Book Review: Deep Work

By Cal Newport

Summarised in one quote

Newport’s book is a ‘pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done. Deep work is important, in other words, not because distraction is evil, but because it enabled Bill Gates to start a billion-dollar industry in less than a semester.’ (p.258)

Deep Work is an excellent guide for those looking to get real work done.

Cal Newport offers confidence to reevaluate your relationship with social media (and other sources of meaningless distraction), and question its value in your life.

It’s useful to outline the difference between Deep Work and Shallow Work.

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.

Shallow Work: Non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These offers tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate

Recommended if you want to:

• Rediscover the fading art of focus in a distracted world
• Appreciate the value deep work has in every job, and every industry
• Hear the arguments against open-plan offices and lightning fast email response times
• Get more value out of your time at work so you can get more out of your time at home

Stories to Remember

Most non-fiction books use storytelling to hit home their points. Here is a selection of my favourite anecdotes from this book, and where to find them.

Concentration Granted (p.37)

To best realise the impact that deep work can have on productivity, it’s best to study the habits of highly effective, productive people.

Adam Grant is one such person. As the youngest person ever to be awarded tenure at Wharton School of Business at Penn, he produces at an astounding rate. In an environment where competent professors output three good research articles a year, Grant produced seven — all of which were featured in major journals. The next year, he published five. Still far above average but below his standard rate. He can be excused for this dip, however because the same year he published a New York Times bestselling book, called Give and Take.

How does he do this? One factor is because he batches hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches. By solely focussing on teaching during the fall, Grant can then turn his attention fully to research in the spring and summer, and tackle it with less distraction.

Newport guesses that Grant doesn’t work substantially more hours than other professors. Instead by consolidating his work into condensed and uninterrupted pulses, he’s leveraging the law of productivity that is Time Spent + Intensity of Focus = High-Quality Work Produced.

The Black Hole of Email (p.53)

Tim Cochran, the chief technology officer of Atlantic Media, decided to measure across the entire company, how much time is spent sending and receiving email. Gathering data from the company’s email servers, and estimating reading and typing speed, he calculated that Atlantic Media was spending over a million dollars a year to pay people to pass on pieces of information, as opposed to performing the skill they had been hired to do.

Cochran got stuck when he tried to measure the value produced by all this time spent on email. What was the company getting in return for its one million dollars? I think we can all agree that email plays an important role in any large company, but how much of a role is unclear and unmeasurable.

Newport describes this as a metric black hole. We all know email is important, and so we don’t feel bad about spending half of our working hours responding to every little request that pops into our inbox. After all, it’s much easier than performing the real work we have been hired for, and it feels far more productive rattling off 10 emails than bending your head around an abstract problem.

Newport implores you to resist this temptation. While of course he understands how email (and other forms of communication such as instant messenger and social media) facilitates the sharing of ideas and communication within a company, he argues that its impact is far less then we might like to believe. Instead, our time is better spent delving into deep work, where real value is born.

The Eudiamonia Machine (p.95)

What is the perfect workspace to facilitate deep learning? Architecture professor David Dewane wanted to find out the answer.

He proposed the Eudaimonia Machine whose goal is to ‘create a setting where the users can get into a state of deep human flourishing’.

Intrigued? Well Dewane’s machine consists of five consecutive rooms with no shared hallway (meaning you have to walk from one to the other). The first room is the gallery, which contains all of the inspiring work produced in the machine. The next room is the salon, flush with comfy chairs, a bar and Wi-Fi. Pretty nice, right? Then you walk into the library. It stores a ton of books and other quality resources, including scanners and printers, for collecting information.

The second to last room is your generic office space for low-intensity activities, admin-like work.

Then the last room is where the magic happens. Dewane calls them Deep Work chambers: totally sound-proofed and secluded personal spaces to allow for uninterrupted flow.

The Eudiamonia Machine is still only a concept, but one that could have huge consequences on how office spaces are designed in the future.

The Social Media Scourge (p.186)

Cal Newport advocates quitting social media.

The common argument against his view is that Facebook and Twitter are key to maintaining connections and forming new professional and personal relationships. It’s true that social media does have its benefits and there are people whose jobs depend on their social media use.

But Newport outlines what he calls the ‘Any Benefit Approach to Networking Tools’. The fact is that everything has intrinsic benefits. Not watching that Netflix show and doing work has benefits. But so does giving in and binging the entire series. Now you can better participate in the work banter.

The key is working out what provides the most benefit in relation to time invested. Newport makes the case that there is a lot more things you could be doing with your time than scrolling a social media feed, and more often than not we use social media to put off more important tasks that involve concentration. He suggests to see what happens when you stop using Twitter for a month. The world won’t explode, you’ll still make friends and you might even get more done.

As always, these brief anecdotes cover a small fraction of the themes explored in the full book. If you like what you’re reading, consider buying the book!

Thanks for reading! I use Medium to document my book notes. Feel free to browse my online bookshelf to learn more.