Deep Work

Author: Cal Newport

• 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.

• In his book Daily Rituals, journalist Mason

• 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.

• 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.

• Jung retreated to Bollingen, not to escape his professional life, but instead to advance it.

• Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit.

• 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

• 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.”

• 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,

• Twain’s study was so isolated from the main house that his family took to blowing a horn to attract his attention for meals.

• 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.

• J.K. Rowling, on the other hand, does use a computer, but was famously absent from social media during the

• 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.

• 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.

• The reason knowledge workers are losing their familiarity with deep work is well established: network tools.

• 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?

• 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 e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks

• In an age of network tools, in other words, knowledge workers increasingly replace deep work with the shallow alternative—constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction.

• Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.

• 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.

• 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

• 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.

• 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.

• After his Excel epiphany, he quit his job at the financial firm and moved home to prepare for his next step.

• 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

• 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

• Learning something complex like computer programming requires intense uninterrupted concentration on cognitively demanding concepts—the type of concentration that drove Carl Jung to the

• 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.

• To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work.

• 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.

• 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).

• 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.

• 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.

• Dewane is an architecture professor, and therefore likes to explore the intersection between the conceptual and the concrete. The Eudaimonia Machine is a good example of this intersection. The machine, which takes its name from the ancient Greek concept of eudaimonia (a state in which you’re achieving your full human potential), turns out to be a building. “The goal of the machine,” David explained, “is to create a setting where the users can get into a state of deep human flourishing—creating work that’s at the absolute extent of their personal abilities.” It is, in other words, a space designed for the sole purpose of enabling the deepest possible deep work. I was, as you might expect, intrigued. As Dewane explained the machine to me, he grabbed a pen to sketch its proposed layout. The structure is a one-story narrow rectangle made up of five rooms, placed in a line, one after another. There’s no shared hallway: you have to pass through one room to get to the next. As Dewane explains, “[The lack of circulation] is critical because it doesn’t allow you to bypass any of the spaces as you get deeper into the machine.” The first room you enter when coming

• Dewane is an architecture professor, and therefore likes to explore the intersection between the conceptual and the concrete. The Eudaimonia Machine is a good example of this intersection.

• The machine, which takes its name from the ancient Greek concept of eudaimonia (a state in which you’re achieving your full human potential), turns out to be a building.

• “The goal of the machine,” David explained, “is to create a setting where the users can get into a state of deep human flourishing—creating work that’s at the absolute extent of their personal abilities.”

• As Dewane explained the machine to me, he grabbed a pen to sketch its proposed layout. The structure is a one-story narrow rectangle made up of five rooms, placed in a line, one after

• The structure is a one-story narrow rectangle made up of five rooms, placed in a line, one after another. There’s no shared hallway: you have to pass through one room to get to the next.

• The first room you enter when coming off the street is called the gallery. In Dewane’s plan, this room would contain examples of deep work produced in the building. It’s meant to inspire users of the machine, creating a “culture of healthy stress and peer pressure.”

• The first room you enter when coming off the street is called the gallery.

• The first room you enter when coming off the street is called the gallery. In Dewane’s plan, this room would contain examples of deep work produced in the building.

• As you leave the gallery, you next enter the salon.

• As you leave the gallery, you next enter the salon. In here, Dewane imagines access to high-quality coffee

• This is a place to debate, “brood,” and in general work through the ideas that you’ll develop deeper in the machine.

• Beyond the salon you enter the library. This room stores a permanent record of all work produced in the machine, as well as the books and other resources used in this previous work.

• Beyond the salon you enter the library. This room stores a permanent record of all work produced in the machine, as well as the books and other resources used in this previous work. There will be copiers and scanners for gathering and collecting the information you need for your project.

• The next room is the office space. It contains a standard conference room with a whiteboard and some cubicles with desks.

• To use our terminology, this is the space to complete the shallow efforts required by your project.

• This brings us to the final room of the machine, a collection of what Dewane calls “deep work chambers”

• “The purpose of the deep work chamber is to allow for total focus and uninterrupted work flow,”

• “The purpose of the deep work chamber is to allow for total focus and uninterrupted work flow,” Dewane explains. He imagines a process in which you spend ninety minutes inside, take a ninety-minute break, and repeat two or three times—at which point your brain will have achieved its limit of concentration for the day.

• Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it’s instead like a muscle that tires.

• The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.

• You must be careful to choose a philosophy that fits your specific circumstances, as a mismatch here can derail your deep work habit before it has a chance to solidify.

• The goal is to convince you that there are many different ways to integrate deep work into your schedule, and it’s therefore worth taking the time to find an approach that makes sense for you.

• Knuth deploys what I call the monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling.

• Knuth deploys what I call the monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling. This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations.

• Another person committed to monastic deep work is the acclaimed science fiction writer Neal Stephenson.

• (This issue is so important to Stephenson that he went on to explore its implications—positive and negative—in his 2008 science fiction epic, Anathem, which considers a world where an intellectual elite live in monastic orders, isolated from the distracted masses and technology, thinking deep thoughts.)

• In my experience, the monastic philosophy makes many knowledge workers defensive. The clarity with which its adherents identify their value to the world, I suspect, touches a raw nerve for those whose contribution to the information economy is more complex.

• A high-level manager, for example, might play a vital role in the functioning of a billion-dollar company, even if she cannot point to something discrete, like a completed novel, and say, “This is what I produced this year.” Therefore, the pool of individuals to whom the monastic philosophy applies is limited—and that’s okay.

• If you’re outside this pool, its radical simplicity shouldn’t evince too much envy.

• Jung’s approach is what I call the bimodal philosophy of deep work. This philosophy asks that you divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else.

• This division of time between deep and open can happen on multiple scales. For example, on the scale of a week, you might dedicate a four-day weekend to depth and the rest to open time. Similarly, on the scale of a year, you might dedicate one season to contain most of your deep stretches (as many academics do over the summer or while on sabbatical).

• This is why the minimum unit of time for deep work in this philosophy tends to be at least one full day. To put aside a few hours in the morning, for example, is too short to count as a deep work stretch for an adherent of this approach.

• Those who deploy the bimodal philosophy of deep work admire the productivity of the monastics but also respect the value they receive from the shallow behaviors in their working lives.

• This chain method (as some now call it) soon became a hit among writers and fitness enthusiasts—communities that thrive on the ability to do hard things consistently.

• This philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit.

• Another common way to implement the rhythmic philosophy is to replace the visual aid of the chain method with a set starting time that you use every day for deep work.

• It was the glacial writing progress during this year that drove Chappell to embrace the rhythmic method. He made a rule that he would wake up and start working by five thirty every morning. He would then work until seven thirty, make breakfast, and go to work already done with his dissertation obligations for the day. Pleased by early progress, he soon pushed his wake-up time to four forty-five to squeeze out even more morning depth.

• The rhythmic philosophy provides an interesting contrast to the bimodal philosophy. It perhaps fails to achieve the most intense levels of deep thinking sought in the daylong concentration sessions favored by the bimodalist. The trade-off, however, is that this approach works better with the reality of human nature.

• The decision between rhythmic and bimodal can come down to your self-control in such scheduling matters.

• Isaacson was methodic: Any time he could find some free time, he would switch into a deep work mode and hammer away at his book.

• I call this approach, in which you fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule, the journalist philosophy. This name is a nod to the fact that journalists, like Walter Isaacson, are trained to shift into a writing mode on a moment’s notice, as is required by the deadline-driven nature of their profession.

• An often-overlooked observation about those who use their minds to create valuable things is that they’re rarely haphazard in their work habits.

• David Brooks summarizes this reality more bluntly: “[Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.”

• This strategy suggests the following: To make the most out of your deep work sessions, build rituals of the same level of strictness and idiosyncrasy as the important thinkers mentioned previously.

• Their rituals minimized the friction in this transition to depth, allowing them to go deep more easily and stay in the state longer.

• Your ritual needs to specify a location for your deep work efforts. This location can be as simple as your normal office with the door shut and desk cleaned off

• If it’s possible to identify a location used only for depth—for instance, a conference room or quiet library—the positive effect can be even greater.

• Regardless of where you work, be sure to also give yourself a specific time frame to keep the session a discrete challenge and not an open-ended slog.

• Your ritual needs rules and processes to keep your efforts structured. For example, you might institute a ban on any Internet use, or maintain a metric such as words produced per twenty-minute interval to keep your concentration honed.

• Your ritual needs to ensure your brain gets the support it needs to keep operating at a high level of depth. For example, the ritual might specify that you start with a cup of good coffee,

• (As Nietzsche said: “It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.”)

• The MIT physicist and award-winning novelist Alan Lightman also leverages grand gestures. In his case, he retreats each summer to a “tiny island” in Maine to think deeply and recharge.

• The MIT physicist and award-winning novelist Alan Lightman also leverages grand gestures. In his case, he retreats each summer to a “tiny island” in Maine to think deeply and recharge. At least as of 2000, when he described this gesture in an interview, the island not only lacked Internet, but didn’t even have phone service. As he then justified: “It’s really about two and a half months that I’ll feel like I can recover some silence in my life… which is so hard to find.”

• The key is to maintain both in a hub-and-spoke-style arrangement: Expose yourself to ideas in hubs on a regular basis, but maintain a spoke in which to work deeply on what you encounter.

• This back-and-forth represents a collaborative form of deep work (common in academic circles) that leverages what I call the whiteboard effect. For some types of problems, working with someone else at the proverbial shared whiteboard can push you deeper than if you were working alone.

• As the authors of The 4 Disciplines of Execution explain, “The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.”

• Once you’ve identified a wildly important goal, you need to measure your success. In 4DX, there are two types of metrics for this purpose: lag measures and lead measures.

• Lag measures describe the thing you’re ultimately trying to improve. For example, if your goal is to increase customer satisfaction in your bakery, then the relevant lag measure is your customer satisfaction scores.

• As the 4DX authors explain, the problem with lag measures is that they come too late to change your behavior: “When you receive them, the performance that drove them is already in the past.”

• Lead measures, on the other hand, “measure the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures.”

• In other words, lead measures turn your attention to improving the behaviors you directly control in the near future that will then have a positive impact on your long-term goals.

• For an individual focused on deep work, it’s easy to identify the relevant lead measure: time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal.

• In the preceding discipline, I argued that for an individual focused on deep work, hours spent working deeply should be the lead measure. It follows, therefore, that the individual’s scoreboard should be a physical artifact in the workspace that displays the individual’s current deep work hour count.

• For an individual focused on his or her own deep work habit, there’s likely no team to meet with, but this doesn’t exempt you from the need for regular accountability.

• Before describing some tactics that support this strategy, I want to first explore why a shutdown will be profitable to your ability to produce valuable output.

• Reason #1: Downtime Aids Insights

• Reason #2: Downtime Helps Recharge the Energy Needed to Work Deeply A frequently cited 2008 paper appearing in the journal Psychological Science describes a simple experiment.

• Reason #2: Downtime Helps Recharge the Energy Needed to Work

• Reason #2: Downtime Helps Recharge the Energy Needed to Work Deeply

• This study, it turns out, is one of many that validate attention restoration theory (ART), which claims that spending time in nature can improve your ability to concentrate.

• Put another way, when walking through nature, you’re freed from having to direct your attention, as there are few challenges to navigate (like crowded street crossings), and experience enough interesting stimuli to keep your mind sufficiently occupied to avoid the need to actively aim your attention.

• Having a casual conversation with a friend, listening to music while making dinner, playing a game with your kids, going for a run—the types of activities that will fill your time in the evening if you enforce a work shutdown—play the same attention-restoring role as walking in nature.

• As you might recall from Part 1, deliberate practice is the systematic stretching of your ability for a given skill. It is the activity required to get better at something. Deep work and deliberate practice, as I’ve argued, overlap substantially.

• The implication of these results is that your capacity for deep work in a given day is limited.

• It follows, therefore, that by evening, you’re beyond the point where you can continue to effectively work deeply. Any work you do fit into the night, therefore, won’t be the type of high-value activities that really advance your career; your efforts will instead likely be confined to low-value shallow tasks (executed at a slow, low-energy pace).

• Another key commitment for succeeding with this strategy is to support your commitment to shutting down with a strict shutdown ritual that you use at the end of the workday to maximize the probability that you succeed.

• The concept of a shutdown ritual might at first seem extreme, but there’s a good reason for it: the Zeigarnik effect.

• Shutdown rituals can become annoying, as they add an extra ten to fifteen minutes to the end of your workday (and sometimes even more), but they’re necessary for reaping the rewards of systematic idleness summarized previously.

• Adam Marlin’s experience underscores an important reality about deep work: The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained. This idea might sound obvious once it’s pointed out, but it represents a departure from how most people understand such matters.

• In my experience, it’s common to treat undistracted concentration as a habit like flossing—something that you know how to do and know is good for you, but that you’ve been neglecting due to a lack of motivation.

• Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.

• Among other insights, Nass’s research revealed that constant attention switching online has a lasting negative effect on your brain.

• People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand… they’re pretty much mental wrecks.

• People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted.

• Before diving into the details, let’s start by considering a popular suggestion for distraction addiction that doesn’t quite solve our problem: the Internet Sabbath (sometimes called a digital detox). In its basic form, this ritual asks you to put aside regular time—typically, one day a week—where you refrain from network technology.

• If you eat healthy just one day a week, you’re unlikely to lose weight, as the majority of your time is still spent gorging.

• The idea motivating this strategy is that the use of a distracting service does not, by itself, reduce your brain’s ability to focus. It’s instead the constant switching from low-stimuli/high-value activities to high-stimuli/low-value activities, at the slightest hint of boredom or cognitive challenge, that teaches your mind to never tolerate an absence of novelty.

• If you’re required to spend hours every day online or answer e-mails quickly, that’s fine: This simply means that your Internet blocks will be more numerous than those of someone whose job requires less connectivity.

• Point #2: Regardless of how you schedule your Internet blocks, you must keep the time outside these blocks absolutely free from Internet use.

• Scheduling Internet use at home as well as at work can further improve your concentration training.

• To summarize, to succeed with deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli. This doesn’t mean that you have to eliminate distracting behaviors; it’s sufficient that you instead eliminate the ability of such behaviors to hijack your attention.

• In particular, identify a deep task (that is, something that requires deep work to complete) that’s high on your priority list. Estimate how long you’d normally put aside for an obligation of this type, then give yourself a hard deadline that drastically reduces this time.

• At this point, there should be only one possible way to get the deep task done in time: working with great intensity—no e-mail breaks, no daydreaming, no Facebook browsing, no repeated trips to the coffee machine.

• The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally—walking, jogging, driving, showering—and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem.

• When faced with a hard problem, your mind, as it was evolved to do, will attempt to avoid excess expenditure of energy when possible. One way it might attempt to sidestep this expenditure is by avoiding diving deeper into the problem by instead looping over and over again on what you already know about it. For example, when working on a proof, my mind has a tendency to rehash simple preliminary results, again and again, to avoid the harder work of building on these results toward the needed solution.

• Willpower is limited, and therefore the more enticing tools you have pulling at your attention, the harder it’ll be to maintain focus on something important.

• This idea that a drastic Internet sabbatical* is the only alternative to the distraction generated by social media and infotainment has increasingly pervaded our cultural conversation.

• The problem with this binary response to this issue is that these two choices are much too crude to be useful.

• This rule attempts to break us out of this rut by proposing a third option: accepting that these tools are not inherently evil, and that some of them might be quite vital to your success and happiness, but at the same time also accepting that the threshold for allowing a site regular access to your time and attention (not to mention personal data) should be much more stringent, and that most people should therefore be using many fewer such tools.

• You’re justified in using a network tool if you can identify any possible benefit to its use, or anything you might possibly miss out on if you don’t use

• You’re justified in using a network tool if you can identify any possible benefit to its use, or anything you might possibly miss out on if you don’t use it.

• The problem with this approach, of course, is that it ignores all the negatives that come along with the tools in question.

• Whereas the any-benefit mind-set identifies any potential positive impact as justification for using a tool, the craftsman variant requires that these positive impacts affect factors at the core of what’s important to you and that they outweigh the negatives.

• While Packer, for his part, worries about distraction, saying: “Twitter is crack for media addicts.”

• The question once again is not whether Twitter offers some benefits, but instead whether it offers enough benefits to offset its drag on your time and attention (two resources that are especially valuable to a writer).

• Stuff accumulates in people’s lives, in part, because when faced with a specific act of elimination it’s easy to worry, “What if I need this one day?,” and then use this worry as an excuse to keep the item in question sitting around.

• Given these dangers, you might expect that more knowledge workers would avoid these tools altogether—especially those like computer programmers or writers whose livelihood explicitly depends on the outcome of deep work. But part of what makes social media insidious is that the companies that profit from your attention have succeeded with a masterful marketing coup: convincing our culture that if you don’t use their products you might miss out.