deep-work

Table of Contents

Work

Deep Work

Part 1

Introduction

Chapter 1 Deep Work is Valuable

Three kinds of Winners in the Knowledge Economy

Highly Skilled Workers

  • Highly skilled workers use technology to amplify their output to do things that a normal worker cannot do; like using programming to create new products.

Superstars

  • You cannot stack up average workers to create the output of a superstar.
  • A Superstar’s output is categorically different from those of an average worker.
  • The open economy is winner-take-all so mediocre work is poorly compensated, whereas Deep Work is highly compensated.

The Owners

  • Those who have capital and make smart investments in rising winner-take-all companies will make more more returns on their capital.

How to become a Winner in the new Economy

  • The ability to quickly master new things.

  • The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

  • Deep Work helps us quickly learn hard things, and produce at an elite level.

High Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) * (Intensity of Focus).

Attention Residue

  • Frequently task switching leads to some of your attention being left behind on the previous task, lowering productivity.

Chapter 2: Deep Work is rare

The metric black hole

  • No one knows how much email costs your team, but for a big organization it might cost millions of dollars, if each employee takes one hour per day to respond to/read emails.

The principal of least resistance

  • Email is easier than not using email.
  • It makes you feel more productive, even when you’re not.
  • People tend to do easier things first.

Internet Faith

  • People tend to believe technology is all good, even if it is a set of tradeoffs.

Chapter 3: Deep Work is meaningful

Part 2

Rule 1: Work Deeply

Why don’t we all work deeply?

  • Every day we fight our desires, and so we can’t work deeply.
  • We must add routine and rituals to help fend off our desires.

Decide on Your Depth Philosophy

Monastic

  • Donald Knuth is unreachable my e-mail, he has a PO box that an assistant filters for him if you want to reach him.
  • He spends all of his time on arcane aspects of computer science, only doing deep work.

Bimodal

  • Carl Jung would follow this, where he had divided his time into deep and shallow work times.
  • You must allow yourself enough time to do shallow work (run a clinic, talking to other academics) while allowing yourself enough time for your own deep work.

Rhythmic

  • Try to chain habits together every day to do more output in a set amount of time per day.

Journalistic

  • Walter Isaacson would spend his few pockets of time (30m-1h) writing his biographies (like Steve Jobs).

Ritualize

  • Make rituals to create a boundary between work and relaxation so you can recharge during relaxation time.
  • Try to find out where to work and how long.
  • How long to work.
  • How to support work.

Making Grand Gestures

  • Check yourself into a grand hotel and burn money to get your last manuscript done.
  • Spend a lot of money on a plane ticket to another place just to get that deep work needed.

Don’t Work Alone

  • MIT used to have a lab that would house all kinds of scientists, and this serendipitous building created many innovations of the 20th century, like radar, chomsky grammar, and video games.
  • Talking with colleagues in front of a whiteboard, exchanging ideas leads to great innovations.

Execute like a Business

  1. Focus on the wildly Important
  • The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.
  1. Act on the Lead Measures
  • Lag Measures describe
  • Lead measures predict
  1. Keep a Compelling Scoreboard
  • Measure the correct metrics and diligently keep score.
  1. Create a Cadence of Accountability
  • Keep a rhythm to allow the team to own a wildly important goal.

Be Lazy

  • Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as Vitamin D is to the body. It is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.
  1. Downtime Aids Insights

  • The scientific literature believes that some problems are better untangled with unconscious thought.

  • A group that was distracted while making a big decision instead of one that concentrated seemed to do better.

  1. Downtime helps recharge the energy needed to work deeply.
  • Simply taking a walk in nature allows us to unwind and replenish our directed attention which is needed to work deeply.
  1. The Work that Evening Downtime Replaces is not that important
  • Deliberate practice can only happen up to four hours per day. Thus, when we take a break in the evenings, we should, for that work we’re replacing is low quality.

Rule 2: Embrace Boredom

Don’t take Breaks from Distraction. Instead Take Breaks from Focus

  • Allow yourself time with the internet in some chunks.

Work Like Teddy Roosevelt

  • Identify a deep task that you’d like done for the day that’s high on your priority list.
  • Then, give yourself a hard deadline that drastically lowers the time required for this.

Meditate Productively

  • Take long walks with focused thought in order to complete tasks you need to get done.
  • Make sure not to let thoughts stray, keeping a laser like focus on the task at hand.
  1. Beware of Distractions and Looping (reiterating priors to a problem)
  2. Structure your Deep Thinking (start with priors, move onto results, then a conclusion).

Memorize a Deck of Cards

  • To Memorize a deck of cards, put each one of the cards in a room in your house in your mind. Then, stick each card in the area where you would go in order.

For example, taking off your shoes, then sitting down, etc.

Rule 3: Quit Social Media

Apply the Law of the Vital Few

  • Identify the main high level goals in your professional and personal life:

  • List the two or three most important activities that help you satisfy the goal.

  • List out if your tools help you substantially meet these goals, if not, purge them.

  • 80% of a given effect is due to just 20% of the possible causes.

Don’t use the internet to entertain yourself

  • Mental Facilities do not tire like an arm or a leg; self improvement in the hours after work help you out more than doing shallow work or distracting yourself.

Rule 4: Drain the Shallows

Schedule every part of your day

  • At the beginning of every day, cut your day into little blocks of time, and assign activities to the blocks.

Quantify the Depth of Every Activity

  • Quantify the work that is required to be deep, by comparing how many months it would take to get a college undergrad to speed on the task. The less time required, the shallower the work.

Ask your Boss for a Shallow Work Budget

  • Ask your boss for a ratio of limiting shallow work

Become Hard to Reach

  • Turn your email into something that only requires a response if something is interesting; Make people more reluctant to send you email unless it’s interesting, and make it so there’s no guarantee you’ll respond.

  • This will help cut out email from your life.