Name: Jahir Fiquitiva's review of Deep Work by Cal Newport
Item: Deep Work
Rating: 5
Author: Jahir Fiquitiva

Cal Newport

Many modern knowledge workers now spend most of their brain power battling distraction and interruption, whether because of the incessant pinging of devices, noisy open-plan offices or the difficulty of deciding what deserves your attention the most. When Cal Newport coined the term 'deep work' on his popular blog, Study Hacks, in 2012, he found the concept quickly hit a nerve. Most of us, after all, are excruciatingly familiar with shallow work instead - distractedly skimming the surface of our workload and never getting to the important part. Newport began exploring the methods and mindset that foster a practice of distraction-free productivity at work, and now, in DEEP WORK, he shows how anyone can achieve this elusive state. Through revealing portraits of both historical and modern-day thinkers, academics and leaders in the fields of technology, science and culture, and their deep work habits, Newport shares an inspiring collection of tools to wring every last drop of value out of your intellectual capacity. He explains why mastering this shift in work practices is crucial for anyone who intends to stay ahead in a complex information economy, and how to systematically train the mind to focus. Put simply: developing and cultivating a deep work practice is one of the best decisions we can make in an increasingly distracted world.

Deep Work

Jahir Fiquitiva

Network tools are distracting us from work that requires unbroken concentration, while simultaneously degrading our capacity to remain focused.

Marián Blaha

One of the most valuable skills in our economy is becoming increasingly rare. If you master this skill, you'll achieve extraordinary results. Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It's a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep-spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there's a better way. In DEEP WORK, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite. Dividing this book into two parts, he first makes the case that in almost any profession, cultivating a deep work ethic will produce massive benefits. He then presents a rigorous training regimen, presented as a series of four "rules," for transforming your mind and habits to support this skill. A mix of cultural criticism and actionable advice, DEEP WORK takes the reader on a journey through memorable stories-from Carl Jung building a stone tower in the woods to focus his mind, to a social media pioneer buying a round-trip business class ticket to Tokyo to write a book free from distraction in the air-and no-nonsense advice, such as the claim that most serious professionals should quit social media and that you should practice being bored. DEEP WORK is an indispensable guide to anyone seeking focused success in a distracted world.

Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

Christina Farkona

 blocks. If you’re not sure how long a given activity might take, block off the expected time, then follow this with an additional block that has a split purpose. If you need more time for the preceding activity, use this additional block to keep working on it. If you finish the activity on time, however, have an alternate use already assigned for the extra block (for example, some non-urgent tasks).

When you’re done, have a set phrase you say that indicates completion (to end my own ritual, I say, “Shutdown complete”).

support your commitment to shutting down with a strict 

 that you use at the end of the workday to maximize the probability that you succeed. In more detail, this ritual should ensure that every incomplete task, goal, or project has been reviewed and that for each you have confirmed that either (1) you have a plan you trust for its completion, or (2) it’s captured in a place where it will be revisited when the time is right.

if you deployed smart routines and rituals —perhaps a set time and quiet location used for your deep tasks each afternoon— you’d require much less willpower to start and keep going. In the long run, you’d therefore succeed with these deep efforts far more often.

[…] It’s crucial, therefore, that you figure out in advance what you’re 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.

. In other words, this strategy suggests that when it comes to your relaxation, don’t default to whatever catches your attention at the moment, but instead dedicate some advance thinking to the question of how you want to spend your “day within a day.” 

I call this approach, in which you fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule, the 

once you’ve hit your deep work limit in a given day, you’ll experience diminishing rewards if you try to cram in more.

Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it’s instead like a muscle that tires.

Ständige Ablenkung ist heute das Hindernis Nummer eins für ein effizienteres Arbeiten. Sei es aufgrund lauter Großraumbüros, vieler paralleler Kommunikationskanäle, dauerhaftem Online-Sein oder der Schwierigkeit zu entscheiden, was davon nun unsere Aufmerksamkeit am meisten benötigt. Sich ganz auf eine Sache konzentrieren zu können wird damit zu einer raren, aber wertvollen und entscheidenden Fähigkeit im Arbeitsalltag. Cal Newport prägte hierfür den Begriff "Deep Work", der einen Zustand völlig konzentrierter und fokussierter Arbeit beschreibt, und begann die Regeln und Denkweisen zu erforschen, die solch fokussiertes Arbeiten fördern. Mit seiner Deep-Work-Methode verrät Newport, wie man sich systematisch darauf trainiert, zu fokussieren, und wie wir unser Arbeitsleben nach den Regeln der Deep-Work-Methode neu organisieren können. Wer in unserer schnelllebigen und sprunghaften Zeit nicht untergehen will, für den ist dieses Konzept unerlässlich. Kurz gesagt: Die Entscheidung für Deep Work ist eine der besten, die man in einer Welt voller Ablenkungen treffen kann.

Regeln für eine Welt voller Ablenkungen

Konzentriert arbeiten

Anton Stallbörger

Sobald Sie ein überaus wichtiges Ziel identifiziert haben, müssen Sie ihren Erfolg messen.

Carla Schwarze

E-mail 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.

To b great at something is to be well myelinated.

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.

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets... it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. 

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.

[Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.

There is a popular notion that artists work from inspiration - that there is some strike or bolt or bubbling up of creative mojo from who knows where... but I hope [my work] makes clear that waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan. In fact, perhaps the single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration.

Nikita Pashinsky

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.

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.

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

The book I've read the fastest. It's entertaining, interesting and made me want to keep reading. 

One of the most valuable skills in our economy is becoming increasingly rare. If you master this skill, you'll achieve extraordinary results. Deep Work is an indispensable guide to anyone seeking focused success in a distracted world. 'Deep work' is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. Coined by author and professor Cal Newport on his popular blog Study Hacks, deep work will make you better at what you do, let you achieve more in less time and provide the sense of true fulfilment that comes from the mastery of a skill. In short, deep work is like a superpower in our increasingly competitive economy. And yet most people, whether knowledge workers in noisy open-plan offices or creatives struggling to sharpen their vision, have lost the ability to go deep - spending their days instead in a frantic blur of email and social media, not even realising there's a better way. A mix of cultural criticism and actionable advice, DEEP WORK takes the reader on a journey through memorable stories -- from Carl Jung building a stone tower in the woods to focus his mind, to a social media pioneer buying a round-trip business class ticket to Tokyo to write a book free from distraction in the air -- and surprising suggestions, such as the claim that most serious professionals should quit social media and that you should practice being bored. Put simply: developing and cultivating a deep work practice is one of the best decisions you can make in an increasingly distracted world and this book will point the way.

John Manoogian III

I read the “hypercard summary” of the main ideas of this book using the iOS app Lucid and it was fine. It’s useful without being exactly earth shaking. I wouldn’t bother reading the actual book cover to cover, I was too busy doing deep work

JoAnna

Newport is great at what he does: making compelling arguments for quality in productivity & performance. He gives wonderfully detailed frameworks for ways to incorporate deep work into different types of working lives.

I have a bone to pick with how it often feels like Newport is speaking to a specific audience—wealthy, educated, high-powered professionals—because the book isn't marketed this way. He's also pretty elitist in the way he approaches his arguments.

Finally read this! Its focus on work and its complete ignorance that people (even the author!) might have a private life was weird at times. But it’s so well-written and hands-on; it sparks the longing for deep concentration and the urge to get it back.

Christoph Rauscher

Ann Gabrielle

wow.

i’ll be honest, i was doubtful and skeptical before i read the book. i was eager to refine and hone my work ethic, so i thought perhaps to read this book only to extract some technical tips on how to go about it.

turns out i was able to reflect as well on why this type of concentration & effort is so crucial not only for work, but for life in general. not only did i extract valuable work ethic & management techniques, but i began to value attention in general. 

my favorite anecdote from the book about a blacksmith he interviewed: 

“At one point about halfway through the smithing, after Furrer has finished hammering out the desired shape, he begins rotating the metal carefully in a narrow trough of burning charcoal. As he stares at the blade something clicks: ‘It’s ready.’ He lifts the sword, red with heat, holding it away from his body as he strides swiftly toward a pipe filled with oil and plunges in the blade to cool it. After a moment of relief that the blade did not crack into pieces—a common occurrence at this step—Furrer pulls it from the oil. The residual heat of the metal lights the fuel, engulfing the sword’s full length in yellow flames. Furrer holds the burning sword up above his head with a single powerful arm and stares at it a moment before blowing out the fire. During this brief pause, the flames illuminate his face, and his admiration is palpable.

To do it right, it is the most complicated thing I know how to make,” Furrer explains. ‘And it’s that challenge that drives me. I don’t need a sword. But I have to make them.’”

it’s increasingly clear to me that productivity is used as the prime indicator of one’s worth in today’s hypercapitalist society. while i do agree that the quantity of work produced and busyness has trumped over our wellness, it seems to me that some people have used this argument to defend aimlessness. what delights me about this book is that it’s not so much the hours and pages and whatever quantity spent in work that makes it valuable, but rather the quality and care and attention we put into it. true, meaningful work shouldn’t subtract one’s enjoyment of life either; if it’s really meaningful, one begins to glow and bask in the tasks. 

tl;dr i have a new bible thanks cal newport

Jaiden Ratti

Jeff Kelly

Good book with some compelling arguments about the future of work and some actionable ideas on how to get the best out of our limited time. One star off because Newport focuses overly on professions that have obvious deep work - authors, artists, craftspeople, but doesn't offer many examples or ideas for how to identify deep work for collaborative or organizational work like operational management. Perhaps he would argue most of what these roles do is not deep work - which may be true, but his advice to simply refuse to do that work or hire an assistant are tone-deaf to reality.

Ryan Haber

Good book. The thesis is good and the rules are also good. It's sensible, and a good antidote for a lot of "common sense" nonsense.

Rohit Arondekar

I liked the format of the book wherein a strategy is proposed and some arguments are provided to either prove that the strategy ought to work or to understand the strategy. The most interesting part of Deep Work was the writing style. Approachable yet had some seriousness to it. The theory and practical advice about deep work is fascinating and I'm eager to put it to use. Will it actually work and is the idea of deep work for everybody? I don't know but the new‑ish trend of being distracted continuously & fed with data from phones or computers is disconcerting. I'm partial to the idea of working with high concentration for chunks of time without distraction. My biases allowed me to accept some of the arguments which were a little stretched at times. Still a wonderful read if productivity is something you care about.

Mustafa Hussain

the book overall is very good has a lot of information on how you can improve your work quality by adapting deep work rules, but the author has written the half of the book to convince the reader that deep work is very important which in my point of view way too much, I am already convinced since I have read the introduction.
so anyone can read the last part of the book and the introduction and you still get the whole idea.

Has some good tips but nothing out of the ordinary which almost every other self-help book covers 

Ayesha 

As a white male in a capitalistic society, I feel qualified for criticizing this book for lopsidedly using white males as examples of deep work and equating one’s success with their monetary worth. 

The book does contain useful approaches to protecting one’s time, and I would recommend it for that. 

Doug Lane

As a white male in a capitalistic society, I feel qualified for criticizing this book for lopsidedly using white males as examples of deep work and equating one’s success with their monetary worth. 

The book does contain useful approaches to protecting one’s time, and I would recommend it for that. 

heleen de boever

Had to put this aside about 70% in, as Newport's patronising rhetoric and corporate, profit-oriented rationale felt just profoundly alienating (and, let's be real, quite nauseating). If you can look beyond those, he elaborates on some valuable ideas.

Gavin

Quite shallow. He uses himself and Carl Jung as exemplars of the method - "I published 4 books in 10 years" and so on - but why should I judge either of them to have made a positive impact, merely because they published a lot? 

Lots of cherry-picked anecdotes in the normal bad self-help mode, with no attention to survivorship bias. Deep Work has the same feel as the disgraced 
  Why We Sleep
: empirically sloppy exaggeration of a plausibly ultra-important topic. Unlike Walker, Newport is not explicitly claiming scientific authority though.

The topic is networked technology as a force against individual productivity. There's a weak and a strong form:

 
  

   Weak: "You need to focus to do great work, or to learn new hard things. And work on the Internet is extremely vulnerable to distraction and tends to be less focussed." 
  

  

  

   Strong: "The always-on fragmentary state of being caused by addictive technology is disabling. It has lasting developmental effects, reducing your attention span, serenity, perspective." (Lanier, Carr.) 
  

 

Newport makes both claims ("Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work."), and the strong one is poorly justified to say the least. But the weak form is plausible and important enough on its own.

I wondered how much this was just a rehash of the Flow idea, and in fact Newport does give it its due. It seems fair to update the idea after 40 great years of tech and the culture of tech. (I had no mobile phone until I was 17, no smartphone until I was 27. My abstinence would be much harder now.)

The weak evidence could be forgiven if the claims were weaker, or if the tone was less pompous. Plus two stars for being about an important possibility, minus one for being unrigorous, minus one for tone.

Things I try to do:

* Track your amount of deep work hours every day.

* Protect your morning: get out of bed quickly and don't browse.

* Do "time blocking", earmarking a whole day for focused work

* Batch shallow work (emails, meetings) in one time slots, probably the evening.
* Leave your phone in a different room. 

He talks about scheduling your entire day, which I suspect is perverse. And "become hard to reach" is only possible for people who are already successful / in particular careers. ymmv.

Odaklanma Becerisini Nasil Yitirdik, Nasil Geri Kazanabiliriz

Pürdikkat

Okan Davut

** spoiler alert **
           Pür Dikkat sosyal medya kullanımı konusunda benim de atmam gereken adımlar konusunda düşünmemi sağladı. Bununla beraber iş günlerini daha etkin kullanmak adına farklı dikkatli çalışma yöntemleri üzerine bilgi edindim. Ve hem sosyal medya hemde odaklı çalışma konusunda adımlar atmamı sağladı. Kesinlikle tavsiye ederim.

Bouke van der Bijl

Forgettable. TL;DR spend less time on social media and focus on what you need to do or something and you might be successful but maybe not because the book is based on a couple anecdotes

Kelly

This just didn’t do it for me. 

Sure, there were some useful tips. But for the most part I found this to be impractical at best, condescending and preachy at worse. 

I really just don’t get the hype. 

I like the ideas of blocking off periods of deep work on my calendar, minimizing shallow work and distractions, using a habit tracker, and creating personal rituals. 

Other than that - this was full of fluff and miscellaneous quotes.

David Melvin

This book provides interesting insights on how to make your work life more meaningful. I only read the 2nd half because, based on the table of contents, it seemed to focus on practical ways to change your work life to fit this system, whereas the first part explains how why it is important to pursue deep work.

Jimmy Cerone

A real game changer. Has me rethinking everything from how I write to how I walk.

Kevin

Deep Work and how it works scientifically was super-interesting. It's definitely worth reading because you'll learn how important deep work is and how easily it is to slip into shallow work. 

The only downside is that it sometimes feels like a blog post on 300 pages and listicle of "these 10 people did it like this", I'd prefer a more on-point book than an academical paper-length.

although some of its points where on spot, i didn’t enjoy this book. i didn’t appreciate his tone and the mindset around “work hard to be the best” and that your value is linked to your job excellence. 

it encourages the perfectionism struggle as well as low self-esteem issues. 

i picked up this book because people recommended it a lot, but i was feeling a huge resistance whilst reading it. like i don’t even want to consider a few of his tips.

some of this knowledge was valuable though, so i choose to take note of that, i’m grateful enough for just that, and i ignore his attitude for the rest of this book ✌🏼.

although some of its points where on spot, i didn’t enjoy this book. i didn’t appreciate his tone and the mindset around “work hard to be the best” and that your value is linked to your job excellence. 

it encourages the perfectionism struggle as well as low self-esteem issues. 

i picked up this book because people recommended it a lot, but i was feeling a huge resistance whilst reading it. like i don’t even want to consider a few of his tips.

some of this knowledge was valuable though, so i choose to take note of that, i’m grateful enough for just that, and i ignore his attitude for the rest of this book ✌🏼.

A seminal read on how to achieve great things with less time. Highly recommend for anyone who wants less wastage and more productivity. Easy yet powerful read.

Fred Rivett

Jowanza Joseph

Most of the time, productivity books like this one are very corny and have impractical advice for the modern age. This book is quite different. For this book, I spent a lot of the time reading it taking notes and making plans to implement what I have been reading. 

This is probably the most valuable book I will read this year (I still have 6 more I need to read to make my goal). However, parts of the book are a bit too preachy and not convincing so I can't give it a 5-star review. That being said, I recommend this book for anyone who wants to get a hold of their life and do more important things with their time.

Nick Gracilla

Writers, artists, craftspeople, scientists, inventors—creative work has historically benefited from deep work strategies. We’re most familiar with “monastic escapes” from everyday life and interaction, where the total focus can become immersion in the work for months at a time. While this approach isn’t realistic for most modern day high skilled knowledge workers, Cal presents other strategies to develop deep work skills that are. Our economy values the outcomes of creative work yet competes for our time and attention through distraction and ad-driven digital addiction. It’s never been more important to develop the skills needed for focused success.

Jahir Fiquitiva &
Deep Work by Cal Newport

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