Newport, Cal. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. 2016.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how to be more productive. Cal Newport’s book Deep Work has greatly influenced my approach to productivity this year, and I wanted to offer a more formal review of a book I’ve read three times over the past few months. Computer Science is Newport’s discipline, but productivity is his domain. He was writing books about mastering college while he was still in college, and his degrees from Dartmouth and M.I.T. and professor gig in Georgetown University’s computer science department testify to his own productivity.
His thesis is that the most immersive, cognitively demanding, and rewarding work we are capable of—what Newport calls deep work—is valuable, rare, and meaningful. Deep work allows us to learn faster and produce more. Consequently, it is the master skill for twenty-first century knowledge workers. We should contrast deep work with shallow work, nearly automatable tasks that we can perform while in a state of distraction. For Newport, an example of deep work would be producing a scholarly paper (he published nine of them during the year he was writing this book) while an example of shallow work would be answering email. Newport argues that the extent to which we can cultivate the ability to work deeply will be the extent of our success.
Newport begins the book by contending that while deep work is valuable—as demonstrated by salary—it is also rare. The very economy that rewards performers like Nate Silver (the 538 project) or David Hannson (Ruby on Rails) has inundated us with network tools that leave us in a state of constant distraction. This is a market inefficiency. If we can train ourselves to work deeply—to learn faster and produce more—while everyone else remains distracted, we will have carved out a secure place for ourselves in a shifting job market. It’s not just that deep work is pragmatically useful, however. Newport contends that deep work provides us with a more meaningful life. Neurologically, we are training our brains to be happy when we focus for extended periods on work that’s worth doing. Psychologically, “flow states” of high concentration and cognitive performance provide some of life’s most deeply satisfying experiences. Philosophically, deep work relieves us of the burden of creating meaning for ourselves; the beauty of developing the deep work skill is that we can discover inherent meaning in well-done work.
The second half of the book offers suggestions on how to fight distraction and embrace deep work. Because deep work is not intuitive, we must cultivate it through intentional practice. We can practice most effectively by building rituals and routines for deep work that are not dependent on how we feel in the moment. Newport outlines four general approaches to deep work—monastic, bi-modal, rhythmic, and journalistic—that range from forsaking the outside world (monastic) to taking the opportunity for deep work whenever it comes on an ad hoc, week-by-week basis (journalistic). Newport recommends that you commit your deep work sessions to “wildly important” goals that you can track. Finally, we have to rest. We may not be able to work deeply more than four to eight hours a day. When we stop doing deep work, we need to give ourselves downtime to recover.
Newport’s next two recommendations strike at the heart of contemporary work culture: cultivate boredom and quit social media. Newport has never had a social media account, and he advocates a complete social media fast. It is not Twitter or Facebook as platforms that Newport dismisses, per se, but the way they encourage shallow work and favor distracted behavior. Instead of planning deep work sessions, Newport encourages us to plan times to be distracted. Instead of scheduling time for work in the midst of constant internet surfing, we should make our phone-fiddling time the exception. We cannot work deeply if we are constantly battling attention residue and bouncing from writing a book review to checking an open email inbox to contributing to a slack chat to refreshing a twitter page. Newport argues that real craftsmen demand specific benefits from the tools they use. By contrast, we often adopt networking techniques and tech tools by using an “any benefit” mindset; if we can think of any conceivable advantage an app or piece of software might offer, we adopt it without considering the habits of mind it cultivates. This section of the book must have piqued the most interest because Newport’s follow-up, Digital Minimalism (2019), turned this section into a full-on life philosophy.
The final section of the book advocates that we “drain the shallows” by taking control of our schedule. First, we should track every hour of our day in the same way that a good budget tracks every dollar we make and spend. Newport’s point is not that we should necessarily prescribe what we do every hour of the day, but that t the end of the day, we should be able to see where our time went. Second, we should stop working at a certain point each evening; for Newport, that meant an official shutdown routine at 5:30pm every evening. Finally, we should actively try to become hard to reach. This will have two effects. It will disabuse us of the notion that people actually need us to be available for 18 hours a day. It will also help us break the cycle of distraction. We can’t stop using email, but the least we can do is use it more constructively.
The book is short and compelling, but reading it for the third time has also helped me figure out some of the book’s problems. Newport wants to approach the problem of deep work pragmatically. He’s not a luddite, (he’s a computer programmer after all) so he shies away from saying that Google is bad or that Facebook is rotting our brains. His point is that you won’t do worthwhile work if you’re a slave to distraction.
And just what constitutes deep work? Again, Newport here is pragmatic. Well, it’s what the market determines is meaningful. For example, Newport determines that his own scholarship is a worthwhile pursuit mainly because it helps him get tenure, not because the work itself is contributing to the world in any significant way. It very well might be making a contribution, but Newport doesn’t make that argument. In the midst of advocating that we determine the “vital few” and focus on “wildly important” goals, Newport never really says how we would determine whether or not the deep work we’re doing is worth doing in the first place. What does it gain knowledge workers to cultivate deep work and lose their souls? Newport’s opening example illustrates this perfectly. He explains that Carl Jung’s prodigious analytical psychology project was a result of his commitment to deep work. This begs the question: was that a worthwhile project? A purely pragmatic philosophy can’t figure that out (I notice that Newport does not appeal to any Jungian concepts in his psychological defense of deep work). Matt Perman’s What’s Best Next, I think I have a greater appreciation for what Newport’s book offers as well as what its shortcomings are. There’s no spiritually neutral deep work, so I had better seek the Holy Spirit’s guidance to ensure that what I’m learning and producing are worth learning and producing in the first place.