Review: Deep Work by Cal Newport

As I mentioned in my last book review, I was hesitant to start a blog for the simple reason of the social media time necessary to market and get readership.  I’m not a fan.

In his book, “Deep Work”, Cal Newport lays out some great reasons why social media, among other things, is indeed a hindrance to doing the work you need to do to stand out.

So you’re probably asking yourself what is deep work, and am I doing it?  Cal defines it as:

 

 

He starts out by arguing, to me successfully, that modern knowledge workers are increasingly having their time chopped into unproductive slivers.  Email and social media are the two biggest evil-doers in this chopping.

Email, social media, and other ADD-like tools create shallow work.  How does Cal define shallow work?

 

At the core, Cal’s hypothesis is that deep work is becoming increasingly rare more and more each day.  And the ability to do deep work – to create that unique value that’s hard to replicate – is what will get you ahead.

He goes into his own example of increasing his output of peer reviewed papers from 4 per year to 9 per year – all the while writing a book.  This is indeed impressive for a professor, and I like it that he’s walking the talk of his advice in the book.  He also claims he created this output while rarely working after 5:30 and never on weekends.  Impressive indeed.

After describing deep and shallow work in the beginning, he then goes on to teach how to cultivate deep work by training your brain and transforming your work habits in your professional life.

 

How Do You Do Deep Work?

He goes into four approaches to deep work:

• Monastic Approach – He uses novelist Neal Stephenson as an example.  Stephenson doesn’t answer emails and asks fans to please not send them.  He basically hermits himself for long periods of time to write his novels.  He claims that if his fans want good novels, then they need to leave him alone.

• Bimodal Approach – This philosophy asks that you divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined and relatively long  stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else.  They key here to the bimodal approach is that it will work only if the enough time is dedicated to reach maximum cognitive flow — the state in which real productivity and breakthrough happens.

• Rhythmic Approach – This approach is more of a scheduling based approach.  It’s about cultivating a regular habit to do deep work, but while still allowing yourself to disconnect from it and take care of shallow things.  The rhymic approach allows for much shorter stretches of deep work than the bimodal, but more of them.  This is the approach I’ve fallen into, not necessarily by choice.

• Journalistic Approach – He cites writer Walter Isaacson here who can jump in and out of deep and shallow work successfully.  Isaacson often uses one hour stretches in between other work to hammer out an article or a few pages of a book.  It’s called this because journalists have chaotic schedules with often tight deadlines.  This approach is not for the weak.  Only those with the strongest discipline and ability to transition in and out of different tasks without leaving residue will succeed here.

Who can benefit from this book?  If what you do relies on delivering substantive results and output, then Cal’s advice can help you tremendously.  I do believe that email and social media prevent so many of us from being as productive as we should be.  Clinical evidence also shows they may be re-wiring our brains.

On the other hand, if your job is more task or production focused as more jobs these days seem to increasingly be, then his advice will likely not help too much or could possibly even hinder.  For instance, someone who’s job is being a virtual assistant for online properties would likely not benefit from this book, plain and simple.

 

Some Quotes

“Network Tools are distracting us from work that requires unbroken concentration, while simultaneously degrading our capacity to remain focused.”

“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. “

“Three to four hours a day, 5 days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.”

“Our technologies are racing ahead but many of our skills in organization are lagging behind.”

“Attention residue comes from switching from one task to another too fast”

“Shallow work becomes self-preserving”

“Great creative minds think like artists but work like accountants.”

“Your mind can be trained to resist distraction. Most things on the internet do not allow that and increase distraction”

 

Verdict

Overall I greatly enjoyed the book, but have some criticisms…  

In my opinion he often overdoes it when he bashes social media and sometimes the internet in general.  I agree they have a lot of downsides, especially social media.  But he admits that he sounds like a curmudgeon at times.  I guess I can too 😉  Everything in moderation.

In his language it’s clear to see that Cal knows some of the things he’s recommending are pretty impractical and are only going to be successfully practiced by those with discipline in the top 1%.  Cal is clearly in the top 1%.

Cal has no social media accounts and only blogs online. He doesn’t answer emails very often.  I get it that this “offline” strategy has worked for him.  But I’m also wondering how much help his books got because he’s an MIT-trained Computer Science Professor who now teaches at another elite college? 

I’m not saying his books aren’t good – I spent the time to read this one and hours more doing this review.  But any old John Q. Public without the credentials of Mr. Newport might not be wise to stay offline and hope his book does well.  That’s my counter-hunch, maybe I’m wrong.

Cal is a super intelligent, super disciplined person.  He’s earned it, I’m not knocking him.  But would this “stay offline” strategy work for someone who just got out of community college and is struggling to be a freelance writer? 

Despite these shortcomings, I recommend this book, especially if your job demands that you create substantive output.  There’s a ton of great practical advice on how to work smarter and avoid distraction.  And we can all likely improve in those areas.

ISBN – 978-1455586691
My Rating: 7/10

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