Disclaimer: The following notes present information solely extracted and reworked from the book, not personal thoughts or considerations.

Introduction

Deep Work: “Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”
Shallow Work: “Non cognitively 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.”

Deep work is necessary to extract all possible value from an individual’s intellectual abilities and to improve their skills. “Network tools” (e.g., SMS, social networks, instant messaging), on the other hand, are the primary cause of concentration fragmentation.

The ability to stay focused and perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare and valuable, especially now that we are moving toward an automated economy where skills like creativity and fast learning are a must-have.

This leads to the Deep Work Hypothesis: “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.”

Part 1: The Idea

Two key skills are essential to thrive in the new economy: the ability to quickly learn difficult things and the ability to produce high-quality work in a short amount of time. Developing these skills requires the capacity to concentrate for long stretches. Concentration is like a muscle, it needs to be trained to get results. Network tools work against this goal and should be minimized as much as possible.

This leads to the concept of deliberate practice, which requires you to focus intensely on what you are doing or learning. By listening to the feedback you receive, you can improve your approach and keep your attention where it’s most valuable.

Multitasking hinders deep work due to attention residue. When you switch from one task to another a part of your attention remains stuck on the previous task preventing you from fully focusing on the new one.

Deep work isn’t for everyone. Some jobs (e.g., managers) can’t eliminate shallow work from their routines. Therefore, while deep work is not the only valuable skill in the new economy, for those for whom it is valuable, it becomes incredibly rare.

Part 2: The Rules

Rule 1: Work Deeply

This rule introduces a series of rituals and routines to help you integrate deep work into your life and push the limits of your concentration.

Decise on Your Depth Pholosophy: no one can apply the same approach in the exact same way, simply because we don’t all live the same life. Below are four different approaches that work very well in practice.

• The Monastic Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling: this approach seeks to maximize deep effort by drastically minimizing shallow obligations in pursuit of a single, high-value professional goal;
• The Bimodal Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling: with this approach you divide your time into two parts: the first dedicated to deep activities and the second for everything else. This division can be defined over different time scales (weeks, months, etc.) but it must be at least one full day to make it possible to reach maximum focus;
• The Rhythmic Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling: the simplest way to make deep work sessions consistent is to turn them into a habit (e.g., the chain method). Compared to the first two philosophies, it’s more difficult to reach the deepest level of focus with this method;
• The Journalistic Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling: this approach involves fitting deep work into any free time you have during the day, in a very dynamic way. This method is not for beginners, as the ability to switch from shallow to deep work in a short time is very complex to develop.

Ritualize: to get the most out of your efforts, it’s necessary to build routines or rituals. You should:

• Define where to practice deep work;
• Define how to practice it: what to avoid, what you need to have nearby, and have a clear idea of what to do;
• Define how to support it: preparations, environment, or anything else that can help maintain concentration.

Great gesture: making a “great gesture” (one that requires an effort of any kind – financial, physical, etc.) helps you achieve results because it increases your commitment to what you’re doing. A prime example is J.K. Rowling spending $1,000 a night at a hotel to write Harry Potter.

Don’t work alone: according to the theory of serendipitous creativity, unexpected innovations can emerge from fortunate combinations resulting from the exchange of knowledge in a shared environment. The coexistence of people with diverse backgrounds can foster this process, which you wouldn’t get from working alone and focused but this doesn’t suggest abandoning deep work. MIT, for instance, has successfully benefited from both strategies by creating a hybrid hub structure.

Execute Like a Business: execution plays a fundamental role in supporting deep work (and is often more difficult than planning). It can be summarized in four steps:

1. Identify a small number of ambitious goals to pursue during deep work;
2. To measure results, you can use Lag Measures (long-term, like “I want to publish 5 papers”) or Lead Measures (short-term, like the number of deep work hours per day). Acting on the latter gives you more control over execution and improves the quality of the final goal;
3. Tracking your progress on Lead Measures helps create a sense of competition that fosters commitment;
4. Regularly checking in helps you understand if something is wrong or if everything is on track.

Be Lazy: it’s essential to reserve moments of freedom from work. At the end of the workday, you need to completely disconnect from work (no emails, no thoughts, etc.). If you really need more time, just extend the workday. Here’s why:

1. Problems with vague rather than strict rules, it’s been observed that engaging in other activities can favor the mind’s unconscious flow, which has a greater capacity to solve these problems than the conscious mind (which requires direct focus on the activity);
2. Downtime helps recharge the energy needed to work deeply;
3. The amount of time you can practice deep work in a day is limited. Working beyond this time would result in low-quality tasks of too little importance to make a difference.

Shoutdown routine: a final routine at the end of the day should be a recap of your to-do list and calendar for the following days. A brief brainstorming session on when to do what will help you finish with a clear mind.

Rule 2: Embrace Boredom

This rule is about pushing your concentration ability beyond its limit. To do so, you must both train your mind and fight distractions.

Don’t take breaks by diving into distractions. Instead, take breaks from focus. Adopt the mindset that not every moment of boredom needs to be filled with noise.

Constantly switching between meaningful work and mindless activities only erodes your ability to concentrate. That’s why it helps to practice an ‘Internet Sabbath’ – periods of time, as long as you can manage, dedicated to detoxing from distractions.

Productive meditation involves using a moment when you are physically but not mentally occupied (e.g., while walking, jogging, driving, etc.) to focus your attention on a single professional problem. This uses time that would otherwise be wasted. Like all processes, this must also be trained. Here are two suggestions to accelerate the learning:

1. Be wary of distractions and looping: when your mind tries to escape the main problem by shifting toward simpler ones, or it enters a loop where it focuses on what has already been solved rather than what comes next, bring your attention back to what matters;
2. Structure your deep thinking: keep the variables in play in mind, then define the question you want to answer and verify the quality of your answer.

Rule 3: Quit Social Media

The Internet Sabbath and Internet Sabbatical (the latter differs in that it involves a longer ‘fast’ of 2+ weeks) are two techniques that take this concept to an extreme. In our daily lives, we can still use these tools, but we should set a strict threshold to help us keep them under control.

The Any-Benefit Approach to Network Tool Selection suggests that you’re justified in using a network tool if you can identify any possible benefit from its use or anything you might miss out on if you don’t use it. The problem with this approach is that it fails to consider the negative effects such as addiction and, most of all, the fragmentation of your concentration.

By contrast, The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection asks you to identify the main factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. You should adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.

This latter approach, unlike the first, emphasizes the negative aspects of tool use. Here are three strategies that favor abandoning the “any-benefit” mindset:

• Apply the Law of the Vital Few to Your Internet Habits: this strategy involves identifying your primary personal and professional goals and analyzing the tools that will help you achieve them. While every tool has some benefit, according to the Pareto Principle, 20% of the tools will give you 80% of the support needed to achieve your goals. Using other, less effective tools simply because they’re vaguely useful would only consume your already limited daily supply of attention;
• Quit Social Media: this strategy suggests that you stop using social media for 30 days. After that period, ask yourself if your life would have been better with their use or if anyone noticed your absence. If the answer to both questions is no, then it’s time to simply stop using them;
• Don’t Use the Internet to Entertain Yourself: plan your free time in advance with stimulating activities that help you avoid the “web-surfing” tunnel. It’s worth noting that engaging in demanding activities – like reading a book – doesn’t harm your attention the next day. Actually, it strengthens it because these activities make you feel more accomplished than random internet browsing.

Rule 4: Drain the Shallows

The goal is to minimize your daily shallow work, not to eliminate it entirely. Although shallow work is often underestimated and can be “dangerous,” it still has its uses if properly controlled.

Schedule Every Minute of Your Day: you can use a notepad to draw out blocks of at least 30 minutes and pre-allocate all your activities, maintaining a balanced mix of deep and shallow work. If something goes wrong, you simply redraw the blocks to regain control of your time. This approach isn’t meant to create a rigid, unchangeable structure; rather, it’s designed to make you constantly ask yourself, “How should I best invest my remaining time?”. Unexpected events are accepted, as long as you repeat this mental exercise to properly manage your time afterward.

Quantify the Depth of Every Activity: a non-trivial process is “labeling” your activities as shallow or deep. To help with this, ask yourself: “How long would it take (in months) to train an intelligent recent graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task?”. This question gives you a clear indicator of where your task falls on the shallow-to-deep scale. A task that would take 50 months to master has an exponentially higher intrinsic value than one that would take only 3 months.

Ask Your Boss for a Shallow Work Budget: unless you are self-employed, it’s a good idea to agree with your superiors on a specific amount of time to dedicate to shallow work. This is because it must be a shared goal with your company to be put into practice. If this isn’t possible, it’s likely that correctly practicing deep work is not compatible with your current job.

Finish Your Work by Five Thirty: an additional useful framework is fixed-schedule productivity. Its application involves choosing a time after which you stop working and then building a strategy to perform all necessary work within that timeframe. This approach rewards deep work and penalizes unnecessary shallow work.

Become Hard to Reach: here are some tips to gain more control over your email and prevent it from excessively absorbing your attention:

1. Don’t respond: it’s the sender’s responsibility to write an email that convinces the recipient that a reply would be profitable for them. A good email is not ambiguous and is of clear interest to the recipient. If these minimum requirements are not met, simply don’t reply (with the necessary exceptions);
2. Make people who send you email do more work: instead of leaving a generic contact on your blog or social media, you can add an entry filter to reduce the influx of messages. This could be a phrase like, “To contact me, write to… I will only reply to proposals that capture my attention,” or an FAQ section, a form, or any other mechanism. When communications increase exponentially, filtering them is vital for managing them effectively.
3. Do more work when you send or reply to emails: rather than responding in a short, rushed way, dedicate time to reply in a structured and complete manner. This avoids prolonging the conversation and creating new distractions later.