Deep Work
> I will admit to never having been able to read Cal Newport’s Deep Work all the way through — I got too irritated — but I would point to his dismissive naming of the idea of “shallow work”, which he defines as logistical and often repetitive tasks, such as writing short emails. Newport recommends entirely stopping or poorly performing that work; I read this as encouraging readers to commit EFT against others around them. It’s pretty weird to me that this is what the author took from Deep Work. Then again, they admitted that they didn’t read it fully. The message of the book is not to dump…
In very brief summary: 1. A lot of shallow work doesn’t need to happen at all. It’s not about offloading it, it’s about stopping altogether, or automating it. 2. When this isn’t possible, structure your workday to preserve uninterrupted blocks of deep work. Do the shallow tasks mindfully in batches, instead of letting them constantly steal your attention throughout the day. 3. Use tools like your calendar to schedule shallow and deep periods of work. A big part of the book is focused on defining the problems that constant interruptions cause so as to deepen the motivation to actually…
Here is how I have come to think of this: Understanding progress vs activity, and 3 types of effort. Rock metaphor: The goal is to deliver a big, shiny rock to the top of the mountain. You can (1) move the rock, (2) polish the rock, and (3) other distractions. * Push the rock up the hill. You have to keep pushing until you get to the next flat land. If you stop whenever you’re interrupted, the rock will roll back down to the bottom of the hill. Requires a chunk of undistracted time (Cal Newport Deep Work, etc). * Polish the rock. You can engage in this type of effort well, even with…
Great article. The author concludes with the following points on what is happening to information as all information is increasingly "flattened" to fit the new, single content stream of the social media feeds on our smartphones: 1. Everything is trivialized: major public policy changes arrive in the same package and placed next to trivial pop culture. 2. We respond to information using the same low-bandwidth tools (like, heart, retweet, etc.) that limit the expressiveness of response. 3. All information is in direct competition, playing the algorithms to gain attention. 4. Power over…
I've been practicing deep work since reading Cal's book just after it was released. Like any of the good habits it's a tough one to form and keep but the outcome can be tremendous. Deep work has allowed me crank on https://nanagram.co solo. I do one thing at a time. While I'm doing that task I'm basically disconnected from the world - No email, no messaging, no phone, nothing. I've got 2 kitchen timers on my desk: One set to 60min, the other 15min. I spend the whole day offline alternating between focused tasks for 60min and 15min breaks. I'm constantly surprised by how much I can accomplish…
I completely agree with this. I feel him taking some time off and easing off would benefit everybody. He is known for his super focused and driven way of work, and as he himself said: “If other people are putting in 40 hour workweeks and you’re putting in 100 hour workweeks, then even if you’re doing the same thing … you will achieve in four months what it takes them a year to achieve.” But he is only human, not a robot (to the best of my knowledge), and sleeping under the desk in the factory overworked will stress out everybody and the people in their close environment no matter how…
A lot of comments are debating the important of physical reading versus screen reading. I think that’s actually missing the point. > “Behind our screens, at work and at home, we have sutured the temporal segments of our days so as to switch our attention from one task or one source of stimulation to another. We cannot but be changed.” This part rings true for me. Last summer I read Cal Newport’s “Deep Work” and then “Digital Minimalism,” in which he gets very into this topic of hypermedia and distracted living. It greatly influenced my thinking about how I use my time, and made me more…
I limit my social-media use to 30 minutes a day- each day at a particular time. In other times, I rather stare at a wall or eyeball the floor, even if I am waiting in a queue. This somehow improves my cognitive tasks a lot. I don't know why. I learned it from Cal Newport's "Deep Work". I also use Pomodoro timer. It works well with me. Without Pomodoro, I can do really focused work for maybe two hours a day max. With Pomodoro, that increases to five, sometimes (very rarely) six hours a day. I listen to music. Especially Bach. I cannot not do some good work when I am listening to that good…
Anything that has an element of "New! Fun!" is "social media". This is a personal nomenclature, and loose. Even arXiv is social media. I have 45 minutes set for using HN and everythinh that comes out of it. YouTube and TikTok have algorithms that have the goal to grab my attention. The garden/road outside my home does not have an algorithm. It is safe to look that way. Outside of the focus hours, I stay away from social media, but I do read books, play Factorio, discover new music, watch documentaries, and rarely movies/series. So there is nothing wrong with media consumption. But social…
I’ve helped build out or steer these sorts of systems a number of times and usually management behaves themselves during the adoption and honeymoon phases but then erode the trust later on by trying to use the system to determine PIP or promotion. Devs who have seen this behavior before tend to push back hard on adoption, and then invest the absolute minimum effort in using these tools. The tools tend to be built wrong often enough to encourage that slide into toxicity. There’s an amount of using a tool where it improves your work experience, and then an additional amount that improves the…