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Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World - Cal Newport #41

Closed amsaha closed 4 years ago

amsaha commented 4 years ago

TL;DR on youtube https://youtu.be/2ybOJMibAbA

amsaha commented 4 years ago

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

This book can be revisited and used as a reference whenever you feel overwhelmed.

TL;DR Four main rules:

  1. Work Deeply: Carve out blocks of time where you can be distraction free. Beginners 1hr, experts 4hrs. More than that is usually not possible, even for expert deep workers. There are several approaches:
    • Monastic - completely cut off - Knuth does that several people do that. These people are often not reachable via email (at all). Not practical for most people.
    • Bimodal - somewhat like sabbatical - go into monastic mode for some periods of the time (say one semester for research (deep) and the other for teaching).
    • Rythmic - setup some specific period at a regular interval, say every weekday. Most people will find this practical.
    • Journalistic - whenever you find a window, work deeply. Very few people can master it cause context switching into deep work takes time and so frequent context switching is not usually practical for most. For certain things, it might be doable my everyone.

Whichever approach, keep tab on how many hours you are putting in and whether the cadence is maintained or not. Don't keep goals of achieving something (lag measure) but instead of putting in the hours (lead measure) on what is important - goals will be reached.

Try to finish your workday by 5:30pm or 6pm. Things done late at night can be done the next day without much impact. Usually, your efficiency will go up by doing stuff within the normal workday and not exhausting yourself with work.

  1. Embrace Boredom: Don't be in the habit of checking your email or the internet whenever you feel like. Let there be boredom, the mind uses that beautifully. Use internet in blocks of time. Don't keep checking smartphone continuously. My tip: Better not to keep smartphone always on you and use the Do Not Disturb setting on smartphones during blocks of time such as in the evening when time is better spent with family as well as during periods that you have charted out for deep work.
  2. Quit Social Media: Enough said :-)
  3. Drain the Shallows: Be methodical with email, other engagements such as travel, reviewing, etc. Try to get away from anything that does not help in your deeper, time engaging goals. Divide day into blocks of important (deep) work and other for shallow (email, review, etc.).