Deep Work by Cal Newport - a fantastic self-help book. Before I share some of my big takeaways from the book, here are some definitions that I think are very helpful in the distinction between “Deep Work” and “Shallow Work”:
“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.”
“Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.”
“The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.”
My big takeaways:
In order to produce things of value, you need to be able to do “deep work”. The thing is, this is easier said than done. In society today, it’s hard to gauge what our outputs are, what our “productivity” really is. So, we have this idea:
“Busyness as a Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in tier jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.”
It’s very easy to fall into this trap of making yourself busy so it seems like you're productive. Being aware of this, and setting goals, and benchmarks for your work, are ways to not fall into this trap!
One way of “going deep” explained in the book that I really resonated with was to think of your work as your craft. What is the job you are doing that takes extreme skill and patience and hard work? I majored in computer science, and I’m a research software engineer. For me, my craft is writing clean, concise, and efficient code to create physics simulation programs.
Essentially, it’s hard to “go deep” in society these days. However, there are concrete steps you can take to help you go deep that are described in the book.
I will most likely write more of an in-depth summary of the book, but for those of you that are interested in increasing your focus, and going deep, I highly suggest reading this book!