Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

According to the author, "deep working" is when you perform your professional activities in a state of distraction-free concentration, pushing your cognitive abilities to their limits. As you do it, you create something of value and boost your skills.

The opposite of deep work is "shallow work." Shallow work is undemanding and logistical, and often made up of tasks that anyone could do. You don't need any particular expertise to do it. Shallow work allows you to give the illusion of doing something important, but it doesn't create anything of lasting value.

Newport isn't suggesting that shallow work is bad. In fact, he says that a certain amount of shallow work is often necessary, and he actually argues against doing too much deep work. But as deep working is becoming an increasingly rare skill, it's also becoming increasingly valuable. So if you can go deep, there may be huge personal and economic opportunities out there waiting for you.

"Deep Work" takes a different tack from other books. It offers strategies that are based on old-school values like quality and craftsmanship. These help you develop your ability to go deep and to ruthlessly disconnect from the online world. Not permanently – just regularly, and with commitment. The book goes on to show how you can thrive as a result of going deep.

The author, Cal Newport, is a widely published academic, with four other books and a number of academic papers to his name. He earned a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is now an assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown University. He says he achieved all this through deep working, despite being a busy father of two young children, so he's well qualified to write on the subject. You can hear an Expert Interview podcast with Newport on the Mind Tools site.

So, keep listening to find out how valuable going deep can be, how it can restore meaning to your life, and what rules you need to follow to become a truly deep worker.

"Deep Work" is divided into seven chapters, split into two parts, and it comes in at just under 300 pages.

The first half of the book walks you through the concept of deep working – the ability to concentrate on cognitively demanding tasks without being distracted. Here, the author explains how rare this is becoming, but that it can still be valuable and meaningful.

In the first chapter, Newport makes a compelling case that our economy is undergoing fundamental change. Companies are investing in technology to do jobs that people used to do. To save money, they're outsourcing tasks to overseas vendors and recruiting remote workers from around the world. Changes like these make us all more vulnerable to being overlooked and outclassed in the jobs market.

In this competitive environment, being able to learn quickly and master difficult tasks is more crucial than it's ever been, as is the ability to work at an elite level. But to develop these skills and to be truly successful, you have to nurture your ability to work deeply – to apply yourself in long, uninterrupted and focused stretches.

The author makes the point that it is possible to be successful without going deep. For high-level executives, for example, being able to think quickly and make major decisions almost on instinct might trump being able to focus deeply. Not all roles value deep work equally. But exceptions like these are rare in an information economy and, for most knowledge workers, deep work is an essential skill to have if you want to stand out from the crowd.

Going deep isn't just good for your career prospects, though. Chapter 3 looks at how it can help you live a rewarding life.

Knowledge workers sometimes struggle to find meaning and significance in their work. The link between what they do all day and a sense of purpose is sometimes difficult to see, in the whirl of meetings, emails and PowerPoint presentations.

Newport says this connection becomes clearer if you do more deep work and less shallow work – as much as your job description allows. You invest more effort into deep work, and you get more out of it.

Whether you're working on an algorithm, a legal brief, or some marketing copy, focusing deeply on the job can create a rich sense of fulfillment. And regardless of what you eventually produce, the act of going deep – of working in an intense, uninterrupted state of concentration on a cognitively demanding task – allows you to find meaning and importance in what you do.

Put simply, taking things easy by lingering on shallow work can never satisfy you as much as doing deep work will. Deep work can be uncomfortable and demanding, but we often work at our best when we're immersed in something that challenges us and pushes us to the limit.

Having established that deep work is rare but valuable, Newport then shows us how to build a professional life centered on depth. In the second part of the book, we learn about the author's four rules for embracing deep work. Each rule covers a lot of ground and contains various strategies, so there's plenty of scope to find tactics that work for you.

He starts by teaching us how we can transform deep work from an aspiration to a regular part of our working lives. Just making the decision to work more deeply, more often, isn't enough. Most of us will need some help to sustain our willpower in going deep, to resist any urge to take a break, surf the web, or check our email.

So, in rule one, which is to work deeply, the author gives us six routines and rituals that we can use to support our good intentions.

One strategy is to adopt one of four depth philosophies that Newport puts forward. First is the monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling, which involves eliminating, or at least drastically cutting, your shallow work obligations. Monastic deep work is best suited to people who tie their professional success to achieving one tightly-defined goal; a goal that can only be achieved by embracing the deep and removing the shallow. It's also only suitable for people with complete control of their schedule and workload.

For most of us, some shallow working is necessary, and the bimodal philosophy allows us to straddle both styles. This is the second of Newport's depth philosophies. Bimodal deep workers allocate some of their schedule to deep work, and during that time they act monastically – isolated and focused. The rest of the time is filled with everything else.

Sometimes, deciding when to go deep can be a bigger challenge than deep work itself. Newport suggests adopting a rhythmic philosophy to solve this dilemma. Here, your goal is to commit to making deep work a regular habit, to generate a self-sustaining rhythm.

But if this would be hard for you, there's still the journalistic philosophy. Here, you slot in deep work wherever and whenever an opportunity arises, as a journalist would slip into writing mode at a moment's notice. This can be a difficult approach to master but, with commitment, you can use it to go deep even when your daily schedule is verging on the insane.

Newport's other strategies involve setting rituals for smoothing the transition into deep work and making grand gestures that boost your will to stick with it. You may be pleased to hear there's also a strategy for unwinding, so you don't exhaust your capacity for deep work.

Rule number two is, perhaps surprisingly, to embrace boredom. Here we get to grips with the idea of building mental muscle, of rewiring your brain so it doesn't crave distraction, and of boosting your ability to concentrate.

The author suggests that many people are dependent on distraction. Think about it. If you had to wait in line for 10 minutes, what would you do? Could you just stand there and wait, or would you pull out your smartphone and check Facebook?

If you'd be reaching for your pocket at the first hint of boredom, then your brain won't be ready for deep work, and you need to train it.

The first tactic here for getting your brain into a deep-work-ready state is to take breaks from focus, so you can give in to distraction – rather than take breaks from distraction to allow you to focus, which is what you might expect.

You might be surprised to hear the author advocate giving in to distraction. He says the important thing is to avoid constantly switching from concentration to distraction whenever you feel bored or challenged by what you're doing. By following a strategy where you separate out periods of distraction from periods of work, you can retrain your mental muscle.

This rule also offers strategies for improving your ability to concentrate, including meditation and even memorizing a deck of cards, or learning the guitar part of a favorite song by ear.

By the time we reach rule number three, we're on more obvious ground – quitting social media. Newport doesn't insist you go so far as to reject social media and infotainment sites altogether. But he does suggest we reduce the number we use. The danger is that we keep going back to them, just because we get some benefit from using them.

Newport asks us to agree that gaining some benefit is not enough. Instead, he suggests carefully assessing sites for their usefulness before we start to depend on them, and then only use a service when its positive effects substantially outweigh any negative ones. He compares this approach to how carefully manual workers assess their tools and materials before starting work, and he calls this strategy the craftsman approach to tool selection.

His framing of social media as tools is thought-provoking, as it reinforces the idea they should be useful in some way, not just entertaining.

You can try the craftsman approach yourself by abstaining for 30 days from Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and any other social media accounts you have. This way, you can find out how important they are to your professional and personal lives. If you feel you would've been more productive if you'd been able to access them, start using them again. But if you decide that abstaining made no difference, or even helped, you could boost your efforts to embrace deep work by staying away from then on.

Newport's final rule for deep working is to drain the shallows. Here, the aim is quite clear – to reduce the shallowness in your schedule to a bare minimum, ruthlessly, and to free up time so you can produce more valuable work.

Strategies here range from thoughtfully planning your time to making it hard for other people to reach you. When you and other people treat your time with greater respect, you're freed up to spend more time on the things that matter and that give your work meaning.

So what's our last word on "Deep Work?" Well, we loved it. The real-life anecdotes and examples that come from all walks of life make this a readable and entertaining book. It's heavily based on scientific studies, original interviews, and the author's own experiments, so it's built on strong foundations.

It's certainly a bold book, too. Companies today tend to see anything Internet-related as being inherently "good" or "necessary," and people are under more time pressure than ever before. On both these fronts, the advice in "Deep Work" isn't going to be welcome everywhere. In this day and age it takes a certain strength to encourage people to radically rethink their Internet use, and a few eyebrows might rise at the suggestion to embrace boredom at a time when people are struggling to squeeze in everything that life demands of them.

"Deep Work" is full of suggestions like these, aimed at replacing distraction and shallowness with concentration and depth. And it doesn't just define the benefits in terms of productivity; it shows you how deep work can bring meaning and satisfaction to all areas of your life.

What we like best about the book, though, is that you don't need to try everything here. You can adopt any of the strategies on their own and still improve your effectiveness at work. So, if you battle with your concentration or just crave greater meaning in what you do, this book can help.

"Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World," by Cal Newport, is published by Grand Central Publishing.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.