Deep Work rules for focused success in a distracted world

 

DEEP WORK

Rules for Focused Success

in a Distracted word

CAL NEWPORT

GRAND CENTRAL 

PUBLISHING

NEW YORK BOSTON

Copyright © 2016 by Cal Newport Cover design by Elizabeth Turner Cover copyright © 2016 by Hachette Book Group, Inc

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Welcome

Introduction

PART 1: The Idea

Chapter 1: Deep Work Is Valuable

Chapter 2: Deep Work Is Rare

Chapter 3: Deep Work Is Meaningful

PART 2: The Rules

Rule #1: Work Deeply

Rule #2: Embrace Boredom

Rule #3: Quit Social Media

Rule #4: Drain the Shallows

Conclusion

Also by Cal Newport

Notes

Newsletters

Deep Work rules for focused success in a distracted world Introduction 

In the Swiss canton of St. Gallen, near the northern banks of Lake Zurich, is a village

named Bollingen. In 1922, the psychiatrist Carl Jung chose this spot to begin building

a retreat. He began with a basic two-story stone house he called the Tower. After

returning from a trip to India, where he observed the practice of adding meditation

rooms to homes, he expanded the complex to include a private office. “In my retiring

room I am by myself,” Jung said of the space. “I keep the key with me all the time; no

one else is allowed in there except with my permission.”

In his book Daily Rituals, journalist Mason Currey sorted through various sources

on Jung to re-create the psychiatrist’s work habits at the Tower. Jung would rise at

seven a.m., Currey reports, and after a big breakfast he would spend two hours of

undistracted writing time in his private office. His afternoons would often consist of

meditation or long walks in the surrounding countryside. There was no electricity at

the Tower, so as day gave way to night, light came from oil lamps and heat from the

fireplace. Jung would retire to bed by ten p.m. “The feeling of repose and renewal that

I had in this tower was intense from the start,” he said.

Though it’s tempting to think of Bollingen Tower as a vacation home, if we put it

into the context of Jung’s career at this point it’s clear that the lakeside retreat was not

built as an escape from work. In 1922, when Jung bought the property, he could not

afford to take a vacation. Only one year earlier, in 1921, he had published

Psychological Types, a seminal book that solidified many differences that had been

long developing between Jung’s thinking and the ideas of his onetime friend and

mentor, Sigmund Freud. To disagree with Freud in the 1920s was a bold move. To

back up his book, Jung needed to stay sharp and produce a stream of smart articles and

books further supporting and establishing analytical psychology, the eventual name

for his new school of thought.

Jung’s lectures and counseling practice kept him busy in Zurich—this is clear. But

he wasn’t satisfied with busyness alone. He wanted to change the way we understood

the unconscious, and this goal required deeper, more careful thought than he could

manage amid his hectic city lifestyle. Jung retreated to Bollingen, not to escape his

professional life, but instead to advance it.

Carl Jung went on to become one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth

century. There are, of course, many reasons for his eventual success. In this book,

however, I’m interested in his commitment to the following skill, which almost

certainly played a key role in his accomplishments:

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.

Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current

intellectual capacity. We now know from decades of research in both psychology and

neuroscience that the state of mental strain that accompanies deep work is also

necessary to improve your abilities. Deep work, in other words, was exactly the type

of effort needed to stand out in a cognitively demanding field like academic psychiatry

in the early twentieth century.

The term “deep work” is my own and is not something Carl Jung would have used,

but his actions during this period were those of someone who understood the

underlying concept. Jung built a tower out of stone in the woods to promote deep work

in his professional life—a task that required time, energy, and money. It also took him

away from more immediate pursuits. As Mason Currey writes, Jung’s regular journeys

to Bollingen reduced the time he spent on his clinical work, noting, “Although he had

many patients who relied on him, Jung was not shy about taking time off.” Deep work,

though a burden to prioritize, was crucial for his goal of changing the world.

Indeed, if you study the lives of other influential figures from both distant and

recent history, you’ll find that a commitment to deep work is a common theme. The

sixteenth-century essayist Michel de Montaigne, for example, prefigured Jung by

working in a private library he built in the southern tower guarding the stone walls of

his French château, while Mark Twain wrote much of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

in a shed on the property of the Quarry Farm in New York, where he was spending the

summer. Twain’s study was so isolated from the main house that his family took to

blowing a horn to attract his attention for meals.

Moving forward in history, consider the screenwriter and director Woody Allen. In

the forty-four-year period between 1969 and 2013, Woody Allen wrote and directed

forty-four films that received twenty-three Academy Award nominations—an absurd

rate of artistic productivity. Throughout this period, Allen never owned a computer,

instead completing all his writing, free from electronic distraction, on a German

Olympia SM3 manual typewriter. Allen is joined in his rejection of computers by

Peter Higgs, a theoretical physicist who performs his work in such disconnected

isolation that journalists couldn’t find him after it was announced he had won the

Nobel Prize. J.K. Rowling, on the other hand, does use a computer, but was famously

absent from social media during the writing of her Harry Potter novels—even though

this period coincided with the rise of the technology and its popularity among media

figures. Rowling’s staff finally started a Twitter account in her name in the fall of

2009, as she was working on The Casual Vacancy, and for the first year and a half her

only tweet read: “This is the real me, but you won’t be hearing from me often I am

afraid, as pen and paper is my priority at the moment.”

Deep work, of course, is not limited to the historical or technophobic. Microsoft

CEO Bill Gates famously conducted “Think Weeks” twice a year, during which he

would isolate himself (often in a lakeside cottage) to do nothing but read and think big

thoughts. It was during a 1995 Think Week that Gates wrote his famous “Internet Tidal

Wave” memo that turned Microsoft’s attention to an upstart company called Netscape

Communications. And in an ironic twist, Neal Stephenson, the acclaimed cyberpunk

author who helped form our popular conception of the Internet age, is near impossible

to reach electronically—his website offers no e-mail address and features an essay

about why he is purposefully bad at using social media. Here’s how he once explained

the omission: “If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive,

uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. [If I instead get interrupted a lot] what

replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time… there is a bunch of

e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons.”

The ubiquity of deep work among influential individuals is important to emphasize

because it stands in sharp contrast to the behavior of most modern knowledge workers

—a group that’s rapidly forgetting the value of going deep.

The reason knowledge workers are losing their familiarity with deep work is well

established: network tools. This is a broad category that captures communication

services like e-mail and SMS, social media networks like Twitter and Facebook, and

the shiny tangle of infotainment sites like BuzzFeed and Reddit. In aggregate, the rise

of these tools, combined with ubiquitous access to them through smartphones and

networked office computers, has fragmented most knowledge workers’ attention into

slivers. A 2012 McKinsey study found that the average knowledge worker now spends

more than 60 percent of the workweek engaged in electronic communication and

Internet searching, with close to 30 percent of a worker’s time dedicated to reading

and answering e-mail alone.

This state of fragmented attention cannot accommodate deep work, which requires

long periods of uninterrupted thinking. At the same time, however, modern knowledge

workers are not loafing. In fact, they report that they are as busy as ever. What

explains the discrepancy? A lot can be explained by another type of effort, which

provides a counterpart to the idea of deep work:

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.

In an age of network tools, in other words, knowledge workers increasingly

replace deep work with the shallow alternative—constantly sending and receiving email messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of

distraction. Larger efforts that would be well served by deep thinking, such as forming

a new business strategy or writing an important grant application, get fragmented into

distracted dashes that produce muted quality. To make matters worse for depth, there’s

increasing evidence that this shift toward the shallow is not a choice that can be easily

reversed. Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently

reduce your capacity to perform deep work. “What the Net seems to be doing is

chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” admitted journalist

Nicholas Carr, in an oft-cited 2008 Atlantic article. “[And] I’m not the only one.”

Carr expanded this argument into a book, The Shallows, which became a finalist for

the Pulitzer Prize. To write The Shallows, appropriately enough, Carr had to move to

a cabin and forcibly disconnect.

The idea that network tools are pushing our work from the deep toward the shallow

is not new. The Shallows was just the first in a series of recent books to examine the

Internet’s effect on our brains and work habits. These subsequent titles include

William Powers’s Hamlet’s BlackBerry, John Freeman’s The Tyranny of E-mail, and

Alex Soojung-Kin Pang’s The Distraction Addiction—all of which agree, more or

less, that network tools are distracting us from work that requires unbroken

concentration, while simultaneously degrading our capacity to remain focused.

Given this existing body of evidence, I will not spend more time in this book trying

to establish this point. We can, I hope, stipulate that network tools negatively impact

deep work. I’ll also sidestep any grand arguments about the long-term societal

consequence of this shift, as such arguments tend to open impassible rifts. On one side

of the debate are techno-skeptics like Jaron Lanier and John Freeman, who suspect

that many of these tools, at least in their current state, damage society, while on the

other side techno-optimists like Clive Thompson argue that they’re changing society,

for sure, but in ways that’ll make us better off. Google, for example, might reduce our

memory, but we no longer need good memories, as in the moment we can now search

for anything we need to know.

I have no stance in this philosophical debate. My interest in this matter instead

veers toward a thesis of much more pragmatic and individualized interest: Our work

culture’s shift toward the shallow (whether you think it’s philosophically good or bad)

is exposing a massive economic and personal opportunity for the few who recognize

the potential of resisting this trend and prioritizing depth—an opportunity that, not too

long ago, was leveraged by a bored young consultant from Virginia named Jason Benn.

There are many ways to discover that you’re not valuable in our economy. For Jason

Benn the lesson was made clear when he realized, not long after taking a job as a

financial consultant, that the vast majority of his work responsibilities could be

automated by a “kludged together” Excel script.

The firm that hired Benn produced reports for banks involved in complex deals.

(“It was about as interesting as it sounds,” Benn joked in one of our interviews.) The

report creation process required hours of manual manipulation of data in a series of

Excel spreadsheets. When he first arrived, it took Benn up to six hours per report to

finish this stage (the most efficient veterans at the firm could complete this task in

around half the time). This didn’t sit well with Benn.

“The way it was taught to me, the process seemed clunky and manually intensive,”

Benn recalls. He knew that Excel has a feature called macros that allows users to

automate common tasks. Benn read articles on the topic and soon put together a new

worksheet, wired up with a series of these macros that could take the six-hour process

of manual data manipulation and replace it, essentially, with a button click. A reportwriting process that originally took him a full workday could now be reduced to less

than an hour.

Benn is a smart guy. He graduated from an elite college (the University of Virginia)

with a degree in economics, and like many in his situation he had ambitions for his

career. It didn’t take him long to realize that these ambitions would be thwarted so

long as his main professional skills could be captured in an Excel macro. He decided,

therefore, he needed to increase his value to the world. After a period of research,

Benn reached a conclusion: He would, he declared to his family, quit his job as a

human spreadsheet and become a computer programmer. As is often the case with such

grand plans, however, there was a hitch: Jason Benn had no idea how to write code.

As a computer scientist I can confirm an obvious point: Programming computers is

hard. Most new developers dedicate a four-year college education to learning the

ropes before their first job—and even then, competition for the best spots is fierce.

Jason Benn didn’t have this time. After his Excel epiphany, he quit his job at the

financial firm and moved home to prepare for his next step. His parents were happy he

had a plan, but they weren’t happy about the idea that this return home might be longterm. Benn needed to learn a hard skill, and needed to do so fast.

It’s here that Benn ran into the same problem that holds back many knowledge

workers from navigating into more explosive career trajectories. Learning something

complex like computer programming requires intense uninterrupted concentration on

cognitively demanding concepts—the type of concentration that drove Carl Jung to the

woods surrounding Lake Zurich. This task, in other words, is an act of deep work.

Most knowledge workers, however, as I argued earlier in this introduction, have lost

their ability to perform deep work. Benn was no exception to this trend.

“I was always getting on the Internet and checking my e-mail; I couldn’t stop

myself; it was a compulsion,” Benn said, describing himself during the period leading

up to his quitting his finance job. To emphasize his difficulty with depth, Benn told me

about a project that a supervisor at the finance firm once brought to him. “They wanted

me to write a business plan,” he explained. Benn didn’t know how to write a business

plan, so he decided he would find and read five different existing plans—comparing

and contrasting them to understand what was needed. This was a good idea, but Benn

had a problem: “I couldn’t stay focused.” There were days during this period, he now

admits, when he spent almost every minute (“98 percent of my time”) surfing the Web.

The business plan project—a chance to distinguish himself early in his career—fell to

the wayside.

By the time he quit, Benn was well aware of his difficulties with deep work, so

when he dedicated himself to learning how to code, he knew he had to simultaneously

teach his mind how to go deep. His method was drastic but effective. “I locked myself

in a room with no computer: just textbooks, notecards, and a highlighter.” He would

highlight the computer programming textbooks, transfer the ideas to notecards, and

then practice them out loud. These periods free from electronic distraction were hard

at first, but Benn gave himself no other option: He had to learn this material, and he

made sure there was nothing in that room to distract him. Over time, however, he got

better at concentrating, eventually getting to a point where he was regularly clocking

five or more disconnected hours per day in the room, focused without distraction on

learning this hard new skill. “I probably read something like eighteen books on the

topic by the time I was done,” he recalls.

After two months locked away studying, Benn attended the notoriously difficult

Dev Bootcamp: a hundred-hour-a-week crash course in Web application

programming. (While researching the program, Benn found a student with a PhD from

Princeton who had described Dev as “the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”)

Given both his preparation and his newly honed ability for deep work, Benn excelled.

“Some people show up not prepared,” he said. “They can’t focus. They can’t learn

quickly.” Only half the students who started the program with Benn ended up

graduating on time. Benn not only graduated, but was also the top student in his class.

The deep work paid off. Benn quickly landed a job as a developer at a San

Francisco tech start-up with $25 million in venture funding and its pick of employees.

When Benn quit his job as a financial consultant, only half a year earlier, he was

making $40,000 a year. His new job as a computer developer paid $100,000—an

amount that can continue to grow, essentially without limit in the Silicon Valley

market, along with his skill level.

When I last spoke with Benn, he was thriving in his new position. A newfound

devotee of deep work, he rented an apartment across the street from his office,

allowing him to show up early in the morning before anyone else arrived and work

without distraction. “On good days, I can get in four hours of focus before the first

meeting,” he told me. “Then maybe another three to four hours in the afternoon. And I

do mean ‘focus’: no e-mail, no Hacker News [a website popular among tech types],

just programming.” For someone who admitted to sometimes spending up to 98

percent of his day in his old job surfing the Web, Jason Benn’s transformation is

nothing short of astonishing.

Jason Benn’s story highlights a crucial lesson: Deep work is not some nostalgic

affectation of writers and early-twentieth-century philosophers. It’s instead a skill that

has great value today.

There are two reasons for this value. The first has to do with learning. We have an

information economy that’s dependent on complex systems that change rapidly. Some

of the computer languages Benn learned, for example, didn’t exist ten years ago and

will likely be outdated ten years from now. Similarly, someone coming up in the field

of marketing in the 1990s probably had no idea that today they’d need to master digital

analytics. 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.

The second reason that deep work is valuable is because the impacts of the digital

network revolution cut both ways. If you can create something useful, its reachable

audience (e.g., employers or customers) is essentially limitless—which greatly

magnifies your reward. On the other hand, if what you’re producing is mediocre, then

you’re in trouble, as it’s too easy for your audience to find a better alternative online.

Whether you’re a computer programmer, writer, marketer, consultant, or entrepreneur,

your situation has become similar to Jung trying to outwit Freud, or Jason Benn trying

to hold his own in a hot start-up: To succeed you have to produce the absolute best

stuff you’re capable of producing—a task that requires depth.

The growing necessity of deep work is new. In an industrial economy, there was a

small skilled labor and professional class for which deep work was crucial, but most

workers could do just fine without ever cultivating an ability to concentrate without

distraction. They were paid to crank widgets—and not much about their job would

change in the decades they kept it. But as we shift to an information economy, more

and more of our population are knowledge workers, and deep work is becoming a key

currency—even if most haven’t yet recognized this reality.

Deep work is not, in other words, an old-fashioned skill falling into irrelevance.

It’s instead a crucial ability for anyone looking to move ahead in a globally

competitive information economy that tends to chew up and spit out those who aren’t

earning their keep. The real rewards are reserved not for those who are comfortable

using Facebook (a shallow task, easily replicated), but instead for those who are

comfortable building the innovative distributed systems that run the service (a

decidedly deep task, hard to replicate). Deep work is so important that we might

consider it, to use the phrasing of business writer Eric Barker, “the superpower of the

21st century.”

We have now seen two strands of thought—one about the increasing scarcity of deep

work and the other about its increasing value—which we can combine into the idea

that provides the foundation for everything that follows in this book:

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.

This book has two goals, pursued in two parts. The first, tackled in Part 1, is to

convince you that the deep work hypothesis is true. The second, tackled in Part 2, is to

teach you how to take advantage of this reality by training your brain and transforming

your work habits to place deep work at the core of your professional life. Before

diving into these details, however, I’ll take a moment to explain how I became such a

devotee of depth.

I’ve spent the past decade cultivating my own ability to concentrate on hard things. To

understand the origins of this interest, it helps to know that I’m a theoretical computer

scientist who performed my doctoral training in MIT’s famed Theory of Computation

group—a professional setting where the ability to focus is considered a crucial

occupational skill.

During these years, I shared a graduate student office down the hall from a

MacArthur “genius grant” winner—a professor who was hired at MIT before he was

old enough to legally drink. It wasn’t uncommon to find this theoretician sitting in the

common space, staring at markings on a whiteboard, with a group of visiting scholars

arrayed around him, also sitting quietly and staring. This could go on for hours. I’d go

to lunch; I’d come back—still staring. This particular professor is hard to reach. He’s

not on Twitter and if he doesn’t know you, he’s unlikely to respond to your e-mail.

Last year he published sixteen papers.

This type of fierce concentration permeated the atmosphere during my student

years. Not surprisingly, I soon developed a similar commitment to depth. To the

chagrin of both my friends and the various publicists I’ve worked with on my books,

I’ve never had a Facebook or Twitter account, or any other social media presence

outside of a blog. I don’t Web surf and get most of my news from my home-delivered

Washington Post and NPR. I’m also generally hard to reach: My author website

doesn’t provide a personal e-mail address, and I didn’t own my first smartphone until

2012 (when my pregnant wife gave me an ultimatum—“you have to have a phone that

works before our son is born”).

On the other hand, my commitment to depth has rewarded me. In the ten-year

period following my college graduation, I published four books, earned a PhD, wrote

peer-reviewed academic papers at a high rate, and was hired as a tenure-track

professor at Georgetown University. I maintained this voluminous production while

rarely working past five or six p.m. during the workweek.

This compressed schedule is possible because I’ve invested significant effort to

minimize the shallow in my life while making sure I get the most out of the time this

frees up. I build my days around a core of carefully chosen deep work, with the

shallow activities I absolutely cannot avoid batched into smaller bursts at the

peripheries of my schedule. Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of

uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of

valuable output.

My commitment to depth has also returned nonprofessional benefits. For the most

part, I don’t touch a computer between the time when I get home from work and the

next morning when the new workday begins (the main exception being blog posts,

which I like to write after my kids go to bed). This ability to fully disconnect, as

opposed to the more standard practice of sneaking in a few quick work e-mail checks,

or giving in to frequent surveys of social media sites, allows me to be present with my

wife and two sons in the evenings, and read a surprising number of books for a busy

father of two. More generally, the lack of distraction in my life tones down that

background hum of nervous mental energy that seems to increasingly pervade people’s

daily lives. I’m comfortable being bored, and this can be a surprisingly rewarding

skill—especially on a lazy D.C. summer night listening to a Nationals game slowly

unfold on the radio.

This book is best described as an attempt to formalize and explain my attraction to

depth over shallowness, and to detail the types of strategies that have helped me act on

this attraction. I’ve committed this thinking to words, in part, to help you follow my

lead in rebuilding your life around deep work—but this isn’t the whole story. My

other interest in distilling and clarifying these thoughts is to further develop my own

practice. My recognition of the deep work hypothesis has helped me thrive, but I’m

convinced that I haven’t yet reached my full value-producing potential. As you struggle

and ultimately triumph with the ideas and rules in the chapters ahead, you can be

assured that I’m following suit—ruthlessly culling the shallow and painstakingly

cultivating the intensity of my depth. (You’ll learn how I fare in this book’s

conclusion.)

When Carl Jung wanted to revolutionize the field of psychiatry, he built a retreat in

the woods. Jung’s Bollingen Tower became a place where he could maintain his

ability to think deeply and then apply the skill to produce work of such stunning

originality that it changed the world. In the pages ahead, I’ll try to convince you to join

me in the effort to build our own personal Bollingen Towers; to cultivate an ability to

produce real value in an increasingly distracted world; and to recognize a truth

embraced by the most productive and important personalities of generations past: A

deep life is a good life.

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