Deep Work: Rules for Success in a Distracted World
by Cal Newport
Introduction
- Deep work is professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit.
- Deep work creates new value, improves your skill, and is hard to replicate.
- Knowledge workers are losing familiarity with deep work because of network tools, which fragment their attention into slivers.
- Shallow work is non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. They don’t create new value and are easy to replicate.
- Our work culture’s shift toward the shallow exposes a massive economic and personal opportunity for the few who resist and prioritize depth.
- Deep work has value because it is required to quickly learn complicated things, and is required to produce the best and most useful things.
- The deep work hypothesis says deep work is becoming both increasingly rare and increasingly valuable, and so those who make it the core of their working life will thrive.