Deep Work

Author: Cal Newport

Introduction

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Deep Work: 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. (2.01005%)

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consider the screenwriter and director Woody Allen. In the forty-four-year period between 1969 and 2013, Woody Allen wrote and directed forty-four films that received twenty-three Academy Award nominations—an absurd rate of artistic productivity. Throughout this period, Allen never owned a computer, instead completing all his writing, free from electronic distraction, on a German Olympia SM3 manual typewriter. (2.51256%)

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The reason knowledge workers are losing their familiarity with deep work is well established: network tools. This is a broad category that captures communication services like e-mail and SMS, social media networks like Twitter and Facebook, and the shiny tangle of infotainment sites like BuzzFeed and Reddit. In aggregate, the rise of these tools, combined with ubiquitous access to them through smartphones and networked office computers, has fragmented most knowledge workers’ attention into slivers. (3.51759%)

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Shallow Work: Noncognitively 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. (3.51759%)

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My interest in this matter instead veers toward a thesis of much more pragmatic and individualized interest: Our work culture’s shift toward the shallow (whether you think it’s philosophically good or bad) is exposing a massive economic and personal opportunity for the few who recognize the potential of resisting this trend and prioritizing depth (4.02010%)

• Comments: Thesis is that we can gain a competitive advantage by practicing deep work, a skill that is in short supply.

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The second reason that deep work is valuable is because the impacts of the digital network revolution cut both ways. If you can create something useful, its reachable audience (e.g., employers or customers) is essentially limitless—which greatly magnifies your reward. On the other hand, if what you’re producing is mediocre, then you’re in trouble, as it’s too easy for your audience to find a better alternative online. Whether you’re a computer programmer, writer, marketer, consultant, or entrepreneur, your situation has become similar to Jung trying to outwit Freud, or Jason Benn trying to hold his own in a hot start-up: To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of producing—a task that requires depth. (6.03015%)

• Comments: Deep work helps you stand out in a more competitive landscape due to the connectedness of the world.

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Deep work is not some nostalgic affectation of writers and early-twentieth-century philosophers. It’s instead a skill that has great value today. There are two reasons for this value. The first has to do with learning. We have an information economy that’s dependent on complex systems that change rapidly. Some of the computer languages Benn learned, for example, didn’t exist ten years ago and will likely be outdated ten years from now. Similarly, someone coming up in the field of marketing in the 1990s probably had no idea that today they’d need to master digital analytics. To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. (6.03015%)

• Comments: Deep work helps you adapt to a rapidly changing world.

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The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the 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. (6.53266%)

• Comments: This is the conclusion that the author will try to prove.

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This book has two goals, pursued in two parts. The first, tackled in Part 1, is to convince you that the deep work hypothesis is true. The second, tackled in Part 2, is to teach you how to take advantage of this reality by training your brain and transforming your work habits to place deep work at the core of your professional life. (6.53266%)

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My commitment to depth has also returned nonprofessional benefits. For the most part, I don’t touch a computer between the time when I get home from work and the next morning when the new workday begins (the main exception being blog posts, which I like to write after my kids go to bed). This ability to fully disconnect, as opposed to the more standard practice of sneaking in a few quick work e-mail checks, or giving in to frequent surveys of social media sites, allows me to be present with my wife and two sons in the evenings, and read a surprising number of books for a busy father of two. More generally, 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. I’m comfortable being bored, and this can be a surprisingly rewarding skill—especially on a lazy D.C. summer night listening to a Nationals game slowly unfold on the radio. (7.03518%)

• Comments: These are some interesting social/personal benefits that I hope the author dives into more.

The Idea

Deep Work Is Valuable

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“We are in the early throes of a Great Restructuring,” Brynjolfsson and McAfee explain early in their book. “Our technologies are racing ahead but many of our skills and organizations are lagging behind.” For many workers, this lag predicts bad news. As intelligent machines improve, and the gap between machine and human abilities shrinks, employers are becoming increasingly likely to hire “new machines” instead of “new people.” And when only a human will do, improvements in communications and collaboration technology are making remote work easier than ever before, motivating companies to outsource key roles to stars—leaving the local talent pool underemployed. (8.54271%)

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this Great Restructuring is not driving down all jobs but is instead dividing them. Though an increasing number of people will lose in this new economy as their skill becomes automatable or easily outsourced, there are others who will not only survive, but thrive—becoming more valued (8.54271%)

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those with the oracular ability to work with and tease valuable results out of increasingly complex machines will thrive. Tyler Cowen summarizes this reality more bluntly: “The key question will be: are you good at working with intelligent machines or not?” (9.04523%)

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what makes Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s analysis particularly useful is that they proceed to identify three specific groups that will fall on the lucrative side of this divide and reap a disproportionate amount of the benefits of the Intelligent Machine Age. (9.04523%)

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The Superstars (9.04523%)

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The High-Skilled Workers (9.04523%)

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Once the talent market is made universally accessible, those at the peak of the market thrive while the rest suffer. (9.54774%)

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The Owners (10.05030%)

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As digital technology reduces the need for labor in many industries, the proportion of the rewards returned to those who own the intelligent machines is growing. A venture capitalist in today’s economy can fund a company like Instagram, which was eventually sold for a billion dollars, while employing only thirteen people. (10.05030%)

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Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy 1. The ability to quickly master hard things. 2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed. (11.05530%)

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How does one cultivate these core abilities? It’s here that we arrive at a central thesis of this book: The two core abilities just described depend on your ability to perform deep work. If you haven’t mastered this foundational skill, you’ll struggle to learn hard things or produce at an elite level. (12.06030%)

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By focusing intensely on a specific skill, you’re forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire, again and again, in isolation. This repetitive use of a specific circuit triggers cells called oligodendrocytes to begin wrapping layers of myelin around the neurons in the circuits—effectively cementing the skill. (13.06530%)

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: (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. (13.06530%)

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neuroscientists have been exploring the physical mechanisms that drive people’s improvements on hard tasks. As the journalist Daniel Coyle surveys in his 2009 book, The Talent Code, these scientists increasingly believe the answer includes myelin—a layer of fatty tissue that grows around neurons, acting like an insulator that allows the cells to fire faster and cleaner. To understand the role of myelin in improvement, keep in mind that skills, be they intellectual or physical, eventually reduce down to brain circuits. This new science of performance argues that you get better at a skill as you develop more myelin around the relevant neurons, allowing the corresponding circuit to fire more effortlessly and effectively. (13.06530%)

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By contrast, if you’re trying to learn a complex new skill (say, SQL database management) in a state of low concentration (perhaps you also have your Facebook feed open), you’re firing too many circuits simultaneously and haphazardly to isolate the group of neurons you actually want to strengthen. (13.56780%)

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there’s one idea in particular that seems central to his method: the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches. Grant performs this batching at multiple levels. Within the year, he stacks his teaching into the fall semester, during which he can turn all of his attention to teaching well and being available to his students. (This method seems to work, as Grant is currently the highest-rated teacher at Wharton and the winner of multiple teaching awards.) By batching his teaching in the fall, Grant can then turn his attention fully to research in the spring and summer, and tackle this work with less distraction. (14.07040%)

• Comments: Batching helps you focus more intensely by only applying yourself to 1 thing at a time.

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, by consolidating his work into intense and uninterrupted pulses, he’s leveraging the following law of productivity: High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus) (14.57290%)

• Comments: This seems like an important lesson. By focusing intensely, you can accomplish more in less time.

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The problem this research identifies with this work strategy is that when you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task. (14.57290%)

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In a 2009 paper, titled, intriguingly, “Why Is It So Hard to Do My Work?,” Leroy introduced an effect she called attention residue. (14.57290%)

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“People experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor performance on that next task,” and the more intense the residue, the worse the performance. (15.07540%)

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Facebook unveiled the plans for a new headquarters designed by Frank Gehry. At the center of this new building is what CEO Mark Zuckerberg called “the largest open floor plan in the world”: More than three thousand employees will work on movable furniture spread over a ten-acre expanse. Facebook, of course, is not the only Silicon Valley heavyweight to embrace the open office concept. (17.58790%)

Deep Work Is Rare

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A third trend is the push for content producers of all types to maintain a social media presence. (17.58790%)

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Another big business trend in recent years is the rise of instant messaging. (17.58790%)

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Even though some details of Piketty’s theory are controversial, the underlying assumption that it’s increasingly difficult to measure individuals’ contributions is generally considered, to quote one of his critics, “undoubtedly true.” We should not, therefore, expect the bottom-line impact of depth-destroying behaviors to be easily detected. As Tom Cochran discovered, such metrics fall into an opaque region resistant to easy measurement—a region I call the metric black hole. (19.59800%)

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I’ll describe various mind-sets and biases that have pushed business away from deep work and toward more distracting alternatives. None of these behaviors would survive long if it was clear that they were hurting the bottom line, but the metric black hole prevents this clarity and allows the shift toward distraction (19.59800%)

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The second reason that a culture of connectivity makes life easier is that it creates an environment where it becomes acceptable to run your day out of your inbox—responding to the latest missive with alacrity while others pile up behind it, all the while feeling satisfyingly productive (more on this soon). If e-mail were to move to the periphery of your workday, you’d be required to deploy a more thoughtful approach to figuring out what you should be working on and for how long. This type of planning is hard. (20.60300%)

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The Principle of Least Resistance: In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment. (20.60300%)

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There are at least two big reasons why this is true. The first concerns responsiveness to your needs. If you work in an environment where you can get an answer to a question or a specific piece of information immediately when the need arises, this makes your life easier—at least, in the moment. 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. All of this would make the day to day of your working life harder (20.60300%)

• Comments: This has always been my first concern with asynchronous messaging. But maybe not getting an answer right away is better.

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Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner. (22.11060%)

• Comments: I'm guilty of this. I determine at least some of my worth from how much I can do.

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mind-set provides another explanation for the popularity of many depth-destroying behaviors. If you send and answer e-mails at all hours, if you schedule and attend meetings constantly, if you weigh in on instant message systems like Hall within seconds when someone poses a new question, or if you roam your open office bouncing ideas off all whom you encounter—all of these behaviors make you seem busy in a public manner. (22.11060%)

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Postman argued that our society was sliding into a troubling relationship with technology. We were, he noted, no longer discussing the trade-offs surrounding new technologies, balancing the new efficiencies against the new problems introduced. If it’s high-tech, we began to instead assume, then it’s good. Case closed. He called such a culture a technopoly, (23.11558%)

• Comments: I think the point made here is just that we aren't encouraged to talk about the downsides of tech because tech is synonymous with good. If you embrace it, you are good. If not, you are bad.

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we’ve made “the Internet” synonymous with the revolutionary future of business and government. To make your company more like “the Internet” is to be with the times, and to ignore these trends is to be the proverbial buggy-whip maker in an automotive age. We no longer see Internet tools as products released by for-profit companies, funded by investors hoping to make a return, and run by twentysomethings who are often making things up as they go along. We’re instead quick to idolize these digital doodads as a signifier of progress and a harbinger of a (dare I say, brave) new world. (23.61810%)

Deep Work Is Meaningful

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The goal of this chapter is to convince you that deep work can generate as much satisfaction in an information economy as it so clearly does in a craft economy. In the sections ahead, I’ll make three arguments to support this claim. These arguments roughly follow a trajectory from the conceptually narrow to broad: starting with a neurological perspective, moving to the psychological, and ending with the philosophical. (25.62810%)

• Comments: Thesis of chapter

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world of craftsmen. “The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy,” explains Matthew Crawford. And we believe him. But when we shift our attention to knowledge work this connection is muddied. (25.62810%)

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Part of the issue is clarity. Craftsmen like Furrer tackle professional challenges that are simple to define but difficult to execute—a useful imbalance when seeking purpose. Knowledge work exchanges this clarity for ambiguity. It can be hard to define exactly what a given knowledge worker does and how it differs from another: (25.62810%)

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Another issue muddying the connection between depth and meaning in knowledge work is the cacophony of voices attempting to convince knowledge workers to spend more time engaged in shallow activities. (25.62810%)

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. We tend to place a lot of emphasis on our circumstances, assuming that what happens to us (or fails to happen) determines how we feel. From this perspective, the small-scale details of how you spend your day aren’t that important, because what matters are the large-scale outcomes, such as whether or not you get a promotion or move to that nicer apartment. According to Gallagher, decades of research contradict this understanding. Our brains instead 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 though the circumstances in both scenarios are the same. As Gallagher summarizes: “Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.” (26.13070%)

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This theory tells us that your world is the outcome of what you pay attention to, so consider for a moment the type of mental world constructed when you dedicate significant time to deep endeavors. There’s a gravity and sense of importance inherent in deep work—whether you’re Ric Furrer smithing a sword or a computer programmer optimizing an algorithm. Gallagher’s theory, therefore, predicts that if you spend enough time in this state, your mind will understand your world as rich in meaning and importance. (27.13570%)

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Many knowledge workers spend most of their working day interacting with these types of shallow concerns. Even when they’re required to complete something more involved, the habit of frequently checking inboxes ensures that these issues remain at the forefront of their attention. Gallagher teaches us that this is a foolhardy way to go about your day, as it ensures that your mind will construct an understanding of your working life that’s dominated by stress, irritation, frustration, and triviality. (28.14070%)

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When measured empirically, people were happier at work and less happy relaxing than they suspected. And as the ESM studies confirmed, the more such flow experiences that occur in a given week, the higher the subject’s life satisfaction. Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging. (29.14570%)

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From Descartes’s skepticism came the radical belief that the individual seeking certainty trumped a God or king bestowing truth. The resulting Enlightenment, of course, led to the concept of human rights and freed many from oppression. But as Dreyfus and Kelly emphasize, for all its good in the political arena, in the domain of the metaphysical this thinking stripped the world of the order and sacredness essential to creating meaning. In a post-Enlightenment world we have tasked ourselves to identify what’s meaningful and what’s not, an exercise that can seem arbitrary and induce a creeping nihilism. “The Enlightenment’s metaphysical embrace of the autonomous individual leads not just to a boring life,” Dreyfus and Kelly worry; “it leads almost inevitably to a nearly unlivable one.” (29.64820%)

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Craftsmanship, Dreyfus and Kelly argue in their book’s conclusion, provides a key to reopening a sense of sacredness in a responsible manner. To illustrate this claim, they use as an organizing example an account of a master wheelwright—the now lost profession of shaping wooden wagon wheels. “Because each piece of wood is distinct, it has its own personality,” they write after a passage describing the details of the wheelwright’s craft. “The woodworker has an intimate relationship with the wood he works. Its subtle virtues call out to be cultivated and cared for.” In this appreciation for the “subtle virtues” of his medium, they note, the craftsman has stumbled onto something crucial in a post-Enlightenment world: a source of meaning sited outside the individual. 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. As Dreyfus and Kelly explain, such sacredness is common to craftsmanship. The task of a craftsman, they conclude, “is not to generate meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill of discerning the meanings that are already there.” This frees the craftsman of the nihilism of autonomous individualism, providing an ordered world of meaning. At the same time, this meaning seems safer than the sources cited in previous eras. The wheelwright, the authors imply, cannot easily use the inherent quality of a piece of pine to justify a despotic monarchy. (30.15080%)

The Rules

Work Deeply

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The five most common desires these subjects fought include, not surprisingly, eating, sleeping, and sex. But the top five list also included desires for “taking a break from [hard] work… checking e-mail and social networking sites, surfing the web, listening to music, or watching television.” The lure of the Internet and television proved especially strong: The subjects succeeded in resisting these particularly addictive distractions only around half the time. These results are bad news for this rule’s goal of helping you cultivate a deep work habit. They tell us that you can expect to be bombarded with the desire to do anything but work deeply throughout the day, and if you’re like the German subjects from the Hofmann and Baumeister study, these competing desires will often win out. (33.66830%)

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The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration. (34.17090%)

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You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. 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. (34.17090%)

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The Monastic Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling (34.67340%)

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the monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling. This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations. Practitioners of the monastic philosophy tend to have a well-defined and highly valued professional goal that they’re pursuing, and the bulk of their professional success comes from doing this one thing exceptionally well. (35.17590%)

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The Bimodal Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling (35.67840%)

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At the same time, the bimodal philosophy is typically deployed by people who cannot succeed in the absence of substantial commitments to non-deep pursuits. Jung, for example, needed his clinical practice to (36.18090%)

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the bimodal philosophy of deep work. This philosophy asks that you divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else. During the deep time, the bimodal worker will act monastically—seeking intense and uninterrupted concentration. During the shallow time, such focus is not prioritized. This division of time between deep and open can happen on multiple scales. For example, on the scale of a week, you might dedicate a four-day weekend to depth and the rest to open time. Similarly, on the scale of a year, you might dedicate one season to contain most of your deep stretches (as many academics do over the summer or while on sabbatical). (36.18090%)

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only if the subject dedicates enough time to such endeavors to reach maximum cognitive intensity—the state in which real breakthroughs occur. This is why the minimum unit of time for deep work in this philosophy tends to be at least one full day. To put aside a few hours in the morning, for example, is too short to count as a deep work stretch (36.18090%)

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Perhaps the biggest obstacle to implementing this philosophy is that even short periods of deep work require a flexibility that many fear they lack in their current positions. (36.68340%)

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This philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit. The goal, in other words, is to generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you’re going to go deep. (37.18590%)

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The chain method is a good example of the rhythmic philosophy of deep work scheduling (37.18590%)

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Another common way to implement the rhythmic philosophy is to replace the visual aid of the chain method with a set starting time (37.18590%)

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The Rhythmic Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling (37.18590%)

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In much the same way that maintaining visual indicators of your work progress can reduce the barrier to entry for going deep, eliminating even the simplest scheduling decisions, such as when during the day to do the work, also reduces this barrier. (37.68840%)

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The Journalistic Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling (38.19100%)

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if you’re writing a dissertation with no one pressuring you to get it done, the habitual nature of the rhythmic philosophy might be necessary to maintain progress. (38.19100%)

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I call this approach, in which you fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule, the journalist philosophy. This name is a nod to the fact that journalists, like Walter Isaacson, are trained to shift into a writing mode on a moment’s notice, as is required by the deadline-driven nature of their profession. This approach is not for the deep work novice. As I established in the opening to this rule, the ability to rapidly switch your mind from shallow to deep mode doesn’t come naturally. Without practice, such switches can seriously deplete your finite willpower reserves. This habit also requires a sense of confidence in your abilities—a conviction that what you’re doing is important and will succeed. This type of conviction is typically built on a foundation of existing professional accomplishment. (38.69350%)

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Ritualize (39.19600%)

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To make the most out of your deep work sessions, build rituals of the same level of strictness and idiosyncrasy as the important thinkers mentioned previously. There’s a good reason for this mimicry. Great minds like Caro and Darwin didn’t deploy rituals to be weird; they did so because success in their work depended on their ability to go deep, again and again (39.69850%)

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Where you’ll work and for how long. Your ritual needs to specify a location for your deep work efforts. (40.20100%)

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Regardless of where you work, be sure to also give yourself a specific time frame to keep the session a discrete challenge and not an open-ended slog. (40.20100%)

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How you’ll work once you start to work. Your ritual needs rules and processes to keep your efforts structured. For example, you might institute a ban on any Internet use, or maintain a metric such as words produced per twenty-minute interval to keep your concentration honed. 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. (40.20100%)

• Comments: Ritualize the work itself to minimize energy spent planning.

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Make Grand Gestures (40.70350%)

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The dominant force is the psychology of committing so seriously to the task at hand. To put yourself in an exotic location to focus on a writing project, or to take a week off from work just to think, or to lock yourself in a hotel room until you complete an important invention: These gestures push your deep goal to a level of mental priority that helps unlock the needed mental resources. (41.70850%)

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Don’t Work Alone (42.21110%)

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, when it’s reasonable to leverage the whiteboard effect, do so. By working side by side with someone on a problem, you can push each other toward deeper levels of depth, and therefore toward the generation of more and more valuable output as compared to working alone. (44.22110%)

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the hub-and-spoke model provides a crucial template. Separate your pursuit of serendipitous encounters from your efforts to think deeply and build on these inspirations. You should try to optimize each effort separately, as opposed to mixing them together into a sludge that impedes both goals. (44.22110%)

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Execute Like a Business (44.72360%)

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Discipline #1: Focus on the Wildly Important (45.22610%)

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For an individual focused on deep work, the implication is that you should identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours. (45.22610%)

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I had identified the importance of prioritizing depth. What I needed was help figuring out how to execute this strategy. (45.22610%)

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Discipline #2: Act on the Lead Measures (45.72860%)

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Lag measures describe the thing you’re ultimately trying to improve. (45.72860%)

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Discipline #3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard (45.72860%)

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Lead measures, on the other hand, “measure the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures.” (45.72860%)

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“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.” (45.72860%)

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the problem with lag measures is that they come too late to change your behavior: “When you receive them, the performance that drove them is already in the past. (45.72860%)

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For an individual focused on deep work, it’s easy to identify the relevant lead measure: time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal. (45.72864%)

• Comments: I need a way to measure amount of deep work per day.

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Discipline #4: Create a Cadence of Accountability (46.23120%)

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the individual’s scoreboard should be a physical artifact in the workspace that displays the individual’s current deep work hour count. (46.23120%)

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the final step to help maintain a focus on lead measures is to put in place “a rhythm of regular and frequent meetings of any team that owns a wildly important goal.” (46.23120%)

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I used a weekly review to look over my scoreboard to celebrate good weeks, help understand what led to bad weeks, and most important, figure out how to ensure a good score for the days ahead. (46.73370%)

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This strategy argues that you should follow Kreider’s lead by injecting regular and substantial freedom from professional concerns into your day, providing you with the idleness paradoxically required to get (deep) work done. (47.23620%)

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At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning—no after-dinner e-mail check, no mental replays of conversations, and no scheming about how you’ll handle an upcoming challenge; shut down work thinking completely. (47.23620%)

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Be Lazy (47.23620%)

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unconscious thought theory (UTT)—an attempt to understand the different roles conscious and unconscious deliberation play in decision making. At a high level, this theory proposes that for decisions that require the application of strict rules, the conscious mind must be involved. For example, if you need to do a math calculation, only your conscious mind is able to follow the precise arithmetic rules needed for correctness. On the other hand, for decisions that involve large amounts of information and multiple vague, and perhaps even conflicting, constraints, your unconscious mind is well suited to tackle the issue. UTT hypothesizes that this is due to the fact that these regions of your brain have more neuronal bandwidth available, allowing them to move around more information and sift through more potential solutions than your conscious centers of thinking. Your conscious mind, according to this theory, is like a home computer on which you can run carefully written programs that return correct answers to limited problems, whereas your unconscious mind is like Google’s vast data centers, in which statistical algorithms sift through terabytes of unstructured information, teasing out surprising useful solutions to difficult questions. (47.73869%)

• Comments: So the next time I find it difficult to tear myself away from work or a task despite feeling drained or stuck on a challenge, I can and should just say, "I'm going to delegate this task to my unconcious mind. I'm not giving up. I'm still working but just in a different way."

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Half the subjects were told to think through the information and then make the best decision. The other half were distracted by easy puzzles after they read the information, and were then put on the spot to make a decision without having had time to consciously deliberate. The distracted group ended up performing better. (47.73870%)

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Reason #2: Downtime Helps Recharge the Energy Needed to Work Deeply (47.73870%)

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. A shutdown habit, therefore, is not necessarily reducing the amount of time you’re engaged in productive work, but is instead diversifying the type of work (47.73870%)

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Reason #1: Downtime Aids Insights (47.73870%)

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attention restoration theory (ART), which claims that spending time in nature can improve your ability to concentrate. (48.24120%)

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Walking through nature, by contrast, exposes you to what lead author Marc Berman calls “inherently fascinating stimuli,” using sunsets as an example. These stimuli “invoke attention modestly, allowing focused-attention mechanisms a chance to replenish.” Put another way, when walking through nature, you’re freed from having to direct your attention, as there are few challenges to navigate (48.24120%)

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To concentrate requires what ART calls directed attention. This resource is finite: If you exhaust it, you’ll struggle to concentrate. (48.24120%)

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if you keep interrupting your evening to check and respond to e-mail, 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. (49.24620%)

• Comments: Sign me up to this point.

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Ericsson notes that for a novice, somewhere around an hour a day of intense concentration seems to be a limit, while for experts this number can expand to as many as four hours—but rarely more. (49.24620%)

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Reason #3: The Work That Evening Downtime Replaces Is Usually Not That Important (49.24620%)

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by evening, you’re beyond the point where you can continue to effectively work deeply. Any work you do fit into the night, therefore, won’t be the type of high-value activities that really advance your career; (49.74870%)

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Another key commitment for succeeding with this strategy is to support your commitment to shutting down with a strict shutdown ritual 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. (49.74870%)

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concerning implementation. To succeed with this strategy, you must first accept the commitment that once your workday shuts down, you cannot allow even the smallest incursion of professional concerns into your field of attention. (49.74870%)

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“Committing to a specific plan for a goal may therefore not only facilitate attainment of the goal but may also free cognitive resources for other pursuits.” (50.25130%)

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The concept of a shutdown ritual might at first seem extreme, but there’s a good reason for it: the Zeigarnik effect. This effect, which is named for the experimental work of the early-twentieth-century psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, describes the ability of incomplete tasks to dominate our attention. It tells us that if you simply stop whatever you are doing at five p.m. and declare, “I’m done with work until tomorrow,” you’ll likely struggle to keep your mind clear of professional issues, as the many obligations left unresolved in your mind will, as in Bluma Zeigarnik’s experiments, keep battling for your attention (50.25130%)

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Shutdown rituals can become annoying, as they add an extra ten to fifteen minutes to the end of your workday (and sometimes even more), but they’re (50.75380%)

Embrace Boredom

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Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction. (51.25630%)

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The strategies that follow are motivated by the key idea that getting the most out of your deep work habit requires training, and as clarified previously, this training must address two goals: improving your ability to concentrate intensely and overcoming your desire for distraction. (51.75880%)

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People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the (51.75880%)

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Don’t Take Breaks from Distraction. Instead Take Breaks from Focus. (52.26130%)

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Schedule in advance when you’ll use the Internet, and then avoid it altogether outside these times. I suggest that you keep a notepad near your computer at work. On this pad, record the next time you’re allowed to use the Internet. Until you arrive at that time, absolutely no network connectivity is allowed—no matter how tempting. (52.76380%)

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you should instead schedule the occasional break from focus to give in to distraction. (52.76380%)

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By segregating Internet use (and therefore segregating distractions) you’re minimizing the number of times you give in to distraction, and by doing so you let these attention-selecting muscles strengthen. (52.76380%)

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Regardless of how you schedule your Internet blocks, you must keep the time outside these blocks absolutely free from Internet use. (53.26630%)

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It’s crucial in this situation, therefore, that you don’t immediately abandon an offline block, even when stuck. If it’s possible, switch to another offline activity for the remainder of the current block (or perhaps even fill in this time relaxing). If this is infeasible—perhaps you need to get the current offline activity done promptly—then the correct response is to change your schedule so that your next Internet block begins sooner. (53.26630%)

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Scheduling Internet use at home as well as at work can further improve your concentration training. (53.76880%)

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if the Internet plays a large and important role in your evening entertainment, that’s fine: Schedule lots of long Internet blocks. The key here isn’t to avoid or even to reduce the total amount of time you spend engaging in distracting behavior, but is instead to give yourself plenty of opportunities throughout your evening to resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom. (53.76880%)

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Work Like Teddy Roosevelt (54.77390%)

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Remember, however, to always keep your self-imposed deadlines right at the edge of feasibility. You should be able to consistently beat the buzzer (or at least be close), but to do so should require teeth-gritting concentration. (55.27640%)

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At this point, there should be only one possible way to get the deep task done in time: working with great intensity—no e-mail breaks, no daydreaming, no Facebook browsing, no repeated trips to the coffee machine. Like Roosevelt at Harvard, attack the task with every free neuron until it gives way under your unwavering barrage of concentration. (55.27640%)

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This strategy asks you to inject the occasional dash of Rooseveltian intensity into your own workday. In particular, identify a deep task (that is, something that requires deep work to complete) that’s high on your priority list. Estimate how long you’d normally put aside for an obligation of this type, then give yourself a hard deadline that drastically reduces this time. (55.27640%)

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The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally—walking, jogging, driving, showering—and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem. (55.77890%)

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Meditate Productively (55.77890%)

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When you notice your attention slipping away from the problem at hand, gently remind yourself that you can return to that thought later, then redirect your attention back. (56.28140%)

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A subtler, but equally effective adversary, is looping. When faced with a hard problem, your mind, as it was evolved to do, will attempt to avoid excess expenditure of energy when possible. One way it might attempt to sidestep this expenditure is by avoiding diving deeper into the problem by instead looping over and over again on what you already know (56.28140%)

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By forcing you to resist distraction and return your attention repeatedly to a well-defined problem, it helps strengthen your distraction-resisting muscles, and by forcing you to push your focus deeper and deeper on a single problem, it sharpens your concentration. (56.28140%)

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Suggestion #1: Be Wary of Distractions and Looping (56.28140%)

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Once the relevant variables are identified, define the specific next-step question you need to answer using these variables. (56.78390%)

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Memorize a Deck of Cards (56.78390%)

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Assuming you’re able to solve your next-step question, the final step of this structured approach to deep thinking is to consolidate your gains by reviewing clearly the answer you identified. At this point, you can push yourself to the next level of depth by starting the process over. (56.78390%)

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Suggestion #2: Structure Your Deep Thinking (56.78390%)

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I suggest starting with a careful review of the relevant variables for solving the problem and then storing these values in your working memory. (56.78390%)

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A side effect of memory training, in other words, is an improvement in your general ability to concentrate. This ability can then be fruitfully applied to any task demanding deep work. (57.28640%)

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“We found that one of the biggest differences between memory athletes and the rest of us is in a cognitive ability that’s not a direct measure of memory at all but of attention,” (57.28640%)

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learn a standard but quite impressive skill in the repertoire of most mental athletes: the ability to memorize a shuffled deck of cards. (57.78890%)

Quit Social Media

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The use of network tools can be harmful. If you don’t attempt to weigh pros against cons, but instead use any glimpse of some potential benefit as justification for unrestrained use of a tool, then you’re unwittingly crippling your ability to succeed in the world of knowledge work. (60.30150%)

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The Any-Benefit Approach to Network Tool Selection: You’re justified in using a network tool if you can identify any possible benefit to its use, or anything you might possibly miss out on if you don’t use it.

The problem with this approach, of course, is that it ignores all the negatives that come along with the tools in question. These services are engineered to be addictive—robbing time and attention from activities that more directly support your professional and personal goals (such as deep work). (60.30150%)

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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 these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts. (62.31160%)

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Apply the Law of the Vital Few to Your Internet Habits (62.81410%)

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Once you’ve identified these goals, list for each the two or three most important activities that help you satisfy the goal. (63.31660%)

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The first step of this strategy is to identify the main high-level goals in both your professional and your personal life. (63.31660%)

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The next step in this strategy is to consider the network tools you currently use. For each such tool, go through the key activities you identified and ask whether the use of the tool has a substantially positive impact, a substantially negative impact, or little impact on your regular and successful participation in the activity. Now comes the important decision: Keep using this tool only if you concluded that it has substantial positive impacts and that these outweigh the negative impacts. (63.81910%)

• Comments: This approach to choosing digital tools makes so much sense. For some reason, you really just take those tools for granted. But as tools, they are supposed to serve you. If they fail to do so, it is within your power to stop using them.

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The Law of the Vital Few: In many settings, 80 percent of a given effect is due to just 20 percent of the possible causes. (65.32660%)*

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Quit Social Media (65.82910%)

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This strategy picks specifically on social media because among the different network tools that can claim your time and attention, these services, if used without limit, can be particularly devastating (66.33170%)

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But here’s the reality of audiences in a social media era. Before these services existed, building an audience of any size beyond your immediate friends and family required hard, competitive work. (66.83420%)

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By dropping off these services without notice you can test the reality of your status as a content producer. For most people and most services, the news might be sobering—no one outside your closest friends and family will likely even notice you’ve signed off. (67.33670%)

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Part of what fueled social media’s rapid assent, I contend, is its ability to short-circuit this connection between the hard work of producing real value and the positive reward of having people pay attention to you. It has instead replaced this timeless capitalist exchange with a shallow collectivist alternative: I’ll pay attention to what you say if you pay attention to what I say—regardless of its value. (67.33670%)

• Comments: This is a very interesting idea. Who is really listening to what you have to say? Are we just trading the illusion that we like each others' lives?

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Don’t Use the Internet to Entertain Yourself (67.83920%)

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Put more thought into your leisure 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.” Addictive websites of the type mentioned previously thrive in a vacuum: If you haven’t given yourself something to do in a given moment, they’ll always beckon as an appealing option. If you instead fill this free time with something of more quality, their grip on your attention will loosen. (68.34170%)

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At this point you might worry that adding such structure to your relaxation will defeat the purpose of relaxing, which many believe requires complete freedom from plans or obligations. Won’t a structured evening leave you exhausted—not refreshed—the next day at work? (69.34670%)

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If you give your mind something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you’ll end the day more fulfilled, and begin the next one more relaxed, than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in semiconscious and unstructured Web surfing. (69.34673%)

• Comments: I honestly thought I needed unstructured relaxation. But I see now that was just an assumption. Maybe I can relax through a full day's worth of structured effort.

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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. (69.84920%)

Drain the Shallows

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The implication is that once you’ve hit your deep work limit in a given day, you’ll experience diminishing rewards if you try to cram in more. Shallow work, therefore, doesn’t become dangerous until after you add enough to begin to crowd out your bounded deep efforts for the day. (70.35180%)

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Schedule Every Minute of Your Day (71.35680%)

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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. (71.35680%)

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If your schedule is disrupted, you should, at the next available moment, take a few minutes to create a revised schedule for the time that remains in the day. You can turn to a new page. You can erase and redraw blocks. Or do as I do: Cross out the blocks for the remainder of the day and create new blocks to the right of the old ones on the page (71.85930%)

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When you’re done scheduling your day, every minute should be part of a block. You have, in effect, given every minute of your workday a job. Now as you go through your day, use this schedule to guide you. (71.85930%)

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Here’s my suggestion: At the beginning of each workday, turn to a new page of lined paper in a notebook you dedicate to this purpose. Down the left-hand side of the page, mark every other line with an hour of the day, covering the full set of hours you typically work. Now comes the important part: Divide the hours of your workday into blocks and assign activities to the blocks. (71.85930%)

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be liberal with your use of task blocks. Deploy many throughout your day and make them longer than required to handle the tasks you plan in the morning. (72.36180%)

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overflow conditional 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 (72.36180%)

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I maintain a rule that if I stumble onto an important insight, then this is a perfectly valid reason to ignore the rest of my schedule for the day (with the exception, of course, of things that cannot be skipped). I can then stick with this unexpected insight until it loses steam. At this point, I’ll step back and rebuild my schedule for any time that remains in the day. (72.86430%)

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Quantify the Depth of Every Activity (72.86430%)

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This type of scheduling, however, isn’t about constraint—it’s instead about thoughtfulness. It’s a simple habit that forces you to continually take a moment throughout your day and ask: “What makes sense for me to do with the time that remains?” It’s the habit of asking that returns results, not your unyielding fidelity to the answer. (72.86430%)

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evaluate activities by asking a simple (but surprisingly illuminating) question: How long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task? (73.36680%)

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What percentage of my time should be spent on shallow work? This strategy suggests that you ask it. If you have a boss, in other words, have a conversation about this question. (74.37190%)

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For most people in most non-entry-level knowledge work jobs, the answer to the question will be somewhere in the 30 to 50 percent range (there’s a psychological distaste surrounding the idea of spending the majority of your time on unskilled tasks, so 50 percent is a natural upper limit, while at the same time most bosses will begin to worry that if this percentage gets too much lower than 30 percent you’ll be reduced to a knowledge work hermit who thinks big thoughts but never responds to e-mails). (74.37190%)

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Ask Your Boss for a Shallow Work Budget (74.37190%)

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These hard numbers will provide you the confidence needed to start scaling back on the shallow activities that are sapping your time. (75.37690%)

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I call this commitment fixed-schedule productivity, as I fix the firm goal of not working past a certain time, then work backward to find productivity strategies that allow me to satisfy this declaration. (75.87940%)

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Finish Your Work by Five Thirty (75.87940%)

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A commitment to fixed-schedule productivity, however, shifts you into a scarcity mind-set. Suddenly any obligation beyond your deepest efforts is suspect and seen as potentially disruptive. Your default answer becomes no, the bar for gaining access to your time and attention rises precipitously, and you begin to organize the efforts that pass these obstacles with a ruthless efficiency. It might also lead you to test assumptions about your company’s work culture that you thought were ironclad but turn out to be malleable. (77.88940%)

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Become Hard to Reach (77.88940%)

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Tip #1: Make People Who Send You E-mail Do More Work (78.39200%)

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I call this approach a sender filter, as I’m asking my correspondents to filter themselves before attempting to contact me. (78.39200%)

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Tip #1: Make People Who Send You E-mail Do More Work Most nonfiction authors are easy to reach. They include an e-mail address on (78.39200%)

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Tip #2: Do More Work When You Send or Reply to E-mails (79.39700%)

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pause a moment before replying and take the time to answer the following key prompt: 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? (79.89950%)

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replace a quick response with one that takes the time to describe the process you identified, points out the current step, and emphasizes the step that comes next. I call this the process-centric approach to e-mail, and it’s designed to minimize both the number of e-mails you receive and the amount of mental clutter they generate. (79.89950%)

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Tip #3: Don’t Respond (80.90450%)

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Professorial E-mail Sorting: Do not reply to an e-mail message if any of the following applies:

• It’s ambiguous or otherwise makes it hard for you to generate a reasonable response. • It’s not a question or proposal that interests you. • Nothing really good would happen if you did respond and nothing really bad (81.40700%)

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As the author Tim Ferriss once wrote: “Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things.” (81.40700%)

• Comments: Being a bit harsh with how you give up your time gives you more time to do important stuff.