I’ve had Deep Work on my long list of books to read, ever since I heard Cal Newport discuss his book on the Ezra Klein show a few years ago. At the time, it struck me as an interesting and clear approach to productivity and was worth engaging with, because I was interested in my own productivity.
A few years have passed, the pandemic has happened (and continues to happen), and there has been a large-scale reevaluation of the place of work in our lives. The idea of maximizing productivity for the sake of your own career now seems a bit less urgent and less interesting today than it did when I first heard about Deep Work years ago. Still, I remembered how intrigued I was by the conversation with Newport, so I decided to give his book a read.
Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by the book and found a few different valuable ideas, even for our “Great Resignation” world. The first is about how to make your work take up less mental real estate. In particular, Newport does a nice job of advocating for the habit of having a fixed work schedule and “shutting down” for the evening. I’ve certainly had the experience of periodically checking in on my work email throughout the evening. When this happens, you cannot feel fully relaxed, especially when an email comes in asking you to do something. The email is going to wait until tomorrow, but just reading the email pulls you back into work mode (p. 151). Newport instead argues for setting a specific time each day at which you completely stop working (p. 236-42). To facilitate this hard stop, Newport outlines a ritual where you add anything outstanding to your to-do list, review your to-do list to make sure there is nothing urgent, and review your schedule for the next few days to make sure you’re prepared (p. 142-54). Once you’ve done this, you are ready to leave your work at work and not think about it again until the next day. This is a strategy I’ve sort of unconsciously tried, so I appreciate Newport making it explicit and offering concrete ways to make it more effective. With a hard upper limit on the number of hours you work each day, you have a “time budget” that you can use to start planning out exactly what you need to accomplish and focus on the most important things.
I also was intrigued by Newport’s discussion of email practices. He offers a number of different strategies to prevent email (and responding to email) from overwhelming your time (p. 242-56). Many of these suggestions are easier to implement if you are an academic or author (like Newport), but he raises good points about what kinds of emails you should respond to and how to prod your correspondents into doing more work instead of passing it on to you. Newport has another book just about email and I’m now interested in checking that out.
One aside that I found provocative was his characterization of a CEO. In evangelizing the importance of working deeply, Newport considers the apparent counterexample of Jack Dorsey who spends all of his time engaging in what appears to be shallow work managing both Twitter and Square and still is wildly successful. This is what Newport says about such CEO’s:
A good chief executive is essentially a hard-to-automate decision engine, not unlike IBM’s Jeopardy!-playing Watson system. They have built up a hard-won repository of experience and have honed and proved an instinct for their market. They’re then presented inputs throughout the day - in the form of e-mails, meetings, site visits, and the like - that they must process and act on. To ask a CEO to spend four hours thinking deeply about a single problem is a waste of what makes him or her valuable. It’s better to hire three smart subordinates to think deeply about the problem and then bring their solutions to the executive for a final decision.
It’s an interesting take on leadership positions, which often seem like they don’t involve as much concentrated deep work as one would like. Instead, leadership is about synthesis (which may involve working deeply) and then making a judgment.
To wrap up, there are some parts that don’t sit well in 2022. Woody Allen and J.K. Rowling shouldn’t feature as success stories. Nate Silver utilizing his deep work to predict elections like it’s a game seems less inspiring in light of the dire consequences of recent elections. But despite these quibbles and even if you aren’t interested in maximizing your own personal value, the strategies and ideas of Deep Work are worth the quick read in 2022.