What a wonderful book, written wonderfully. Cal Newport creates a hypothesis around deep work and then goes about adding stories and data to validate those hypothesis.
What is this book about?
The book is about, well, deep work. The kind of work that is needed in today’s marketplace to be in demand. The book starts with convincing the reader about what deep work is and why it is very important. Then it talks about how you can achieve it.
Why this book?
I saw this video and it absolutely convinced me to read this book.
What did I learn from this book?
My takeaway from the book was to get rid of social media (like twitter, instagram, facebook) because it fragments your attention. Our brain is wired to avoid hard problems. If you are person, who, when posed with a hard problem, like, writing a 6 pager or some other long for documents tells yourself ‘let me quickly browse [insert your choice of social media] and come back in 15 minutes refreshed and energized’. If so, then you are an addict and this book is for you. You can still find me on twitter but what I did was unfollow everyone (yes, everyone), so that I can use twitter like this blog, where I can just post stuff without getting sucked into the FEED!
The other take away is to create large chunks (90 mins) of time in your work day as deep work time or focus time, where you quit your slack, email and only focus on whatever problem you want to solve (be it writing a long document or solving a hard problem) with no other distractions.
This takes training, you will start noticing the small things your brain tells you to avoid deep work. For example, after I quit social media, when I start at any hard problem to solve, I will feel thirsty, or I will find some dust in the room that I need to clean etc. As soon as I started noticing that, I tell my brain to focus and all these things can wait for another 90 minutes. In the last two weeks, I can vouch that this has definitely helped. My mind isn’t distracted and I, honestly, haven’t missed social media.
Rating – 5 stars
Book link – https://amzn.to/3ytuK0Z
JoeJayanth 