Here’s my summary and notes from the book I read recently. The book is “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World” by author Cal Newport.
Cal Newport’s thesis: In an economy that rewards speed, complexity, and creativity, the ability to concentrate without distraction — what he calls deep work — is fast becoming a super-power. Shallow, fragmented work might keep you busy, but only deep work moves the needle.
1. Why Deep Work Matters
- Cognitive edge: Intense focus lets you learn complicated things quickly and produce high-value output.
- Economic edge: Deep workers out-compete peers who multitask; their results can’t be easily automated or outsourced.
- Personal edge: Working deeply is inherently satisfying; it turns tasks into crafts and days into accomplishments.
2 . Four Rules to Go Deep
| Rule | Quick Take (Why) | Key Tactics (How) |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Work Deeply | Build repeatable rituals so intense focus becomes the default. | • Time-block 60–120 min “focus blocks” • Pre-work ritual: clear desk, water + noise-canceling headphones • Leave phone in another room or lock with Focus mode • Use a visible scoreboard (e.g., ✓ for each deep hour) |
| 2. Embrace Boredom | Train your brain to tolerate zero stimulation so it doesn’t crave quick hits. | • “No-input” commute or walk; let thoughts wander • Put phone on grayscale to make doom-scrolling less tempting • Practice “productive meditation”: mull one hard problem while jogging • Schedule purposeful day-dream windows between deep sessions |
| 3. Quit Social Media | Keep only tools that deliver outsized, provable value. | • 30-day digital declutter → re-add only mission-critical apps • Whitelist sites in Freedom / Cold Turkey blocker • Check social feeds in one 15-min window, calendar-blocked • Substitute low-friction alternatives (RSS, newsletters) |
| 4. Drain the Shallows | Ruthlessly shrink low-value work to free cognitive budget. | • Batch email twice daily (11 a.m. & 4 p.m.) • Default meetings to 25 min with agenda in invite; decline if none • Set a daily “shutdown complete” hard stop (e.g., 6 p.m.) • Limit shallow work to a fixed weekly budget (e.g., 10 hrs) |
3. Tactics That Stick
- Time-block planning: Every minute gets a job; revise the plan as reality intrudes.
- Grand gestures: Occasional dramatic moves (a cabin weekend, a hotel day) can jolt you into deep mode.
- Productive meditation: Chew on a single thorny problem while doing something mindless (e.g., jogging).
- Work-shutdown ritual: End each day by updating task lists and declaring aloud, “Shutdown complete.” It frees mental RAM for the evening.
4. Watch-outs
- Deep work ≠ long hours. It’s about intensity, not brute-force time.
- Focus fatigue is real. Aim for 3–4 deep hours daily; quality drops sharply after that.
- Busyness ≠ productivity. If you can’t point to tangible wins, you’re likely stuck in the shallows.
5. My Action Plan
I realize that while the book presents some interesting anecdotes the concepts aren’t totally new to me. I’ve come across the techniques presented in the book in the past. The book helped reinforce understanding of those techniques with very good examples.
Some actions that I noted down for myself:
- Pick one distraction to cut for 30 days, I will start with strictly limiting usage of x.com for 5 mins per day.
- Continue/revive using the chain method for more life goals. I’ve been using Duolingo and the results have been good. I check off every day and now I am practicing Spanish for 365 days. Same can be done for fitness and losing weight.
- Hub and spoke theory for my social life. Maintain deep work routine but still keep my schedule and life open for any serendipitous encounters.
- Spend more time in nature.
- I often switch to phone when at work, waiting for things like build compilation. I’d watch YouTube Shorts or Instagram Reels or read Google News. Per the book, this time is better spent starting blank at the screen. “Embrace Boredom”
- Use Instagram/social media only when I am spending more time “creating” on it rather than “consuming” on it.
- Go through garage and get rid of stuff that I’ve never used in last 2 years. I most likely don’t need it and it will make me asset light.
- Put more thought into leisure time. Figure out evenings and weekends schedules before they begin.
- 4 hrs seem to be the max deep work limit so don’t kill myself for not being overly productive throughout the day.
- Add more structure to the day, regular gym at 7 AM, sleep by 11 PM, the 4 meals per day timings that I used to follow earlier.
Highlights
Introduction
To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of producing—a task that requires depth.
But 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 yet recognized this reality.
Deep work is not, in other words, an old-fashioned skill falling into irrelevance. It’s instead a crucial ability for anyone looking to move ahead in a globally competitive information economy that tends to chew up and spit out those who aren’t earning their keep. The real rewards are reserved not for those who are comfortable using Facebook (a shallow task, easily replicated), but instead for those who are comfortable building the innovative distributed systems that run the service (a decidedly deep task, hard to replicate).
I build my days around a core of carefully chosen deep work, with the shallow activities I absolutely cannot avoid batched into smaller bursts at the peripheries of my schedule. Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output. My commitment to depth has also returned nonprofessional
Part 1 : The Idea
In this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital.
Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy
- The ability to quickly master hard things.
- The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.
If you can’t learn, you can’t thrive. If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.
…we argue that the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.” American culture, in particular, loves the storyline of the prodigy…
My guess is that Adam Grant doesn’t work substantially more hours than the average professor at an elite research institution (generally speaking, this is a group prone to workaholism), but he still manages to produce more than just about anyone else in his field. I argue that his approach to batching helps explain this paradox. … The best students understood the role intensity plays in productivity and therefore went out of their way to maximize their concentration—radically reducing the time required to prepare for tests or write papers, without diminishing the quality of their results.
The Principle of Least Resistance: In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment. This includes checking emails or replying to Slack messages as soon as they come.
As Crawford describes in his 2009 ode to the trades, Shop Class as Soulcraft, he quit his job as a Washington, D.C., think tank director to open a motorcycle repair shop exactly to escape this bewilderment. The feeling of taking a broken machine, struggling with it, then eventually enjoying a tangible indication that he had succeeded (the bike driving out of the shop under its own power) provides a concrete sense of accomplishment he struggled to replicate when his day revolved vaguely around reports and communications strategies.
A similar reality creates problems for many knowledge workers.
‘the idle mind is the devil’s workshop’ … when you lose focus, your mind tends to fix on what could be wrong with your life instead of what’s right.”
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 one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and 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.
Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.
Whether you’re a writer, marketer, consultant, or lawyer: Your work is craft, and if you hone your ability and apply it with respect and care, then like the skilled wheelwright you can generate meaning in the daily efforts of your professional life.
Part 2 : The Rules
Rule #1: Work Deeply
The subjects succeeded in resisting these particularly addictive distractions only around half the time. You might respond at this point that you will succeed where these subjects failed because you understand the importance of depth and will therefore be more rigorous in your will to remain concentrated.
You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.
The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.
(As argued in this rule’s introduction, attempting to schedule deep work in an ad hoc fashion is not an effective way to manage your limited willpower.)
Jung’s approach is what I call the bimodal philosophy of deep work. This philosophy asks that you divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else.
As Jung, Grant, and Perlow’s subjects discovered, people will usually respect your right to become inaccessible if these periods are well defined and well advertised, and outside these stretches, you’re once again easy to find.
He keeps a calendar on his wall. Every day that he writes jokes he crosses out the date on the calendar with a big red X. “After a few days you’ll have a chain,” Seinfeld said. “Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”
This chain method (as some now call it) soon became a hit among writers and fitness enthusiasts—communities that thrive on the ability to do hard things consistently.
By reducing the need to make decisions about deep work moment by moment, I can preserve more mental energy for the deep thinking itself.
I hope [my work] makes clear that waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan. In fact, perhaps the single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration.
Your ritual needs rules and processes to keep your efforts structured. For example, you might institute a ban on any Internet use, or maintain a metric such as words produced per twenty-minute interval to keep your concentration honed. Without this structure, you’ll have to mentally litigate again and again what you should and should not be doing during these sessions and keep trying to assess whether you’re working sufficiently hard. These are unnecessary drains on your willpower reserves.
There was nothing physically stopping Gates from thinking deeply in his office in Microsoft’s Seattle headquarters, but the novelty of his weeklong retreat helped him achieve the desired levels of concentration.
Not everyone has the freedom to spend two months in Maine, but many writers, including Dan Pink and Michael Pollan, simulate the experience year-round by building—often at significant expense and effort—writing cabins on their properties.
We can, therefore, still dismiss the depth-destroying open office concept without dismissing the innovation-producing theory of serendipitous creativity. The key is to maintain both in a hub-and-spoke-style arrangement: Expose yourself to ideas in hubs on a regular basis, but maintain a spoke in which to work deeply on what you encounter.
First, distraction remains a destroyer of depth. Therefore, the hub-and-spoke model provides a crucial template. Separate your pursuit of serendipitous encounters from your efforts to think deeply and build on these inspirations. You should try to optimize each effort separately, as opposed to mixing them together into a sludge that impedes both goals. Second, even when you retreat to a spoke to think deeply, when it’s reasonable to leverage the whiteboard effect, do so. By working side by side with someone on a problem, you can push each other toward deeper levels of depth, and therefore toward the generation of more and more valuable output as compared to working alone.
At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning—no after-dinner e-mail check, no mental replays of conversations, and no scheming about how you’ll handle an upcoming challenge; shut down work thinking completely. If you need more time, then extend your workday, but once you shut down, your mind must be left free to encounter Kreider’s buttercups, stink bugs, and stars.
Some decisions are better left to your unconscious mind to untangle.
For decisions that require the application of strict rules, the conscious mind must be involved. For example, if you need to do a math calculation, only your conscious mind is able to follow the precise arithmetic rules needed for correctness. On the other hand, for decisions that involve large amounts of information and multiple vague, and perhaps even conflicting, constraints, your unconscious mind is well suited to tackle the issue.
Dijksterhuis’s team isolated this effect by giving subjects the information needed for a complex decision regarding a car purchase. Half the subjects were told to think through the information and then make the best decision. The other half were distracted by easy puzzles after they read the information, and were then put on the spot to make a decision without having had time to consciously deliberate. The distracted group ended up performing better.
Shutdown habit, therefore, is not necessarily reducing the amount of time you’re engaged in productive work, but is instead diversifying the type of work you deploy.
This study, it turns out, is one of many that validate attention restoration theory (ART), which claims that spending time in nature can improve your ability to concentrate.
Having a casual conversation with a friend, listening to music while making dinner, playing a game with your kids, going for a run—the types of activities that will fill your time in the evening if you enforce a work shutdown—play the same attention-restoring role as walking in nature.
Ericsson notes that for a novice, somewhere around an hour a day of intense concentration seems to be a limit, while for experts this number can expand to as many as four hours—but rarely more.
You should hit your daily deep work capacity during your workday. It follows, therefore, that by evening, you’re beyond the point where you can continue to effectively work deeply.
(to end my own ritual, I say, “Shutdown complete”). This final step sounds cheesy, but it provides a simple cue to your mind.
The concept of a shutdown ritual might at first seem extreme, but there’s a good reason for it: the Zeigarnik effect. This effect, which is named for the experimental work of the early-twentieth-century psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, describes the ability of incomplete tasks to dominate our attention. It tells us that if you simply stop whatever you are doing at five p.m. and declare, “I’m done with work until tomorrow,” you’ll likely struggle to keep your mind clear of professional issues, as the many obligations left unresolved in your mind will, as in Bluma Zeigarnik’s experiments, keep battling for your attention throughout the evening (a battle that they’ll often win).
Rule #2: Embrace Boredom
Much in the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, you’ll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom.
Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction, Nass discovered, it’s hard to shake the addiction even when you want to concentrate. To put this more concretely: If every moment of potential boredom in your life—say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives—is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the “mental wrecks” in Nass’s research, it’s not ready for deep work—even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.
The idea motivating this strategy is that the use of a distracting service does not, by itself, reduce your brain’s ability to focus. It’s instead the constant switching from low-stimuli/ high-value activities to high-stimuli/ low-value activities, at the slightest hint of boredom or cognitive challenge, that teaches your mind to never tolerate an absence of novelty. This constant switching can be understood analogously as weakening the mental muscles responsible for organizing the many sources vying for your attention. By segregating Internet use (and therefore segregating distractions) you’re minimizing the number of times you give in to distraction, and by doing so you let these attention-selecting muscles strengthen.
At this point, there should be only one possible way to get the deep task done in time: working with great intensity—no e-mail breaks, no daydreaming, no Facebook browsing, no repeated trips to the coffee machine. Like Roosevelt at Harvard, attack the task with every free neuron until it gives way under your unwavering barrage of concentration.
As argued in the previous strategy, the more you practice resisting such urges, the easier such resistance becomes.
The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally—walking, jogging, driving, showering—and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem.
Rule #3: Quit Social Media
You’re justified in using a network tool if you can identify any possible benefit to its use, or anything you might possibly miss out on if you don’t use it. The problem with this approach, of course, is that it ignores all the negatives that come along with the tools in question. These services are engineered to be addictive—robbing time and attention from activities that more directly support your professional and personal goals (such as deep work).
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.
And because your time returns substantially more rewards when invested in high-impact activities than when invested in low-impact activities, the more of it you shift to the latter, the lower your overall benefit.
Stuff accumulates in people’s lives, in part, because when faced with a specific act of elimination it’s easy to worry, “What if I need this one day?,” and then use this worry as an excuse to keep the item in question sitting around. Nicodemus’s packing party provided him with definitive evidence that most of his stuff was not something he needed, and it therefore supported his quest to simplify.
Don’t formally deactivate these services, and (this is important) don’t mention online that you’ll be signing off: Just stop using them, cold turkey. If someone reaches out to you by other means and asks why your activity on a particular service has fallen off, you can explain, but don’t go out of your way to tell people.
Would the last thirty days have been notably better if I had been able to use this service? Did people care that I wasn’t using this service?
But here’s the reality of audiences in a social media era. Before these services existed, building an audience of any size beyond your immediate friends and family required hard, competitive work. In the early 2000s, for example, anyone could start a blog, but to gain even just a handful of unique visitors per month required that you actually put in the work to deliver information that’s valuable enough to capture someone’s attention.
Fortunately, Arnold Bennett identified the solution to this problem a hundred years earlier: Put more thought into your leisure time. In other words, this strategy suggests that when it comes to your relaxation, don’t default to whatever catches your attention at the moment, but instead dedicate some advance thinking to the question of how you want to spend your “day within a day.” Addictive websites of the type mentioned previously thrive in a vacuum: If you haven’t given yourself something to do in a given moment, they’ll always beckon as an appealing option. If you instead fill this free time with something of more quality, their grip on your attention will loosen.
It’s crucial, therefore, that you figure out in advance what you’re going to do with your evenings and weekends before they begin.
Rule #4: Drain the Shallows
For those familiar with the rigors of such activities, the limit expands to something like four hours, but rarely more.
The implication is that once you’ve hit your deep work limit in a given day, you’ll experience diminishing rewards if you try to cram in more. Shallow work, therefore, doesn’t become dangerous until after you add enough to begin to crowd out your bounded deep efforts for the day.
I would go so far as to argue that someone following this combination of comprehensive scheduling and a willingness to adapt or modify the plan as needed will likely experience more creative insights than someone who adopts a more traditionally “spontaneous” approach where the day is left open and unstructured.
Without structure, it’s easy to allow your time to devolve into the shallow—e-mail, social media, Web surfing. This type of shallow behavior, though satisfying in the moment, is not conducive to creativity.
Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.
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?
As argued earlier, tasks that leverage your expertise tend to be deep tasks and they can therefore provide a double benefit: They return more value per time spent, and they stretch your abilities, leading to improvement. On the other hand, a task that our hypothetical college graduate can pick up quickly is one that does not leverage expertise, and therefore it can be understood as shallow.
(there’s a psychological distaste surrounding the idea of spending the majority of your time on unskilled tasks, so 50 percent is a natural upper limit, while at the same time most bosses will begin to worry that if this percentage gets too much lower than 30 percent you’ll be reduced to a knowledge work hermit who thinks big thoughts but never responds to e-mails).
By his estimation, he spent only one and a half out of the twelve total hours sitting in his office tackling “real” work, which he defines as efforts that make progress toward a “research deliverable.”
I, too, am incredibly cautious about my use of the most dangerous word in one’s productivity vocabulary: “yes.” It takes a lot to convince me to agree to something that yields shallow work.
Another tactic that works well for me is to be clear in my refusal but ambiguous in my explanation for the refusal. The key is to avoid providing enough specificity about the excuse that the requester has the opportunity to defuse it. If, for example, I turn down a time-consuming speaking invitation with the excuse that I have other trips scheduled for around the same time, I don’t provide details—which might leave the requester the ability to suggest a way to fit his or her event into my existing obligations—but instead just say, “Sounds interesting, but I can’t make it due to schedule conflicts.” In turning down obligations, I also resist the urge to offer a consolation prize that ends up devouring almost as much of my schedule (e.g., “Sorry I can’t join your committee, but I’m happy to take a look at some of your proposals as they come together and offer my thoughts”). A clean break is best.
In most knowledge work jobs, it can be difficult in the moment to turn down a shallow commitment that seems harmless in isolation—be it accepting an invitation to get coffee or agreeing to “jump on a call.” A commitment to fixed-schedule productivity, however, shifts you into a scarcity mind-set. Suddenly any obligation beyond your deepest efforts is suspect and seen as potentially disruptive. Your default answer becomes no, the bar for gaining access to your time and attention rises precipitously, and you begin to organize the efforts that pass these obstacles with a ruthless efficiency.
Less mental clutter means more mental resources available for deep thinking.
For example, the following e-mail would likely not generate a reply with many of the famous names at the Institute: Hi professor. I’d love to stop by sometime to talk about < topic X >. Are you available?
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