Deep Work by Cal Newport
Last updated: 18 January 2025
“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.”
highlight @ loc 46“Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.”
highlight loc 78“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.”
highlight loc 89“exposing a massive economic and personal opportunity for the few who recognize the potential of resisting this trend and prioritizing depth”
highlight loc 93“To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things.”
highlight loc 148“To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of producing—a task that requires depth.”
highlight loc 154“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.”
highlight loc 166“A deep life is a good life.”
highlight loc 207“Though an increasing number of people will lose in this new economy as their skill becomes automatable or easily outsourced, there are others who will not only survive, but thrive”
highlight loc 240““The key question will be: are you good at working with intelligent machines or not?””
highlight loc 252“talent is not a commodity you can buy in bulk and combine to reach the needed levels: There’s a premium to being the best.”
highlight loc 268“Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy 1. The ability to quickly master hard things. 2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.”
highlight loc 305“the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.””
highlight loc 364“(1) your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you’re trying to improve or an idea you’re trying to master; (2) you receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it’s most productive.”
highlight loc 372“batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches.”
highlight loc 413“also batches his attention on a smaller time scale.”
highlight loc 417“High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)”
highlight loc 426““People experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor performance on that next task,””
highlight loc 449“big trends in business today actively decrease people’s ability to perform deep work, even though the benefits promised by these trends (e.g., increased serendipity, faster responses to requests, and more exposure) are arguably dwarfed by the benefits that flow from a commitment to deep work (e.g., the ability to learn hard things fast and produce at an elite level).”
highlight loc 560“The Principle of Least Resistance: In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment.”
highlight loc 620“Feynman was adamant in avoiding administrative duties because he knew they would only decrease his ability to do the one thing that mattered most in his professional life: “to do real good physics work.””
highlight loc 665“Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.”
highlight loc 686“deep work is hard and shallow work is easier, that in the absence of clear goals for your job, the visible busyness that surrounds shallow work becomes self-preserving, and that our culture has developed a belief that if a behavior relates to “the Internet,” then it’s good—regardless of its impact on our ability to produce valuable things. All of these trends are enabled by the difficulty of directly measuring the value of depth or the cost of ignoring it.”
highlight loc 758“your world is the outcome of what you pay attention”
highlight loc 847““concentration so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems.”)”
highlight loc 854“To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction.”
highlight loc 925“Any pursuit—be it physical or cognitive—that supports high levels of skill can also generate a sense of sacredness.”
highlight loc 960“You don’t need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work.”
highlight loc 983“The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and 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.”
highlight loc 1066“there are many different ways to integrate deep work into your schedule, and it’s therefore worth taking the time to find an approach that makes sense for you.”
highlight loc 1092“monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling. This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations.”
highlight loc 1105“bimodal philosophy of deep work. This philosophy asks that you divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else.”
highlight loc 1151“The bimodal philosophy believes that deep work can produce extreme productivity, but only if the subject dedicates enough time to such endeavors to reach maximum cognitive intensity—the state in which real breakthroughs occur.”
highlight loc 1156“Another common way to implement the rhythmic philosophy is to replace the visual aid of the chain method with a set starting time that you use every day for deep work.”
highlight loc 1192“fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule, the journalist philosophy.”
highlight loc 1241“not for the deep work novice.”
highlight loc 1243“Their rituals minimized the friction in this transition to depth, allowing them to go deep more easily and stay in the state longer.”
highlight loc 1283“Where you’ll work and for how long.”
highlight loc 1287“How you’ll work once you start to work.”
highlight loc 1292“How you’ll support your work.”
highlight loc 1296“the grand gesture. The concept is simple: By leveraging a radical change to your normal environment, coupled perhaps with a significant investment of effort or money, all dedicated toward supporting a deep work task, you increase the perceived importance of the task.”
highlight loc 1319“This combination of soundproofed offices connected to large common areas yields a hub-and-spoke architecture of innovation in which both serendipitous encounter and isolated deep thinking are supported.”
highlight loc 1417“For some types of problems, working with someone else at the proverbial shared whiteboard can push you deeper than if you were working alone. The presence of the other party waiting for your next insight—be it someone physically in the same room or collaborating with you virtually—can short-circuit the natural instinct to avoid depth.”
highlight loc 1440“Discipline #1: Focus on the Wildly Important”
highlight loc 1477“Discipline #2: Act on the Lead Measures”
highlight loc 1488“Lag measures describe the thing you’re ultimately trying to improve.”
highlight loc 1490“Lead measures, on the other hand, “measure the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures.””
highlight loc 1493“Discipline #3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard”
highlight loc 1502“Discipline #4: Create a Cadence of Accountability”
highlight loc 1517“heuristic: At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning”
highlight loc 1558“providing your conscious brain time to rest enables your unconscious mind to take a shift sorting through your most complex professional challenges.”
highlight loc 1584“The core mechanism of this theory is the idea that you can restore your ability to direct your attention if you give this activity a rest.”
highlight loc 1610“your capacity for deep work in a given day is limited.”
highlight loc 1631“support your commitment to shutting down with a strict shutdown ritual that you use at the end of the workday to maximize the probability that you succeed. In more detail, this ritual should ensure that every incomplete task, goal, or project has been reviewed and that for each you have confirmed that either (1) you have a plan you trust for its completion, or (2) it’s captured in a place where it will be revisited when the time is right. The process”
highlight loc 1643“The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained.”
highlight loc 1706“two goals: improving your ability to concentrate intensely and overcoming your desire for distraction.”
highlight loc 1733“schedule the occasional break from focus to give in to distraction.”
highlight loc 1754“The key here isn’t to avoid or even to reduce the total amount of time you spend engaging in distracting behavior, but is instead to give yourself plenty of opportunities throughout your evening to resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom.”
highlight loc 1801“Estimate how long you’d normally put aside for an obligation of this type, then give yourself a hard deadline that drastically reduces this”
highlight loc 1831“Roosevelt dashes leverage artificial deadlines to help you systematically increase the level you can regularly achieve—providing, in some sense, interval training for the attention centers of your brain.”
highlight loc 1842“The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally—walking, jogging, driving, showering—and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem.”
highlight loc 1859“Suggestion #1: Be Wary of Distractions and Looping”
highlight loc 1878“Suggestion #2: Structure Your Deep Thinking”
highlight loc 1889““We found that one of the biggest differences between memory athletes and the rest of us is in a cognitive ability that’s not a direct measure of memory at all but of attention,””
highlight loc 1918“If you don’t attempt to weigh pros against cons, but instead use any glimpse of some potential benefit as justification for unrestrained use of a tool, then you’re unwittingly crippling your ability to succeed in the world of knowledge work.”
highlight loc 2036“more careful tool curation”
highlight loc 2045“The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.”
highlight loc 2085“Whereas the any-benefit mind-set identifies any potential positive impact as justification for using a tool, the craftsman variant requires that these positive impacts affect factors at the core of what’s important to you and that they outweigh the negatives.”
highlight loc 2087“you should have a small number of goals for both the personal and professional areas of your life.”
highlight loc 2129“Once you’ve identified these goals, list for each the two or three most important activities that help you satisfy the goal.”
highlight loc 2130“ask whether the use of the tool has a substantially positive impact, a substantially negative impact, or little impact on your regular and successful participation in the activity”
highlight loc 2136“The Law of the Vital Few*: In many settings, 80 percent of a given effect is due to just 20 percent of the possible causes.”
highlight loc 2195“If you service low-impact activities, therefore, you’re taking away time you could be spending on higher-impact activities. It’s a zero-sum game.”
highlight loc 2211“After thirty days of this self-imposed network isolation, ask yourself the following two questions about each of the services you temporarily quit: 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?”
highlight loc 2243“in return for receiving (for the most part, undeserved) attention from your friends and followers, you’ll return the favor by lavishing (similarly undeserved) attention on them.”
highlight loc 2277“when it comes to your relaxation, don’t default to whatever catches your attention at the moment, but instead dedicate some advance thinking to the question of how you want to spend your “day within a day.””
highlight loc 2331“The strategies that follow are designed to help you ruthlessly identify the shallowness in your current schedule, then cull it down to minimum levels—leaving more time for the deep efforts that ultimately matter most.”
highlight loc 2396“Schedule every minute of your day.”
highlight loc 2440“I would go so far as to argue that someone following this combination of comprehensive scheduling and a willingness to adapt or modify the plan as needed will likely experience more creative insights than someone who adopts a more traditionally “spontaneous” approach where the day is left open and unstructured”
highlight loc 2487“How long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task?”
highlight loc 2514“Once you know where your activities fall on the deep-to-shallow scale, bias your time toward the former.”
highlight loc 2543“What percentage of my time should be spent on shallow work?”
highlight loc 2549“fixed-schedule productivity, as I fix the firm goal of not working past a certain time, then work backward to find productivity strategies that allow me to satisfy this declaration.”
highlight loc 2594“A commitment to fixed-schedule productivity, however, shifts you into a scarcity mind-set.”
highlight loc 2650“Your default answer becomes no, the bar for gaining access to your time and attention rises precipitously, and you begin to organize the efforts that pass these obstacles with a ruthless efficiency.”
highlight loc 2651“sender filter, as I’m asking my correspondents to filter themselves before attempting to contact me.”
highlight loc 2681“consider sender filters as a way of reclaiming some control over your time and attention.”
highlight loc 2729“What is the project represented by this message, and what is the most efficient (in terms of messages generated) process for bringing this project to a successful conclusion?”
highlight loc 2743“started by identifying the project implied by the message.”
highlight loc 2764“process that gets us from the current state to a desired outcome with a minimum of messages required. The final step was to write a reply that clearly describes this process and where we stand.”
highlight loc 2766“Do not reply to an e-mail message if any of the following applies: • It’s ambiguous or otherwise makes it hard for you to generate a reasonable response.”
highlight loc 2803“It’s not a question or proposal that interests you. • Nothing really good would happen if you did respond and nothing really bad would happen if you didn’t.”
highlight loc 2804