Review: Deep Work, by Cal Newport

Russ Allbery eagle at eyrie.org
Sat May 12 21:34:19 PDT 2018


Deep Work
by Cal Newport

Publisher: Grand Central
Copyright: January 2016
ISBN:      1-4555-8666-8
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     287

If you follow popular psychology at all, you are probably aware of the
ongoing debate over multitasking, social media, smartphones, and
distraction. Usually, and unfortunately, this comes tainted by
generational stereotyping: the kids these days who spend too much time
with their phones and not enough time getting off their elders' lawns,
thus explaining their inability to get steady, high-paying jobs in an
economy designed to avoid steady, high-paying jobs. However, there is
some real science under the endless anti-millennial think-pieces. Human
brains are remarkably bad at multitasking, and it causes significant
degredation of performance. Worse, that performance degredation goes
unnoticed by the people affected, who continue to think they're
performing tasks at their normal proficiency. This comes into harsh
conflict with modern workplaces heavy on email and chat systems, and
even harsher conflict with open plan offices.

Cal Newport is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown
University with a long-standing side profession of writing self-help
books, initially focused on study habits. In this book, he argues that
the ability to do deep work — focused, concentrated work that pushes
the boundaries of what one understands and is capable of — is a
valuable but diminishing skill. If one can develop both the habit and
the capability for it (more on that in a moment), it can be extremely
rewarding and a way of differentiating oneself from others in the same
field.

Deep Work is divided into two halves. The first half is Newport's
argument that deep work is something you should consider trying. The
second, somewhat longer half is his techniques for getting into and
sustaining the focus required.

In making his case for this approach, Newport puts a lot of effort into
avoiding broader societal prescriptions, political stances, or even
general recommendations and tries to keep his point narrow and focused:
the ability to do deep, focused work is valuable and becoming rarer. If
you develop that ability, you will have an edge. There's nothing
exactly wrong with this, but much of it is obvious and he belabors it
longer than he needed to. (That said, I'm probably more familiar with
research on concentration and multitasking than some.)

That said, I did like his analysis of busyness as a proxy for
productivity in many workplaces. The metrics and communication methods
most commonly used in office jobs are great at measuring responsiveness
and regular work on shallow tasks in the moment, and bad at measuring
progress towards deeper, long-term goals, particularly ones requiring
research or innovation. The latter is recognized and rewarded once it
finally pays off, but often treated as a mysterious capability some
people have and others don't. Meanwhile, the day-to-day working
environment is set up to make it nearly impossible, in Newport's
analysis, to develop and sustain the habits required to achieve those
long-term goals. It's hard to read this passage and not be painfully
aware of how much time one spends shallowly processing email, and how
that's rewarded in the workplace even though it rarely leads to
significant accomplishments.

The heart of this book is the second half, which is where Deep Work
starts looking more like a traditional time management book. Newport
lays out four large areas of focus to increase one's capacity for deep
work: create space to work deeply on a regular basis, embrace boredom,
quit social media, and cut shallow work out of your life. Inside those
areas, he provides a rich array of techniques, some rather
counter-intuitive, that have worked for him. This is in line with
traditional time management guidance: focus on a few important things
at a time, get better at saying no, put some effort into planning your
day and reviewing that plan, and measure what you're trying to improve.
But Newport has less of a focus on any specific system and more of a
focus on what one should try to cut out of one's life as much as
possible to create space for thinking deeply about problems.

Newport's guidance is constructed around the premise (which seems to
have some grounding in psychological research) that focused,
concentrated work is less a habit that one needs to maintain than a
muscle that one needs to develop. His contention is that multitasking
and interrupt-driven work isn't just a distraction that can be
independently indulged or avoided each day, but instead degrades one's
ability to concentrate over time. People who regularly jump between
tasks lose the ability to not jump between tasks. If they want to shift
to more focused work, they have to regain that ability with regular,
mindful practice. So, when Newport says to embrace boredom, it's not
just due to the value of quiet and unstructured moments. He argues that
reaching for one's phone to scroll through social media in each moment
of threatened boredom undermines one's ability to focus in other areas
of life.

I'm not sure I'm as convinced as Newport is, but I've been watching my
own behavior closely since I read this book and I think there's some
truth here. I picked this book up because I've been feeling vaguely
dissatisfied with my ability to apply concentrated attention to larger
projects, and because I have a tendency to return to a comfort zone of
unchallenging tasks that I already know how to do. Newport would
connect that to a job with an open plan office, a very interrupt-driven
communications culture, and my personal habits, outside of work hours,
of multitasking between TV, on-line chat, and some project I'm working
on.

I'm not particularly happy about that diagnosis. I don't like being
bored, I greatly appreciate the ability to pull out my phone and occupy
my mind while I'm waiting in line, and I have several very enjoyable
hobbies that only take "half a brain," which I neither want to devote
time to exclusively nor want to stop doing entirely. But it's hard to
argue with the feeling that my brain skitters away from concentrating
on one thing for extended periods of time, and it does feel like an
underexercised muscle.

Some of Newport's approach seems clearly correct: block out time in
your schedule for uninterrupted work, find places to work that minimize
distractions, and batch things like email and work chat instead of
letting yourself be constantly interrupted by them. I've already
noticed how dramatically more productive I am when working from home
than working in an open plan office, even though the office doesn't
bother me in the moment. The problems with an open plan office are
real, and the benefits seem largely imaginary. (Newport dismantles the
myth of open office creativity and contrasts it with famously creative
workplaces like MIT and Bell Labs that used a hub and spoke model,
where people would encounter each other to exchange ideas and then
retreat into quiet and isolated spaces to do actual work.) And
Newport's critique of social media seemed on point to me: it's not that
it offers no benefits, but it is carefully designed to attract time and
attention entirely out of proportion to the benefits that it offers,
because that's the business model of social media companies.

Like any time management book, some of his other advice is less
convincing. He makes a strong enough argument for blocking out every
hour of your day (and then revising the schedule repeatedly through the
day as needed) that I want to try it again, but I've attempted that in
the past and it didn't go well at all. I'm similarly dubious of my
ability to think through a problem while walking, since most of the
problems I work on rely on the ability to do research, take notes, or
start writing code while I work through the problem. But Newport
presents all of this as examples drawn from his personal habits, and
cares less about presenting a system than about convincing the reader
that it's both valuable and possible to carve out thinking space for
oneself and improve one's capacity for sustained concentration.

This book is explicitly focused on people with office jobs who are
rewarded for tackling somewhat open-ended problems and finding creative
solutions. It may not resonate with people in other lines of work,
particularly people whose jobs are the interrupts (customer service
jobs, for example). But its target profile fits me and a lot of others
in the tech industry. If you're in that group, I think you'll find this
thought-provoking.

Recommended, particularly if you're feeling harried, have the itch to
do something deeper or more interesting, and feel like you're being
constantly pulled away by minutia.

You can get a sample of Newport's writing in his Study Habits blog,
although be warned that some of the current moral panic about excessive
smartphone and social media use creeps into his writing there. (He's
currently working on a book on digital minimalism, so if you're
allergic to people who have caught the minimalism bug, his blog will be
more irritating than this book.) I appreciated him keeping the moral
panic out of this book and instead focusing on more concrete and
measurable benefits.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-05-12

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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