Vojtech &
Deep Work by Cal Newport

One of my favourite productivity books. I like the research-based productivity tips, some I use in my own life.

Very insightful. Simple, smart and practically helpful for life. Worth rereading until it sinks in.

Read this if you want to start (and finish) dreams you dream.

Advice that came at the right time. Long sustained focus, or "going deep" as Cal would say, is a skill that is crucial in success. practicing and honing this skill to where you can do 4 hours of deep work is the end goal. afterwards, controlled social media use, ext. Look forward to applying these tips today.

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

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

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.

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

(3.9)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

** 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.