This book is the follow up to So Good They Can't Ignore You - sort of. In the first part of the book, Newport motivates the value of deep work, while in the second part, he tells you how to get it done.The first half of the book has good stories about the value of focusing one's mind - from the great Carl Jung building his stone tower in the middle of nowhere in order to create a space where he can think, to Adam Grant writing an entire academic paper in 2-3 days of complete solitude. The point is that "complete and utter silence" is important for creating valuable, rare and meaningful work and our modern culture is making that harder and harder to accomplish. I liked this first section, but as someone who has read quite a bit about this research, it was definitely material that was a bit dated for me.
The second half of the book has advice on how to get deep work done - and for me, this was better than the first half of the book. In this section, you read about the cultural criticism of social networks in general and how "real professionals" should just quit them if they want to get stuff done(see his TEDxTysons talk and his new book Digital Minimalism,) but the real juice comes from the parts of the book where the advice is super concrete and sometimes counter-intuitive.
For example, I really like the idea of "scheduling the occasional break from focus to give in to distraction" (where distraction is synonymous with internet use). The point is that when you turn off your internet and the focus gets super hard, your mind will extend itself as you push yourself through the hard work of staying focused.
The section on structuring your deep thinking is pure gold. It amounts to having a set of relevant variables that you will be focusing on in your deep thinking-like if you are trying to understand whether a particular company is a good investment you might have things like-"research product category in general to see whether it is a healthy one that has a significant growth future," or "is the CEO of this company a good listener?," or "does he actively seek criticism?" Once these variables are defined-you create a "next-step question" that you need to answer using these variables.
I also absolutely loved his advice on how to structure emails so that the response back is clear and concise. The idea here is that email has become the new chit-chat phone call/text messaging, where in order to organize a meeting with several people, you send and receive 20+ emails. No. Don't do that. Take the time to structure your emails so that you can bring the goal of the email to a conclusion - he calls this a "process-centric approach," and for me, it was pure gold.
This book gets 4.75 out of 5 stars.
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