Deep Work

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book really highlights the importance of achieving continuous periods of concentration, not just as means of productivity but as well as means of living a meaningful life, this skills is particularly rare and important in the modern knowledge worker economy.
In modern society, there are many "threats" that we need to avoid constantly in order to achieve periods of Deep Work. Some of them are to avoid context switching, social media (internet addiction in general), not being able to say no, current workplaces are loud and crowded - which won't allow people to dive into periods of deep work, companies forcing their employees on being available at all times (Email, Slack, etc.).
Positive world changing ideas have mostly came from people who have achieved long periods of concentration, these includes the creation of the modern computer OS from people like Bill Gates, artists, scientists, etc.

🎨 Impressions

Certainly one of the books that has changed my life the most. Particularly around ritualising productivity, it has allowed me to develop solid and healthy habits in my ways of working.

It also provide me with some meaning in my life, it helped me to understand in order to achieve meaningful goals - Deep Work is necessary.

Who Should Read It?

I believe this work should be compulsory reading for anyone who wants to achieve something meaningful with their lives. Understand how to gather those abilities proves absolutely essential in this time and age.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

Radically changed the rituals in how I approach work and rest.
Made me realise that for most people being able to achieve great things is a matter of habits.
I feel way happier being less distracted in my life, just saying no to more things and living simpler feels better to me.
I felt that since I started achieving more periods of Deep Work I have been able to radically improve in my career, at a much faster rate than before.

✍️ My Top 3 Quotes

To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work. If you don't cultivate this ability, you're likely to fall behind as technology advances.
psychologists, Ericsson and the other researchers in his field are not interested in why deliberate practice works; they’re just identifying it as an effective behavior. In the intervening decades since Ericsson’s first major papers on the topic, however, neuroscientists have been exploring the physical mechanisms that drive people’s improvements on hard tasks. As the journalist Daniel Coyle surveys in his 2009 book, The Talent Code, these scientists increasingly believe the answer includes myelin—a layer of fatty tissue that grows around neurons, acting like an insulator that allows the cells to fire faster and cleaner. To understand the role of myelin in improvement, keep in mind that skills, be they intellectual or physical, eventually reduce down to brain circuits. This new science of performance argues that you get better at a skill as you develop more myelin around the relevant neurons, allowing the corresponding circuit to fire more effortlessly and effectively. To be great at something is to be well myelinated.
Scientists can watch this effect in action all the way down to the neurological level. Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen, to name one such example, used an fMRI scanner to study the brain behavior of subjects presented with both positive and negative imagery. She found that for young people, their amygdala (a center of emotion) fired with activity at both types of imagery. When she instead scanned the elderly, the amygdala fired only for the positive images. Carstensen hypothesizes that the elderly subjects had trained the prefrontal cortex to inhibit the amygdala in the presence of negative stimuli. These elderly subjects were not happier because their life circumstances were better than those of the young subjects; they were instead happier because they had rewired their brains to ignore the negative and savor the positive. By skillfully managing their attention, they improved their world without changing anything concrete about it.

📒 Summary + Notes

Will Power is finite

We all have a finite amount of Will Power available, the sooner we depleted the harder, if not impossible it will be to achieve periods of being focused. As well as knowing that the experts don't spend time thinking about the things they have to do, but instead just get to do it, don't wait for motivation to strike them as a lightning bolt, they just know they have to get to work, and this includes some of the most creative people in the world.

In the current world economy your attention is worth a lot, so many different companies and products will compete for it, as will power is limited - the more tools you have around you trying to pull your attention the harder it will be to achieve meaningful periods of work.

Ritualise

In order to achieve periods of Deep Work consistently, we need to develop rituals around it, just wanting it or having good intentions won't make it happen. We need to strictly stay away from distractions and develop a life designed to achieve these periods of Deep Works consistently, it is necessary to acknowledge that will power is finite and that context switching is really time expensive.

Deep Work as means of being creative

Quoted from David Brooks "Great creative minds think like artists but work like accountants". This is not the first time I've heard this, having heard conversations with Tim Ferris with some of the most constantly creative human beings, you realize that is no coincidence that these humans produce at such level. They are extremely diligent about their work habits, they behave like professionals, they show up to work without waiting for motivation to strike.

Effective resting as means of being productive

Your attention gets drained, and our bodies need time to "replenish it", trying to do more work in a day will effectively reduce our effectiveness the following day, to the point that you will be way less productive the following day - and the extra push would not have been worth it.

ART - Attention restoration theory. A theory that claims that spending time in nature can improve your ability to concentrate.

Walking in nature is just one of many ways to restore the ability to concentrate. But so can be listening to music, cooking, talking to a friend, playing a game with your family, going for a run, etc.

Research pointed in the book indicate that resting after sessions of DeepWork will radically improve the quality of your working sessions, so when you are done - be actually done.

Deep Work as a way of becoming an expert

Is no myth that you need around 10,000 hours to become what people qualify as an expert at something.

Achieving regular periods of deep work will allow us to create the necessary layers of Myelin in the brain in order to be able to become proficient at a particular skill. Without deliberate practice and focused work this would be incredibly longer and more difficult.

To quote the book on the paper by Ericsson on the topic titled ""The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of skills" he dedicates this section to reviewing what the research literature reveals and individual capacity for cognitively demanding work.

"For a novice, somewhere around an hour a day of concentration seems to be a limit, while for experts this number can expand to as many as four hours - but rarely more.

Multi-Tasking is the enemy

Research by Clifford Nass a Stanford professor, on the downsides of constant attention switching topic quotes:

"We have scales that allows us t divide up people into people who multitask all the time and people who rarely do, and the differences are remarkable. People who multitask all the time can't filter out irrelevancy. They can't manage a working memory. They're chronically distracted.

They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand... They're pretty much mental wrecks."

Nass also points out, that once your brain becomes accustomed to these constant distractions, it becomes quite hard to get rid of the addiction once you have to concentrate.

It is ok to become bored, if you have to check at your phone when you are waiting in a line every minute, you start getting your brain used to multitasking all the time.

Scheduling as means of achieving Deep Work

In order to avoid getting distracted all the time, try to practice mental "Callisthenics", once you have booked periods of work, you can't have anything around that requires will power to avoid getting distracted. Try your hardest to remain focused during those periods, is ok to rest and distract yourself outside of them. If something that you need to do comes to mind, write it down in a paper and re-visit it once you are done with your working period.

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 it positvely impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts."

We should pick the tools we use and the ones we don't in the same way a carpenter or a blacksmith would use and buy his tools. Each one of them should use and serve a purpose, we shouldn't just be using everything because is in fashion, or everyone else is using it.

I loved this Quote by Newport:

"These tools can be fun, but in the scheme of your life and what you want to accomplish, they're a lightweight whimsy, one unimportant distraction among many threatening to derail you from something deeper.

Expecting to produce Deep and Meaningful work for 4 hours a day is unrealistic

Deep work is exhausting and it should push you to the limit of your abilities. Studies in performance psychology have extensively studied for how long these efforts can be sustained by a person in a day. Anders Ericsson on his paper on deliberate practice, cited that infants we should only expect them to focus for an hour improving at a particular skill. For individuals more familiar with achieving periods of deep work, we should expect 4 hours a day and rarely more.

Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen

Tim ferris once wrote "Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don't, you'll never find time for the life changing big things.