Why Deep Work Matters

Part 1: Why Deep Work Matters | Chapters 1-3: It’s Important, Difficult, and Fulfilling

Newport outlines three foundational ideas to keep in mind as you learn to commit yourself to deep work:

• It’s important, and therefore necessary.
• It’s difficult, and therefore rare.
• It’s fulfilling, and therefore worth your time.

Idea #1: Why Deep Work Is Important

Newport says that in our current information economy, those who have the ability to master technology and solve complex problems are the most valuable types of people. He argues that deep work allows you to do two things critical to your performance in this economy:

1. Learn and master new skills: Today’s economy changes so quickly that a technology or best practice that was hot five years ago might be obsolete today. Newport notes that this is true of fields as wide-ranging as computer programming, marketing, academic research, and financial investments. He explains that, to stay relevant over decades, you must continue to learn challenging new skills—which requires focused concentration.

(Shortform note: Experts have pinpointed several actions that usually lead to skill mastery: First, determine if your goal is attainable and ensure that the skill is relevant to your career. Then, find a method that aligns with your learning style and allows you to take on the skill bit by bit, instead of all at once. Finally, rely on others—find a mentor who can coach you and help you reflect on your progress.)

2. Apply the skills to increase your output: Once you’ve learned a skill, you need to do something useful with it. Consider the simple rule: High-quality work produced = Time Spent x Intensity of Focus. And once again, the application of highly technical skills requires deep focus. (Shortform note: The key here is that what you do with your skill must be useful. In The Effective Executive, Peter Drucker explains how to determine if your work is effective—useful work that improves your performance and comes with application of Newport’s rule—or just efficient—productivity for the sake of increasing output that’s not necessarily useful or high-quality.)

If you want to stand out in your career, you must repeat these two practices over and over again.

(Shortform note: Many people falsely believe that they can only excel if they have innate talent. Newport’s argument here—that practice is crucial to excellence—comes from the research of Anders Ericsson. In his book Peak, Ericsson explains that talent has little to do with it—research has repeatedly shown that people get to the top of their field through regular, focused practice. Ericsson calls this deliberate practice—as mentioned, Newport used this term in his So Good They Can’t Ignore You before developing the idea further into the concept of “deep work.”)

Furthermore, the changing economy also increases competition for your job, making it more critical to update your skills. Technology is making remote work more commonplace, putting the greatest talent around the world in reach of companies. If you’re currently employed in an office, this means one of your competitive advantages—a warm body close to headquarters—will be diminished, and you will have to increase your skills to compensate and compete with remote talent. You’ll need deep work time to do that.

Why Deep Work Is Especially Important for Remote Workers

As companies increasingly shift toward full-time remote work, your ability to do deep work won’t only help you stand out in your field—it will also help you maintain a healthy work/life balance and avoid the burnout that’s becoming more and more common among remote workers.

Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, many workers shifted to working remotely, and the results surprised many companies: Their employees, for the most part, maintained or increased their productivity. However, remote workers report that due to an inability to separate their work and home lives, working from home is more distracting than working in the office. This means that though their productivity looks good on a superficial level, they’re forced to work longer hours to offset the endless distractions of home life.

How Distraction Hinders Learning and Productivity

Newport explains that without opportunities for deep work, your productivity and learning are hindered by distraction.

Distraction’s Effect on Productivity

Newport explains that each time you switch between tasks, you retain some mental residue from the previous task. It takes time for you to adjust to the new task because of this residue—it might be minutes before you get into the groove of the new task. Even worse, he explains, is that if you’re switching between tasks every few minutes, you might have zero time in which you’re fully focused.

(Shortform note: In an interview, Newport stressed the importance of understanding that “task switching” isn’t all that different from multitasking. He says that most people try to do one thing at a time because they know they shouldn’t multitask—the problem, he says, is that most people don’t realize that they shouldn’t be frequently switching between “things” either.)

Distraction’s Effect on Learning

Distraction might even change your brain on a molecular level—it interrupts myelination, or the process of modifying your neurons to make them more effective. This process is critical to training neural circuits and improving your skills. Newport explains that in environments of deep focus without distractions, myelination seems to be more effective.

(Shortform note: In The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle explains that people don’t have a fixed amount of myelin—you can increase it with a combination of practice, passionate commitment, and mentorship.)

Idea #2: Deep Work Is Difficult

If deep work is so important, why don’t we do it more often? Newport explains that it’s extremely difficult to do because our world bombards us with near-constant distractions. He outlines three major ways that modern workplaces derail knowledge workers’ ability to engage in deep work.

1) Open floor plans: Open floor plans were meant to increase collaboration and cross-pollination between teams. But Newport explains that they're a continuously distracting environment, where every conversation is heard, and one person can disrupt dozens of people.

• In this model, the distraction of the open floor plan is where people spend their time by default. Deep work and privacy are the exception.

(Shortform note: Previous to the Covid-19 pandemic, many companies were already starting to rethink their open floor plans, finding that putting so many employees in a shared space was creating too much distraction. For these companies, the pandemic highlighted the heightened risk of disease transmission in open shared spaces and accelerated their decision to leave open floor plans behind.)

He argues that the ideal office floor plan is the “hub and spoke” model, in which central hubs—such as meeting rooms, break areas, and cafeterias—allow for communal work and serendipitous meetings and branch off into spokes that lead to quiet, private places for people to do deep work.

• In this model, privacy and deep work become the default, and the distracting environment of the communal hub becomes the exception.

(Shortform note: We’ll explore different ways that knowledge workers who must work in an open floor plan environment can avoid distraction in Chapter 5.)

2) Instant communication: Emails are distracting enough. But instant communication takes distraction to another level. With tools like Slack and texting, people can interrupt your work on-demand and expect help within seconds. According to Newport, as a result of this, we stop being deep thinkers and become human network routers.

Superficially, we prefer instant communication as the easy path. If you don’t know something, you can just ask someone. You don’t need to do the hard work of planning ahead, studying what you do or don’t know, and scheduling meetings thoughtfully.

(Shortform note: We’ll look at actionable steps to make instant messaging less distracting in Chapter 5.)

3) Social media: On social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, conversations continue endlessly, 24/7. You can get stuck in unending dialogue.

The effects are insidious. The new content you see always seems novel and productive, but it doesn’t move you closer to the major things you really care about.

(Shortform note: The addictive quality of social media is due to our attraction to variable rewards: rewards that happen at random times, rather than in a predictable pattern—so they always feel like a surprise. In their book Hooked, Nir Eyal and Ryan Hoover explain that variable, surprising rewards trigger a much stronger dopamine response in your brain than rewards that happen on a fixed schedule. You can’t predict which refresh of your newsfeed will reward you with interesting information or more likes, so the action never loses its appeal. We’ll explore strategies for avoiding the distraction of social media in Chapter 5.)

Why Do Organizations Adopt Distracting Practices?

Newport points out that these distractions are ubiquitous in the corporate setting. This is confusing because, typically, if companies know something is drastically lowering productivity and profits, they move to stop it. But he reports that the reaction to distractions seems to be the opposite: Companies support distractions like open floor plans and real-time messaging. How did so many companies systematically adopt these destructive distractions as the right thing to do? Newport outlines three reasons:

1) Shallow Work Is Easier

If there was solid proof that deep work is value-driving and shallow work is not, then companies would switch right away, but there isn’t. Newport explains that this lack of proof means that people don’t see any reason to do demanding deep work—in their minds, it has the same output value as easy shallow work. As a result, people usually just gravitate toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment, instead of doing harder things.

(Shortform note: It’s hard to say whether we’d choose deep work over shallow work even if we did know its value. In Switch, Chip and Dan Heath explain that our brains are split into two systems: rational and emotional. The emotional side is much stronger than the rational side—even if we rationally know deep work is a more valuable use of our time, our brains will push us toward shallow work activities that promise instant gratification. However, if we teach our brains to do difficult actions on autopilot, we can override this tendency. This is why, in Part 2, Newport stresses the importance of scheduling deep work and making it a part of your routine.)

2) A New Economy Calls for New Proxies of Progress

The information economy brings a management challenge: how to measure output from individual workers. Newport explains that for factory jobs in an industrial economy, output is clear and quantitative—you produce so many widgets in an hour, and you can be compared on equal footing with other workers. On the other hand, in information jobs, complex problems often require a larger team of people with different roles. It’s no longer clear who contributes what. People’s jobs become more diffuse and vague—for example, a “marketing manager” could be doing lots of different things with different projects.

To deal with this, Newport says that managers have developed superficial proxies, or indicators, of progress such as email response times or number of meetings conducted. The thinking is that as long as there’s a lot of motion, surely people are being productive. In contrast, deep work looks like slacking. Stepping away from email to think deep thoughts seems indulgent when everyone else is buzzing around the office.

(Shortform note: Another factor encouraging people to choose shallow work is recency and availability bias, which causes you to attribute more importance to information that you most recently encountered and is therefore most readily available in your mind. The combination of this psychological phenomenon and the fact that email is always a click away (therefore always recent and available) contributes to managers overestimating the importance of your inbox.)

3) Keeping Up With the Joneses

Newport explains that there’s also a technological imperative or belief that “any technology is likely good technology.” There’s pressure to look—to the press, potential employees, and customers—like you’re on the vanguard of technology. This makes you adopt open floor plans and new tools like Slack and social media without fully considering their impact.

(Shortform note: This tech-adoption tendency affects workers’ ability to engage in deep work both inside and outside the office. As organizations increasingly normalize remote work—and in many cases, advertise it as a perk of working for them—we’re already seeing a clear way that new tech is harming productivity: During the Covid-19 pandemic, many organizations started to rely heavily on Zoom meetings as a means of staying connected. This tanked employee productivity—what was once a quick email or phone call was now an entire meeting via Zoom. Over the course of the pandemic, researchers found that employees attended 13% more meetings than before, and each meeting had 14% more attendees than normal.)

Idea #3: Deep Work Is Fulfilling

Shallow work is deceptively bad because it feels productive and meaningful. Answering emails feels like you’re doing something. Staying on top of the office conversation in Slack makes you feel updated on what’s going on.

In contrast, Newport admits that deep work can often feel directionless, for several reasons. First, complex problems require thinking time that can lead to multiple dead ends. Second, you produce fewer concrete results, and the results come unpredictably. Answering emails feels like a better place to spend your time. To combat this perception, realize that deep work moves you more meaningfully toward happiness and fulfillment. As previously explained, deep work is when you’re most capable of tackling your thorniest problems. Because these problems often yield the largest rewards, deep work is often far more rewarding than shallow work.

Beyond this, Newport offers three other ways deep work leads to fulfillment.

(Shortform note: Newport mentions in an interview that he didn’t originally intend to include a chapter on the fulfilling aspect of deep work. However, as his research went on, he found so many accounts of people whose deep work practices led to a deeper sense of happiness and fulfillment in their work, he felt that he needed to include it.)

1) Deep Work Creates a State of “Flow”

Most people report feeling most fulfilled when doing deep work. Newport explains that the idea of deep work aligns closely with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s ideas on “flow.” Csikszentmihalyi, psychologist and author of Flow, found that when people concentrate on a worthwhile task and are pushed to their cognitive limit (that is, the task is neither too hard nor too easy), they experience a state of flow—a sense of contentment and purpose.

Surprisingly, Newport notes, leisure time doesn’t bring the same level of satisfaction. Free time is too unstructured and requires effort to be shaped into something as satisfying as stretching to your mental limits.

(Shortform note: Because flow occurs when you’re working hard at something you believe is important, it naturally would be more likely to happen when you’re doing deep work in support of your goals than when you’re scrolling through Reddit comments.)

Newport says that achieving a flow state hits on universal behavior drivers—seeking mastery, autonomy, and purpose.

(Shortform note: In Drive, Daniel Pink explains that you usually can’t bribe yourself into doing creative work with external motivators like money—this is why the flow state and the intrinsic motivators (or behavior drivers) it creates are so vital to deep work.)

2) Deep Work Has a Protective Psychological Effect

Deep work insulates your mind from many distracting, often negative irritants.

• You tend to attribute happiness to your circumstances (what happens to you), but studies suggest your happiness is really dependent on what you pay attention to. Given the same situation, focus on positive things, and you will be happy; focus on negative things, and you will be sad.
• When you lose focus, you tend to fixate on what’s wrong with your life, rather than what’s right. Problems come to mind more readily than positives, and without something productive to concentrate on, you dwell on the little problems.
• Checking email is psychologically harmful because it often represents unresolved tasks and complaining people.

(Shortform note: Newport doesn’t comment on the many ways that superficial work—such as responding to emails from happy customers—can not only make you feel good but also keeps you engaged with your work. Anders Ericsson touches on this idea in Peak—he argues that receiving positive feedback during deliberate practice (deep work) is crucial. Without it, the inherently difficult and tedious process of deep work can become boring and unmotivating.)

3) Deep Work Creates a Sense of Meaning

Newport’s last argument for deep work is his most abstract. He explains that deep work brings meaning to your tasks.

In the past, “meaning” was easier to achieve due to widespread belief that everything someone did in their life was in service to a higher power. Then, with the rise of secularism and the Enlightenment, “meaning” became something that individuals must actively seek out, rather than look to their faith to provide.

This could easily lead many to nihilism, but craftsmen, in particular, have found a source of meaning in the materials they transform—for instance, one might find meaning in discovering the beautifully carved table that was “hidden” in a piece of wood. The craftsman does things that are superficially menial—sculpting marble or weaving blankets—but it takes a great deal of skill to discover beauty within preexisting objects.

Knowledge workers face a more difficult challenge in finding meaning because their tasks are not as defined or tangibly successful as those of craftsmen—they can struggle to find satisfaction. But Newport argues that there’s elegance in any work if you have the right mindset and look for the meaning in superficially menial tasks—a block of computer code can be beautiful, as can a marketing slogan, business plan, or new technology.

(Shortform note: Employers should focus on cultivating pride of workmanship instead of focusing on numbers and costs. In Out of the Crisis, W. Edwards Deming explains that postwar Japanese companies emphasized quality for its own sake, which allowed their employees to focus on doing their best and feel pride in their work. Employees with this mindset are more satisfied and productive, which saves the companies both time and money.)

Deep Work Is More than Work

Newport has noted that the concept of deep work—and its importance in our increasingly distracted world—doesn’t only apply to what we traditionally think of as work. He says you might apply the idea of focusing without distraction to developing skills in a new hobby, spending time with your family, or hitting personal goals such as reading more books.