Cal Newport’s blueprint for achieving productivity. I was disappointed by this book as I expected more scientific evidence rather than loads of examples attempting to prove the benefits of deep work.

Deep work is undoubtedly an important concept but could be covered in a simpler way. Unless you struggle terribly with focus and have no idea of what you might be missing, this book may not be helpful.

My Notes

• Shallow work refers to noncognitively demanding tasks performed while distracted. Shallow work do not create new value and is easily replicable.
• Deep work, in contrast, is the ability to perform an activity by pushing your cognitive capacities to their limit.
• Two core abilities in today's economy
  • The ability to quickly master hard things
  • The ability to produce at an elite level
• Advancing your skills in a specific area requires you to focus deeply.
• Deliberate practice, according to psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, requires focused attention on a skill you want to improve and feedback to correct your approach.

Diffused attention is almost antithetical to the focused attention required by deliberate practice. — K. Anders Ericsson

• A popular formula to represent productivity is the following: High Quality Work = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)
• Attention residue is the loss of attention that follows when you switch from task A to task B. Because your attention does not immediately follow, a residue of it remains stuck in the original task.
• People who switch tasks are less focused than the ones who don't, leading to poorer performance and cognitive capabilities.
• Multitasking is essentially a myth.
• Deep work is the ability to enter a state of extreme concentration, also described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as flow.
• As you move through the day, your attention span diminishes, and most people can rarely achieve more than four hours of deep, intense work.
• The key to developing a deep work habit is to add routines to your life designed to minimize the amount of willpower necessary to transition into a state of unbroken focus.
• Productive meditation: take a period in which you're physically occupied (walking, driving) to focus on a single well-defined professional problem.
• Most people use social media for superfluous reasons. The truth is that for most, social media adds little to no value to their work or well-being.

Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converging rays of attention; let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea. — Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life