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Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World Hardcover – January 5, 2016
Cal Newport (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It's a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep-spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there's a better way.
In DEEP WORK, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite. Dividing this book into two parts, he first makes the case that in almost any profession, cultivating a deep work ethic will produce massive benefits. He then presents a rigorous training regimen, presented as a series of four "rules," for transforming your mind and habits to support this skill.
A mix of cultural criticism and actionable advice, DEEP WORK takes the reader on a journey through memorable stories -- from Carl Jung building a stone tower in the woods to focus his mind, to a social media pioneer buying a round-trip business class ticket to Tokyo to write a book free from distraction in the air -- and no-nonsense advice, such as the claim that most serious professionals should quit social media and that you should practice being bored. DEEP WORK is an indispensable guide to anyone seeking focused success in a distracted world.
- Reading age5 years and up
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions5.75 x 1 x 8.5 inches
- PublisherGrand Central Publishing
- Publication dateJanuary 5, 2016
- ISBN-101455586692
- ISBN-13978-1455586691
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"DEEP WORK accomplishes two considerable tasks: One is putting out a wealth of concrete practices for the ambitious, without relying on gauzy clichés. The second is that Mr. Newport resists the corporate groupthink of constant connectivity without seeming like a curmudgeon."―Wall Street Journal
"As automation and outsourcing reshape the workplace, what new skill do we need? The ability to do deep work. Cal Newport's exciting new book is an introduction and guide to the kind of intense concentration in a distraction-free environment that results in fast, powerful learning and performance. Think of it as calisthenics for your mind-and start your exercise program today."―Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive and When
"DEEP WORK makes a compelling case for cultivating intense focus, and offers immediately actionable steps for infusing more of it into our lives."―Adam M. Grant, author of Originals and Think Again
"Cal Newport is a clear voice in a sea of noise, bringing science and passion in equal measure. We don't need more clicks, more cats, and more emojis. We need brave work, work that happens when we refuse to avert our eyes."―Seth Godin, author of This is Marketing and The Practice
"Cal Newport offers the most well-informed and astute collection of practical advice I have seen for reclaiming one's mental powers."―Matthew B. Crawford, author of The World Beyond Your Head and Why We Drive
"Just when you think you already know this stuff, DEEP WORK hits you with surprisingly unique and useful insights. Rule #3 alone, with its discussion of the 'Any-Benefit' mind-set, is worth the price of this book."―Derek Sivers, founder, Sivers.org
"Here lies a playbook for professionals of all stripes to achieve true differentiation in a crowded talent marketplace. Cal Newport's latest shows why he is one of the most provocative thinkers on the future of work."―Ben Casnocha, co-author of The Start-Up Of You
"Deep work is the killer app of the knowledge economy: it is only by concentrating intensely that you can master a difficult discipline or solve a demanding problem."―The Economist
"This is a deep, not shallow, book which can enrich your life."―The Globe and Mail
"In this strong self-help book, Newport declares that the habits of modern professionals-checking email at all hours, rushing from meeting to meeting, and valuing multitasking above all else-only stand in the way of truly valuable work."―Publisher's Weekly
"[A] worthwhile distraction."―ValueWalk
"A wonderfully entangled, intertwined, and erudite series of strategies, philosophies, disciplines, and techniques to sharpen your focus and dive deep into your work."―800-CEO-READ
"DEEP WORK is now one of my all-time favorite books, and I'm not joking when I say it was a life-changing read for me. I think it can be for you too."―Brett McKay, author of The Art of Manliness
"What emerges most powerfully is the sense that it's wrong to think of deep work as one more thing you've got to try to cram into your schedule. Truly committing to it, Newport suggests, transforms the rest of your time - so you'll crank through shallow work faster, be more present in your home life, and eliminate time wasted switching between tasks. Depth, in short, isn't at odds with a full life - it facilitates it. I'm persuaded."―Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian
About the Author
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Product details
- Publisher : Grand Central Publishing; 1st edition (January 5, 2016)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1455586692
- ISBN-13 : 978-1455586691
- Reading age : 5 years and up
- Item Weight : 14.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.75 x 1 x 8.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,683 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #6 in Time Management (Books)
- #9 in Personal Time Management
- #20 in Job Hunting & Career Guides
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Cal Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University, and a writer who explores the intersections of technology, work, and culture. He is the author of seven books, including, most recently, A World Without Email, Digital Minimalism, and Deep Work. These titles include multiple New York Times bestsellers and have been translated into over 40 languages. Newport is also a contributing writer for the New Yorker and the host of the Deep Questions podcast.
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Reviewed in the United States on December 12, 2017
Top reviews from the United States
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These books should be taken together as a whole because they give you the WHAT, the WHY and the HOW for being an elite knowledge worker.
So Good they Can't Ignore you shows you why building valuable and rare skills, which Newport calls "career capital" is the number one most important thing for finding a job you love (not "finding your passion"). Building that capital allows you to find a job where you can have creative control over your work and more control over your time, which allows you to do "deep work," aka deliberate practice (and the 10,000 hour rule for expertise, Gladwell, Ericsson and others). There are also 2 other factors, choosing a domain or mission or project where you will have a postive impact on the world, and choosing to work with people who you like being around, which aren't covered much but Newport assumes you should be able to figure out on your own.
Summary of what you need to be So Good They Can't Ignore You
1. Rare and valuable skills (aka career capital)
2. Creative control over projects
3. Control over your time (which allows you to do deep work, virtuous cycle)
4. Work that has a positive impact on the world
5. Working with people you enjoy being with
Here's the formula:
-Use deep work to learn fast and build up rare and valuable skills.
-Then apply these rare and valuable skills to the right projects so that you can build up career capital.
-Then cash in the career capital to get more creative and time control over your job.
-All the while, try to pick jobs and projects that have a positive impact and allow you to work with good people.
-However, these are usually also things that you need to trade in your career capital (rare skills and experience using them) in order to maximize.
-Don't try to save the world or have a big impact until you have the career capital to match. Otherwise you will probably fail. You have to earn all these perks via building career capital by using deep work.
So Good They Can't Ignore You doesn't spend much time explaining how to actually implement deep work (deliberate practice) into you life. It tells you to focus deeply, stretch yourself cognitively and get constant high quality feedback on your work/output.
That's where Deep Work comes in. Deep Work shows you exactly WHY deep work is so important (as opposed to Shallow Work), especially for modern knowledge workers, and why the way most people work, with constant interruptions from social media, email and their phones, is holding most knowledge workers back from being successful and competitive in today's job market.
The first part of the book argues for why Deep Work is important. If you have already bought into the idea, you can skim this part, but I found the examples and people he featured to be very interesting so it's worth a read. Just don't expect a lot of tactics until part 2.
Chapter 1 explains why deep work is VALUABLE. Our economy is changing, and the days of doing the same thing over and over for 40 years until you retire are over. Newport lays out an interesting theory for 3 types of workers, Superstars, Owners and High Skill Workers and makes a convincing and important argument for the importance in the future of being able to work at higher levels of abstraction and work with intelligent machines.
In this chapter he also makes a case for the two critical skills for knowledge workers:
1. Learning Quickly
2. Producing at an Elite Level
This conclusion informs the rest of the book. If you want to be good at these two skills, the most important thing to be good at is deep work.
Chapter 2 focuses on why deep work is RARE. He shows how distractions are becoming more and more common for knowledge workers, and that attention is becoming more and more fractures. Newport makes a good case for how complex knowledge work is often hard to measure, so managers measure busyness instead of output that relates to bottom line results (KPIs). Busyness as a vanity metric. People end up optimizing for looking busy instead of getting real work done, and everybody plays along with this charade.
Chapter 3 goes into why deep work is MEANINGFUL. Meaning is a key part of Newport's argument because the whole book links back to the Passion vs. Rare Skills debate…which is a better strategy for finding a job you love? If the job isn't meaningful, then deep work doesn't fully answer the question of how to best find a job you love. Newport give 3 theories on why deep work is meaningful, a psychological, neurological and a philosophical reason.
That's it for part 1.
In Part 2, Newport tells you how to implement deep work into your day to day life with 4 rules.
Rule 1 gives you a bunch of strategies and examples of how to integrate deep work into your schedule. He offers different strategies depending on what kind of work you do. The Grand Gestures part of this chapter is really good, you learn about Bill Gates Think Week and same famous authors who go to secluded islands or build cabins to get a lot of deep work done when necessary. There is also a section here on execution using the 4 Disciplines from Clayton Christensen's work. The point on lead vs. lag measures is really good.
Rule 2 covers the idea of embracing boredom. Newport gives a number of strategies for doing two important things: improving your ability to focus and eliminating your desire for distraction. At first these seem like the same thing but Newport explains why they are actually two different skills. For example, someone who is constantly switching between social media and infotainment sites can block off time for deep work but they won't be able to focus if they can't control their desire to always have instant gratification and constant stimulus. The point about making deep work your default, and scheduling shallow work in between is also a game changer.
Rule 3 is about social media sites and infotainment sites. This rule isn't as strategic as the other ones, it's mostly about making a side argument that these networking sites aren't as important is you think they are. He gives some good strategies for measuring what sites and services you should include in your day to day life based on the total collection of all the positive and negative effects. This sort of critical thinking and measurement usually doesn't get applied to these kind of sites.
Rule 4 is about draining the shallows, meaning going through the process of eliminating as much as possible shallow work from your daily schedule. This is more tactical chapter, (This and Rule 1 are the most useful of the 4) you learn how to plan out your day, how to stop from bringing your work home with you with an end of day ritual and how to manage your email so that you cut down on the amount of time you spend in your inbox each day. There is also a strategy for how to talk to your boss about deep work so you can get permission to re-arrange your schedule to be more productive.
Overall Thoughts:
This book, and Newport's previous book So Good They Can't Ignore You, are some of the most important books you will read on planning your career.
Most people spend little to no time on these decisions, or just go with the flow or with how other people approach things, even though this planning process will affect the next 4 to 5 decades of their life.
Most people's thinking is still stuck in the industrial economy way of thinking…it makes sense thought, our education system is also stuck in this way of thinking. Deep work gives you a solid, actionable plan and doesn't leave anything out that I can think of.
First off, howdy Cal! We're neighbors! Loved the recommendation for Smith Meadows grass fed meat.
Love the vernacular as well. Cal is an outstanding writer, and from one writer to another, superbly impressed by this. Favorite word I think is heuristic.
I purchased the kindle version and actually got so, so much from this book that I copied into "Notes" for personal review that eventually I got a message error saying "copy limit reached"!
There is just so much use included in this book, backed by an entirely action-driven plan complete with science-backed evidence. Cal stays clear more or less of the political and philosophical debates (he dabbles, but not much at all)
I'm not a fan of people including summaries in their review, I think that's wildly unethical actually, so all I will say is you're looking for a way to become more efficient and successful, this book is not to be missed. Only regret not reading it sooner.
P.s. During the reading thought of the potentiality of using Pavlovian cues to start/end blocks of deep work...perhaps a series of bells or sounds, each individual to the start or end of a particular area of deep work. This could potentially help the mind become more accustomed to the start and stop of said work.
Love, love, love this book. Will re-read often! Thanks, Cal!
Top reviews from other countries

The book does point out that deep work genuinely isn't for everyone - for different but related reasons, CEOs of huge corporations and carers of young children might be better off entirely working at the 'shallow' level. However, it does make excellent points about how routine administration, productivity checks and social discourse, especially using social media, are vampires of time and attention like nothing else. As well as being very useful for individuals, many managers could usefully read this book, to help empower workers to achieve more of real value and - and this point is not unrelated - stop constantly harassing them with administrative requests of little or no real importance. One important facet of this is it shows very persuasively how deep work is almost the opposite of long work, or overwork - working better decreases working time overall, with much better results. For employees, and intelligent employers, what is not to like about that? It really chimed in with my experiences in the organized working environment.
So highly recommended for anyone interested in how to work better on an individual level, or how work might be done better on an organizational level. I suppose I can't say better than that I actually made one set of the recommended changes immediately on finishing the book...

I bought it after reading the kindle sample. If you've read the kindle sample, you've read the whole book - nothing else is added.

Deep Work is a common sense book than a self-help book. The crux of the book is that there are two kind of work we do. One is Deep work and the other is shallow work. Deep work is rare and hard. Shallow work is easy and ubiquitous.
What is Deep Work? Deep work is concentrating on a cognitively demanding work with zero distractions to produce quality work. Its demanding and helps provide valuable things to society that are hard to replicate or replace.
What Shallow work? Any work we do on auto-pilot. Replying emails , social media presence etc. These work are easy to replace and not valued much in society.
The book is dividend into two parts. Part I is about why Deep work matter and its scientific backing. Part II is how to achieve Deep work.
Part I doesn't have to try hard to convince us about the internet chipping away our ability to concentrate and contemplate. And provides all the necessary studies and research on internet and its effects on attention. Most of the critique are well ground and rational, and definitely not a luddite rant on the internet.
Part II is how to achieve Deep Work.
Discusses on what type of Deep work philosophy to choose.
Ritualising Deep work: Identify Location and time to do deep work. Adhere to rules and process to deep work. (like no internet)
4DX fundamentals: Focus unimportant things, Act on measures, Keep a scorecard, Create accountability.
Embrace Boredom:Don't take break from distraction. Instead take breaks from Focus. Schedule your internet usage. Structure your deep thinking.
Quit Social Media.
Drain the Shallows: Schedule your day in blocks in advance to focus on Deep work.
Although it follows the typical science/self-help format with familiar paragraphs like 'The Study conducted by University of X researchers on group of people in Y of the age Z in ABC environment agrees with my thesis', this is a potent work with strong common sense solutions to the ubiquitous problem of shallow work. My thoughts on self-help books remains unchanged. However I would highly recommend this book.

Rating : 5/5
Deep work is a book for everyone although the author emphasises it for knowledge workers. In my opinion it is for businessmen who wants to achieve their goals in their hectic schedule, teachers (faculties) who wants to pursue research despite their academic duties, or an entrepreneur who wants to increase the productivity and creativity of the team, or just some random guy who wants to spend some quality time with family but cannot. Books helps you to develop self discipline.
This book can best be placed among books like Outliers/Mastery/Flow/Peak etc. where importance of work and it’s consequences are explained. Only thing is Deep work is more detailed in terms of strategies and bit less on psychology studies.
The book is hardly 300 pages but will require some time to fully understand all hacks & strategies. Work habits of great people like Carl Jung, J K Rowling, Bill Gates, Walter Isaacson and many others are very well explained. The author also writes about his life and experience.
After reading this book you will definitely be more productive, you might be able schedule every minute/hour/day of your life, you would be able to effectively choose your career job and not fall for dead end jobs, and lastly decipher what is fact from fiction when it comes to big companies.
After completing this book and from my experience at different work places I think the book may be a bit ambitious for developing & undeveloped countries. This is because I think in this countries there is still lack of work ethics and your company/institute may not respond as the book says or they may not even consider deep work as meaningful. All in all deep work gives a positive experience.

Reviewed in India on March 9, 2020
Rating : 5/5
Deep work is a book for everyone although the author emphasises it for knowledge workers. In my opinion it is for businessmen who wants to achieve their goals in their hectic schedule, teachers (faculties) who wants to pursue research despite their academic duties, or an entrepreneur who wants to increase the productivity and creativity of the team, or just some random guy who wants to spend some quality time with family but cannot. Books helps you to develop self discipline.
This book can best be placed among books like Outliers/Mastery/Flow/Peak etc. where importance of work and it’s consequences are explained. Only thing is Deep work is more detailed in terms of strategies and bit less on psychology studies.
The book is hardly 300 pages but will require some time to fully understand all hacks & strategies. Work habits of great people like Carl Jung, J K Rowling, Bill Gates, Walter Isaacson and many others are very well explained. The author also writes about his life and experience.
After reading this book you will definitely be more productive, you might be able schedule every minute/hour/day of your life, you would be able to effectively choose your career job and not fall for dead end jobs, and lastly decipher what is fact from fiction when it comes to big companies.
After completing this book and from my experience at different work places I think the book may be a bit ambitious for developing & undeveloped countries. This is because I think in this countries there is still lack of work ethics and your company/institute may not respond as the book says or they may not even consider deep work as meaningful. All in all deep work gives a positive experience.





Highly recommend to anyone, and it has wide relevance across many fields. Also very readable and entertaining. It is a joy to read and has plenty of interesting tales and case studies to make the book flow perfectly, whilst imparting the necessary wisdom.