The Tangibles Five: Deep Work by Cal Newport

Hello folks,

I’d like to introduce a new, recurring segment called "The Tangibles Five." This segment is going to be, roughly, a 5 minute review of books under the productivity, health, business, and finance genres.

The aim of this blog is to give you "Tangibles," which are points worth considering to help you think about your own personal financial strategy. By doing so, I hope that you are able to build a life that is minimally impacted by the dollars you have in your bank account. While financial independence is a worthy goal, it makes little sense to save and invest if you aren’t happy with your career. I hope you all are able to build careers that you find fulfilling and purposeful. The intention of this new segment is to give you tools that you can use to do the aforementioned.

Today, we are going to be doing a review of the book “Deep Work” by Cal Newport.

Before we dive into our review, I’d first like to tell you a bit about the author. Cal Newport is a computer scientist and author at Georgetown University. He has written seven books, and he earned a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. In his academic career, he wrote more than 60 papers that have been cited more than 3,500 times. His Penguin Random House books have gone on to win several "New York Times Best Seller" awards.

Without further ado, let’s dive into our book review.

Thesis

According to Cal, to come up with any great idea, you need “deep work.”

What is deep work? Deep work is focusing on a cognitively demanding task without getting distracted. You don't want to do much of the opposite, which is shallow work. Shallow work is low value work – things like checking email, planning meetings, organization, etc. These tasks are all things that seem to be productive, but are just low impact tasks.

A brief aside: Cal really hates email; some parts of this book just felt like Cal groaning on and on about emails.

Cal says that, in today’s economy, you have to produce the best product. A good product is not enough. People that produce mediocre products are and will be weeded out of the marketplace.

According to Cal, only three types of people will succeed in today’s economy.

1. People That Work With Intelligent Machines: Most low value tasks will be automated.

2. Superstars: People that are at the top of their field. The best may end up outsourcing themselves as consultants.

3. Owners: People with a lot of money that can buy up or fund companies like Instagram, which sold for a billion dollars while only employing 13 people.

Given that you and I likely don’t have millions of dollars, type 3 goes out of the window for us. However, we can focus on becoming types 1 and 2.

Cal says that if you want to learn hard things, you have to do deep work. The difference between normal individuals and experts is not talent, it is the amount of effort and time that they put into a specific domain. Developing skills comes down to how your brain works. Oligodendrocytes myelinate neurons – essentially, you develop myelin around the circuits that fire more. This is the biology behind the colloquial saying “neurons that fire together, wire together.”

Attentional Control

Referring back to our initial point, to do deep work, you must have agency over your own brain. This means being able to voluntarily withdraw or focus your attention to specific tasks.

One example that Cal uses is the case of Daniel Kilov. Daniel was diagnosed with ADHD; he had horrible working memory, but still managed to become a memory champion. Your working memory is dictated by something called “attentional control,” which is your ability to direct your attention to important information. This is something you can improve at.

Memory champions are able to memorize an entire deck of cards. They don’t do rote memorization to become champion memorizers. They do so by association. You can practice this by doing a mental walkthrough of your house and memorizing items in each room in relation to where they are in the room or each other. You can also do this by attempting to memorize a deck of cards by associating each card to something or someone.

Attention Restoration Theory

If you find yourself distracted or unable to focus after a deep work session, you might want to consider Attention Restoration Theory (ART). ART is a theory corroborating that spending time in nature improves your ability to concentrate – for example, taking a 10 minute walk in nature. However, this can also be any activity that does not require focused concentration. This may serve as a “rest period” between deep work sessions.

Multitasking Is a Myth

When doing deep work, the last thing you want to do is switch between tasks. Task switching results in “attention residue.” When you switch from one task to another, some of your attention is on the last task instead of the current task. Therefore, you should avoid switching back and forth between tasks.

People that multitask are unable to categorize tasks according to their relevance. Secondly, their working memory suffers due to multitasking. According to Cal, they become suckers for irrelevancy. Single tasking as much as possible should be the goal. When you repeat a behavior of multitasking, and subsequently, distracted working, you are eroding neuronal “deep work” pathways. When you multitask, you are optimizing neuronal circuits for low value work.

Productive Meditation

While you can’t focus on two cognitive tasks at the same time, you can do one cognitive task while doing a non-cognitive task. The term “productive meditation” refers to thinking about problems while doing a low value task like walking or washing the dishes.

Spend Less Time Working by Optimizing for Deep Work

Another point to note is that sometimes working less is working more. Basecamp’s founder shortened his company's 5 day workweek to a 4 day workweek. Some reporter chastised him and said that it isn’t good to have staff work four 10 hour days. However, she was wrong. The founder said they work four 8 hour days. Shortening the workweek trims the fat from an organization. By having just a 4 day workweek, Basecamp can reduce the amount of meetings and office conversations. This allows them to reduce wasted time that isn’t conducive to doing meaningful work.

Social Media Degrades Your Purpose

There is one recurring central theme in "Deep Work" and that is avoiding social media like the plague. Bill Gates, JK Rowling, and Carl Jung do not engage much on social media. They are too busy doing deep work.

Cal thinks that you should strongly limit social media; one way to do this is to self-police or self-parent. I do this by setting a daily calendar notification late in the day, say 6:30 PM, for using social media. I restrict myself to a 30 minute block, and I do not use social media outside of this block of time. Why?

I have to consider the downsides of "Network Tools" like LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, and others. A question I ask myself is "Are you spending your time intentionally, or are you serving the missions of Mark Zuckerberg and Ryan Roslansky, the CEO of LinkedIn?" The problem with social media is that it is meant to keep you there for as long as possible with things like infinite scroll – probably longer than you initially intended.

Another problem with social media is that we all have a finite amount of willpower. Every time we get social media notifications, we erode our willpower. This is the antithesis of deep work. Consider turning off app notifications for social media that doesn’t serve your purpose and goals.

Best Practices for Deep Work

In summary, the best practices for "Deep Work" are as follows:

1. Start Early: Do higher impact work earlier in the morning. Throughout the day, your willpower erodes due to the number of decisions you have to make and notifications that draw your attention elsewhere. This is why you should save your least important work for the end of the day.

2. Be Consistent: Jerry Seinfeld was once asked "How do I become a better comic?" Jerry said, "You become a better comic by writing better jokes. And how do you write better jokes? You do this by writing jokes every day." Jerry would write a joke every day and mark an "X" on his calendar for the day. If you want to get good at something, you must do it daily.

3. Have Sustained Deep Work Periods: When JK Rowling had to write the Deathly Hallows, she booked a hotel room and started writing the book there. This idea worked so well that she just wrote the entire book at the hotel. Similarly, you can segment a part of your house to only do deep work if you work from home.

4. Have a Fixed Endpoint: Cal practices "Fixed Scheduled Productivity." This means that he doesn’t work past 5:30 PM. You should have a clear endpoint of your workday so that you can go ahead and restore your attention. Don’t do low value work after your workday is over. You should have a shutdown ritual to get your work done by the end of the workday.

This concludes today’s segment. I hope you found several "Tangible" takeaways from today’s post. These were my personal takeaways from this phenomenal book. This book might leave a different impression on you; it's definitely worth a read. As a matter of fact, I enjoyed reading and re-reading this book three times over the last two years.

However, there is a certain degree of practicality that this book is lacking towards certain careers. This would be highly inappropriate for an administrative assistant, and some of this may even be inappropriate for you. There are definitely some "Tangible" points that are inapplicable. That said, I hope you found at least some value in this book review.

Is there anything you found useful or that I missed above? If so, please leave a comment in the comment box below.

See you on the next one!

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Disclaimer: The article above is an opinion and is for informational/educational purposes only. It is not intended to violate copyright and is protected under the fair use doctrine. If you are the publisher or author, and you take issue with this article, please contact me directly. The author has taken care in writing this post but makes no expressed or implied warranty of any kind and assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for incidental or consequential damages in connection with or arising out of the use of this information.