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Book Club

Deep Work

Deep Work by Cal Newport poses the idea that “Deep Work” is extremely important in today’s work environment, but also completely underestimated in our nonstop connected world of distraction. Deep work is work that requires focus rather than distraction. I came into the book agreeing with the premise, which makes the beginning half quite unnecessary as it tries to convince you that Deep Work is valuable and necessary. I do wish that part of the book was condensed to a chapter and more time is spent on how best to achieve Deep Work.

In the second half, we get to techniques to achieve deep work. It starts with 4 major approaches. One is the monastic approach where someone truly just goes off and stops interacting with the distractions. The second is bimodal which is basically the monastic approach, but for a limited time. The third is rhythmic, where you set aside time each day for deep work. The final style is called journalistic where you just fit deep work in wherever you can.

For the vast majority of people, I’d say rhythmic is the only realistic option. Journalistic is way too wishful. Everyone thinks they can just fit in some deep work whenever they have spare time, but it takes a massive amount of discipline to do it rather than browse on your phone for the 100th time that day. There are certainly some journalists that are so well practiced in producing content that they can just do it this way (hence the name), but for most people, it ain’t happening.

Monastic and bimodal are way too disconnected from everything for me. There may be some professions where you can get away with it, such as a successful author, but most people need to do a normal job that requires communication. Unsuccessful authors simply can’t afford to disconnect from everything. Maybe they can take a week off and use vacation time as their deep work time, but a single week is rarely enough time to create something significant. Taking a single day each week away from all distractions would also count as bimodal and that seems a lot more possible. If you really want to grind out some deep work, it could be a general method to do it.

Still, for me, rhythmic makes the most sense. Dedicate an hour or two each day to deep work where you will ignore everything else. Most people can afford to be away from distractions for an hour at a time and if you get good at it, you can get into some good flow and get some real work done.

The author also recommends some further ideas to improve your deep work, such as Jerry Seinfeld’s “don’t break the chain” method. Simply put out a sheet of paper with dates on it in an obvious place. Then put an X on each day you do your deep work task. It doesn’t take long before you’ve got a chain that you feel motivated to keep. I’ve done it with exercise and it’s surprisingly effective. That visible chain can really work wonders and you don’t want to lose it.

The author also has other specific methods to improve your deep work, but I’ll let you read the book to get those.

Overall, I’d recommend the book. It should give some general ideas about what you should be doing with your working life and also some specific ideas on how to do it. There’s plenty of good information in a reasonable short book, so well worth the time to read or listen to.