Deliberate practice: "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."
Attention residue: "that quick email check introduces a new target for your attention. Even worse,
seeing messages that you cannot deal with at the moment, you'll be forced to turn back to the
primary task with a secondary task left unfinished."
Cal on being present for his kids after work: "the lack of distraction in my life tones down that
background hum of nervous mental energy that seems to increasingly pervade people's daily lives."
Human beings are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.
"A wooden wheel is not noble, but its shaping can be. The same applies to knowledge work. You
don't need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work." He argues that
most knowledge work can be cast as craftsmanship, in that you're applying high levels of skill.
"Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for
me; my role is to be on the bottom of things." - Donald Knuth
In office spaces, "you should try to optimize each effort (depth and serendipity) separately, as
opposed to mixing them together into a sludge that impedes both goals."
Focus on an ambitious, specific goal and use that to motivate you to find deep work time.
"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."
All goals and all of life requires shallow work to maintain and operate. The goal should not be to
eliminate shallow work, but to tame it.
Intro
Carl Jung's stone "Tower" (his private home office): "There was no electricity at the Tower, so as
day gave way to night, light came from oil lamps and heat from the fireplace. Jung would retire to
bed by ten p.m. 'The feeling of repose and renewal that I had in this tower was intense from the
start.'"
Deep work definition: 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: 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 by others.
Networking tools result in fragmented time for knowledge workers.
Learning a new skill or career is a form of deep work — like learning to code. He argues that
many have lost this ability.
Deep work is valuable today because 1) the information economy changes quickly, and evolving
requires learning deep things; 2) broad distribution of products via the internet means it's easy
for people to ignore mediocrity, and so you must differentiate your work.
Cal on being present for his kids after work: "the lack of distraction in my life tones down that
background hum of nervous mental energy that seems to increasingly pervade people's daily lives."
Deep work is valuable (chap 1)
To compete in this economy requires learning hard things quickly, and sustained elite performance,
both of which are forms of deep work.
Deliberate practice requires two things: a narrow focus on improving a skill or idea, and a
feedback loop so you can correct your approach and focus your attention on what's most productive.
Deliberate practice: "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."
High quality work produced = (time spent) x (intensity of focus)
Attention residue: "that quick email check introduces a new target for your attention. Even worse,
seeing messages that you cannot deal with at the moment, you'll be forced to turn back to the
primary task with a secondary task left unfinished."
Why is Jack Dorsey successful? As the CEO of two companies, his work cannot be deep.
"A good chief executive is essentially a hard-to-automate decision engine. They have built up a
hard-won repository of experience and have honed and proved an instinct for their market.
They're then presented inputs throughout the day in the form of emails and meetings that they
must process and act on.
Not all jobs require depth to be successful. Some sales and customer success jobs reward
connectedness and responsiveness more.
Deep work is rare (chap 2)
Open offices might create more opportunities for collaboration, but they do so at the cost of
"massive distraction".
He argues that few companies seem to prioritize deep work. Communication and coordination is more
valued, at the expense of deep work. Maybe at a certain scale, that's the right tradeoff:
eliminating duplicate work is more valuable than deep work.
The "metric black hole"
Some behaviors are very hard to measure in terms of impact and cost to the company. If it were
easy, they would be quantified and eliminated. Email, meetings, impromptu distractions, open
floor plans.
The principle of least resistance
Without good metrics for some behaviors, this is why they prevail.
In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of behaviors to the bottom line, we
will tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment.
Why we prefer our team mates to be highly available: "if you couldn't count on this quick
response time you'd instead have to do more advance planning for your work, be more organized,
and be prepared to put things aside for a while and turn your attention elsewhere while waiting
for what you requested."
Reactive work is better defined than proactive work. So it's easier in that way.
Standing meetings: for many, standing meetings become a simple (but blunt) form of personal
organization. Instead of trying to manage their time and obligations themselves, they let the
impending meeting each week force them to take some action on a given project and more generally
provide a highly visible simulacrum of progress.
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.
Busyness as a Proxy for Productivity: many professions do not have a clear metric for measuring
productivity, so workers fall back to optimizing time spent and responsiveness/latency.
"Assuming the trends outlined here continue, depth will become increasingly rare and therefore
increasingly valuable."
Deep work is meaningful (chap 3)
He argues that doing deep work which restricts your focus to meaningful problems will give you
joy, and prevent you from being distracted by noisy, shallow, less-meaningful everyday trivia.
"Our brains construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to. If you focus on a cancer
diagnosis, you and your life become unhappy and dark, but if you focus instead on an evening
martini, you and your life become more pleasant — even through the circumstances in both
scenarios are the same."
More "time on the hammock" is not actually the kind of time people would enjoy most. "Ironically,
jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities, they have built-in
goals, feedback, rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one's
work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and
requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed."
Human beings are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.
Craftsmanship as a philosophical construct for getting meaning from our existence:
"The wheelwright doesn't decide arbitrarily which virtues of the wood he works are valuable and
which are not: this value is inherent in the wood and the task it's meant to perform"
"A wooden wheel is not noble, but its shaping can be. The same applies to knowledge work. You
don't need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work." He argues that
most knowledge work can be cast as craftsmanship, in that you're applying high levels of skill.
Work deeply (chap 4)
It costs willpower to switch to and then maintain focus on hard work, so use habits and rituals
like a "deep work by default" time and environment, so it's more automatic to engage in deep work,
and so you're less vulnerable to willpower fatigue and shiny distractions.
Donald Knuth's "monastic philosophy" to deep work
"I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd
used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one
lifetime. Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things.
But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying
and uninterruptible concentration."
His approach is a radical reduction of all non-core, shallow work. This only really applies if
you are an individualized creator with a clear, narrow contribution, like an author or inventor.
Bimodal strategy of deep work scheduling: reserve deep work days, or monthly retreats, or entire
seasons (like academics do in the summer). The rest of time is filled with operational work.
Rhythmic strategy of deep work scheduling: some time every day, like before you go to work. More
habitual and compatible with most environments, but less deep, since you'll get 2 hour chunks at
most.
Chappell, a doctoral candidate with a full time job and child: "he made a rule that he would
wake up and start working by 530am every morning. He would then work until 730am, make
breakfast, and go to work already done with his dissertation obligations for the day. Pleased by
early progress, he soon pushed his wake-up time to 445am to squeeze out even more morning depth.
"Great creative minds think like artists but work like accountants." - David Brooks.
How to ritualize deep work:
Predetermine where you'll work and for how long, so you can precommit. Like in your office, with
a clean desk; or a spot reserved only for deep work, like the library.
Determine how you'll use your time
Have a pre-programmed agenda, or a metric you're trying to hit, like words per hour. And rules
of conduct: no email; phone in do-not-disturb mode.
"Without this structure, you'll have to mentally litigate again and again what you should and
should not be doing during these sessions and keep trying to assess whether you're working
sufficiently hard. These are unnecessary drains on your willpower reserves."
How you'll support your work: e.g. walking, coffee, clear desk, music
Making grand gestures
A grand gesture is a big change in environment, like going to a new office or on a work
vacation, or a habit that makes it feel more special, and thus easier, to dedicate time to deep
work and sustain the effort.
JK Rowling finishing Deathly Hallows at a hotel in Edinburgh:
"Writing a chapter of a Harry Potter novel, for example, is hard work and will require a lot
of mental energy — regardless of where you do it. But when paying more than $1,000 a day to
write the chapter in a suite of an old hotel down the street from a Hogwarts-style castle,
mustering the energy to begin and sustain this work is easier than if you were instead in a
distracting home office."
(Other examples: Bill Gates' think weeks; Stripe's founding "hack from Sao Paulo"; my friend
Lex moving to a new city to attend a coding boot camp.)
Building and using an external writing cabin on one's own property.
Office layout: should provide inspiration and serendipity, but also focus and privacy when
working. The Hub and Spoke model achieves this. The spokes can be offices of small teams or pairs
of people.
On the office space at MIT labs: "This 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. It's a setup that straddles a spectrum where
on one extreme we find solo thinker, isolated from inspiration but free from distraction, and on
the other extreme, we find the fully collaborative thinker in an open office, flush with
inspiration but struggling to support the deep thinking needed to build on it."
In office spaces, "you should try to optimize each effort (depth and serendipity) separately, as
opposed to mixing them together into a sludge that impedes both goals."
Accountability: the presence of the other party waiting for your next insight — be it someone
physically in the same room or collaborating with you virtually — can short-circuit the natural
instinct to avoid depth.
4DX framework for executing (from management consulting)
"Focus on the wildly important"
"The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish."
Execution should be aimed at a small number of "wildly important goals". This will help focus
an organization's energy to a sufficient intensity to ignite real results.
Focus on an ambitious, specific goal and use that to motivate you to find deep work time.
"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."
"I used to focus on lag measures of deep work, such as papers published per year. These measures,
however, lacked influence on my day-to-day behavior because there was nothing I could do in the
short term that could immediately generate a noticeable change to this long-term metric."
Now he focuses on time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward his wildly important goal.
"For teams, consider a scoreboard of a leading metric for the wildly important goal. It will drive
them towards that goal and give them the focus, even when other demands vie for their attention."
Downtime helps recharge the energy (willpower) needed to work deeply
A study showed that walking through nature for 20m vs. a city improved the person's performance
of a concentration-sapping task by 20%.
The study argues that the busy city streets require you to use directed attention, as you must
perform complicated tasks like figuring out when to cross a street or walk around a slow group.
So this activity drains your directed attention rather than restoring it. Nature requires much
less directed attention to walk through.
Beware of the short-term productivity dip which comes at the expense of tomorrow's deep work
"If you keep interrupting your evening to check and respond to email, or put aside a few hours
after dinner to catch up on an approaching deadline, you're robbing your directed attention
centers of the uninterrupted rest they need for restoration."
The work that evening downtime replaces is usually not that important
It's not deep work, either because you're fatigued and can't do more, or you don't set up the
environment for depth.
On the other hand, if you need to finish some shallow work to unlock time tomorrow for deep
work, then working in the evening rather than resting can be worthwhile.
Beware the dynamic of attention residue: residue from even small contact with work (like checking
email) is large and pollutes your mindshare for awhile, preventing you from fulling focusing on
the activity in front of you.
Making a high-level plan for how to complete an incomplete task will improve the odds that you
later execute the plan. But importantly, it lets your mind release it from the foreground. This
was documented in the paper "Consider It Done!".
Have an "energy edge":
"When you work, work hard. When you're done, be done. Your average email response time might
suffer some, but you'll more than make up for this with the sheer volume of truly important work
produced during the day by your refreshed ability to dive deeper than your exhausted peers."
Embrace boredom (chap 5)
Intense study of scripture each day provides mental training for doing deep work, because the
scripture reading is itself deep work.
"Getting the most out of your deep work habit requires training; this training must address two
goals: improving your ability to concentrate intensely and overcoming your desire for
distraction."
"Don't take breaks from distraction; instead, take breaks from focus"
This means scheduling email or internet use into blocks, and not using either distraction during
blocks of deep work. Strengthen your "attention selecting" muscles.
Be invincible to the temptation to context switch
"To summarize, to succeed with deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting
distracting stimuli. This doesn't mean that you have to eliminate distracting behaviors; it's
sufficient that you instead eliminate the ability of such behaviors to hijack your attention."
"Roosevelt dashes": interval training for your muscles of intense concentration
Time challenge yourself on a task, so that you must work with great intensity.
"Like Roosevelt at Harvard, attack the task with every free neuron until it gives way under your
unwavering barrage of concentration."
Give yourself a hard deadline to "drastically reduce" the amount of time you would realistically
estimate it takes. But reasonable enough that you can occasionally hit the deadline.
Meditate productively
When occupied physically on a run or when driving to work, chew on a professional problem. When
your mind wanders, return it. This is not only productive: it builds muscles of focus.
"Looping": your mind will attempt to avoid excess expenditure of energy when possible. It will
avoid diving deeper into a problem by continually looping repeatedly over what you already know.
Avoid this when you notice it and push forward.
Structure your deep thinking time
You can't just leverage an open mental landscape. Prepare beforehand to identify the important
variables at play, and their values, so you have them at hand. Also define the "next-step
questions" you need to answer. Finally, consolidate the answer you produced, plus rationale.
Suggested workout: memorize a deck of cards. It's a pure and hard mental exercise requiring
concentration.
Quit social media (chap 6)
"Networking tools fragment our attention."
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
those factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts." Social media does not make the cut for
most craftsmen.
On the lack of Twitter usage by Michael Lewis and other writers: "Twitter doesn't support the 20
percent of activities that generate the bulk of the success in their writing careers. Even though
in isolation this service might return some minor benefits, when their careers are viewed as a
whole, they're likely more successful not using Twitter, and redirecting that time to more
fruitful activities, than if they added it into their schedule as one more thing to manage."
Quid pro quo — liking someone's post because they liked yours — is why you can build an audience
on social networks even if you've produced no compelling content worthy of an audience. But these
audiences are shallow and worthless.
"Social networks can be fun, but in the scheme of your life and what you want to accomplish,
they're a lightweight whimsy, one unimportant distraction among many threatening to derail you
from something deeper."
Avoid bite-sized entertainment, like BuzzFeed, when standing in line. It's a cognitive crutch. "33
Dogs Winning at Everything."
Make how you spend your non-working 16 hours each day deliberate. Then you will fill it with
meaningful things. Your "day within a day."
Drain the Shallows (chap 7)
All goals and all of life requires shallow work to maintain and operate. The goal should not be to
eliminate shallow work, but to tame it.
4 day-a-week work policy during the summer (37Signals)
This is active May - Oct. "People should enjoy the weather in the summer."
People do their personal business on their day off.
"Fewer official working hours helps squeeze the fat out of the typical workweek. Once everyone
has less time to get their stuff done, they respect that time even more. People become stingy
with their time and that's a good thing. They don't waste it on things that just don't matter.
When you have fewer hours you usually spend them more wisely." - Jason Fried
Capacity for deliberate practice each day is bounded
"Shallow work doesn't become dangerous until after you add enough to begin to crowd out your
bounded deep efforts for the day."
"I'm asking you to treat shallow work with suspicion because its damage is often vastly
underestimated and its importance vastly overestimated. This type of work is inevitable, but you
must keep it confined to a point where it doesn't impede your ability to take full advantage of
the deeper efforts that ultimately determine your impact."
Time blocking
Method: a sheet of lined paper; every line is 30m, and assigned to a task block.
"Give every minute of your work day a job."
"Treat your time with respect."
Allow the schedule to be flexible. Rewrite the remaining part of the day if you under-estimate.
Ignore the schedule if something important or inspiring happens. The goal is to encourage
thoughtfulness, not to restrict.
How to accurately label whether work is deep or shallow?
Try this exercise: "how many months would it take to train a smart recent college graduate with
no specialized training in my field to complete this task?"
If it's many months, then this work is leveraging your hard-won expertise and is deep and
valuable, returning a lot of value for the time invested.
Cap your shallow work
Having a strict 8 hour workday forces you to work backwards and find ways to fit in the deep
work, which will then limit your shallow work.
E.g. a junior professor capping travel to 5 trips per year, rather than 10-15. Traveling
generates lots of shallow work like travel logistics and preparing talks.
The only activity that matters for professors is doing deep work towards a research deliverable.
Make people who send you email do more work
A "send filter" is a prompt for your senders which makes them consider carefully if their
message is worthwhile. Also, it sets the expectation that you won't respond to every inbound
proposal. It's relieving for the recipient, and clarifying for the sender.
Example: "If you have a project that might make my life more interesting, email me at xyz. For
the reasons stated above, I'll only respond to those proposals that are a good match for my
schedule and interests."
Reduce the amount of email traffic around a project by doing more work when you send emails
Ask yourself this question: "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?"
Don't just respond to emails; ask this question and reduce the number of messages required for
resolution.
Each message in an email thread saps attention and requires a context switch.