Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It's a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep-spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there's a better way.

In Deep Work, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite. Dividing this book into two parts, he first makes the case that in almost any profession, cultivating a deep work ethic will produce massive benefits. He then presents a rigorous training regimen, presented as a series of four "rules," for transforming your mind and habits to support this skill.

Newport uses principles of psychology and neuroscience to enhance his points. He elaborates how to improve a person's cognitive abilities and how employers should encourage workers to not take shortcuts for completing projects. He claims that the best way to break away from the corporate race is to take a break from technology and social media and use some alone-time to rewind and introspect. Newport enforces the beliefs of a non-technophile to deliver work that is productive and efficiently delivered.

A mix of cultural criticism and actionable advice, Deep Work takes the reader on a journey through memorable stories-from Carl Jung building a stone tower in the woods to focus his mind, to a social media pioneer buying a round-trip business class ticket to Tokyo to write a book free from distraction in the air-and no-nonsense advice, such as the claim that most serious professionals should quit social media and that you should practice being bored. Deep Work is an indispensable guide to anyone seeking focused success in a distracted world.

Worth reading. Helped me make some drastic changes in my schedule. I will post an update how these changes went after six months.

What I learned: (spoiler alerts)

1. Figure out what is most valuable to your success. 2. Spend most of the time on it, mostly in the early hours of your day where your attention span is long. 3. Try to spend at least 3 deep sessions on it approx. 90 min each. 4. Almost anything other than your main task is a shallow task. 5. Bunch all the shallow tasks into one deep task. 6. Nature helps to retain your attention span. 7. Email and Internet in general is a huge attention sucker.