Top highlights from Deep Work
If you dont produce, you wont thriveno matter how skilled or talented you are.
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Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.
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Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you loveis the sum of what you focus on.
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what we choose to focus on and what we choose to ignoreplays in defining the quality of our life.
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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.
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As the author Tim Ferriss once wrote: Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you dont, youll never find time for the life-changing big things.
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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, youre robbing your directed attention centers of the uninterrupted rest they need for restoration. Even if these work dashes consume only a small amount of time, they prevent you from reaching the levels of deeper relaxation in which attention restoration can occur. Only the confidence that youre done with work until the next day can convince your brain to downshift to the level where it can begin to recharge for the next day to follow. Put another way, trying to squeeze a little more work out of your evenings might reduce your effectiveness the next day enough that you end up getting less done than if you had instead respected a shutdown.
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To simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, its incredibly valuable.
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If you cant learn, you cant thrive.
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Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in ones work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.
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Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you dont simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.
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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 arent 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.
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Less mental clutter means more mental resources available for deep thinking.
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Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging. There
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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.
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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) its captured in a place where it will be revisited when the time is right. The process should be an algorithm: a series of steps you always conduct, one after another. When youre done, have a set phrase you say that indicates completion (to end my own ritual, I say, Shutdown complete). This final step sounds cheesy, but it provides a simple cue to your mind that its safe to release work-related thoughts for the rest of the day.
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(As Nietzsche said: It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.)
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In this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital.
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Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction, Nass discovered, its hard to shake the addiction even when you want to concentrate. To put this more concretely: If every moment of potential boredom in your lifesay, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrivesis relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the mental wrecks in Nasss research, its not ready for deep workeven if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.
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Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; its instead like a muscle that tires.
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If you service low-impact activities, therefore, you're taking away time you could be spending on higher-impact activities. It's a zero-sum game.
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[Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.
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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 hoursbut rarely more.
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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.
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To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. Put another way, the type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work.
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Your goal is not to stick to a given schedule at all costs; its instead to maintain, at all times, a thoughtful say in what youre doing with your time going forwardeven
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This, ultimately, is the lesson to come away with from our brief foray into the world of experimental psychology: To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction.
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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.
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To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work. If you dont cultivate this ability, youre likely to fall behind as technology advances. The
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In our current culture, we place a lot of emphasis on job description. Our obsession with the advice to follow your passion (the subject of my last book), for example, is motivated by the (flawed) idea that what matters most for your career satisfaction is the specifics of the job you choose. In this way of thinking, there are some rarified jobs that can be a source of satisfactionperhaps working in a nonprofit or starting a software companywhile all others are soulless and bland. The philosophy of Dreyfus and Kelly frees us from such traps. The craftsmen they cite dont have rarified jobs. Throughout most of human history, to be a blacksmith or a wheelwright wasnt glamorous. But this doesnt matter, as the specifics of the work are irrelevant. The meaning uncovered by such efforts is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in craftsmanshipnot the outcomes of their work.
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Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioral economics to family counseling, similarly suggest that the skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.
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If you want to win the war for attention, dont 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. For
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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.
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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.
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the hospital after the diagnosis she formed a sudden and strong intuition: This disease wanted to monopolize my attention, but as much as possible, I would focus on my life instead. The cancer treatment that followed was exhausting and terrible, but Gallagher couldnt help noticing, in that corner of her brain honed by a career in nonfiction writing, that her commitment to focus on what was good in her lifemovies, walks, and a 6:30 martiniworked surprisingly well. Her life during this period should have been mired in fear
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To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things.
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To do it right, it is the most complicated thing I know how to make, Furrer explains. And its that challenge that drives me. I dont need a sword. But I have to make them.
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Feynman was adamant in avoiding administrative duties because he knew they would only decrease his ability to do the one thing that mattered most in his professional life: to do real good physics work.
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Then theres the issue of cognitive capacity. Deep work is exhausting because it pushes you toward the limit of your abilities. Performance psychologists have extensively studied how much such efforts can be sustained by an individual in a given day.* In their seminal paper on deliberate practice, Anders Ericsson and his collaborators survey these studies. They note that for someone new to such practice (citing, in particular, a child in the early stages of developing an expert-level skill), an hour a day is a reasonable limit. For those familiar with the rigors of such activities, the limit expands to something like four hours, but rarely more.
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To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction. To learn, in other words, is an act of deep work. If youre comfortable going deep, youll be comfortable mastering the increasingly complex systems and skills needed to thrive in our economy. If you instead remain one of the many for whom depth is uncomfortable and distraction ubiquitous, you shouldnt expect these systems and skills to come easily to you. Deep Work Helps You Produce at an Elite Level Adam Grant produces at an elite level. When I met Grant in 2013, he was the youngest professor to be awarded tenure at the Wharton School of Business at Penn. A year later, when I started writing this chapter (and was just beginning to think about my own tenure process), the claim was updated: Hes now the youngest full professor* at Wharton. The reason Grant advanced so quickly in his corner of academia is simple: He produces. In 2012, Grant published seven articlesall of them in major journals. This is an absurdly
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Decades of work from multiple different subfields within psychology all point toward the conclusion that regularly resting your brain improves the quality of your deep work. When you work, work hard. When youre done, be done. Your average e-mail response time might suffer some, but youll more than make up for this with the sheer volume of truly important work produced during the day by your refreshed ability to dive deeper than your exhausted peers.
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Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.
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When Carl Jung wanted to revolutionize the field of psychiatry, he built a retreat in the woods. Jungs Bollingen Tower became a place where he could maintain his ability to think deeply and then apply the skill to produce work of such stunning originality that it changed the world. In the pages ahead, Ill try to convince you to join me in the effort to build our own personal Bollingen Towers; to cultivate an ability to produce real value in an increasingly distracted world; and to recognize a truth embraced by the most productive and important personalities of generations past: A deep life is a good life.
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To do real good physics work, you do need absolute solid lengths of time it needs a lot of concentration if you have a job administrating anything, you dont have the time. So I have invented another myth for myself: that Im irresponsible. Im actively irresponsible. I tell everyone I dont do anything. If anyone asks me to be on a committee for admissions, no, I tell them: Im irresponsible.
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In Part 1, I quoted writer Winifred Gallagher saying, Ill live the focused life, because its the best kind there is. I agree. So does Bill Gates. And hopefully now that youve finished this book, you agree too.
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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.
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With these rough categorizations established, the strategy works as follows: Schedule in advance when youll 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 youre allowed to use the Internet. Until you arrive at that time, absolutely no network connectivity is allowedno matter how tempting.
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Giving students iPads or allowing them to film homework assignments on YouTube prepares them for a high-tech economy about as much as playing with Hot Wheels would prepare them to thrive as auto mechanics.
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I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. Id used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. Email 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. Knuth
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I argue that his approach to batching helps explain this paradox. In particular, by consolidating his work into intense and uninterrupted pulses, hes leveraging the following law of productivity: High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)
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decade: The best moments usually occur when a persons body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Csikszentmihalyi calls this mental state flow (a term he popularized with a 1990 book of the same title).
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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. To be great at something is to be well myelinated. This understanding is important because it provides a neurological foundation for why deliberate practice works. By focusing intensely on a specific skill, youre 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 circuitseffectively cementing the skill. The reason, therefore, why its important to focus intensely on the task at hand while avoiding distraction is because this is the only way to isolate the relevant neural circuit enough to trigger useful myelination. By contrast, if youre 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), youre firing too many circuits simultaneously and haphazardly to isolate the group of neurons you actually want to strengthen. In
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Whether youre a writer, marketer, consultant, or lawyer: Your work is craft, and if you hone your ability and apply it with respect and care, then like the skilled wheelwright you can generate meaning in the daily efforts of your professional life.
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Seinfeld began his advice to Isaac with some common sense, noting the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes, and then explaining that the way to create better jokes was to write every day. Seinfeld continued by describing a specific technique he used to help maintain this discipline. He keeps a calendar on his wall. Every day that he writes jokes he crosses out the date on the calendar with a big red X. After a few days youll have a chain, Seinfeld said. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. Youll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain. This chain method (as some now call it) soon became a hit among writers and fitness enthusiastscommunities that thrive on the ability to do hard things consistently.
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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.
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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; its instead like a muscle that tires.
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To leave the distracted masses to join the focused few, Im arguing, is a transformative experience. The deep life, of course, is not for everybody. It requires hard work and drastic changes to your habits. For many, theres a comfort in the artificial busyness of rapid e-mail messaging and social media posturing, while the deep life demands that you leave much of that behind. Theres also an uneasiness that surrounds any effort to produce the best things youre capable of producing, as this forces you to confront the possibility that your best is not (yet) that good. Its safer to comment on our culture than to step into the Rooseveltian ring and attempt to wrestle it into something 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. This
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the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain. American
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Rosen explains as follows: Hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance. In other words, talent is not a commodity you can buy in bulk and combine to reach the needed levels: Theres a premium to being the best. Therefore, if youre in a marketplace where the consumer has access to all performers, and everyones q value is clear, the consumer will choose the very best.
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