Below is a quick summary from the book DEEP WORK: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport. Use it as a Cheat Sheet or a general overview of the book. I often find such summaries to be very useful when you want to remember the core concepts, or want to reread certain sections.

and their core concepts, and not just to mindlessly read them. Such summaries are created for that exact purpose.

The Idea

Deep Work is Valuable

Computers and the Internet have opened up many exciting opportunities, but they have also forever restructured how our economy works. Certain people are rewarded much more then others. With the availability of the internet, it is no longer nessecary to look for workers in your immediate area, you can search for the best of them online. This means that you as a worker now have to compete with a huge number of people who do your job faster and better. Cal Newport identifies two traits that would make you a winner in the current economy.

1. The ability to quickly master hard things.
2. The ability to produce at an elite leve, in terms of both quality and speed.

"To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction. To learn, in other words, is an act of deep work."

"To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. Put another way, the type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work."

Deep Work is Rare

Even though Deep Work is valuable, we don't see it encouraged in businesses around the world. What we often find is the opposite, activities that create an environment filled with distractions in hope of increasing productivity. Newport argues that Deep Work is a disadvantage in a technopoly because it build on old-fashioned values and often even requires the rejection of much of what is new and high-tech.

"Deep work is exiled in favor of more distracting high-tech behaviours, like the professional use of social media."

He states that there is a "metric black hole" that prevents us from accurately measuring productivity and performance which is why Deep Work not popular in the business sector. If such measurements would have been possible, we would see "our current technopoly would likely crumble".

Deep Work should be a priority for any business that wants to excel in the current technological climate, but since it's not this provides us with an opportunity to master Deep Work and elevate our standing amongst our peers. If you systematically develop your personal ability to do Deep Work, you will reap great rewards.

Deep Work is Meaningful

The author gives three distinct arguments for why Deep Work is meaningful before he dives in the actual techniques on how to develop it.

1. Neurological Argument
2. Psychological Argument
3. Philosophical Argument

I will not dive deeply into them.

The Rules

Rule 1: Work Deeply

The Author doesn't give us only one strategy to improve our deep work habit, he gives us four: The Monastic, The Bimodal, The Rhythmic, and The Journalistic philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling. Let us explore them in a little more detail.

The Monastic Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling

This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations. Practitioners of the monastic philosophy tend to have a well-defined and highly valued professional goal that they’re pursuing,

and the bulk of their professional success comes from doing this one thing exceptionally well.

People who adopt the Monastic Philosophy are usually radical in their decision, eliminating all distractions included but not limited to: social media, email, speakin engagements, etc. They work in long uninterrupted time-chunks and sacrifice

other persuits to achieve their work. For these people they are confronted with two options: Excel at their Deep Work, or be stuck in a perpetual distraction of email, social media, or something similar and produce no great result.

The Bimodal Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling

While the monastic philosophy tries to completely eliminate distraction and shallowness from their professional lives, the Bimodal Philosophy seeks this elimination only during certain periods. The Author bring an example with Carl Jung who often had retreats during which he used to work deeply, but had also ran a busy clinical practice, was an active participant in Zurich coffeehouse culture, and attended many lectures, etc.

This philosophy asks that you divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else. During the deep time, the bimodal worker will act monastically. During the shallow time, such focus is not prioritized.

The Rhythmic Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling

Instead of having certain times when you retreat into your work, you can create a rhythmic schedule and do some amount of deep work every day. You can either pre plan when you will do the work every day taking all the time scheduling out of the equations, or keep it even simpler and just say that you'll do x amount of deep work this day and when you do cross out the date on the callendar until you have a long chain that will motivate you to not miss a single day of depth.

The rhythmic philosophy provides an interesting contrast to the bimodal philosophy. It perhaps fails to achieve the most intense levels of deep thinking sought in the daylong concentration sessions favored by the bimodalist. The trade-off, however, is that this approach works better with the reality of human nature. By supporting deep work with rock-solid routines that make sure a little bit gets done on a regular basis, the rhythmic scheduler will often log a larger total number of deep hours per year.

The Journalistic Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling

Any time you can find some free time, you can switch into a deep work mode and hammer away at your desired task. In the example of Isaacson, this is how one can write a nine-hundred-page book on the side while spending the bulk of one's day becoming one of the country's best magazine writers. This approach is not for the deep work novice. The ability to rapidly switch your mind from shallow to deep mode doesn't come naturally. Without practice, such switches can seriously deplete your finite willpower reserves. This also requires a sense of confidence in your abilities.

This mode provides you with the most flexibility. When you develop the ability to switch your mind to deep mode, you can complete deep work in any free time that you can find while doing other things on the side.

Ritualize

It is important to ritualize your deep work so it becomes ingrained faster as a habit. Some things to keep in mind when creating a ritual:

1. Where you'll work and for how long.
2. How you'll work once you start to work.
3. How you'll support your work.

Make Grand Gestures

Making grand gestures oftentime aids in making you feel focused. Buying a very expensive notebook for an important research paper might give you that little push that is needed for you to start working and focusing on that task a little more deeply. The author brings an example of J.K. Rowling when she was writing the end to the Harry Potter books. To shift her mindset she checked into a suite in the five-star Balmora Hotel located in the heart of downtown Edinburgh costing her more than $1,000 dollars a day. This made it possible for her to deeply focus on her work and successfully finish her very popular Harry Potter series.

Don't Work Alone

In MIT lore, it’s generally believed that this haphazard combination of different disciplines, thrown together in a large reconfigurable building, led to chance encounters and a spirit of inventiveness that generated breakthroughs at a fast pace, innovating topics as diverse as Chomsky grammars, Loran navigational radars, and video games, all within the same productive postwar decades.

The environment plays a big role in bringing out these chance encounters and insights and it is not always done right. There is a lot of discussion on how you should work with people from other disciplines and how to encourage innovations. It is not always possible and not always desirable. In short, when it comes to deep work, consider the use of collaboration when appropriate, as it can push your results to a new level.

Execute Like a Business

1. Focus on the Wildly Important
2. Act on the Lead Measures
3. Keep a Compelling Scoreboard
4. Create a Cadance of Accountability

Be Lazy

1. Downtime Aids Insights
2. Downtime Helps Recharge the Energy Needed to Work Deeply
3. The Work That Evening Downtime Replaces Is Usually Not That Important

Rule 2: Embrace Boredom

The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained. Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don't simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.

1. Don't Take Breaks from Distraction. Instead Take Breaks from Focus. One of the main enemies of focus is internet. In this point the author provides us with a strategy to limit internet use and points out why this strategy will work no matter what position you're in.
2. Work Like Teddy Roosevelt. This strategy asks you to inject the occasional dash of Rooseveltian intensity into your own workday. In particular, identify a deep taks that's high on your priority list. Estimate how long you'd normally put aside for an obligation of this type, then give yourself a hard deadline that drastically reduces this time.
3. Meditate Productively. The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you're occupied physically but no mentally - walking, jogging, driving, showering - and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem. The Author provides a couple suggestions and examples on how you can do this and what might work for you, including exercises such as: memorizing a deck of cards, learing the guitar part of a song by ear.

Rule 3: Quit Social Media

Most people approach social media from the Any-Benefit Approach. They use social media because it provides a small benefits to their lives, and they assume that anything that provides a small benefit has to be good. The Author argues that we have to treat social media as any other tool and weight the good versus the bad and come to a decision wether or not using social media is worth it. He concludes that in most cases, using social media is not worth it and should activelly be avoided due to it's big negatives that affect deep work and our attention spans. Instead of using the Any-Benefit Approach, we should use the Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.

Apply the Law of the Vital Few to Your Internet Habits

The first step of this strategy is to identify the main high-level goals in both your professional and your personal life.

Once you’ve identified these goals, list for each the two or three most important activities that help you satisfy the goal.

The next step in this strategy is to consider the network tools you currently use. For each such tool, go through the key activities you identified and ask whether the use of the tool has a substantially positive impact, a substantially negative impact, or little impact on your regular and successful participation in the activity. Now comes the important decision: Keep using this tool only if you concluded that it has substantial positive impacts and that these outweigh the negative impacts.

Quit Social Media

Use this experiment to determine wether or not you should quit social media. Don't use social media for 30 days. Don't tell this to anyone. After 30 days of this self-imposed network isolation, ask yourself the following two questions about each of the services you temporarily quit:

1. Would the last thirty days have been notably better if I had been able to use this service?
2. Did people care that I wasn't using this service? If the answer to both is "no", quit the service permanently. If the answer was a clear "yes", then return to using the service. If your answer were ambiguous, it's up you to decide.

Don't Use Internet to Entertain Yourself

To summarize, if you want to eliminate the addictive pull of entertainment sites on your time and attention, give your brain a quality alternative. Not only will this preserve your ability to resist distraction and concentrate, but you might even fulfill Arnold Bennett’s ambitious goal of experiencing, perhaps for the first time, what it means to live, and not just exist.

Rule 4: Drain the Shallows

Shallow work dominates our life. The author uses several examples to clearly show us this fact. He proposes a couple strategies to minimize the shallow work we do which wastes our time and creates an illusion of meaningful work.

Schedule Every Minute of Your Day

The author suggest using Time Blocking as a good way to control what we will do in a day. It is not essential to follow a schedule strictly, it is important to use it as a guide for the day to make sure that shallow work doesn't overtake what is important.

Quantify the Depth of Every Activity

It is important to identify which work requires deep work the most. The Author suggests using a simple exercise to determine which work requires more attention from you as a deep worker. On any given task ask yourself this simple question: How long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task? If the answer is a lot of months that is most likely a task that requries deep work. If it's a couple of months than it does not require immediate attention and is shallow work that you can work your way around and minimize.

Ask Your Boss for a Shallow Work Budget

What percentage of my time should be spent on shallow work. This is a question that you should ask not only yourself, but your boss. If you're in a position that is filled with shallow work and you cannot negotiate time for deep work, it might be time to start looking for a deeper alternative. Otherwise you should be able to bring to light some distractions and have a real excuse to why you can't answer to emails or take part in office meetings.

Finish Your Work by Five Thirty

There are clear studies that show that you have a fixed amount of willpower. Your deep work also has this limit. Usually the work you do in the evening is either shallow or you won't be able to do serious advancements on it because you have depleated your deep work reserves. Therefore, the author argues that you should impose a strict work deadline on yourself and stick to it. This will keep you more successful and relatively stress free while still making you work at you fullest potential.

Become Hard to Reach

It is not essential for you to obey the common convention that you should answer to every email that is sent to you. The more emails you answer, the more of them will flood your inbox. The Author argues that you have to become hard to reach and make other people respect your time. You can introduce filters so that you don't receive emails that can be esily answered or should not concern you. The Author brings an example of a website that directs the user to the FAQ page first, makes sure that your question is directed towards the right person, and then makes it clear that you might or might not respond.

Conclusion

In the conclusion the author gives an example of Bill Gates who managed to build a billion dollar product in less than one semesters time with the help of his immense and powerful deep work habit.

""I’ll live the focused life, because it’s the best kind there is." I agree. So does Bill Gates. And hopefully now that you’ve finished this book, you agree too."

You can get the book through Amazon below:

• https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted/dp/1455586692