The Best Ideas From Cal Newport’s “Deep Work”

If your workplace uses apps like Slack, or has an email culture that requires instant responses and an "always on" mindset, you likely know the feeling of working your ass off all day without appearing to have achieved anything meaningful.

You may also know the opposite feeling: of being so engrossed with your work that time seems to pass more quickly, a feeling of harmony between mind and body, focused, motivated, effortful without strain, beyond distraction.

This is the difference between "shallow" and "deep" work. The former is how most of us spend our days, fruitlessly busy, exhausted without much to show for it. The latter is where genuine value and learning occur, and is the subject of this fascinating and wonderfully cathartic book by Cal Newport - Deep Work: Rules For Focussed Success In A Distracted World.

The simple but compelling premise of Deep Work is that "network tools" such as social media, instant messaging, and email have normalised an environment of rapidly changing contexts and never-ending interruptions that disrupt our ability to do deep work.

What is "Deep Work"?

Many excellent blog posts summarise the book in detail (Todoist’s summary is particularly good) so I'm not going to repeat that work here - instead, I'll briefly summarise the main points and then go deeper with some of the ideas that resonated the most with me.

The book is structured in two parts: firstly, the research and supporting ideas that back the "deep work" premise up, and secondly, a method for artfully detangling yourself from shallow work while creating rituals that ensure focus and depth.

Newport defines deep work as ...

“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.”

In other words, to produce your best and most meaningful work, or to learn any significantly difficult subject matter, long periods of uninterrupted focus are required.

It can help to think about deep work in contrast with its troublesome counterpart, shallow work:

“Non-cognitively 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.”

Newport outlines four rules for working more deeply, which I'll briefly go over here:

Rule 1: Work Deeply

This describes four philosophies of deep work designed to integrate with different lifestyles and experience levels and emphasises the importance of rituals and routines to support your deep work schedule.

1. Monastic - literally isolate yourself from all distractions - no phone, no email, live in a shack in the woods. Not practical for most people.

2. Bimodal - create stretches of time (days, weeks, months) for deep work while leaving the rest open for distraction.

3. Rhythmic - consistent, daily sessions of at least 90 minutes. More realistic for most people.

4. Journalistic - fitting deep work into whatever time there is available. For the more experienced practitioners who can switch in and out of deep work at will.

Rule 2: Embrace Boredom

Because we are so used to distracted lifestyles our minds are unsuited to the kind of prolonged focus required for deep work. This rule suggests some techniques for training our minds to focus, such as avoiding your smartphone as much as possible and a technique called productive meditation that encourages focusing on solving problems when, for example, commuting to work or walking the dog.

Rule 3: Quit Social Media

This rule establishes a category of software called "network tools" - social media, email, instant messaging, sms - and encourages us to abandon their use by showing how they cause distraction in our lives while not providing the supposed benefits that have led to their ubiquity.

Rule 4: Drain The Shallows

This rule suggests some methods for removing unnecessary shallow work from your life, such as scheduling every minute of your day very precisely, quantifying the depth of every activity, and asking your boss for a “shallow work budget” so you can understand how much shallow work is expected of you.

Deep work feels really good

Having spent some time following the book's guidance recently, I can say it doesn't emphasise enough how gloriously energising it feels to work in this way.

Try asking yourself these questions:

• Is the work that you do satisfying?

• Are you doing your best work daily?

• Do you feel good at the end of each workday, as though you contributed a lot of value?

If the answer to these questions is "no" then it's likely you spend large parts of your days in the shallows: processing emails, chatting on Slack, attending meetings (that could have been emails), and doing simple tasks that don't require much cognitive effort.

This type of work is draining because often it doesn't amount to anything valuable. The rarely considered emotional toll of living this way is high, as you expend effort for no good reason.

Put simply, distracted work doesn’t feel good, it feels demoralising and exhausting.

Now, consider an alternative: you spend most of your day in isolation focusing on work that matters and pushing yourself to solve difficult problems. You feel challenged, motivated, active, energised, even excited! You look at the clock and can't believe the time has passed so quickly. At the end of the day, you feel tired but satisfied as you were able to genuinely apply your talents.

This is the promise of deep work. Not only are you much more likely to create value with your effort, but it makes you feel incredible: accomplished, passionate, purposeful, content. How many of us can say that about our daily routines?

Context switching is killing your productivity

The belief that you can 'context switch' back and forth between different types of focus without significantly affecting performance may be how most of us live our lives, but it's not an idea that's backed by research.

One study that investigates this is “Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks” by Sophie Leroy, which measures how effectively people multi-task at work and states that "results indicate it is difficult for people to transition their attention away from an unfinished task and their subsequent task performance suffers".

The study employs the term 'attention residue' to describe how attention from a previous task bleeds over into the consideration of a new task, meaning your attention is stuck thinking about the previous task when you start the next, negatively impacting your ability to tackle the new task. This phenomenon is especially pronounced if the first task was unfinished when the switch happened.

In other words, when you switch from one task to another, especially without finishing the first task, your performance at both will suffer. If you imagine switching between multiple tasks in a short period and consider how this affects attention residue, the implications for performance are stark.

This rings true when I consider my own experience. It's difficult to remember a time when I focused on one task from start to finish in a deep way. My most common workday experiences are a frantic mix of meetings, slack messages, emails, and other digital distractions, and trying to fit other tasks in between the cracks.

All of this leaves a feeling of never quite being on top of things, never feeling as though I've done good work, and a deeply unsatisfying state of mental and emotional exhaustion.

What you focus on shapes how you feel

Winifred Gallagher's book 'Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life' details a fascinating phenomenon that is counterintuitive to most people's worldview: the idea that what you choose to focus on determines how you feel, rather than the slings and arrows of life's circumstances.

Many people believe that how happy they are has more to do with what happens to them - whether they get that promotion, can afford the nice new car, or can move to a bigger apartment - but what Gallagher's research shows is that skilfully focusing on the simpler, more pleasant aspects of life will significantly improve mood and outlook, even in objectively bad circumstances.

While this seems on the surface a somewhat glib encouragement to look on the bright side, the research, conducted by scanning amygdalas with MRI scanners, shows the effectiveness of finding the positive in negative situations.

This idea is beautifully easy to try out for yourself, something my wife and I have been doing to great effect recently. For whatever reason, both of us tend towards negativity first thing in the morning. We wake up and mull our lot over coffee. As parents of a toddler with stressful jobs, a large mortgage, advancing years, and no time to ourselves, there are ample opportunities for grumbling.

However, when we remember to intentionally focus on all that is good in our life - our beautiful, joyful son, our health, an upcoming dinner party, the spring weather - the difference this makes to how we step out into the world is profound.

In the context of deep work, this research can be applied by considering how much of your day is spent focusing on things you care about, and how much is spent fractured across a slightly bewildering array of inputs: social media, news, office politics, empty email exchanges, text messages, and so on. In order to feel better, focus intently on things that matter.

Willpower versus the limbic system

To understand willpower and its limitations, it can help to understand how our brains are formed. The structure of the human brain is a timeline of our evolution. In simple terms, our brains are a lizard brain inside a mammal brain inside a chimp brain inside a human brain. Many powerful desires that drive our actions occur upstream, in our lizard/mammal/chimp brains.

This pre-thought, pre-rationality part of our brain is called the limbic system. It's a place of emotion, reactivity, and basic desires like eating, sleeping, and sex. Much of how we behave begins in this primordial place.

Many people feel that their rational selves control their actions, but recent research shows this is not the case. Often it's only after we've begun to act, driven by an impulse in our limbic system, that our conscious, human brain becomes aware and starts to rationalise what we're doing.

The shiny toys of social media and web browsing are tuned to speak to our pre-conscious brains. Algorithms serve up endless feeds of emotionally reactive content, keeping us in our limbic system, where we're not truly thinking or using our rationality. There's a kind of quicksand effect here, where we're not fully aware that we're sinking before it's too late.

A high degree of willpower is required to climb out of the quicksand, but our beliefs about willpower can hold us back.

Willpower isn’t what we think it is

We tend to think of willpower as an aspect of our character that can be applied on command, but this is wrong. Rather than being a limitless resource, it's more like a muscle that fatigues with use and becomes weak without regular exercise.

Simply acknowledging willpower as a fragile muscle and recognising the powerful, addictive forces it’s up against can help us understand that relying on willpower alone will not work.

To successfully build a deep work habit we can use routines and rituals to support the judicious application of our willpower’s strength. Building habits is a whole subject in itself (see Atomic Habits by James Clear) but some routines that are helping me at the moment are:

1. Building deep work time into my calendar every day.

2. Changing my sleep routine to give me time early in the morning before the rest of my household is awake.

3. Only opening my "network tool" apps (browser, email, messages, WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, etc.) when I need to use them, then closing them down immediately after.

4. Not carrying my phone on my person all day. At home, I keep it in a cupboard in the kitchen and try to leave it in the car as often as possible when I'm out.

5. Allowing myself to become bored.

These routines and rituals aren’t a silver bullet, but they can help to narrow the odds more in my favour, increasing the chance that applying my willpower towards deep work will be successful.

The internet has become synonymous with progress

In the early 1990s, author Neil Postman argued that technology and the internet were ascending to a position of ideological primacy in modern society. The adoption of new technologies was taken for granted while analysis of costs and benefits were overlooked, ignored, or simply not carried out.

“He called such a culture a technopoly, and he didn’t mince words in warning against it. ‘Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World,’ he argued in his 1993 book on the topic. ‘It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant.’”

Deep Work - Cal Newport (p. 58). Kindle Edition.

Fast-forwards 30 years and it's hard not to argue that Postman's warnings about our relationship with technology have borne out. If anyone is asking themselves whether or not their workforce spending so much time switching back and forth between email, meetings, and slack messages is good for the quality of their work then, in my experience at least, it's not obvious.

Our ability to work deeply and focus for long periods has eroded, replaced by an always-connected cult of digital interactivity. The average knowledge worker today faces a 24/7 bombardment of notifications demanding their attention. It takes considerable effort and discipline to create an environment that allows prolonged concentration.

What explains this slide into the 'Cult of the Internet', as Newport calls it? Here are two principles to consider:

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.

... and ...

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 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. If you’re using busyness as a proxy for productivity, then these behaviors can seem crucial for convincing yourself and others that you’re doing your job well.

Deep Work - Cal Newport (p. 55). Kindle Edition.

In other words, network tools enable a misleading measure of productivity that can be used to judge our professional worth and it's a lot easier to quantify people in this way than to carry out a detailed analysis of their output.

For example, a friend who worked closely with a CEO at a tech startup told me they used Slack engagement metrics to decide who would be included in their next round of lay-offs. The value of their work was secondary to how active they appeared on the network.

Likewise, a prolific output on Twitter has become synonymous with ideas like moral correctness, popularity, and societal worth. High engagement is seen as sufficient evidence of credibility, so much so that the author's voice should hold sway in public discourse, be quoted prominently in the press, and even sweep absurd orange-skinned fraudsters into the highest political office.

Part of the explanation is that it's simply easier to look at someone's follower count than investigate their background to decide if they're a legitimate expert, or look at how many likes a tweet has than to meaningfully unpack its content.

The dominance of platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram over our attention, along with the agendas of virtually every media outlet that has survived the digital revolution, has happened despite the obvious downsides.

This is Neil Postman's worst fear come to fruition.

Play is as important as work

I love this point because it helps to counteract one of the more toxic elements of self-help advice, i.e. that you should be working hard all the time, being productive with every spare moment.

If you accept that deep work is your best work then you may also acknowledge that the cognitive effort required for genuinely difficult work is high. It's different for everyone but in general, you're likely to hit diminishing returns on your efforts after about 4 hours of deep work per day.

This is great news because it means you can schedule downtime and relaxation into your schedule without feeling guilty!

In fact, it's supporting your best work. Here's some of the ways how:

Getting away from your work will improve it - many creativity rituals emphasise the vital importance of stepping away from your work to do other things because the power of the subconscious to organise and connect dots is well understood. You may have experienced the feeling of focusing intensely on some problem but hitting a wall, only for the solution to come to you in the shower or while idling in traffic. In a way, the deep work is only half of the process - the conscious half. The other half happens while you're loading the dishwasher.

Rest restores energy - this may sound obvious but rest is important for restoring the energy required for deep work. The more you work without resting the less focused you will become over time and the more likely you will be to burnout.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy - if life becomes all work and no play your enjoyment of it will diminish. Even worse, it may lead you to a place of deep regret in later life, as you consider how much time you spent working and how little you spent with your friends and family.