This book is for everyone who wants to improve his or her efficiency and performance. In this distracted world, it is hard for us to concentrate fully on one task for hours without checking our messenger or daydreaming. Resisting those distractions is the key to success. This book provides a lot of constructive insights and rules for work deeply. I am eager to implement them and experience the result. Here, I will try to write the main information concisely.
What is deep work? Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your capabilities to their limit.
Conversely, what is shallow work? Noncognitively demanding tasks, often performed while distracted.
The ability to perform deep work is becoming rare at the same time it is becoming valuable. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and make it to the core of their working life, will thrive.
How you can thrive in the new economy
The gap between machine and human abilities is shrinking. Although many people will lose in this new economy as their skill becomes automatable, there are others who will not only survive but thrive — becoming more valuable than before. Three groups that will fall on the lucrative side:
- The high-skilled workers: Those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines.
- The superstars: Those who are the best at what they do. Talent<being the best
- The owners: Those with access to capital.
2 core abilities that push you to succeed:
- Quickly master hard things.
- Produce the absolute best stuff you are capable of, in terms of both quality and speed.
If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive. No matter how skilled or talented you are. These 2 core abilities depend on your ability to perform deep work.
Attention residue
When you switch from some task A to another task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow. The residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the former task. This Residue gets especially thick if your work on task A was not finished, but even if you finish task A before moving on, your attention remains divided for a while. Attention residue leads you to perform poorly on the next task.
Drain the shallows
The depth-destroying habits such as immediate e-mail responses and an active social media presence can seem crucial for convincing yourself and others that you’re doing your job well. When we are doing these shallow works, time is consumed easily. The shallow work’s damage is often underestimated and its importance is often overestimated. In order to produce the best, eliminate shallow work and replace this time with more deep work. Once you have hit your deep work limit (usually four hours) a day, you’ll experience rewards.
Quit social media
To support deep work often requires the rejection of much of what is new and high-tech. We live in an era where anything Internet-related is understood by default to be innovative and necessary. The companies that profit from your attention have succeeded with a masterful marketing coup: Confessing you that if you don’t use their products, you might miss out.
The reason that binds people to social media is the idea that people want to hear what you have to say, and they might be disappointed if you suddenly leave them. When you know the people who follow your Instagram account volunteered to hear what you have to say, you will believe that your activities on these services are important — this is a powerfully addictive feeling.
“I’ll pay attention to what you say if you pay attention to what I say regardless of its value. You “like” my status update and I’ll “like” yours.”
Social media services are just products, developed by private companies, funded lavishly, marketed carefully, and designed to capture then sell your personal information and attention to advertisers. They can be fun, but in the scheme of your life and what you want to accomplish, they will derail you from something deeper.
Deep work is meaningful
We tend to place a lot of emphasis on our circumstances, assuming that what happens to us (or fails to happen) determines how we feel. The small-scale details of how you spend your day aren’t that important, because what matters are the large-scale outcomes. Our brains instead construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to. Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love -is the sum of what you focus on.
If you keep interrupting your evening to check and respond to social media, even if this work consumes a small amount of time, they prevent you from reaching deeper relaxation in which attention restoration can occur. When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done. Incomplete tasks dominate your attention.
When it comes to your relaxation, don’t default to whatever catches your attention at the moment, but instead dedicate thinking to the question of how you want to spend your day. If you haven’t given yourself something to do in a given moment, the useless websites always beckon as an appealing option. If you give your mind something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you will end the day more fulfilled, and begin the next one more relaxed, than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in semiconscious and unstructured Web surfing. A workday driving by the shallow is likely to be a draining and upsetting day, even if most of that shallow things seem harmless or fun. You both should and can make deliberate use of your time outside work, especially reducing the impact of network tools on your ability to perform deep work.
Not only will this preserve your ability to resist destruction and concentrate, but you might even fulfill what it means to live and not just exist.
Prioritize
People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They initiate a much larger part of their brain that is irrelevant to the task at hand.
Law of vital few:
In many settings, 80% of a given effect is due to just 20% of the possible outcome. You could probably list 10–15 beneficial activities, it’s the top 2 or 3 that make most of the difference in whether or not you succeed with the goal.
- Identify a small number of main goals in your professional and personal life.
- List for each the 2 or 3 most important activities that help you satisfy the goal.
- Consider the network tools you will use.
- Use this tool only if its positive impact outweighs its negative impact.
Ritualize
You have a limited amount of willpower that becomes vanished as you use it. Add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration. If you suddenly decide, when you are browsing, to switch your attention to a cognitively demanding task, you will draw heavily from your finite willpower. If you deployed smart routines and rituals you would require much less willpower to start and keep going. The rituals minimize the friction in this transition to depth, allowing them to go deep more easily and stay in the state longer.
Any rituals must address:
- Where you will work and for how long. (If you can identify a location used only for depth, a positive effect can be even greater.)
- How you will work once you start to work.
- How you’ll support your work: enough food of the right type to maintain energy, and do exercise, etc.
Make grand gestures
If you invest effort or money all dedicated to supporting a deep work task, you will increase the importance of the task. This boost in importance reduces your procrastination and delivers motivation and energy. It’s not just the change of environment or seeking of quiet. The dominant force is the psychology of commuting so seriously to the task.
Schedule your day
We spend much of our day on autopilot, not giving much thought to what we are doing with our time. When you have fewer hours to get your stuff done, you usually spend them more wisely. The only way to get the deep task done in time is to work with great intensity — no email breaks, no daydreaming, no browsing, no repeated trips to the refrigerator.
Schedule in advance when you will use the Internet and then avoid it altogether outside these times:
The issue you may face is you will need to go online to look for some information or message that you need to continue your current task. If your next internet block doesn’t start for a while, you may think about looking up the information then returning to your offline block. You must resist this temptation. The internet is seductive: when you want to retrieve one message from your Facebook, you’ll find it hard to not glance at the other notifications.
Schedule every minute of your day:
Assign your tasks to every 30 minutes. You should recognize that almost definitely you’re going to underestimate how much time you require for most tasks. Over time, you will accurately predict the time tasks will require. If you are not sure how long a given activity might take, assign your expected time, then follow this with an additional 1 hour or 30 mins. If you need more time for the preceding activity, use this additional block. If you finish the activity on time, have an alternate use already assigned for the extra block(nonurgent tasks). By scheduling your day, you can determine how much time you are actually spending in shallow activities.
Quantify the depth of every activity:
Tasks that leverage your expertise tend to be deep tasks, and they return more value per time spent, and stretch your abilities, leading to improvement. A task that doesn’t leverage your expertise can be understood as shallow.
Conclusion
It is obvious that the ability to pay attention on one important task for hours and produce the best outcome a person can is crucial. Although people want to work deeply, they keep spending much time in the shallow work and can’t prioritize the urgent one and focus on it deeply. I agree that social media is making a big wall between people and deep work. After I read the “Quit Social Media” part, I have this feeling of hating Instagram, TikTok, and whatever that is useless and debilitates my ability ot perform deep work. I really want to take action and make changes to my life. I am trying to shedule my day, resist depth-destroying habits, and spend less time on social media. It is hard to get used to it. Deep work requires hard work and drastic changes to my habits, and I hope that this hard work is worth it.
A deep life is not just economically lucrative, but also a life well lived.
