Book A Discovery Exam

Deep Work by Cal Newport

Table of Contents

Part 1: Qualities of Deep Work

Deep Work is Valuable

  • 3 types of people will succeed in the new economy
    1. High-skilled workers i.e. doctors, statisticians
    2. owners and investors of capitol i.e. trump
    3. Superstars i.e. james clear
    • In both the First and Third case, the worker who accumulates vast amounts of deep work will prevail.
  • Winners in the New Economy must have two skills
    1. They must be able to learn quickly
    2. They must produce on an elite level
  • Quality Work = Time Spent Working x Depth of Focus
    • you can get more done in less time if you work with greater depth

Key Takeaway: Deep work is essential for both learning and creating making you successful in the new economy

Deep Work is Rare

  • Deep work is rare for four main reasons
    1. The Metric-Black Hole
    2. The Principle of Least-Resistance
    3. Busyness as a proxy for productivity
    4. The Cult of the Internet
    These issues make it so that shallow work is protected by the lack of accountability and questioned provided bu the fact that people thinj that you are productive simply for being busy

Key Takeaway: The fact that deep work is so rare is not great for companies but it is great for you. If you develop this skill you will stand out

Meaningful

  • Deep work is meaningful from the neurological perspective, the psychological perspective, and the philosophical perspective
    • Neurological
    • Psychological
    • Philosophical
  • Key Takeaway:

Part 2: How to Work Deep

Work Deeply

  • Pick your Style of Deep Work (4 typical varieties)
    1. The Monastic
    2. The Bimodal
    3. The Rythmic
    4. The Jouranalistic
  • Ritualize your deep work–how, where, and support (i.e. work on a specifically chosen goal at a specifically chosen place and plan for any needs–like bringing food)
  • Make grand gestures
    • i.e. can be as big as renting a hotel room to focus or as small as buying coffee to stay and work.
    • Oftentimes the new environment can help us focus as well as not wanting to lose the sunken costs.
  • Don’t work alone
    • He qualifies this and says working with people can be dangerous for our focus as well. He’s just saying not to discount the value of working with other people.
  • Execute like a business
    • 4 disciplines of a business
      1. Focus on the Wildly Important
      2. Act on Lead Measures
      3. Keep a Compelling Scorecard
      4. Create a Cadence of Accountability
  • Have a Structured and Non-negotiable Down-time
    • Downtime aids insights
    • Downtime helps recharge the energy needed to work deeply
    • The work that the evening wind down replaces is usually not important

Embrace Boredom

  • Take certain structured breaks from technology no matter how much it is required of you. You can use tech as much as you need, but you must have certain times that you abstain from use no matter what. This retrains your brain to stop habitually turning to the shallow.
  • Try working like Teddy Roosevelt
    • Teddy would devote 8 am – 4 pm to school work. He would workout, eat, and go to class during this time but he would squeeze every other last minute out into his school work. Anytime outside of this window he would spend working on other things which is why he was able to be such a Renaissance man
  • Meditate Productively
    • When you are doing physically challenging but mentally void things like walking, spend that time working through a relevant problem that can be attacked by simply thinking.
  • Memorize a deck of Cards
    • an interesting challenge that requires you to focus with depth

Quit Social Media

  • Apply the Law of the Vital Few
  • Quit Social Media
  • Don’t use Internet to entertain yourself

Drain the Swallows

  • Schedule every minute of the day
  • Quantify the Depth of every activity
    • To do this, you ask the question, “How long would it take to train a smart recent college graduate to do this work”
  • Ask your boss for a shallow work budget
    • get your boss to agree that some amount of shallow work is not profitable for yourself or the company. Many times this simply goes unquestioned, but when elucidated it becomes clear that the shallow work demands are futile
  • Finish your work by 5:30
  • Become hard to reach
    • You can make people have to work a little harder to reach you, you can send better emails that require less follow-up, and you can simply not respond to some messages
© Jeremiah Cox 2024. 
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