Mastering Deep Work: Key Insights and Strategies from Cal Newport’s Deep Work for Maximum Productivity
Lessons from Deep Work by Cal Newport to improve focus and productivity
Why do we need deep work?
There are three groups of people that society deems valuable
- Highly skilled individuals: they work with intelligent machines and draw results
- Superstars: they are at the peak of their market (artists, movie stars, etc)
- Owners: the ones with capital and investing power
To become a part of group 1 or 2, you need two things:
- Ability to quickly master difficult concepts
- Ability to produce at an elite level, quality, and speed
The second point is especially important because no matter how skilled or talented you are, if you don’t produce you won’t thrive.
How to achieve deep work?
The only way you can achieve a state of deep work is through deliberate practice:
- Your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you’re trying to improve or an idea you’re trying to master
- You receive feedback, so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it’s most productive
The reason why it’s 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. This is what allows you to build the pathways in your brain that let you enter a state of deep work when you need to.
The only people who can afford distractions are high-level executives because those distractions bring greater returns.
Why do we avoid deep work?
Most of us tend to pretend that the distractions are important or we allow ourselves to engage in shallow work.
The principle of least restraint says that we tend to do tasks that have the lowest friction. So the easiest tasks that demand the least brainpower are what we are naturally attracted to.
Busyness is a proxy for productivity.
This is essentially convincing yourself that you’re being productive while keeping yourself busy with menial tasks. I fall victim to this by thinking that I’m busy with my tasks at work when they often don’t require the deep focus needed.
Why should you care?
“The world is the outcome of what you pay attention to” and this quote from Gallagher, author of Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, highlights the importance of paying attention to the right things.
“I’ll live a focused life, because it’s the best kind there is” — Winifred Gallagher
Personally, I feel at the peak of my work when I enter the flow state. This is when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. You usually enter flow when the difficulty of the task is just right to keep you engaged but not too low to get you bored or too high to make you give up.
Rules for Deep Work
Cal talks about 4 broad rules that allow him to cultivate deep work.
1. Work deeply: Philosophies of deep work
These are how you can implement deep work in your life. Each approach is suited to a different lifestyle and obligations.
The monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling
- Maximize deep efforts by minimizing shallow obligations.
- For someone who’s contributions are discrete, clear, and individualized.
- Block out large amounts of time (weeks, months, years) dedicated to deep work.
The bimodal philosophy of deep work scheduling
- Devote deep work time and leave the rest open to everything else.
- However, for this to work the minimum unit of time for deep work should be at least one full day.
- Useful for professors and post-docs who can dedicate an entire day to work.
The rhythmic philosophy
- The easiest way to consistently do deep work is to create a habit.
- This one is common among deep workers in standard office jobs where they are not allowed long periods of uninterrupted focus.
- Get into the habit of doing bouts of deep work.
Journalistic philosophy
- You fit deep work wherever you can in your schedule.
- This is not for the deep-work novice. You can’t easily switch your mind from shallow to deep work.
- It is useful if you have already built the habit of deep work.
Predetermine the way you will enter deep work to reduce friction in the transition to depth.
- Where you’ll work, and for how long
- How you’ll work once you start to work
- How you’ll support your work
A grand gesture can be a way to get you to commit to doing deep work. Something with effort or money that gives a perceived importance to the task. For example, locking yourself in a cabin or hotel room to work. You have to obtain your objectives before you leave.
You can utilize a hub and spoke model to allow for mixing with people and ideas. You can think of this as a central space where all the interaction takes place for sharing ideas but at the same time, you have a dedicated space for your deep work.
Interaction is good because working with someone and engaging in constant back and forth can create the whiteboard effect which short circuits our instinct to avoid depth.
Measuring the effectiveness of your deep work
- Focus on the wildly important → small number of ambitious outcomes
- Act on the lead measures → time spent in deep work towards your wildly important goal
- Keep a compelling scoreboard → keep track of deep work to measure outcomes and efficiency
- Create a cadence of accountability → review and adjust based on your tracking
- You should be lazy at certain times to provide the idleness to support deep work
- Downtime aids insights and recharges the energy needed to work deeply
- The work that you want to get done in downtime is not that important so use it to properly wind down.
2. Embrace Boredom
Don’t schedule a break from distraction to focus, instead schedule a break from focus so you can give in to distraction.
Schedule in advance when you will use the internet and don’t use it outside of those times. This will help you avoid switching at the slightest hint of boredom or cognitive challenge.
- This strategy works even if your job requires internet/e-mail use. For example, you can schedule email checks every 15 minutes in a 2-hour work session.
- Keep time outside these blocks free from internet use. Resist the temptation to look up things until the block is over, even if you need it to move on. Try to switch to another offline activity or change your schedule so that the next internet block starts sooner. Even a 5-minute gap is good.
- Scheduling this time both at work and at home. You can allow for immediate access to time-sensitive information. Otherwise, put your phone away and ignore texts and social media. If you use it for entertainment then schedule blocks for it. This is not meant to restrict the time you have for these but instead to avoid it as a distraction. Simply wait in line and be bored, resist the temptation to pick up your phone.
Techniques to improve focus
Roosevelt dashes
Set a hard deadline for any task that you have as this will force you to work with great intensity. Experiment with this once a week at first, and increase the frequency as you feel yourself become comfortable.
Productive Meditation
Focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem. This can be during your commute/walking the dog. This sharpens your concentration and forces you to resist distraction as well.
When your mind wanders, redirect your attention back. Avoid looping on the same idea over and over but instead, build on/diverge from what you already know.
Have the preliminary data in your head and focus on the next specific step. Consolidate reviewing your answer and restarting the cycle together with your newfound answer.
Learn to memorize a shuffled deck of cards.
Memory champions have greater attention control than the masses. They do this by building a memory palace.
- Begin by cementing a mental image of walking through 5 rooms in your home.
- In each room, conjure a clear image of what you see.
- Fix in your mind, a collection of 10 items in each of the rooms. It is recommended that these items be large.
- Establish an order to look at each of these items in each room.
- Add two more items to get to a total of 52.
- Practice the mental exercise of walking through the rooms, looking at the items in each room, in a set order.
- Associate a person or thing with each of the 52 possible cards, and try to maintain a logical association with the card and the image
- Then as you go through the cards, associate an item in your house with the mental image (the image of doing something with the item)
- Do it a few times to solidify and then walk through the house
3. Quit Social Media
Ditch the any-benefit mindset: you find any benefit or anything you might miss out on to justify using a social media tool.
The craftsman approach to tool selection — identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.
Steps to filter network tools
- Identify goals and one to two activities associated with your personal and professional life
- Consider the network tools currently being used
- Mark whether each tool has a positive/negative/little impact on each activity
- Keep using this tool only if the positive impact is greater than the negative impact
The Law of the vital few states that 80% of the effect is due to 20% of the causes (Pareto principle). You should focus on the 20% in your life to achieve the goals you are working towards.
Delete all social media for 30 days. After the thirty days:
- Would the last 30 days have been better if you had used the apps?
- Did people care that you weren’t using the app?
If your answer is no to both, then quit.
Put more thought into your leisure time. Don’t waste it on social media.
Structure your weekend time before it begins — give time to quality leisure. This should be time to unwind and get ready for another bout of deep work.
4. Drain the shallows
Schedule every minute of your day.
Write down the activity for every 30 min block of your work day. You do not have to stick to this but it helps to build a habit of prioritizing the deep
Identify shallow work in your current schedule, cut it out, and replace it with deep work. Quantify shallow work by asking how long it would take a recent graduate to be trained on this. If it’s not long (by your relative measure), then ditch it.
Enforce fixed schedule productivity by not working past a given time. Work backward to figure out how to fit your deep work inside your workday. Put artificial limits on your time by imposing deadlines.
Email rules
- Make people who send you emails do more work (they should be clear and put effort into their email)
- Put more work into your email response so that there is less back-and-forth
- Don’t respond if it is a waste of your time or you get no value out of it
This book has some great insights that I’ve distilled into this short post. However, I strongly recommend that you read the book and listen to Cal Newport’s podcast which contains even more tools for a focused life. Check out my post on the tools I’m using this year to be more focused on my goals which includes a FREE Notion template.
If you like my content, please hit the follow button and share this post.
Subscribe to me and follow me on X. Check out my website as well.
Related articles:
