Hello friend!
Deep Work by Cal Newport is an excellent read for everybody who wants to create meaningful work in his life. Newport offers insights into the workflows of high-achieving knowledge workers and how you can replicate those for yourself. The book is divided into two parts: Firstly, The Idea, which is, you guessed it, all about the idea behind deep work, and why it is more important than ever before. And secondly, The Rules and how you can practice this concept yourself. Some of these rules might come to you intuitively; I used some of them before reading the book, too. But the way they are explained will be beneficial for everybody interested.
Now, I want to give you a simple overview of the presented concepts in the book.
The Idea
The first part focuses on the definition of deep work, why it is so important, and its counterpart – shallow work. Nowadays, many things can be automated using machines or even artificial intelligence, so deep work is more important than ever. The definition given in the book is the following:
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, on the other hand, is everything else that distracts us from our important work. Things like answering e-mails, attending useless meetings, and all other distractions in the workplace keep us busy while we are not making real progress.
The book details why deep work is so important, the concepts behind it, and why we should pursue it. Especially today, where it might seem more important to seem busy than actually being productive.
The Rules
The book’s second part focuses on rules one can implement if one wants to achieve more deep work and create meaningful things.
Work Deeply
This first rule is all about learning to focus again. Many things try to grab hold of our attention while distracting us from the important things in our lives. For this, the author offers different strategies which might help you focus.
Embrace Boredom
From time to time, it is vital to get bored. We have our best ideas if we are bored. That’s why we should not let all the little things distract us, even if we get bored. Allow yourself some time to get bored to ignite your inspiration. Our biggest distraction is the internet; try to spend time without it.
Quit Social Media
While the internet is a big distraction in itself, Social Media actively fights for your attention and tries to lock you into its content. It might be worth considering quitting social media or using it less. Maybe just use it for your work, if you need it for that. You have to find what works for you.
Drain the Shallows
This last rule is all about reducing the non-important work in your days. Again, the author offers some interesting strategies ranging from “Schedule every minute of your day” to “Become hard to reach.” This last one was especially interesting for me. It is about the distractions E-mail provides and how to reduce them.
In Conclusion
This was just a superficial overview of the topics covered in the book, but it should give you a general feeling of what you can read in it. I found the book very interesting and recommend it to anybody who gets easily distracted but wants to do meaningful work.