Realising what action needs to be taken to achieve a goal is a world of difference from figuring out _how_ to achieve it.__
* __Focus on the wildly important -- it's better to focus on a small number of ambitious outcomes rather than fracturing attention between lots and lots of smaller ones.__
* __Let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else.__
* Measure progress on the goals that you're trying to achieve and put them in your face.
* Lag measures vs lead measures, lag measures are too late.
* Create a scoreboard for competition, people play differently when they're being measured.
* To track deep work, put tallies next to week dates on a piece of paper. Circle the tally where you achieved something important.
* Regular accountability: use a weekly review to look at progress being made and metrics being recorded.
* Be lazy: Shut down work thinking before the end of each day, and try not to think about it at all.
* Downtime is crucial, it helps you recharge your batteries for working deeply again.
* It's easier to walk through nature than it is to walk through the city because there's less challenges involved.
* Shutdown ritual, make sure it's in a system like in Getting Things Done, kinda like an end of day review.

##### "Great creative minds..."??
"think work artists but think like accountants".

##### "Let the terrifying..."??
"longing crowd out everything else".

#### Rule #2: Embrace Boredom
* Concentration is a skill that can be trained.
* Need to be comfortable with boredom in order to improve active concentration.
* Constantly fracturing attention means your brain gets worse at concentrating.
* Take breaks from focus, rather than taking breaks from distraction.
* Internet sabbaths aren't good and should be flipped: take breaks from focus in order to distract yourself with the internet. Schedule in advance when you'll use the internet.
* Keep the time outside of the internet completely offline.
* Schedule internet restrictions even after work is over.
* Being forced to wait is a crucial situation that helps improve your concentration.
* Inject the occasional dash of Rooseveltian attention to a deep work task -- make it intense and attack the task with every neuron. You're trading concentration for completion time.
* You can use artificially set deadlines to make yourself work harder.
* Try it for once a week at the start.
* Productive meditation: take a period where you're occupied physically but not mentally to think deeply about one specific professional task, i.e. take thinking walks.
* Things like this improve your ability to concentrate while also making you more productive.
* Memory training helps you concentrate -- learn to memorise a deck of cards!

#### Rule #3: Quit Social Media
* Social media and "infotainment" sites fragment our attention.
* Find a middle ground between using social media heavily and not at all.
* Any benefit mindset: _identifying any benefit as a justification for using a tool without considering the negatives._
* The craftsman mindset: _adopt a tool if and only if it's positive benefits on your personal and professional values outweigh the negative effects._
* Identify a small number of professional and personal goals, then identify the activities that pursue those goals.
* Measure if the network tools you use help, hurt or have little effect on the goal.
* The law of the vital few: in many settings, 80% of a given effect is because of 20% of contributions.
* __Companies fire clients! If one client is being unproductive then they can redirect the hours they would normally spend towards a more lucrative contract.__
* Ban yourself from using social media for 30 days and see what you actually end up needing to use.
* Think "would the last 30 days have been noticeably better if I was using this service?" and "Did anybody care that I was offline?"
* Don't use the internet to entertain yourself. There's plenty of things that are more real and valuable you can use, like books or even films.
* People view the time after work/school as like the end of the day, when really there is another 16 hours.
* Spend those 16 hours like an aristocrat would, reading great literature and poetry.
* You should and can make deliberate use of your time outside of school and work.
* Every psychological trick possible is used on entertainment sites in order to keep you engaged.
* They are crazy effective. You end up using them when...
	* Waiting in a line.
	* Waiting for the plot of a TV show to pick up.
	* Waiting to finish eating a meal.
* They can ruin your attention. Sites like HackerNews, BuzzFeed and Reddit don't even require sign-ups; they're always there, just a click away.
* __Figure out what you're planning to do with your evenings and weekends before they begin.__
* __Addictive websites thrive in a vacuum -- when you have nothing else to do, they easily fill that space. When you purposefully plan what you're going to do, they go away.__
* Read an interesting book rather than going on YouTube. They don't have to be complicated, you could pick something light-hearted that's a bit easier to digest.
* Always give your brain a quality alternative. I think this advice applies to snacking too.

##### How can you paradoxically make relaxation time more relaxing??
Plan out how you're going to relax.

##### "Addictive websites..."??
"thrive in a vacuum".

#### Rule #4: Drain the Shallows
* 4-day workweeks can be just as effective as 5-day workweeks because people prioritise deep work over shallow work.
* Ruthlessly identify the shallowness in your current schedule and then cut it down to a minimum.
* You can improve your ability to do Deep Work from about 1 hour a day to 4 hours a day. It's hard to get over the 4 hours a day limit.
* Some level of shallow work is required, you can't just quit email full stop.
* Treat shallow work with suspicion. Its harm is underestimated and its benefits are overestimated.
* Schedule every minute of your day.
* Pause before action and think "what makes the most sense right now"?
* Timeboxing -- break each day down to 30 minute chunks and draw squares where you plat what you want to do and when.
* Estimated will prove wrong and interruptions will appear. Don't throw away the schedule, revise it.
* If you stumble onto an unexpected insight, allow that to change priorities of everything else.
* "What would make sense to do with the time remaining?"
* Quantify the depth of every activity.
* Ask yourself how long you should be spending on shallow work per day.
* Finish work at 5:30PM (fixed schedule productivity).
* Work out what habits are needed to fulfil the commitment of fixed productivity scheduling.
* Guard obligations and don't say yes to shallow work very often.
* Become hard to reach.
* For people who receive a lot of emails from a lot of people; make people do more work to reach you (Sender filters).
* Process centric approach to email: _Identify the project inside the email and then come up with the response that brings the project to the conclusion quickly and effectively._
* Just don't reply to email if it's ambiguous.

#### Conclusion
* Concentration is a skill that gets valuable things done.
* Find quiet places and focus hard.
* It's uncomfortable to think about trying the hardest you can because you have to confront the fact that you're not good enough.
* "Step into the Rooseveltian ring"

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