Deep Work - Cal Newport Flashcards
Introduction
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.
The reason knowledge workers are losing their familiarity with deep work is well established: network tools (email/SMS/social media).
This state of fragmented attention cannot accommodate deep work, which requires long periods of uninterrupted thinking.
Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.
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 will thrive.
Part One - The Idea
As we’ve understood since Marx, access to capital provides massive advantages.
Differences between expert performance and normal adults reflect a lifelong period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.
Myelin is a layer of fatty tissue that grows around neutrons, acting like an insulator that allows the cells to fire faster and cleaner. To understand the role of myelin in improvement, remember the skill, be they intellectual or physical, eventually reduce down to brain circuits.
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 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.
High quality work produced = Time Spent x Intensity of Focus
Attention Residue: most of us switch between tasks while at work, but your attention doesn’t immediately follow – a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task.
In a series of studies, she found that the higher up the chain we go, the more likely we are to work on multiple projects at once.
“People experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor performance on the next task”.
Open plan offices might create more opportunities for collaboration, but they do so at the cost of “massive distraction”.
Twitter is crack for media addicts.
The Metric Black Hole
Even though we abstractly accept that distraction has costs and depth has value, these impacts are difficult to measure.
It is objectively difficult to measure individual contributions to a firm’s output.
In the absence of such measures, irrational outcomes, such as executive salaries way out of proportion to the executive’s marginal productivity, can occur.
The culture of connectivity now has a position of dominance, where one is expected to read and respond to emails (and related communication) quickly.
Cultures of connectivity persist because it’s easier. We will tend towards behaviours that are easiest in the moment.
Constant connectivity is an example of business behaviours that are antithetical to depth. In the absence of metrics, most people fall back on what’s easiest.
Busyness is not a proxy for productivity
Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.
Knowledge workers are tending toward increasingly visible busyness because they lack a better way to demonstrate their value.
This mindset provides another explanation for the popularity of many depth-destroying behaviours i.e. if you answer emails at all hours or if you schedule and attend meetings constantly.
Deep Work is meaningful.
There is a connection between attention and happiness.
The skilful management of attention is the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.
“I’ll choose my targets with care, then give them my rapt attention. In short, I’ll live the focused life, because it’s the best kind there is.”
Human beings are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.
In a post-Enlightenment world we have tasked ourselves to identify what’s meaningful and what’s not, an exercise that can seem arbitrary and induce a creeping nihilism.
You don’t need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work.
Part 2 The Rules
We find ourselves in distracting open offices where inboxes cannot be neglected and meetings are incessant.
Find a deep work retreat. Give yourself a specific time frame to keep the session a discrete challenge and not an open-ended slog.
“It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth” (Nietzsche)
Focus on the wildly important
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. It is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.
At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning. There is a science behind the value of downtime.
Attention restoration theory claims that spending time in nature can improve your ability to concentrate.
To concentrate requires what ART calls directed attention. This resource is finite: if you exhaust it, you’ll struggle to concentrate.
Your directed attention resources can replenish whilst spending time in nature.
Your capacity for deep work in a given day is limited.
Once your workday shuts down, do not allow even the smallest incursion of professional concerns into your field of attention.
In psychology, the Zeigarnik effect states that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.
Embrace boredom
People who multitask all the time cannot filter out irrelevancy. They cannot manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted.
Once you’re wired for distraction, you crave it.
Quit Social Media
To master the art of deep work, you must take back control of your time and attention from the many diversions that attempt to steal them.
You must reject the state of distracted hyper connectedness.
There is a lot of communication that will be impoverishing and not enriching.
Facebook’s essence: I’ll pay attention to what you say if you pay attention to what I say - regardless of its value.
Don’t use the Internet to entertain yourself
Our thinking about leisure time has not evolved. It consists primarily of a blur of distracted clicks on least-common denominator digital entertainment. Give your brain a quality alternative.
You should and can make deliberate use of your time outside work. Put more thought into your leisure time.
Figure out in advance what you’re going to do with your evenings and weekends before they begin.
A commitment to deep work is not a moral stance and it’s not a philosophical statement - it is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done.
To leave the distracted masses to join the focused few, I’m arguing, is a transformative experience.
For many, there’a a comfort in the artificial busyness of rapid email messaging and social media posturing, while the deep life demands that you leave much of that behind.
There is also an uneasiness that surrounds any effort to produce the best things you’re capable of producing, as this forces you to confront the possibility that your best is not (yet) that good.
