📚 The Book in 3 Bullets

• Be deliberate in how you schedule your days. We spend too much of our time on autopilot and don’t fully take control of what we do each day.

• Deep work is difficult and requires every ounce of your concentration. It is also the only way that meaningful and creative work is produced.

• Deep work should be prioritized when you’re most productive in your day. I prefer to engage in deep work early in the morning to ensure that I produce some form of meaningful work every day.

👤 Who Should Read It?

• People who work in office jobs that require frequent interaction and email with coworkers. And anyone who frequently engages in “Shallow Work” and does not deliberately think about how they spend their time each day.

🌎 How the Book Changed Me

• This book has changed my perspective on the importance of being deliberate with each part of the day. Yes, scheduling tasks like projects, time at work, and errands that need to be completed is important. But also, being intentional with how you spend your free time is valuable. As Seneca said, “It’s not that we don’t have enough time, it’s that we waste too much of it.”

✍️ My Top Quotes

• Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, can produce a lot of value.

• A focused life is the best kind there is.

• To simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, it’s incredibly valuable.

• Put more thought into your leisure time.

• If you give your mind something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you’ll end the day more fulfilled, and begin the next one more relaxed, than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in semiconscious and unstructured web surfing.

• Schedule every minute of your day.

• Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things.

📖 Summary & Notes

• Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

• Shallow Work: Noncognitively 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.

• To remain valuable in our economy, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This requires deep work.

• The deep work hypothesis: 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 this economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital.

• To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction.

• To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction.

• Our brains construct our worldviews based on what we pay attention to. If you focus on a cancer diagnosis, you and your life become unhappy and dark, but if you focus instead on an evening martini, you and your life become more pleasant—even though the circumstances in both scenarios are the same.

  • Who you are, what you think, feel, and do is the sum of what you focus on. Pay attention to where you’re paying attention.

• We enjoy things that stretch us to our capabilities. Like tasks that have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges. This makes an argument for being more in flow at work than when you have free time. Which is unstructured and requires greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.

• People will usually respect your right to become inaccessible if these periods are well-defined and well-advertised, and outside these stretches, you’re once again easy to find.

How to create deep work?

• Create a ritual for creating deep work. Whether that be working at the same place each day, having a cup of coffee and reading, or listening to the same playlist.

• Determine how you’ll work once you start. Make a plan to ban certain distractions like your phone or the internet.

• Putting yourself in an exotic location like a fancy library or a cabin in the woods can help you focus on the reason you’re there—to create deep work.

• Focus wildly on the few enormously important tasks. The more you try to do, the less you’ll actually get done.

• Keep track of how many hours of deep work you get each day and set a weekly goal.

• Shut down at the end of the workday. No after-dinner emails or texts, no mental replays of conversations, no scheming about how you’ll handle an upcoming challenge.

• For decisions that involve large amounts of information and multiple vague, and perhaps even conflicting constraints, your unconscious mind is well suited to tackle the issue.

• Downtime helps recharge the energy needed to work deeply. Spending time in nature can improve your ability to concentrate.

• When walking through nature, you’re freed from having to direct your attention, as there are few challenges to navigate (like crowded street crossings), and experience enough interesting stimuli to keep your mind sufficiently occupied to avoid the need to actively aim your attention.

• The work that evening downtime replaces is usually not that important.

  • By evening, you’re beyond the point where you can effectively work deeply. Any work you do at night, won’t be the high-value activities that advance your career. Focus on restoring the mind and recovering from the day.

• Once you're wired for distraction, you crave it. So taking a day off from social media does not do much for your attention span in the long run.

• Instead of scheduling the occasional break from distraction so you can focus, you should instead schedule the occasional break from focus to give in to distraction.

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

• A study found that one of the biggest differences between memory athletes and the rest of us is in a cognitive ability that’s not a direct measure of memory at all—but of attention

• Use the Craftman’s approach to tool selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your life. Adopt tools on your phone only if the positive impacts substantially outweigh the negatives.

• When it comes to your relaxation, don’t default to whatever catches your attention at the moment, be deliberate with your free time and put thought into how you want to spend your time.

• It’s crucial to figure out how you’re going to spend your time on evenings and weekends before they begin. Structured hobbies are great to fill in this time.

• If you want to eliminate the addictive pull of entertainment sites on your time and attention, give your brain a quality alternative.

• Be suspicious of shallow work. Its value is overestimated and its damage is underestimated. This type of work is inevitable, but you must not let it suck away time from quality deep work.

• Schedule every minute of your day.

  • Divide the hours of the day into blocks and assign activities to the blocks. There might be blocks for lunch or relaxation breaks.

  • Don’t get discouraged if your schedule gets disrupted. Take a few minutes to revise your schedule. Inevitable situations will arise. Don’t fight them with frustration.

• Without structure, it’s easy to allow your time to devolve into the shallow—email, social media, and Web surfing.

• Set a sender filter on your email.

  • You may use “I’ll only respond to those proposals that are a good match for my schedule and interests”

• The default social convention on email is that unless you’re famous if someone sends you something, you owe him or her a response. You need to reset your correspondents’ expectations to the reality that you’ll probably not respond, the experience is transformed.

• Try to reduce the number of email exchanges you have. For instance, spend more time thoughtfully crafting one email that saves you time playing email ping pong. This may mean giving a person a solution to their problem and sending times that you’re available to talk.

• How to sort your emails in your “respond” and “do not respond” categories

  • Don’t respond if:

    • It’s ambiguous or otherwise makes it hard for you to generate a reasonable response.

    • It’s not a question or proposal that interests you.

    • Nothing really good would happen if you did respond and nothing really bad would happen if you didn’t.

• A commitment to deep work is a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done.