Book Review - Deep Work

I finished reading Cal Newport’s book, “Deep work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World”. The subtitle is indicative of what the book is about. The books starts with a few case studies of people who have left their mark in the world and their working style and develop a bit of vocabulary. The author then classifies two types of activities that one may call as work - “Deep work” and “shallow work”, deep work being something that leaves a lasting impact like writing a paper that explains a new way of doing something or a new music composition or work that produces value to customers, depending on one’s profession. Shallow work is the peripheral things one does in the day, which may or may not be connected to the main work. This can be chatting with other co-workers over coffee, reading/writing email, browsing social networking websites or other seemingly important websites (like hacker news or reddit for programmers..). He also talks about his own quest for deep work, producing more output and at the same time working not beyond 5pm on the work days.

I didn’t make detailed notes while reading the book. But these are some points I recall.

• Working at quiet places as opposed to open offices (and wearing headphones!) to get some deep work done.
• Author argues successfully (Imho) that casual and aimless browsing in between work, when practives for many days and is habituated “weakens the mind’s general ability to resist distraction, making deep work difficult later when you really want to concentrate”. From my own experience, I totally agree.
• “Put more thought into your leisure time”
• The author touches upon the idea of a “packing party”, which I never heard about before. It sounded like a wonderful idea to get rid of things one rarely use.
• The author argues that blocking websites during work time and unblocking it after work (during leisure time) does not work and talks about the idea of a “planned relaxation”.. but won’t it cause more exhaustion? Isn’t leisure meant to be unplanned? To the contrary, it is argued in the book that it will leave you with a relaxed and fullfilled mind next day.
• “Don’t use the internet for entertainment”.
• Ask two questions on your social networking habits, after abstaining from it for 30 days: 1. Would the last thirty days have been notably better if i had been able to use this service? 2. Did people care that I wasn’t using this service?
• The book also talks about scheduling the day upto minutes – though the method suggested does not go down to that level, instead divides the days into chunks of half an hour.
• Avoiding the “conversational” email for “process oriented” email. It took me a while to get this, but the idea is to make the “round trips” of emails short and there by write more thoughtful emails where both the parties get to “work” rather than just one of the parties. Again, this makes sense for work email than personal email.

Overall, I liked the book a lot and hope to put at least some of the ideas in the book to practice.