“Deep Work”

Cal Newport

I’m of a thoroughly mixed opinion about this book. It’s a mix of good examples and aged-like-milk references, useful thought technologies and toxic productivity. Many of the best ideas are things I already do, and have been doing for quite a while—but I suspect they trace back to this book, as filtered through some of the podcasts I was listening to around the time the book came out.

To try to pull out the most useful pieces:

Deep work, intense uninterrupted focus, is the productive part of the knowledge worker’s day. Shallow work—checking email, going to meetings, responding to Slack messages—will expand to fill as much space as you let it, and is more about performing productivity than actually producing value.

Focusing on doing more deep work than shallow can improve your career, productivity, et cetera et cetera. Take as a given that that’s a goal; the book explains why, but many of the examples are where those “aged-like-milk references” come in.

A few techniques for doing this:

Embrace boredom and practice the skill of not picking up your phone/going online whenever you feel like it. This is “calisthenics for the mind.”

Have a fixed productivity schedule. Make a hard line that you’re done with work at (suggested time) 5:30pm, and don’t even touch your work computer/phone after that. Now, backsolve how you spend the rest of your work hours to make that possible.

Consider simply… not answering emails. If you do answer an email, don’t jot out a quick response, drop a tactical nuke of focused response—basically, try to accomplish a week’s worth of back-and-forth in a single, cringe-inducingly-over-written email. It’ll save you time in the long run.

Try block scheduling! At the start of the day, fill out every single minute of your calendar with things you’ll be doing. It’s okay if your estimates are wrong, and if you’re doing the Deep Work Thing, just ignore the block scheduled things, go back and rebuild the schedule once the Deep Work Thing naturally ends.1

I’m not going to pretend that this is a 100% complete summary of the book, but I do think I’ve hit the key points here. Even knowing—and doing—most of this already, I still found it useful to read: it made me focus on these thought technologies, and re-evaluate my use of some of them.2

One last fun thought I had while reading: he’s got a description of a hub-and-spokes model for office design. The hub is a common shared space, room for those Steve Jobs-ian ‘serendipitous moments’ of collaboration. The spokes are individual office, ideally soundproofed, to which one can retreat for focused deep work sessions. And I thought about that, and thought about the current3 vogue of combining hybrid in-office/remote work schedules and cubicle-farms, and wondered: have companies accidentally arrived at this hub-and-spokes model, on the scale of the week? The hub is the office, a cubicle or open-plan hellscape, and the spokes are the home office? That sure is a cost-efficient way to do it. Insidious.

Anyhow, I did wind up enjoying the read, and thought it was a useful consolidation of a bunch of helpful techniques, so I’m quite comfortable recommending it. Give it a read.4

Protip: any given calendar software will let you have multiple calendars, and these can often be color-coded. My work calendar has the actual Scheduled Things I Must Do in red, and I do the block scheduling in blue, so I can see at a glance if that upcoming event is a thing I actually need to interrupt my flow to do, or if I can ignore it. ↩

I’ve got some thoughts about adjusting my email and Slack usage, for one. I may write myself a little utility to just quit out of both those apps outside of designated Communication Times. We’ll see. ↩

As of this writing – who knows, maybe by the time this scheduled post goes up, the style will have changed! ↩

This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩