this is stuff you like and deep work changed my life. Or to be strictly
accurate reading deep work by Cal Newport helped reset my life. I love me
some Cal Newport and most of that is down to the fact that I find his ideas
quite compelling. The idea for example that one can do big things and make an
impact on the world fabulous and that the route to this accomplishment is
through skills skills which can be learned and practiced rather than
talents which are innate and inborn even better. Although yes obviously natural
talent does play a role in things. I reviewed a Cal Newport book for stuff you
like's fourth anniversary when I rhapsodized about so good they can't
ignore you. so good they can't ignore you is a treatise on doing really really
good work why doing really really good work and learning rare and valuable
skills is the key to a good and happy life and why follow your passion is
terrible advice in about 95% of cases deep work is in many ways the follow-up
to that because it answers the question brought up by so good they can't ignore
you: how? how does one become so good that one's contributions to a field or
job or whatever speak for themselves?how do we get there? Cal's answer do a lot of
deep work by which I mean cognitive capability expanding work or to put it
another way if you are good at concentrating deeply and thinking hard
about difficult things then you can master new skills quickly produce better
work overall and produce that work at a faster pace or just more efficiently so
you have more free time to do other more fun things the book is divided into two
sections and the first section attempts to sell you on the concept: what is deep
work? why does the author think it is so useful?
the second section attempts to teach you how to become better at the skill itself
part one has a pretty simple premise deep work the ability to concentrate
hard on things and make significant progress on them is becoming
increasingly valuable in a knowledge-based information economy at
the same time it is becoming increasingly rare because our attention
is becoming ever more fragmented social media and infotainment sites like
BuzzFeed, Cal argues, are in many ways kind of like having a slot machine in
your pocket they are entertaining in an erratic sort of fashion and it's
entertainment that can be accessed anytime anyplace anywhere thus we are
losing our capacity for boredom and subsequently our ability to concentrate
on hard things not only that but the constant checking of email or slack
during the day is fragmenting our attention and
creating attention residue which carries over into our next task humans in
general are terrible multitaskers but it turns out that even switching between
tasks is terrible for your concentration but truth to tell I personally did not
need selling on the concept of deep work is valuable because I may have mentioned
it I have a kid. I read and wrote the script for so good they can't ignore you
while I was pregnant and filmed it while I was pregnant and the actual thing
didn't come out until my baby was two months old I spent the first fourteen
months of my child's life in a state of advanced sleep-deprived distraction
everything was difficult because sleep deprivation is the worst but even when I
started getting a mostly full night of sleep again I realized that something
weird and disturbing had happened my concentration span was shot writing
long-form essays or scripts in one go was next to impossible. I knew I had done
it before when I was 17 I used to write three essays a week for homework plus
all of the other subjects that I had to keep on the go clearly back in the days
before smart phones and Twitter and am I being unreasonable I was able to focus
so surely I could learn it again. And thus part two is my favorite part because
part two teaches you specific tactics in order to improve your ability to do deep
work this includes things like having a shutdown ritual after you finish work so
you stop and when you're done you're done for the evening it also includes
scheduling your internet time so you don't just pick up your smartphone every
single time you get even slightly bored it encourages you to clarify your goals
and then look at all of the network tools that you use Facebook Twitter
Pinterest YouTube and decide which of those will really help you to achieve
your goals there are also tactical tips for improving
your memory like learning how to memorize a deck of cards or improving
your cognitive capabilities by studying the Torah at 5:00 a.m. which I can
imagine is a pretty challenging task but I have particularly found severely
limiting social media to be a very helpful practice because that shiz is
brain crack and I am weak if you're someone who wants to do really good work
and has grand ambitions but find yourself constantly procrastinating and
distracted and kind of low-level anxious all the time maybe give deep work a read
because maybe the problem isn't that you're incapable maybe it's just that
you've never learned how to do deep work and you're a little bit addicted to
brain crack. I've never been a particularly anxious person but I have
noticed a lower level of general anxiety when I severely limit Twitter and Tumblr
and Facebook plus reading deep work gets me excited to do difficult stuff and
that's never a bad thing and overall I think a world in which people do more