Performing deliberate practice requires:<ol><li class="ql-align-justify">Tightly focused attention on a skill you're trying to improve or an idea you're trying to master.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Feedback to correct your approach and improve productivity.</li></ol>Attention Residue: when you switch from Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn't immediately follow- a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task.Therefore, batch hard/intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches.High Quality Work = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)

Deliberate Practice

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Who you are, what you think, feel and do, what you love- is the sum of what you focus on.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Free time is unstructured and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Knowledge workers do lots of stuff visibly to appear busy. However, this busyness is a proxy for productivity.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Deep work is an activity well-suited to generate a flow state.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">You don't need a rarified job; you instead need a rarified approach to your work.</li></ul>

Productivity & Depth

<ol>
<li>Monastic Philosophy - attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating shallow obligations.</li>
<li>Bimodal Philosophy - divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else.</li>
<li>Rhythmic Philosophy - generate a rhythm by transforming consistent deep work sessions into a simple regular habit.</li>
<li>Journalistic Philosophy - switch into deep work mode any time you find some free time. This approach is not for beginners.</li>
</ol>

Depth Philosophies

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">Some decisions are better left to your unconscious mind to untangle.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Attention Restoration Theory: spending time in nature can help improve your ability to concentrate.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Don't try to squeeze a little more work out of your evenings. It can reduce your effectiveness the next day.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Your capacity to perform deep work on a given day is limited.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Schedule in advance when you'll use social media, and then avoid it altogether outside these times.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Put more thought into your leisure time. Don't default to whatever catches your attention at the moment.</li></ul>

Be Lazy

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

Check out the following link for vocabularies from this book and more book summaries:https://whealthlab.blogspot.com/2024/07/book-simplified-deep-work-by-cal-newport.html

Final Words

Three groups of people will have a particular advantage in the new economy:<ol><li class="ql-align-justify">High-skilled - those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Superstars - those who are the best at what they do.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Owners - those with access to capital to invest in new technologies driving the new economy.</li></ol>Two core abilities to thrive in the new economy:<ol><li class="ql-align-justify">The ability to quickly master hard things.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.</li></ol><ul><li class="ql-align-justify">If you can't learn, you won't thrive.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">If you don't produce, you won't thrive- no matter how skilled or talented you are.</li></ul>

Winning in the New Economy

E-mails deliver a steady stream of distractions addressed specifically to you.<ol><li class="ql-align-justify">Use a sender filter - "I'll only respond to those proposals that are a good match for my schedule and interests". Send this to everyone to set their expectations.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">It's the sender's responsibility to convince the receiver that a reply is worthwhile. Do not reply to e-mails if they are ambiguous, or uninteresting, or nothing really good would happen if you did respond and nothing really bad would happen if you didn't.</li></ol>

Use E-mail Mindfully

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">Deep Work: focused, distraction-free work that uses maximum cognitive capabilities, resulting in creation of value and improvement of skills.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Shallow Work: non-cognitively demanding replicable work that can be done in a distracted state and that creates no value.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">The information economy requires us to master the art of quickly learning complicated things.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Knowledge workers are unable to perform deep work due to distractions from social media.</li></ul>

Deep Work v/s Shallow Work

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">Specify where you'll work and for how long.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Specify the rules and processes once you start to work.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Specify how you'll support your work (Ex: coffee, food, light exercise, etc.)</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Sometimes to go deep, you must first go big. Make a grand gesture (go to a library, book/rent a room, etc.)</li><li class="ql-align-justify">The Whiteboard Effect: for some types of problems, working with someone else can push you deeper than if you were working alone.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Focus on a few "wildly important goals".</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Track your activities and perform a weekly review.</li></ul>

Deep Work Ritual

Master one of our economy’s most rare skills and achieve groundbreaking results with this “exciting” book (Daniel H. Pink) from an “exceptional” author (New York Times Book Review). Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It's a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep Work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep-spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there's a better way. In Deep Work, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite. Dividing this book into two parts, he first makes the case that in almost any profession, cultivating a deep work ethic will produce massive benefits. He then presents a rigorous training regimen, presented as a series of four "rules," for transforming your mind and habits to support this skill. 1. Work Deeply 2. Embrace Boredom 3. Quit Social Media 4. Drain the Shallows A mix of cultural criticism and actionable advice, Deep Work takes the reader on a journey through memorable stories-from Carl Jung building a stone tower in the woods to focus his mind, to a social media pioneer buying a round-trip business class ticket to Tokyo to write a book free from distraction in the air-and no-nonsense advice, such as the claim that most serious professionals should quit social media and that you should practice being bored. Deep Work is an indispensable guide to anyone seeking focused success in a distracted world. An Amazon Best Book of 2016 Pick in Business & Leadership Wall Street Journal Business Bestseller A Business Book of the Week at 800-CEO-READ

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Productivity

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Personal Development

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Learning & Education

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Time Management

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Books

Cal Newport is Provost’s Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University, and the author of seven books. His ideas and writing are frequently featured in major publications and on TV and radio.From his website: "I write about the intersection of digital technology and culture. I’m particularly interested in our struggle to deploy these tools in ways that support instead of subvert the things we care about in both our personal and professional lives."

TIM FERRISS

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