Deep Work
One of the most valuable skills in our economy is becoming increasingly rare. If you master this skill, you'll achieve extraordinary results. Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It's a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep-spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there's a better way. In DEEP WORK, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite. Dividing this book into two parts, he first makes the case that in almost any profession, cultivating a deep work ethic will produce massive benefits. He then presents a rigorous training regimen, presented as a series of four "rules," for transforming your mind and habits to support this skill.
Stats for nerds
310recommend
678mentions
498people
2015–2026years
60% recommend35% neutral6% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Cal Newport lays out a pretty good criticism of these types of offices in Deep Work.
- I have followed that up with removing all algorithmical feeds from my life (I recommend News Feed Eradicator extension for that) and then setting phone to Focused mode from 9am till 2pm. It's been life changing.
I thought people at work would be mad, but everybody adjusted instantly.
Next up I'd like to pre-plan blocks of focused work - an idea I got from the Deep Work book.
- Getting Things Done by David Allen gave me a framework to get out of the weeds when I am overwhelmed (usually once or twice a year when I stretch myself): build a to-do list that us complete enough to stop thinking about what you have to do, if a new task take less than 5 minutes just do it right away, and then prioritise the rest.
Deep Work by Cal Newport gave me a way to think about my time management: information work is not the same as a factory line where doing the same thing at similar productivity from 9 to 5 makes sense, and it is important to dedicate long stretch of quality time to be productive (vs busy).
There are no silver bullets, but learning what worked for a group of people, testing it for myself, adapting it, and using it as needed has been helpful to me.
- You've inadvertently given yourself the best advice for your situation: get rid of the notifications (let alone constant ones) as you do deep work; more generaly, establish and defend boundaries in space and time. Also, if you haven't, do read Cal Newport's "Deep Work."
- I'm truly thankful to Cal Newport for his "Deep Work," a book I would recommend to anyone here, but this article read like one of those videos which, despite interesting, are ultimately a thin wrapper around "a message from our sponsors."
In short: "[Self-help influencing] succeeds because what it sells looks hard enough to be worth doing but easy enough we feel we could. I fear we, specially the young, will settle for that and stop seeking truly hard, truly rewarding goals. Speaking of, I recommend Brad Stulberg's new book 'The Way of Excellence.'"
- Chronologies toward a working theory of advancing science, which is the subject of Orgega's contention for mediocre scholars, working on accumulating citations, footnotes, etc. For a proper understanding of technical pieces, Cal Newport's concept of deep work is essential.
