By reading this summary I will assure you that you don’t need to read a book. In this post, I have covered all chapter’s lessons
For just 1 page summary you can click here.
Why do you have to read this Deep Work book summary?
Reason:
To extract the maximum value from your current intellectual capacity, you must work hard.
And this book gonna teach you how to do it.
The mental exhaustion that comes with doing intense work is also required to increase your abilities, as we now know from decades of research in both psychology and neuroscience.
To put it another way, deep work was precisely the kind of effort required to excel in a cognitively demanding field like academic psychiatry in the early 20th century.
Benefits:
This book has two main goals, which are pursued in two parts.
The first goal, as discussed in Part 1, is to persuade you that the deep work hypothesis is correct.
The second goal of Part 2 is to teach you how to take advantage of this reality by training your brain and changing your work habits to prioritize deep work in your professional life.
Want to know how?
Favorite quote: “If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.”
Let’s get started.
Chapter 1: Deep Work Is Valuable
Two Essential Skills for Thriving in the New Economy
1. The ability to quickly master difficult tasks.
2. The ability to produce at the highest levels of quality and speed.
Start with the first ability.
Of course, being able to pick up difficult concepts quickly is important for working well with intelligent machines, but it’s also important for trying to excel in just about any field, including those unrelated to technology.
For instance, mastering an ever-more-complex set of physical skills is necessary to become a top-tier yoga instructor.
Another example of how you need to be able to quickly master the most recent research on pertinent procedures is to be excellent in a particular area of medicine.
To more succinctly state these observations: You can’t succeed if you can’t learn.
Think about the second core ability now.
Mastering the necessary skills is important, but it won’t make you a superstar. The next step is to translate that latent potential into noticeable and appreciated results.
The high dependence of these abilities on deep work is not immediately apparent; a closer examination of the science of learning, concentration, and productivity is required.
The sections that follow will take a closer look at this relationship between deep work and economic success, transforming it from unexpected to unimpeachable for you.
Deep work allows you to learn difficult things quickly.
Its essential components are typically identified as follows:
(1) your attention is tightly focused on a specific skill you’re attempting to improve or an idea you’re attempting to master;
(2) you receive feedback so you can adjust your approach to keep your attention precisely where it’s most productive.
High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)
Chapter 2: Deep Work Is Rare
In the previous chapter, the author argued that deep work is more valuable than ever in our changing economy.
If this is true, you would expect this skill to be promoted not only by ambitious individuals but also by organizations looking to get the most out of their employees.
As the examples demonstrate, this is not the case.
In the business world, many other ideas are being prioritized as more important than deep work.
It’s bad enough that so many trends are prioritized over deep work; to make matters worse, many of these trends actively reduce one’s ability to go deep.
Open offices, for example, may increase opportunities for collaboration, but at the expense of “massive distraction,” according to the findings of experiments conducted for a British TV special titled The Secret Life of Ice Buildings.
“If you’re just getting started on some work and a phone ring in the background, it ruins what you’re working on,” said the neuroscientist who conducted the experiments for the show.
“Even if you are not aware of it at the time, your brain responds to distractions.”
The rise of real-time messaging raises similar concerns.
In theory, e-mail inboxes can only distract you when you open them.
Chapter 3: Deep Work Is Meaningful
Everyone is aware that whatever we focus on, we attract into our lives and become what we think. If your level of concentration is very well managed, you will avoid doing a lot of small, pointless tasks that take up a lot of your time.
Actually, it’s simpler to enjoy your work than your free time.
According to the author, you become more engaged in your work when you take on a challenge that is connected to your goal. You can easily concentrate and give that task your full attention.
To use hard work in our profession and develop any skill, commitment is required. We can change our destructive behavior into a rewarding activity with the aid of deep work.
We perform challenging tasks every day by utilizing deep work in our lives. Get rid of extra work as well.
The first step toward entering the deep workflow state is extremely rewarding and valuable. Deep work is the process of separating important and meaningful tasks from less important and unnecessary tasks.
Chapter 4: rule 1: Work deeply
It will teach you how to turn deep work from an aspiration into a regular and significant part of your daily routine.
However, before I get into these strategies, I’d like to address a question that you may have: Why do we require such extensive interventions?
To put it another way, once you accept that deep work is valuable, shouldn’t you just start doing more of it? Unfortunately, replacing distraction with focus is not so straightforward.
To understand why this is so, consider one of the primary impediments to going deep: the desire to focus on something more surface-level.
Most people understand that this desire can make it difficult to focus on difficult tasks.
However, most people underestimate its consistency and power.
People fight their desires all day. “Desire turned out to be the norm, not the exception,” Baumeister summarized in his subsequent book, Willpower (co-authored with science writer John Tierney).
Not surprisingly, the five most common desires these subjects fought were eating, sleeping, and sex. However, among the top five desires were “taking a break from [hard] work… checking e-mail and social networking sites, surfing the web, listening to music, or watching television.”
The Internet and television were especially appealing: the subjects were only able to resist these highly addictive distractions about half of the time.
You could simply try to prioritize deep work.
The impact can be significant once you’ve evolved something that feels right. Working deeply is a significant undertaking that should not be taken lightly.
Surrounding such efforts with a complicated (and possibly strange to the outside world) ritual accepts this reality, providing your mind with the structure and commitment it requires to slip into the state of focus where you can begin to create things that matter.
Chapter 5: Rule #2 Embrace Boredom
Attempts to deepen your focus will fail unless you simultaneously wean your mind from a dependency on distraction.
You’ll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom, much like athletes must take care of their bodies outside of training sessions.
Clifford Nass was the late Stanford communications professor known for his study of behavior in the digital age. Nass’ research revealed, among other things, that people who constantly multitask are unable to filter out irrelevant information. They are unable to maintain working memory.
They are perpetually distracted. They activate much larger parts of their brain that are unrelated to the task at hand… they’re basically mental wrecks.
Don’t Take Breaks from Distraction. Instead, Take Breaks from Focus.
For example, if you’ve scheduled your next Internet block thirty minutes from now and you’re starting to get bored and want to distract yourself, the next thirty minutes of resistance become a session of concentration calisthenics.
A full day of scheduled distraction becomes a full day of similar mental training as a result.
At this point, there should be only one way to complete the deep task on time: work with great intensity—no e-mail breaks, no daydreaming, no Facebook browsing, and no frequent trips to the coffee machine.
Chapter 6: Rule 3 quit social media
This rule attempts to break us out of this rut by proposing a third option: accepting that these tools are not inherently evil and that some of them may be quite important to your success and happiness,
but also accepting that the threshold for allowing a site regular access to your time and attention (let alone personal data) should be much higher and that most people should therefore use far fewer such tools.
The previous strategy provided a methodical approach to assisting you in sorting through the network tools that currently vie for your time and attention.
In more detail, this strategy requires you to throw a packing party on the social media services you currently use.
Instead of “packing,” you’ll forbid yourself from using them for thirty days. All of them: are Facebook, Instagram, Google+, Twitter, Snapchat, Vine, and any other popular services.
Don’t formally deactivate these services, and (most importantly) don’t announce your departure online: Simply discontinue their use.
If someone contacts you through another channel and inquires as to why your participation in a particular service has dwindled, You can explain, but you shouldn’t go out of your way to tell others.
After thirty days of self-imposed network isolation, ask yourself two questions about each of the services you temporarily discontinued:
1. Would the last thirty days have been significantly better if I could have used this service?
2. Did it bother anyone that I wasn’t using this service?
If you answer “no” to both questions, you must leave the service permanently.
Return to using the service if your answer was emphatical “yes.” If your answers are qualified or ambiguous, it is up to you whether you return to the service, though the author would advise you to quit. (You can always come back later.)
Chapter 7: Rule #4 Drain the Shallows
The shallow work that increasingly consumes the time and attention of knowledge workers is less important than it appears at the time.
Most businesses’ bottom lines would likely remain unaffected if significant amounts of this shallowness were removed.
And, as Jason Fried discovered, if you not only eliminate shallow work but also replace this recovered time with more of the deep alternative, the business will not only survive but may even thrive.
This rule requires you to apply these insights in your personal and professional life.
The strategies that follow are intended to assist you in ruthlessly identifying the shallowness in your current schedule and then reducing it to minimum levels—leaving more time for the deep efforts that ultimately matter most.
The strategies that follow will assist you in putting this reality into action.
Schedule Every Minute of Your Day
Quantify the Depth of Every Activity
Finish Your Work by Five Thirty
Become Hard to Reach
Thank you for your time.
ok computer