The first part of the book really tries to sell you on the value of deep work (vs. shallow work). I didn't really need the sales pitch, I'm already in on the value. But the later parts of the book provide practical applications and suggestions on how and when to set yourself up for deep work, how to avoid or minimize shallow work, and how to avoid distractions while maintaining focus. ( )

I find the self-help quality a bit tedious and the stories about successful people are examples selected a posteriori that do not offer statistical significance to the authors case... however there is enough useful advice that I found the book worthwhile. I would recommend any academic to at least skim the text. ( )

An interesting book to read along with David Allen's "Getting Things Done" (Allen is more practical).

Two parts. First part builds argument in favor of deep thinking instead of moving through life in a distracted haphazard method. Second part tries to give some practical advice along with stories of success.

Reaction- I will condense down what I need from the book into two or three pages of notes to apply in my life.

Good short read. ( )

After reading Newport's HOW TO BECOME A STRAIGHT-A STUDENT (and loving it), I picked this one up immediately. I wasn't quite as enthralled by DEEP WORK as I was the previous book, but I still found it incredibly valuable and so timely.

Like many people, I've been finding myself wasting so much time in aimless distraction. I've been pulling out my phone to fill minutes of boredom (waiting in line, while the bread is toasting... I've even been reaching for it while stopped at red lights!) I knew something had to give. What I didn't realize is just how much damage I was doing by rewiring my brain to be craving that constant distraction.

Like some of the people mentioned in this book, I, too, thought I could just switch from distraction to focused work in a second. But the truth is, I can't. And without a steady practice of "deep work", that's just not going to happen.

I've been focusing on deep work on my own (without calling it that) for the past couple of months, but it was so nice to get some concrete tips and direction in this book that I can now apply to my day. I particularly appreciated the tips about scheduling and seeking out structure, even for leisure time. I've been reading more since I instituted a "no work after 5:30" rule (as per Newport), and not reaching for my cell phone every time I craved entertainment.

Another winner from Cal Newport. I look forward to many more! ( )

This book is more of a habit management book. Its premise relies on the philosophy of limiting distraction, such as social media and unnecessary emails. Towards the end, it discusses strategies to reduce back-and-forth emails by providing an extra two minutes to discuss following steps and action items to Complete the inquiry. It also discusses how most people do not need social media, and the time spent on that could be best. Used to build more personal meaningful relationships. Although he didn’t note that some good can come out of it such as business relationships.

Why to Deep work
To court abilities for thriving in the new economy:
To court abilities for thriving in the new
Economy. The ability to quickly master heart things. Two, The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

The author notes, a professor of informatics at the University of California Irvine professor Gloria Mark.

To do real good physics work, you need absolute solid length of time. It needs a lot of concentration.

Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities, they have built in goals, feedback, rules, and challenges , all of which encourage want to become involved in one’s work to concentrate and to lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.

The author cites, a Greek concept of EUDAIMONIA which is a state in which you achieve your full human potential. Also known as a state of deep human flourishing

The author sites the law of vital field. In many settings, 80% of a given effect is due to just 20% of the possible causes.

In my experience, if you give your mind, something meaningful to do throughout all your walking hours, you’ll end the day, more fulfilled, and begin the next one more relaxed, then, if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours, and semi conscious and unstructured web surfing.

Shallow work: non-cognitively, demanding, logistical style tasks, often perform while distracted. Easy to replicate.

The author concludes this reading by citing the story of Bill Gates, who was a young Harvard student in winter of 1974, who utilized deep work through hours of coding for a computer software. ( )

First Cal Newport book I've read. A bit underwhelmed as I've found some of his blog posts quite insightful - perhaps because his thinking has sharpened in the years since authoring this book in 2016?

Agree with some other reviewers that the book could have been a focused series of blog posts - it has a bit of a 'padded - out' feel at times.

Nonetheless, Cal makes some good points about the structure and methods to tame the madness of modern work. The biggest take away for me was getting work groups and individuals to reset their expectation of 'response time' when 'immediate' is the default. And 'immediate' is hardly ever the case for most people in most jobs. ( )

Despite saying that he isn’t, the author falls back on old man yelling at cloud quite a bit. Regardless, there’s a lot of good tips here. ( )

Amazing! Newport shows how to master our focus, and also gives convincing reasons of why to adopt the so called "Deep Work". ( )

Very helpful book. He tells a lot of stories and anecdotes to prove his point and persuade. So it’s not a purely strategic book. But the strategies in the book are super effective. The book is already dated in regards to social media &c, but still very applicable.

Would recommend if struggling with productivity and distraction. ( )

Deep Work

Quote in Summary:

“Deep work is when your mind reaches a state of uninterrupted flow and is engrossed in the state of the work you are partaking in. It allows you to be free to be a producer of content at a high level instead of a consumer passively. “ ( )

Like his book "So Good They Can't Ignore You", the central idea is a valuable and important one (and also a simple and elegant one) but could have been a series of 4-5 blog posts rather than a full book. I started skimming halfway through because the examples felt like they were really just padding it out to meet a page number quota or something. ( )

student ( )

helped me to focus more

brief history before and after partition

TLDR: Worth buying the book if you are into productivity and self-help (Skip first 90 pages, read Part II only). If you like it, come back to Part I later.

This book is awesome, but it doesn't come without its flaws. Let me explain, the Part II of the book really shines, it gives you lots of great insight.

Now, if you read the book from the beginning, you may not finish it, I found the book boring on the first part (up to page 90), and then I put it aside, then I came back and gave it another chance, it's great that I did it, because the book deserves it!!!

I gave it 4/5 stars because of this one fault, it's boring slow on the beginning, I can see why, the author is trying to sell you the idea of the book, but for me, it could a 206 page but (Part II only), or even 171 pages (if you don't read the notes on the end). ( )

Great premise but Lost interest. Seemed repetitive. Didnt finish. ( )

This book contained good advice. And, what is sometimes the surprising part coming from the genre of personal productivity, it has enough depth to be worth reading even if you know the soundbite version.

The premise of this book is that for most of us, we produce the most value when we what we are working on requires deep, prolonged concentration. This is the best way to learn, a constant need in the knowledge economy, and it is the best way to make progress on creative work or problem solving.

The first part of this book motivates the idea that deep work is valuable. It takes three approaches. First, it highlights the importance of deep work in today's economy. Second, it contrasts deep work to the culture of constant connectivity and the shallow work such a work style encourages. Third, it connects deep work to craftsmanship and living a meaningful life. I enjoy these chapters, although I was not reading them with a need to be convinced that deep work is valuable.

The second part of the book contains the substance of how to engage in deep work. The first thing to do is to figure out how to best fit deep work into your life. Most of us cannot escape other obligations for days at a time. Thus, we should take a realistic look at what we can commit to. For most people, having a regular schedule of deep work provides a good balance. E.g., 1-2 90 minute chunks each day. Having a schedule is just the beginning. Creating a ritual for transitioning into deep work is important.

Even more important though is structuring the work correctly. Deep work time should be spent on your most important work, and you should track your progress so that you know the time spent is important. It's better to use a leading measure, such as words written, rather than a trailing one, such as papers published.

In some sense, that's all there is to deep work. But Newport recognizes that most of us have not cultivated a habit of concentration. Thus, he spends a chapter discussing ways to increase your ability to concentrate. Much of this comes down to embracing the mindset that instead of taking breaks from distraction to concentrate, we take breaks from concentration to be distracted (for a bounded time). Concentration can also be improved by adding constraints, such as needing to get a project done by a certain time. A structured problem solving process can also help.

There is a chapter that is a rant against social media. Not the rantiest rant against social media that I've seen, but certainly in the genre. While I overall agree with Newport that social media is a huge source of distraction unless you give it a highly constrained role in your life, I feel like that topic was sufficiently covered in other parts of the book. It did not need a whole chapter.

Finally, Newport discusses how to reduce the amount of shallow work competing for your time. All of the commitment to deep work in the world cannot help you if you are in a work environment where people expect near instantaneous responses to email. Time-boxing shallow work and understanding the depth of everything you do are two techniques for reducing shallow work and creating more time for deep work. If your role has you spending a lot of time on shallow work, talking to your manager to try to understand the right use of your time (and making a case for more time one deep work) can help. This probably won't work so well if your bosses are children. :-)

Overall, I found this to be a motivating book full of useful and practical advice. I did personally find the little biographies that were in most chapters to be more of a distraction than useful, and, as noted, the chapter on social media felt redundant. Still, overall, it was worth the read. ( )

I don’t waste time writing long reviews for books I hate, so let me say that. But I need to be critical of Deep Work because there are really solid and good ideas, but there does seem to be a whole lot of privilege and confirmation bias at work as well. In an interview with Newport for the Hidden Brain podcast (https://www.npr.org/transcripts/75433...), the host, Shankar Vedantam remarked, “I'm wondering if some people might say your advice is really advice for people who, in some ways, are at the top of their food chains.” Vedantam also addressed the impact of one’s “deep work” on other people, something that Newport does not discuss with any…depth. I remember cheering when Vedantam took him to task (gently) because I had spent much of the interview thinking about how little resemblance Newport’s “case studies” had to my own life and experience. Yet, there was enough that I decided to read the book.

There are some serious gaps in Newport’s logic toward application of the “deep work” model. First, he seems reticent to accept neurodiversity, or at least address it. He merely notes: “If you instead remain one of the many for whom depth is uncomfortable and distraction ubiquitous, you shouldn’t expect these systems and skills to come easily to you.” (37). Fair enough, but what’s missing is any kind of guidance or attempt to explain how to meet these additional challenges. I’ve become quite engaged in mindfulness (something Newport addresses), and I admire how Jeff Warren (at Ten Percent Happier) talks about his own ADHD and how that works with mindfulness, rather than just saying “it’s a challenge”. I also bristled a bit at Newport’s underlying assumption of elite and economic goals. Take for example, this footnote: “Giving students iPads or allowing them to film homework assignments on YouTube prepares them for a high-tech economy about as much as playing with Hot Wheels would prepare them to thrive as auto mechanics.” (31) Deep Work, it would seem, does not allow for modern creativity, unless that creativity translates into computer programming (Bill Gates), or the countless other high-economy examples Newport uplifts. He seems to know the “less-skilled” (his words) exist, but fails to acknowledge that much of the status of high-skilled workers and the “superstars” can at some point be attributed to resting on the shoulders of those less-skilled folks. And it might surprise him to know that there are those academics (like this one) who don’t lie awake at night worrying about our h-index on Google Scholar.

Newport does seem to tone down the privilege in the “Deep Work is Meaningful” section, which resonated more than the initial “Deep Work is Rare” section. He surprisingly connects it to ideas of craftsmanship and even a “glimpse of the sacred.” (89). He references the medieval quarry worker’s creed, quoted in The Pragmatic Programmer: “We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals.” (89) That’s one framing of the sacred, I suppose. But there is value in the doing, sometimes, and that more…Zen…concept seems to elude Newport.

In Part 2, Newport presents four rules designed to “reduce the conflict” of being a “disciple of depth in a shallow world.” (97) It is statements like the latter that made me roll my eyes on more than one occasion. He does, however, allow for different philosophies of deep work or deep work scheduling, at any rate: the monastic, bimodal, rhythmic, and journalistic. Here Newport seems to do the most to engage with a multitude of circumstances and approaches. The section on ritualizing behavior rests on a plethora of pre-existent productivity literature, but even here, Newport sometimes favors the privileged. His advice to “make grand gestures” as a way to motivate oneself to deeply work is supported only by the single example of J.K. Rowling checking into a ritzy Edinburgh hotel to finish the last of the Harry Potter series. In addition to Newport’s point that the “grand gesture” (in this case paying more than $1000 per day for a hotel room) can be motivating, I assume being able to pay that (or take a “Think Week” like Bill Gates, or summer on a tiny island in Maine like Alan Lightman), might also be a rather motivating factor. Perhaps some examples of more economically realistic grand gestures (for those who might not make six figures or beyond) would solidify the wisdom behind this directive.

I found Newport’s small section on architecture and layout most capitvating, particularly because he called upon his own lived experience at MIT, instead of making grand pronouncements about things he does not engage with (e.g. social media). He is critical of the open-floor plan “serendipitous creativity” model, and his argument for “hub-and-spoke” architecture, wherein “both serendipitous encounter and isolated deep thinking are supported” (131) is very convincing. And perhaps the greatest take away moves the architecture into the land of metaphor: “Expose yourself to ideas in hubs on a regular basis, but maintain a spoke in which to work deeply on what you encounter.” (132)

Another truly valuable discussion is that of the “lead vs. lag” measures of 4DX (The Four Disciplines of Execution). Newport suggests that to measure one’s success, there need to be “lead” measures that will drive the success of the “lag” measures—in other words, short term goals that are fundamentally important to larger objectives. This echoes the wisdom of many productivity systems and philosophies, including David Allen’s exhortation to remember the “steps” to get to the destination.

It is Rule #3 that I found the most…vexing: Quit Social Media. Despite not using it himself, Newport can’t help but be rather judgmental about Facebook and Twitter, but his caution against the “any-benefit” mindset is useful. He asks us to do a true “cost”-benefit analysis of using a network tool, remembering our ultimate baseline. He reveals his own bias when he notes: “We don’t have to argue about whether these authors are right in their personal decisions to avoid Twitter (and similar tools) because their sales numbers and awards speak for themselves.” (194) The baseline metric for Newport is clear, and it arises every time he attempts to work with his own biases. All that said, the diagnostic Newport offers to apply to our own social media behavior is valuable, but flawed in one key aspect: it does not take into account how others wish to engage. Networking does imply communication with people other than ourselves. The deep work model is rather uncompromising, and this extends to Newport’s critique of social media. While a phone call to a dear friend to catch up might be more meaningful for me, perhaps it is important to them that I’ve seen the latest photos of their children on Facebook. Missing from the discussion (although Newport briefly notes it) is the nuance of WHO is in our Facebook networks, HOW we engage with it, and the question remains that using Facebook and having a “thriving and rewarding social life” aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive or one-size-fits-all. Still, asking ourselves how much FOMO informs the time we spend online is useful.

Newport’s practical advice may not be so practical for a lot of people, but that doesn’t remove its value. Like any productivity model, Deep Work has a lot to offer—both philosophically and strategically. I plan to implement many of his suggestions during my sabbatical, and I’ll be running a few “experiments” of my own. While Newport’s perspective that the road to hell is paved with tweets seems a bit biased and hyperbolic, we could all likely benefit from an audit of what “depth” means for our own lives and workflow. ( )

I would strongly recommend everyone read this to boost their productivity. Evidence includes why you should not use open space concepts (which is what I have been saying for several years). Even if you have ADHD like I do, this book will help you in ways you can't even imagine. ( )

This book never quite established a position in my mind. I liked the idea of deep (focused) work. Before this book I have gravitated away from meetings. Luckily, I am a knowledge worker with a great amount of autonomy over my time and I'll take a few of the suggestions.


( )

Intriguing and helpful. ( )

Newport's work is on to something. In our present cultural moment of ultra-distractedness, shallow work, and dwindling attention spans, Newport has much to say. In his own words, his purpose for writing is "best described as an attempt to formalize and explain my attraction to depth over shallowness, and to detail the types of strategies that have helped me act on this attraction" (17). He accomplishes this in a clear and compelling way. His writing is full of case studies and inside stories into the lives of people who have cultivated a habit of working deeply.

Newport's first three chapters present the nature of deep work as something that is valuable, rare, and meaningful. In the final four chapters, he outlines four rules that come with a handful of strategies to help you build a life of depth. I enjoyed the book thoroughly and plan to read more of Newport this year. ( )

Some good advice, but awkwardly written, repetitive and very, very self-promoting. ( )

I give the book and author five stars because they actually caused me to change my behavior. ( )

Very straightforward and clear, with an attempt to justify its suggestions. It's not surprising based on the content of the author's blog. The recommendations are not earth-shattering, but the theme of weaning oneself from multitasking is welcome.