Notes on Deep Work, Focus, and

Meaningful Productivity

+ Highlights and key takeaways from my interview with Cal Newport

+ Book notes from Cal Newports book, Deep Work

Shawn Blanc

thesweetsetup.com | thefocuscourse.com
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Cal Newport Interview Notes and
Takeaways
Cal Newport is one of my favorite writers and thinkers. His book, So Good They Can't Ignore
You, was one of the most impactful books I read in 2015. And his brand new book, Deep Work,
is equally fantastic.

The hypothesis behind Deep Work is this:

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.

In our conversation, Cal and I talked about time management, how to develop a lifestyle where
you are consistently able to spend time in your day on the things that matter most, how it's a
skill to be able to do deep work and focus and how to develop that skill, and more.

Below youll find transcriptions of the conversation with the key notes, takeaways, etc.

***

There are so many components to doing your best creative work, but the very foundational
one is the creative work itself. If you're not showing up every day and practicing, then you'll
never reach your potential - you'll never do your absolute best.

Deep Work, Deliberate/Intentional Practice, The Craftsman Mindset, Finding Flow - all of
these are synonyms for showing up every day.

But they go beyond just showing up. Showing up and working hard isn't enough. You need to
make sure that the time you spend in deep work is productive time.

In So Good They Can't Ignore You, Cal writes that people will hit a performance plateau beyond
which they fail to get any better. And his newest book, Deep Work is all about how to push
through that plateau. Deep Work is about what to do when you do show up, and how to turn all
of it into a part of your lifestyle.

In short, to do your best creative work, you need to hone the skill of being able to focus.

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Why is Deep Work Valuable?
Consider the inverse On an average day, how eective do you feel at your job? How much
time do you spend on email, checking various inboxes, and responding to the urgent?

Are you able to sit down for 30 minutes and write without interruptions?

By far and away, when Im talking to people about the challenges they face at work it has to do
with distractions and interruptions.

There are two types of distractions: those that come from without and those that come from
within.

Those from without include your boss or your coworker tapping you on the shoulder, your
phone buzzing, your email program beeping, etc.

Those from within are when you get sidetracked or distracted during a focused work time.

For example: Im writing this article. When I hit a point that Im not sure what to keep saying,
or just after a few minutes when I dont feel like continuing to write, it can be tempting to
relieve that tension by switching away from Ulysses and into Twitter, or email, or my favorite
weblogs to see whats new.

That is a distraction from within. And it takes time to build up that deep work muscle in
order to keep from giving in to the distraction and see my focused work time through to the
end.

In an article about Deep Work, Cal Newport wrote that most knowledge workers are bad at
working. Consider this

Chess players know how to study chess, practice their skills, and systematically improve their
game. Musicians know how to study, practice, and systematically improve their skills with
their instrument. Athletes have a daily routine for systematic strength building and skill
development.

But knowledge workers? Well, many spend hours per day checking email. Yikes!

In order to do your best work, you need focused, uninterrupted time every day to do work that
is meaningful.

If you spend all your day doing shallow work (meetings, emails, social networks, casual blog
reading) then you'll never build up your knowledge skill. You'll never progress as a knowledge
worker and as a creative. You'll never get breakthrough in your work.

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Developing the Skill of Deep Work
Deep work and focus are skills; not personality types.

To develop the skill of deep work you have to:

1. Control and protect your time

2. Slowly spend time training yourself to focus without giving in to distractions

3. Make lifestyle changes so that even in your down time you arent allowing unnecessary
noise and distractions to fill up every minute of your day.

To have an eective deep work session, you need to:

1. Schedule the time

2. Have an expected outcome that you are aiming to accomplish during that time

3. Realize that youre working the focus muscle and that it takes practice and time.

To succeed with deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting
stimuli.

Reduce the amount of novel stimuli that you let in to your day-to-day life. When you have a
strong baseline level of noise in all the little moments of your life, it makes it more dicult to
focus on the task at hand when youre doing deep work. Because youre training your brain
boredom is bad.

By reducing the baseline level of noise, it helps us to focus for extended periods of time. It also
helps your mind to rest as it should during your down time.

You Cant Trust Your Instincts

Deep work is not a natural activity. When it comes to doing important work and improving our
skills, our mind and instincts cant be trusted. Thus, it is helpful to have a plan and to schedule
your day. This takes the guesswork out of where you should be focusing on, and all you have
left to do is show up and do what youve planned to do.

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There are four styles of deep work:
As defined in Cals book, they are:

1. Monastic: This philosophy attempts to maximize deep eorts by eliminating or

radically minimizing shallow obligations. (Think seclusion somewhere)

2. Bimodal: This philosophy asks that you divide your time, dedicating some clearly
defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else.

3. Rhythmic: This philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work
sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit.

4. Journalistic: in which you fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule.

For me (Shawn), on any given week, I employ the Bimodal and Rhythmic styles of deep work in
concert.

What that means is that my day is generally divided into 2 or 3 chunks. With the first half of
my day being set aside for deep, focused work and the latter half of my day giving space for
various admin tasks, errands, and other shallow-work miscellany. Thats the Bimodal style
every day is divided with significant time dedicated to deep pursuits.

I also employ the Rhythmic style in that not only do I have dedicated time set aside every day,
but I have a habitual / ritualistic routine to help me get into a deep work flow, so to speak.

There are, additionally, seasons from time to time where Ill go full-on Monk Mode. Where I
pretty much shut o all other obligations and focus intently on one specific task for a period of
time. This is what I did during the month of August as we were preparing to launch our Learn
Ulysses course.

I couldnt do the Monastic style as a long-term lifestyle. I like the pendulum swing that allows
me to go from one one extreme back to another. But I do enjoy getting to put my head down
for a few weeks at a time and really focus in on a single project.

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Don't let busyness be a proxy for productivity
For many of us, we put an emphasis on eciency rather than eectiveness.

Or, paradoxically, we also tend consider the total time spent on a project as being more
valuable than the results themselves.

You can change that mindset and change your paradigm about what it means to be eective.
Challenge the culture that values crushing it that says only those who are super busy and
who work every waking hour are the ones who are super hungry. Realize that you can work
eectively, and you can be focused without overworking yourself.

There is a division between being out-of-control busy and being a hard worker.

How to do More Deep Work

If you want to do more deep work, but you're not sure where to start, do this:

1. Look at your calendar and block out 5 hours on your schedule over the next two weeks

2. Put your phone away when you get home so that you don't get distracted

3. Find a balanced ratio of shallow work and deep work in your day-to-day life.

Shallow work and deep work are both necessary. The former is doing the things that need to
be done for the sake of today. The latter is doing the things that need to be done for the sake
of the future. Put another way: Shallow work keeps you from getting fired; deep work gets you
promoted.

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The Three Waves of Productivity
Over the past 15 years, productivity training has matured significantly. We began with an
emphasis on eciency; then we began to ask the question about how to use that eciency to
do meaningful work; and now we are realizing that doing meaningful work is a skill in and of
itself.

Productivity Wave One: Eciency

This first wave focused heavily on systems and methodologies and tools. It touted eciency
as the ultimate form of productivity, stating that you need to capture and organize all your
tasks and projects and other areas of responsibility. And to do this you need smarter lists and
more powerful tools.

(Note that there are many ways to be ecient with your time and your tasks beyond a specific
or complex methodology. I for one am a huge fan of the Ivy Lee method.)

Productivity Wave Two: Intentionality

This second wave build on the first. Saying that organizing your tasks is not the height of
productivity. But rather its about making room to do the real work. This second wave was
more of a mindset shift than a skill.

In other words, it was the realization that when you are ecient with all the incoming stu and
your ideas and your time, then you are able to create space in your day to do the important
work. (Note that another way to create space in your day is to say no to certain incoming
things and get yourself some margin.)

This intentionality of choosing to do meaningful work exposed a truth that to merely free up
your time isnt enough.

Once people time available to do the real work they often didnt even know what it was,
nor did they have the skills needed to take advantage of that time.

Doing the real work is, in itself, a craft that takes time and practice. And this is what the third
wave is all about

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Productivity Wave Three: Meaning
Wave three is about defining what to do in the time that youre fighting to clear out and taking
advantage of that real work time.

We have had to reengage with what it means to concentrate and do focused, meaningful work.
We are now giving our attention to what it means to do deep work.

These three waves serve one another. You need all three to get the true benefits, and its not
until you get to the third wave that you start to see all the benefits.

It is in the third wave where you start to produce more valuable work and you find your work
more meaningful.

However, the challenge here is that many people do not have clarity about what it means to be
productive and valuable. They cannot define what important, deep work is. As a result, that
lack of clarity leads to unfocused busy work such as checking email, social media, news, etc.

In his book, Deep Work, Cal warns against using busyness as a proxy for productivity:

In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many
knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stu in a
visible manner.

Clarity cures busywork.

Clarity about what matters also gives clarity about what does not. Clarity is vital if you want to
do deep work on a regular basis over the long run.

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Deep Work Book Notes
The whole hypothesis behind Deep Work is this:

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.

In his book, So Good They Cant Ignore You, Cal writes that people will hit a performance plateau
beyond which they fail to get any better.

Deep Work continues this theme. Cal writes: To succeed you have to produce the absolute best
stu youre capable of producing a task that requires depth. (pg. 13)

What Deep Work is all about is how to push through that plateau; how to move toward
mastery; how to stay focused; and why it all matters. This book gives practical advice and
insight about what to do when you do show up to do the work and how to turn it into a part of
your lifestyle.

Deep Work Unto Your Best Work

The common habit of working in a state of semi-distraction is potentially devastating to your
performance.

To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration
on a single task free from distraction. Put another way, the type of work that optimizes
your performance is deep work. If youre not comfortable going deep for extended periods
of time, itll be dicult to get your performance to the peak levels of quality and quantity
increasingly necessary to thrive professionally. Unless your talent and skills absolutely dwarf
those of your competition, the deep workers among them will outproduce you.

Ive spoken to many people who are struggling with the balance of growing their business or
side project. In fact, this is a challenge that I am also facing.

If you feel that youve reached a ceiling in your ability to create quality work on a consistent
basis, its probably because in your work life there is an undercurrent of working in a distracted
state.

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Are you often in a semi-focused state at best? If so, then its no wonder that it can feel
impossible to gain traction on business growth while also maintaining your ability to do high-
quality creative work.

There are two moves for people in this situation

For one, they no doubt need to automate, eliminate, and delegate additional tasks and
responsibilities o their plate. Freeing them up to focus more on things that only they can do.

Secondly, they need more time spent on intentional practice and focused, deep work. As Cal
writes, Deep work helps you produce at an elite level.

Clarity Cures Busywork

You need clarity about what matters if you want to do deep work on a regular basis over the
long run.

I always plan my single, most-important task, ahead of time. At the end of each day, I write
down the one thing Im going to focus on tomorrow that is most important.

Then, on the following day when I sit down to do the work, I have only one focus: accomplish
the previously-defined task.

However, without that foreknowledge of defining ahead of time what is most important, then I
would have a dual-focus when it came time to do my focused work. First, I would have to think
about what to do, and then I would have to begin doing the actual work.

This lack of clarity about knowing what it is that is important to do is why so many people turn
to email and other inboxes in order to keep busy. They dont know what else to do. And thus
they end up doing shallow busywork which helps them to feel productive.

Cal warns against using busyness as a proxy for productivity. He writes:

In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs,
many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots
of stu in a visible manner.

Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.

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On choosing to embrace boredom:

The ability to concentrate intently is a skill that must be trained. Much in the same way
that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, youll struggle to
achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the
slightest hint of boredom.

Book Highlights
- Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free
concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These eorts create
new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate. (pg. 3)

- Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while

distracted. These eorts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy
to replicate. (pg. 6)

- To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stu you're capable of producinga
task that requires depth. (pg. 13)

- The Deep Work Hypotheseis: 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. (pg. 14)

- Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed
concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output. (pg. 16)

- More generally, the lack of distraction in my life tones down that background hum of
nervous mental energy that seems to increasingly pervade people's daily lives. I'm
comfortable being bored, and this can be a surprisingly rewarding skillespecially on a
lazy D.C. summer night listening to a Nationals game slowly unfold on the radio. (pg.
17)

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Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy

1. The ability to quickly master hard things.

2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed. (pg. 29)

If you can't learn, you can't thrive. (pg. 31)

This brings us to the question of what deliberate practice actually requires. Its core
components are usually identified as follows: (1) your attention is focused tightly on a
specific skill you're trying to improve or an idea you're trying to master; (2) you receive
feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it's
most productive. (pg. 35)

To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction. To learn, in
other words, is an act of deep work. (pg. 37)

High-Quality Work Produced =

(Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus) (pg. 40)

- The common habit of working in a state of semi-distraction is potentially devastating

to your performance. (pg. 43)

- To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full
concentration on a single task free from distraction. Put another way, the type of work
that optimizes your performance is deep work. (pg. 44)

- Unless your talent and skills absolutely dwarf those of your competition, the deep
workers among them will outproduce you. (pg. 44)

- The Principle of Least Resistance: In a business setting, without clear feedback on the
impact of various behaviors to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviors that are
easiest in the moment. (pg. 58)

- If e-mail were to move to the periphery of your workday, you'd be required to deploy a
more thoughtful approach to figuring out what you should be working on and for how
long. This type of planning is hard. (pg. 59)

- Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not. (pg. 62)

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- Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it
means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back
toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stu in a visible manner.
(pg. 64)

- ...the visible busyness that surrounds shallow work becomes self-preserving, and that
our culture has developed a belief that if a behavior relates to "the Internet," then it's
goodregardless of its impact on our ability to produce valuable things. (pg. 70)

- Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something
challenging. (pg. 84)

- Any pursuitbe it physical or cognitivethat supports high levels of skill can also
generate a sense of sacredness. (pg. 89)

- ...one of the main obstacles to going deep: the urge to turn your attention toward
something more superficial. (pg. 98)

- You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. (pg. 100)

- You need your own philosophy for integrating deep work into your professional life...
You must be careful to choose a philosophy that fits your specific circumstances,... (pg.
102)

- Practitioners of the monastic philosophy tend to have a well-defined and highly valued
professional goal that they're pursuing, and the bulk of their professional success
comes from doing this one thing exceptionally well. It's this clarity that helps them
eliminate the thicket of shallow concerns that tend to trip up those whose value
proposition in the working world is more varied. (pg. 103-104)

- Bimodal philosophy asks that you divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined
stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else. (pg. 108)

- Those who deploy the bimodal philosophy of deep work admire the productivity of the
monastics but also respect the value they receive from the shallow behaviors in their
working lives. (pg. 109)

- ...people will usually respect your right to become inaccessible if these periods are well
defined and well advertised,... (pg. 110)

- The rhythmic philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work
sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit. The goal, in other words, is to
generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need for you to invest energy in
deciding if and when you're going to go deep. (pg. 111)

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- The journalist philosophy, in which you fit deep work wherever you can into your
schedule. (pg. 115)

- There's no one correct deep work ritualthe right fit depends on both the person and
the type of project pursued. (pg. 119)

- The grand gesture: leveraging a radical change to your normal environment, couple
perhaps with a significant investment of eort or money, all dedicated toward
supporting a deep work task, you increase the perceived importance of the task. (pg.
122)

- The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained. (pg. 157)

- Much in the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their
training sessions, you'll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you
spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom. (pg. 157)

- To succeed with deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting
distracting stimuli. (pg. 165)

- Productive Meditation: The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which

you're occupied physically but not mentallywalking, jogging, driving, showeringand
focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem. (pg. 170)

- To master the art of deep work, therefore, you must take back control of your time and
attention from the many diversions that attempt to steal them. (pg. 182)

- The Any-Benefit Approach to Network Tool Selection: You're justified in using a

network tool if you can identify any possible benefit to its use, or anything you might
possibly miss out on if you don't use it. (pg. 186)

- ...tools are ultimately aids to the larger goals of one's craft. (pg. 191)

- The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: Identify the core factors that determine
success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its
positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts. (pg. 191)

- It's crucial, therefore, that you figure out in advance what you're going to do with your
evenings and weekends before they begin. Structured hobbies provide good fodder for
these hours, as they generate specific actions with specific goals to fill your time. (pg.
213)

- If you not only eliminate shallow work, but also replace this recovered time with more
of the deep alternative, not only will the business continue to function: it can become
more successful. (pg. 218)

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- Treat shallow work with suspicion because its damage is often vastly underestimated
and its importance vastly overestimated. (pg. 221)

- We spend much of our day on autopilotnot giving much thought to what we're doing
with our time. This is a problem. It's dicult to prevent the trivial from creeping into
every corner of your schedule if you don't face, without flinching, your current balance
between deep and shallow work, and then adopt the habit of pausing before action and
asking, "What makes the most sense right now?" (pg. 222)

- Shallow Work: Non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed

while distracted. These eorts tend not to create much new value in the world and are
easy to replicate. (pg. 228)

- Ubiquitous e-mail access has become so ingrained in our professional habits that were
beginning to lose the sense that we have any say in its role in our life. (pg. 242)

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