Notes from Deep Work by Cal Newport
Here are a few notes from this book:
Why Deep Work
Deep work lets you to learn a complex topic. If you’re always distracted, you won’t be able to do that. And in today’s world, being able to master something sophisticated is necessary for success.
Deep work lets you be globally competitive. In earlier times, markets were local. It was enough for you to be competitive with people in your own city. If you’re a marketer, and better than other marketers in your city, you’d be hired in preference to them. Further improvement had diminishing returns, because you’re already being hired. More people are working remotely, as a full-time employee, or consulting, or starting a company that provides a product or service to people all over the world. As a result, buyers are able to buy from all over the world. Even if the difference between two options is only 20%, buyers naturally pick the best one. Would you use a Notion alternative that’s 20% worse? So now you as a professional need to compete with professionals all around the world, not just your city. And if you do, you have a global market to reach than your city’s, so the upside is much higher.
Deep work lets you achieve a lot, like getting a PhD, writing multiple papers every year, and writing multiple books, in one decade, all while being present with your kids and spouse after 5 PM. In a university, the students who scored just lower than the first tier actually spent more time studying — they’d substituted deep work for more hours with worse results.
Deep work calms your mind. Many people can’t disconnect when they’re with their family. They’re constantly checking to see if anyone messaged them. Or checking social media. This creates a background hum of nervous mental energy. When you develop the ability to do deep work, you learn to disconnect distractions, which also calms your mind.
The Problem with Knowledge Work
Knowledge work like engineering, law or accounting doesn’t have a well-defined job description, like courier delivery does. It’s also hard to measure: if you’re a software engineer, you can’t come up with a number to capture the value you added yesterday, the way a delivery guy can say that he made 40 deliveries yesterday, and so feel satisfied about a good day’s work. This causes may knowledge workers to be dissatisfied or burn out. One director of a Washington, DC-based think tank didn’t understand from the discussions about abstract concepts like “communication strategies” whether he’s doing anything useful with his time at all. So he quit and set up a motorcycle repair shop. When a motorcycle arrived broken down and left under its own power, he could see that he was adding value.
The dissatisfaction often causes knowledge workers to shift their focus from adding value to appearing to add value instead, such as responding to emails quickly. This can at least be measured and so can give you satisfaction. Some people make it a matter of professional pride. These kinds of secondary indicators are also visible to the boss, while the actual value add may be hard for the boss to assess. Some corporate cultures are driven by such appearances more than the actual value added. In fact, some CEOs like Marissa Mayer explicitly told her team that if they’re not appearing to work, they’ll be considered to not have worked at all.
On the other hand, it’s hard to quantify the cost of distractions like social media. You can’t say that you were 11% less productive because of Twitter.
The immeasurability of the value we’re adding, coupled with the immeasurability of the cost of social media, means that we waste time in unproductive ways.
Flow is when you’re lost in deep work and don’t notice the passage of time, or small annoyances, like the room being too cold. People are happier working in flow than when they’re relaxing.
People sometimes advise you to find work you’ll love. But satisfaction comes more from your approach to the job than the job itself.
When you switch from one task to another, your attention still lingers on the old task for a while. This is why multitasking doesn’t work.