Deep Work by Cal Newport || Book Review

Although I've had other books by Cal Newport on my TBR, I've never given Deep Work a second glance. The title is self-explanatory and I thought that it wouldn't be too useful for me considering I can do deep work.

However, recently when someone mentioned it, I decided to give it a shot. After all, books that seem to be innocuous can turn out to be what we need.

what is Deep Work about?

One of the most valuable skills in our economy is becoming increasingly rare. If you master this skill, you'll achieve extraordinary results.

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.

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.

my review

Firstly, I was a bit surprised by how this author wrote the book the way I write my blog posts. By that I mean saying "I" a lot and speaking about personal experiences and learnings while talking about a general subject and speaking to "you." Non-fiction books are usually written in third person. Even when they address the reader, the author don't mention themselves a lot. This isn't like that.

Throughout Deep Work, Cal Newport interweaves his experiences and that of his friends with the stories of famous people. Whenever he's talking about a concept, he also tells us how he applied it in his life or how it helped him. To make it a bit generic, he mentioned stories of others' as well but it's easy to tell that he's writing the book from his experience instead of only research. It's easy to tell that he's passionate about the subject too because he frequently shares why it works for him.

The above writing style made the book slightly easier to read, especially in the latter half of the book. However, the first half was dreary enough to put me to glorious sleep twice. It suffers from something that most non-fiction books have, something I hate, which is the dump of anecdotes and stories everywhere. Every time I pick up a non-fiction book, I hope that it doesn't follow the same rule and I'm disappointed 90% of the times.

The author has clearly done a lot of research and wants to share it with us. But there's a point at which we're convinced enough and don't need to hear more. He frequently used the same writing device which is to say a story of some famous person, how they changed their life, and then say that the reason for it can be found in so-so research. For half the book, we're given multiple stories and researches together without being given the point is a clear and concise manner.

There's a point at which we'd like to see if it's useful for us instead of continuing to hear about how it's useful for everyone else. After all, something that works for the majority may still not work for us. We have to try it out. This book waits fairly long to give us actionable advice. Considering it's a 300 pages long (quite a few are references at the end), that's too long.

I won't say that I didn't know this going into the book. The author clearly mentions in the introduction that he's going to talk about research and success stories before helping us apply the principles in our lives. But why is so much necessary?

No wonder non-fiction is still considered to be an intellectual's genre, it's not easily read by most. I'm a seasoned reader and even I struggled to get through the first half without falling asleep a couple of times. How are new readers supposed to read it long enough to get the value it promises?

Despite this book's popularity, it's not read by most people. Just look at the number of ratings it has on Goodreads vs. Fourth Wing's ratings. As I write this, Deep Work has almost 180k ratings. Fourth Wing has 3 MILLION. I would argue that Deep Work is a gift that would keep giving while Fourth Wing is helpful (for escapism) only for the duration you read it. And yet, Deep Work is read by only a fraction of people. Non-fiction writing styles have to change, otherwise they'll remain books that are bought but not read fully.

As we shift to an information economy, more and more of our population are knowledge workers, and deep work is becoming a key currency—even if most haven't recognized this reality.

I was definitely in the target audience for this book. I'm a knowledge worker through-and-through. I'm a programmer, to be specific, and he has referred to my job in many examples. I deal with email a lot, most of my work is done when I'm at my desk and not in conversation, and I'm in an office with an open floorplan (which the author argues against because it's not conducive for deep work).

Although I didn't call it deep work, I've been aware of how "focused work hours" are the most productive. My attention was extremely fractured in my previous job because of the responsibilities I had and my knowledge which made deep work hard. I remembered being able to do the most when I worked at home or when I worked hidden in a corner where no one could find me. I was also able to blog a fair amount because of my focused hours for it.

Reading the description of deep work, where it applies, and to whom it applies was like understanding the details of something I already knew. The author spends a significant amount of chapters trying to convince the reader that deep work is essential. Since I already knew that, I found the amount excessive. Maybe it would be necessary for people who don't know it yet.

I liked that deep work's limit was stressed upon as well. The author clearly says that it's surprising how much work can be done in a few deep work hours, but 4 hours a day tends to be the limit for people and it's a bit useless to chase it after that.

I also liked the advice to end the work day at 5:30 (which I actually follow right now, since my current job allows it) because the work produced after that won't be quality work anyway. It's true. I've always found that if I work late to catch up on things, I end up performing lower than I would if I just did it the next morning.

Even though we abstractly accept that distraction has costs and depth has value, these impacts are difficult to measure.

Although I definitely think that the first half of the book was too long and a lot of it was unnecessary, there were useful parts in it. One was the exploration into why we work the way we work.

It was interesting to read about why deep work is so hard nowadays and the author doesn't place the blame on individuals alone. Since deep work is mainly necessary for knowledge workers at the office, he focuses on why offices make it hard for their employees to do the very thing that generates the most value.

Most offices have open floorplans for collaboration. There are daily meetings for status updates and often more meetings for discussing project-specific statuses. However, all this collaboration comes at a cost.

Personally, I find that I work best on the days when I don't have any meetings because on the days I have them, they're right in the middle of focused work hours. Thankfully, I don't have meeting everyday in my current job otherwise I would be as frazzled and unproductive like I was at my previous job right before I quit.

The author argues that all of these things are added because one can measure their value easily while work done in focused undisturbed hours is hard to measure. It's far easier to say that someone who responds to messages and emails fast, who has many impromptu discussions with people on the floor, is more productive than someone who works in silence and doesn't advertise themselves.

That argument stuck in my mind for days after I read it. I specifically looked at my job, what I do, and realized that it's true. So then, how do we fix it? How do we do deep work despite of the organizational challenges?

Divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else.

Once I arrived at the second half of the book, I found it very useful. Without wasting any more time of long anecdotes and stories, the second half gives many tips and advice to tackle the different areas that affect deep work.

Instead of focusing on only one area that seems to impact deep work the most, the author makes us look at our work holistically. If we're having trouble getting into flow state, there is advice for that. If we're having trouble staying in the flow state, there are specific tips for that.

I actually took away lots of helpful advice and plan to implement some of them soon. (I'm writing this the day after reading the book) I plan to make a list of all the action items that I've annotated and stick it up on my wall so that I can tackle them one by one.

I liked that the advice included long-term habit changes as well as one-time tasks. Reading the book, it doesn't feel like everything is heavy-lift effort. Some are simple like changing contact pages on blogs to mention a disclaimer about what correspondence you'll respond to (I'm going to implement this on the blog!). Others are habits that we have to put some long-term effort into like creating a shutdown ritual at work or quitting social media that isn't working for us.

The advice and tips aren't specific to certain careers or workdays, they're fairly general that every knowledge worker will be able to gain value from the book. The author adds disclaimers to some advice that they won't work for a certain type of worker, which I appreciated. It showed that the content was written thoughtfully instead of being a compilation of things that specifically targeted different people like Feel-Good Productivity was.

When you know that more than two hundred people volunteered to hear what you have to say, it's easy to begin to believe that your activities on those services are important.

I guessed that the book would touch upon social media since it's the ultimate distraction and destroyer of deep work but I didn't expect that there would be an entire section titled "quit social media." And honestly, everything the author said made sense.

While most of us know that social media isn't as helpful as it should be for the time we put into it, this book details why we're still on it. It talks about how most of us have an any-benefit mindset which lets through social media and how we need to have a crasftsman's mindset instead. Another compelling argument about how it short-circuits the hard work of producing real value was interesting too.

Since I've quit social media already, I didn't have any actionable advice to take away from this section. I related to everything that was said, though. Coincidentally, I was writing my post on 2 years without social media when I started reading this book and it helped me articulate a few things better.

I appreciated that the author didn't see social media as an all-bad thing but something that is generally for the worse. The author specifically calls out the drastic "internet sabbatical" or social media detox mindset that asks to completely go off-grid all the time. Instead of that, he proposes a better approach that checks which is actually necessary and only bringing something if the pros outweighed the cons.

Your goal is not to stick to a given schedule at all costs; it's instead to maintain, at all times, a thoughtful say in what you're doing with your time going forward—even if these decisions are reworked again and again as the day unfolds.

I've been vocal about the time-blocking method not working for my productivity. I've tried it multiple times and it was frustration each time. It didn't help at all. It was too rigid. My method of creating a "menu" of tasks and picking stuff based on my mood worked better.

However, I'm reconsidering time-blocking after this book. For the first time, I'm seeing it as an activity to achieve something else and not something to cram everything into a day. The approach suggested in Deep Work is to use it to be thoughtful about our days instead of letting it slip by is refreshing.

This approach lets us make mistakes and be wrong about our estimates. It lets us set time for texting or scrolling without feeling guilty about it. The author encourages throwing the schedule out the window if we're engrossed in something nice.

It's not about being as productive as possible in a day, rather it's about doing what you actually want to do. After all, we can only do 4 hours of deep work a day. The point is to do the shallow work that important or make time for play the rest of the time.

I really like this idea. In fact, I tried time-blocking today. I didn't block off every hour in my day and I kept buffers between everything. I'll have to try it out for longer to see if it's actually helping but I'm trying it again and that's what matters.

overall

This review depicts how reading this book went. Starting with a small surprise, then with a bunch of annoyance in the first half, then being full of positives in the second half.

Overall, I found the book helpful and enjoyable (for the most part). I highly recommend it. It'll be hard to get through the first half and I wholeheartedly suggest skipping it if you're finding it unnecessary or too boring. The second half is worth the read.

chat with me!

Have you read Deep Work? Do you prioritize deep work or focused work hours in your day? Are you able to structure your day to get the most out of it, and how do you do it? How do you do deep work—by scheduling the same time everyday, using noise-blocking headphones, or something else?