Chapter 0:
Deep work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. Their efforts create new value, improve your skill and are hard to replicate.
Shallow work: Non cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.
Deep work is so important that we might consider it, to use the phrasing of businesswriter Eric Barker "the superpower of the 21st century".
Chapter 1:
Type of workers:
- High Skilled Workers: Able to use complex systems and create value.
- The Superstarts: Top talent.
- The Owners: Capital owners
Two core abilities for thriving in the New Economy: The ability to quickly master hard things. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.
Law of productivity: High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) X (Intensity of Focus)
Exceptions: High executives like Jack Dorsey that thrives in lots of shallow work.
Chapter 2:
Deep work is rare. Deep work is hard to quantify and measure.
The principle of Least Resistance: people will tend to the behaviour that is the easiest at the moment.
Busyness as a Proxy for Productivity
"If it's high tech, we began to instead assume then it's good". This is called technopoly.
"It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant" --The Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.
Chapter 3:
Deep work is meaningful. Helps to create "Flow" (Another great book by the way). Craftsman use this to connect deeply with their work.
Part 2:
Rule 1: Work deeply
"You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it" -- Roy Baumeister
Decide on your depth philosophy
1) The Monastic Philosophy: completely disconnect
2) Bimodal Philosophy: have clearly defined stretches of uninterrupted time
3) Rhythmic Philosophy: chain method: do the same thing every day
Ritualise it.