Deep Work by Cal Newport - A Book Review

I read the book “Deep Work” by Cal Newport. The entire book speaks about doing deep work with full focus and concentration without getting distracted. Deep Work is valuable, rare, and meaningful. It revolves around the philosophy of, “I’ll live the focused life, because it’s the best kind there is,” by Winifred Gallagher.

The definitions for Deep Work and Shallow Work in the book are as follows.

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: Noncognitively 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.

An example of deep work is a cardiac surgeon who performs a complex heart surgery for 2 hours. The surgeon can’t afford to get distracted as it is a question of life and death. An example of shallow work is sending funny forwarded videos on Whatsapp.

Cal offers a quick trick to determine if the work you are doing is deep or shallow. Ask yourself, “How long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete the task (that I want to do)?”

He states 2 examples for the above question. To properly edit an academic paper requires immense knowledge of the subject and you need fifty to seventy-five months to train a recent graduate. On the other hand, to create a Powerpoint presentation that describes your quarterly sales, you will need only two months to train the recent graduate. Cal tells that we can evaluate each task we are about to do on a shallow-to-deep scale like this.

Cal’s rules for deep work are Work Deeply, Embrace Boredom, Quit Social Media, and Drain the Shallows. Cal speaks about the different philosophies of deep work scheduling – monastic, bimodal, rhythmic, and journalistic based on the time and frequency of your core task and other tasks. He talks about a grand gesture where you, for example, book an expensive hotel in an inspiring place to finish your deep work. Your investment shows how important the task is for you and so you focus better. When we do deep work, we complete the work fastly. This reduces the need to work late nights and on weekends.

Image Courtesy VerbalToVisual.com

The best aspect of the book is that Cal at no point claims his method or idea is the best and only way. He is quick to offer counter-examples of people succeeding without doing much deep work.  

I liked a well-written passage in the book on Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT) and would like to quote the same. Some decisions are better left to your unconscious mind to untangle. In other words, to actively try to work through these decisions will lead to a worse outcome than loading up the relevant information and then moving on to do something else while letting the subconscious layers of your mind mull things over. If you need to do a math calculation, only your conscious mind is able to follow the precise arithmetic rules needed for correctness. On the other hand, for decisions that involve large amounts of information and multiple vague, and perhaps even conflicting constraints, your unconscious mind is well suited to tackle the issue.

Cal Newport

The book has many examples, opinions, counter-examples, and techniques to do deep work and avoid distractions. The book has 296 pages of which the core content is 263 pages. You can know more about Cals’ work from his blog named Study Hacks at https://www.calnewport.com/blog/