What is Deep Work?

• Deep work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit; efforts that create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

• Shallow work: Non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted; efforts that tend not to create much new value and are easy to replicate.

Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness, and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work. The idea is therefore to build our work around a core of carefully chosen deep work, with the shallow activities that absolutely cannot be avoided batched into smaller bursts at the peripheries of our schedule. Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration can produce a lot of valuable output.

Why Deep Work Matters

Core abilities for thriving in the new economy

Those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital will have a particular advantage in the new economy.

This means there are two core abilities for thriving in the new economy:

1. The ability to quickly master hard things.

   Intelligent machines are complicated and hard to master. To work well with these machines requires that you hone your ability to master hard things, and because these technologies change rapidly, the process of mastering hard things never ends. You need to be able to do it quickly, again and again. If you can't learn, you can't thrive.

2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

   Mastering the relevant skills is necessary but not sufficient. You must then transform that latent potential into tangible results that people value. If you don't produce, you won't thrive, no matter how skilled or talented you are.

This is where deep work comes in. Both abilities require us to engage deeply with cognitively demanding work rather than operate in a state of fragmented attention.

Why these abilities require depth

Master hard things through deliberate practice

Deliberate practice refers to (a lifelong period of) deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain. Its core components include:

• Focusing your attention tightly on the specific skill you're trying to improve or idea you're trying to master.

• Receiving feedback so you can correct your approach and keep your attention where it's most productive.

Deliberate practice cannot exist with distraction; it requires uninterrupted concentration because this is the only way to isolate the relevant neural circuits enough to trigger useful myelination (the process by which myelin, a fatty insulating layer, forms around nerve fibres (axons), allowing neural signals to travel more quickly and efficiently and, over time, helping to cement the skill).

Produce high-quality work through intense concentration

The intensity of our focus affects how much high-quality work we can produce: High-quality work produced = time spent × intensity of focus.

However, that intensity of focus is compromised when we repeatedly switch our attention between tasks, because of an effect known as attention residue. When you switch from task A to task B, your attention doesn't immediately follow; some of it remains stuck thinking about the original task. This residue becomes especially strong if your work on task A was unbounded and of low intensity before you switched.

It might seem harmless to take a quick glance at your inbox every ten minutes, but seeing messages that you cannot deal with at that moment leaves a secondary task unresolved as you return to your primary task. The resulting attention residue dampens your performance. It is thus important to work without distraction to minimise attention residue and preserve the intensity of focus needed to produce high-quality work.

The Rules

Rule 1: Work deeply

Create a deep work ritual

• You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. The key to developing a deep work habit is therefore to add routines and rituals that minimise the amount of limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.

• A deep-work ritual should specify:

  • Where you will work and for how long: Specify a location for your deep-work efforts. If possible, identify a location used only for that purpose. Give yourself a specific timeframe so that the session becomes a discrete challenge rather than an open-ended slog.

  • How you will work once you start: Your ritual needs rules and processes to keep your effort structured. E.g. You might institute a ban on internet use or maintain a metric such as words produced per 20-minute interval. Without this structure, you have to mentally litigate again and again what you should and should not be doing during these sessions. These are unnecessary drains on your willpower reserves.

  • How you will support your work: Ensure your brain gets the support it needs to keep operating at a high level of depth: e.g. coffee, the right food, light exercise, or organising the raw materials of your work to minimise energy-dissipating friction. Systematise this support so that you don't waste mental energy figuring out what you need in the moment.

Make grand gestures

• Sometimes to go deep, you must first go big. By leveraging a radical change to your normal environment (perhaps coupled with a significant investment of effort or money), you increase the perceived importance of the task. This boost in importance reduces your mind's instinct to procrastinate and delivers an injection of motivation and energy.

Don't necessarily work alone

• Whiteboard effect: For some problems, working with someone else at the proverbial shared whiteboard can push you deeper than working alone. The presence of someone waiting for your next insight can short-circuit the natural instinct to avoid depth.

• Maintain a hub-and-spoke arrangement: Distraction remains a destroyer of depth. Separate the pursuit of serendipitous encounters from your efforts to think deeply and build on those inspirations. Optimise each effort separately; expose yourself to ideas in hubs on a regular basis, but maintain a spoke in which to work deeply on what you encounter.

Execute like a business

1. Discipline 1: Focus on the wildly important.

   Identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep-work hours.

2. Discipline 2: Act on the lead measures.

   Lag measures describe the thing you're ultimately trying to improve, while lead measures measure the behaviours that will drive success on those lag measures. If you focus on a lag measure, there is little you can do today that will immediately change it. On the other hand, tracking a lead measure such as deep-work hours makes the measure relevant to your day-to-day behaviour.

3. Discipline 3: Keep a compelling scoreboard.

   People play differently when they're keeping score. For someone focused on deep work, hours spent working deeply can serve as the lead measure.

   1. The author would circle the tally mark corresponding to the hour in which he reached an important milestone. This helped him connect accumulated deep-work hours with tangible results and mentally calibrate how many hours of deep work were actually needed to produce those results.

4. Discipline 4: Create a cadence of accountability.

   Regularly confront the scoreboard, commit to specific actions to improve it, and review what happened with previous commitments. For individuals, this can take the form of a weekly review in which you make a plan for the work week ahead.

When you're done, be done

At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning. There should be no after-dinner email checks, mental replays of conversations or mulling about how you'll handle an upcoming challenge. If you need more time, extend your workday, but once you shut down, your mind must be left free. This is since:

1. Downtime aids insights.

   Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT) attempts to understand the different roles that conscious and unconscious deliberation play in decision-making. Decisions requiring the application of strict rules require the conscious mind, while decisions involving large amounts of information and multiple vague or conflicting constraints may be better suited to unconscious thought. This is because the regions of the brain involved in unconscious thought have more neuronal bandwidth available, allowing them to process more information and sift through more potential solutions than our conscious centres of thinking.

   
   

   Your conscious mind is like a home computer on which you can run carefully written programs that return correct answers to limited problems, whereas your unconscious mind is like Google's vast data centres, in which statistical algorithms sift through terabytes of unstructured information, teasing out surprising yet useful solutions to difficult questions.

   
   

   Providing your conscious brain time to rest enables your unconscious mind to take a shift at sorting through complex professional challenges.

   
   

2. Downtime helps recharge the energy needed to work deeply.

   Concentration requires directed attention, which is a finite resource that becomes depleted with use. Attention Restoration Theory (ART) argues that giving directed attention a rest allows it to replenish, with time spent in nature being particularly restorative. This helps restore our ability to concentrate and, in turn, our capacity for deep work.

   
   

3. The work that evening downtime replaces is usually not that important.

   Your capacity for deep work in a given day is limited. By evening, you're often beyond the point where you can sustain the concentration it requires. Work squeezed into the night is therefore more likely to consist of low-value, shallow tasks performed at a slow, low-energy pace. If that's all you're likely to accomplish, you're better off not bothering and giving your mind the downtime it needs to recover for the next day.

Have a shutdown ritual

At the end of the workday, ensure every incomplete task, goal or project has been reviewed and that, for each, you have either:

• a plan you trust for its completion; or

• captured it somewhere you know it will be revisited.

This helps address the Zeigarnik effect — the ability of incomplete tasks to dominate our attention. Committing to a specific plan for a goal can free cognitive resources for other pursuits.

Rule 2: Embrace boredom

The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained. This means resisting the habit of reaching for distraction whenever boredom arises, not only while working, but also during our leisure time.

The goal isn't necessarily to reduce how much time you spend online, but to eliminate the ability of distracting behaviours to hijack your attention.

Schedule internet blocks

One way to train this ability is to schedule specific blocks in which you allow yourself to use the internet, while keeping the time outside these blocks free from internet use.

• Make no exceptions, because it doesn't take many exceptions before your mind begins to treat the barrier between internet and offline blocks as permeable. Even if you need to retrieve something online very quickly to complete your current offline activity, don't immediately abandon the offline block. Enforce at least a five-minute gap between wanting to go online and actually doing so. From a behavioural perspective, this matters because it separates the sensation of wanting to go online from the reward of actually doing so.

• Continue this practice outside the workday. During offline periods at home, put your phone away, ignore texts and refrain from internet use. The point is to create opportunities to experience boredom without immediately relieving it through distraction.

Practise working intensely

Another way to train concentration is to periodically push it to its limits.

• Identify a deep task high on your priority list, estimate how long you would normally put aside for it, then give yourself a hard deadline that drastically reduces this time.

• Keep the self-imposed deadline right at the edge of feasibility. You should be able to consistently beat the buzzer, or at least come close, but doing so should require teeth-gritting concentration.

  
  

Productive meditation

You can also train your ability to sustain attention on a single problem during periods when you're physically but not mentally occupied. E.g. while you are walking, jogging or showering, try focusing your attention on a single well-defined professional problem. As with mindfulness meditation, continue bringing your attention back to the problem when it wanders or stalls.

• By forcing yourself to resist distraction and return repeatedly to a well-defined problem, you strengthen your distraction-resisting muscles. By pushing your focus deeper and deeper into one problem, you sharpen your concentration.

Rule 3: Quit social media

The argument for quitting social media is not that these tools have no value (e.g. entertainment, staying connected with friends). The problem is that we often evaluate these tools using a very low bar: if we can identify any benefit from using them, we assume they are worth using.

The "any-benefit" approach to tool selection

• If you justify using a tool based on any possible benefit without weighing it against the costs, you risk letting marginal benefits justify its (possibly unrestrained) use.

• Consider this example:

  • Farmer Forrest Pritchard's farm raises animals that need hay for feed during winter, when grazing is impossible. The farm already has grass growing freely on its land. At first glance, owning a hay baler therefore seems like an obvious choice: why pay for hay when you already have the grass and can bale it yourself?

• If Pritchard applied the any-benefit approach, the decision would end there: the hay baler clearly provides a benefit. However, he went further to consider the total benefits and costs, including less obvious opportunity costs and longer-term effects on the farm. Weighing the convenience of the baler against his larger goal of maintaining soil fertility, he concluded that selling the baler and buying hay instead would better support the long-term health of his farm.

• Moral of the story:

  • A tool can be genuinely useful for accomplishing an immediate task while simultaneously undermining the larger goal it is supposed to serve.

  • Usefulness alone is therefore not enough to justify using a tool. Its benefits have to outweigh its costs in relation to what you're actually trying to accomplish.

• The author contrasts this with the craftsman approach:

  • Any-benefit approach: "Can I identify any benefit from using this tool?" → If yes, use it.

  • Craftsman approach: "Do the substantial positive impacts of this tool on the things I value outweigh its substantial negative impacts?" → Use it only if the balance is favourable.

• Applied back to social media, the question is whether benefits such as entertainment and staying connected with friends are substantial enough to outweigh the costs these tools impose on our time and attention, especially when those costs may undermine our ability to work deeply. The craftsman approach therefore asks us to be more selective: does this particular tool meaningfully support the things we value most, enough to justify what it costs us?

Rule 4: Drain the shallows

Shallow work may be unavoidable, but the goal is to contain it so that it doesn't crowd out the deep work that creates more value. This means being more deliberate about what deserves your time, how much time you give to work, and how accessible you make yourself to others.

Assess how deep a task is

To reduce shallow work, you first need a way to recognise it. Quantify the depth of an activity by asking: "How long would it take, in months, to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialised training in my field to complete this task?" The longer it would take to train someone to do the task, the deeper the task is likely to be.

Fixed-schedule productivity

Once you can distinguish deep from shallow work, put a hard boundary around how much time work is allowed to consume.

Fix a firm goal of not working past a certain time, then work backwards to find productivity strategies that allow you to satisfy this declaration. The constraint forces you to be more selective about what deserves your limited working hours and to ruthlessly reduce the shallow obligations that don't.

Become hard to reach

One major source of shallow work is communication: every incoming message creates a potential demand on your time and attention. We should therefore be more deliberate about both receiving and sending emails.

1. Make people who send you email do more work.

   Reduce unnecessary communication before it reaches you by using a sender filter: Set clear expectations about what someone needs to include before contacting you, so vague or low-value messages are filtered out. This reduces unnecessary email exchanges and protects your time and attention for deeper work.

2. Do more work when you send or reply to emails.

   For messages that do require a response, invest a little more effort upfront to reduce the amount of communication they generate later.

   Process-centric approach to email:

   1. Identify the project implied by the message.

   2. Think through a process that gets from the current state to the desired outcome with the minimum number of messages.

   3. Write a reply that clearly describes that process and where things currently stand.

When a project is initiated by an email, it enters your mental landscape as something that still needs to be addressed. A good process-centric message immediately closes the loop with respect to the project at hand. By working through the whole process, adding relevant commitments to your task lists and calendar, and bringing the other party up to speed, your mind can reclaim the mental real estate that project once demanded. Less mental clutter means more mental resources available for deep thinking.

3. Don't respond.

   Finally, recognise that not every message deserves a response at all. Don't reply to an email if:

   1. It is ambiguous or otherwise makes it hard for you to generate a reasonable response;

   2. It is not a question or proposal that interests you; or

   3. Nothing really good would happen if you responded and nothing really bad would happen if you didn't.