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My notes on Deep Work by Cal Newport

  • It has become acceptable to ‘run your day out of your inbox’ as if this is the locus of your agency.
  • There are similar arguments to [[A World Without E-mail]] here about the manner in which immediate availability reshapes the nature of workplaces. You can get the information you want immediately (headpicking, as Georgia calls it) which makes individual lives immediately easier but the aggregate implications for the organisation’s capacity to focus are extremely negative. It enables people to work in an ad hoc way and doesn’t require them to plan ahead to the extent that would otherwise take place. The point I guess is that “busyiness becomes a proxy for productivity” with disastrous consequences.
  • The Zeigarnik effect: “the tendency for tasks which have been interrupted and uncompleted to be better remembered than tasks which have been completed” Source illustrates the need for a shut down ritual. It’s only by ensuring we are confident we have a plan for when and how we will perform a task that it becomes possible to avoid being plagued by thoughts of it during our downtime.
  • E-mails can take seconds to write but consume minutes or hours of other people’s time, particularly when it comes to group e-mails. Forwarding an e-mail group can be an immediate way to get something out of your inbox that makes everyone’s lives much more difficult in the process.
  • He frames the academy as a desirable outlier with regards to matriculation, in the sense that academics are governed by clear measures of their productivity. Much like his praise of workload models, it suggests a certain unworldiness on his part.
  • He makes an import point about how constantly reacting leaves the things you are reacting to at the forefront of your consciousness. It engenders a specific way of being in the world in which things that could be batched instead define the rhythm of the day.
  • Four philosophies of embedding deep work:
    • Monastically stripping away all shallow influences from working life
    • Alternating between deep and shallow work. Establishing units of at least a day for deep immersion.
    • Rhythmic deep work involves establishing daily cycles which give a protected place to deep work.
    • Journalistic deep work involves fitting it whether you can into your schedule.
  • He critiques what he describes as the any benefit mindset in which even fleeting benefits accrued through digital tech are seized upon as if they provide endless justification for use. Instead he argues we need a sober weighing up of the upsides and downsides of digital technologies in the way we would with more established features of our working lives.
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