Deep Work (2016)1.3 Attention, Dopamine & Digital Discipline
Introduction · Depth and the information economy
Pre-context
Section titled “Pre-context”What kind of chapter this is. This page covers the book’s Introduction, which comes before the numbered chapters. The table of contents shows what follows it. Part 1, titled “The Idea,” has three chapters: “Deep Work Is Valuable,” “Deep Work Is Rare” and “Deep Work Is Meaningful.” Part 2, titled “The Rules,” has four chapters of practical rules, and a Conclusion ends the book. In a book laid out this way, an introduction usually states the main idea and gives reasons to care about it. The detailed argument usually comes in the chapters after it. It helps to read the Introduction as the statement of a position, and to keep asking where that position is argued properly.
When it was written. The book was first published on January 5, 2016, so the Introduction was written in 2015 or earlier. When it says “today,” “now” or “modern,” it means the working world of about 2015. At that time smartphones were common, and e-mail and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter were the main sources of interruption at work. The general-purpose AI tools available in 2026 did not exist. Reading “today” as 2015 lets you notice the gap between the workplace the author describes and the one you work in.
Who wrote it. Cal Newport wrote the book as an assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown University, before he was granted tenure. His own career was built on long stretches of focused research work, in a job that gave him more control over his schedule than most jobs do. His background is covered in detail in Author context on the book page.
Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud and “the unconscious.” The chapter opens with Carl Jung and assumes you already know who he was. Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist, meaning a medical doctor who specialises in mental illness. Sigmund Freud was an Austrian doctor who founded psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is a method of treating mental distress by exploring thoughts and wishes the person is not aware of. Both men called the part of the mind that holds such thoughts and wishes “the unconscious.” The idea is that this part of the mind shapes feelings and behaviour without the person noticing. Here is an illustration of the idea, not a claim that it is true. In this view, someone who keeps forgetting appointments with one particular person might, without realising it, not want to see that person. Jung worked closely with Freud before developing his own, different theory.
Mason Currey and Daily Rituals. The chapter’s description of Jung’s daily routine is second-hand. It comes from Daily Rituals (2013), a book by the journalist Mason Currey. Currey collected descriptions of how writers, artists and thinkers organised their working days, drawing on biographies, letters and interviews. So the routine you are about to read is a journalist’s reconstruction from other sources, not Jung’s own diary.
How to read a story about a successful person. The Introduction opens with a story about a famous, successful person. A story like that can show what a successful person did. It cannot, on its own, show that what they did caused their success. The reason has a name: survivorship bias. Survivorship bias means drawing a conclusion only from the cases that got through some filter. Here the filter is becoming famous enough for someone to write about your habits. Suppose, as a hypothetical, that a hundred writers each work alone in a quiet shed. Five become famous and get biographies that mention the shed. Nobody writes about the other ninety-five. Someone who read only the five biographies would see a strong link between sheds and success, even if the sheds made no difference at all. None of this means the habits in such stories do not matter. It means a story illustrates a claim, and the test of the claim has to come from somewhere else.
Two terms the book is built on. The chapter’s printed title is “Depth and the Information Economy,” and the book’s argument is aimed at knowledge workers.
- A knowledge worker is someone paid mainly to think and to handle information, rather than to make or move physical things. A software engineer, an accountant, a researcher and a marketing analyst are knowledge workers. A factory machine operator and a delivery driver are not. Some jobs mix both: a surgeon handles information and also does skilled physical work.
- An information economy is an economy in which a large and growing share of jobs and profits comes from creating, processing and communicating information. A company whose main product is software or data is typical of it. The contrast is an industrial economy, in which most work involves producing physical goods, such as steel, cars or clothing.
What the book’s frame assumes. The chapter title frames depth in economic terms, so expect the examples and the reasoning to be about paid work and careers. Your brief names five areas: learning, reading, building products, working and exercise. Keep that list in mind while reading. It will let you notice which examples are about paid work only, without deciding in advance what carries over to the other areas.
Core message
Section titled “Core message”Key points
Section titled “Key points”Deep work is becoming rarer and more valuable at the same time, so the few people who build it into the centre of their work will thrive.
This is what the author calls the deep work hypothesis, and he says everything else in the book rests on it. Deep work, in his definition, is professional work done without distraction, at the limit of your mental ability. It creates new value, improves your skill and produces results that are hard for someone else to copy. The hypothesis joins two separate trends. The first is that fewer people can do this kind of work. The second is that the economy rewards it more. “Thrive” here means doing very well in career and income.
An analogy helps show why the two trends together matter more than either alone. The analogy is price in any market with short supply. When fewer people can do something and more employers need it done, the people who can do it can ask for more. The analogy breaks in two places. A skill is not traded at a single market price. And a rare skill that nobody needs earns nothing, which is why the author has to argue for value separately from rarity. There is also a difference in the opposite direction. A scarce material stays scarce, but the author claims anyone willing to train can build this skill. Part 2 of the book exists to show how.
The author’s example is Jason Benn. Benn had lost the ability to concentrate, which fits the rarity trend. He then rebuilt it to learn programming, and his income rose from 40,000 to 100,000 US dollars a year, which fits the value trend. In the Introduction the hypothesis is stated rather than proven. Its support here is a set of stories about individuals, one McKinsey estimate and a reference to several popular books, and the author assigns the actual argument to Part 1.
The diagram below shows how the Introduction’s argument fits together. Two separate trends meet in the hypothesis, and the two parts of the book then take it up. Each solid arrow is a link the author claims, not one this page has checked. The dotted arrows show where Jason Benn’s story illustrates each trend.
flowchart TD A["Network tools fragment attention"] -->|"push work toward"| B["Shallow work replaces deep"] B -->|"makes depth"| C["Deep work grows rarer"] D["Fast-changing information economy"] -->|"demands"| E["Learning hard things fast"] D -->|"rewards"| F["Producing your best work"] E -->|"depends on"| G["Deep work grows valuable"] F -->|"depends on"| G C -->|"combines with"| H["The deep work hypothesis"] G -->|"combines with"| H H -->|"Part 1 argues"| I["The case it is true"] H -->|"Part 2 teaches"| J["Rules for building depth"] K["Jason Benn's story"] -.->|"shows loss of"| C K -.->|"shows payoff of"| G
Deep work is valuable for two reasons: the economy rewards people who can learn hard things quickly, and it rewards people who produce the best work in their field.
The first reason is about learning. The systems knowledge workers depend on change fast. The author notes that some programming languages Benn learned did not exist ten years earlier and will probably be outdated ten years later. He adds that a marketer who started in the 1990s could not have known they would one day need to master digital analytics, the measurement of how people behave online. To stay valuable you must keep learning complicated things quickly, and the author says that takes deep work.
The second reason is about reach. The internet lets anyone who makes something useful reach an almost unlimited audience of employers or customers, which multiplies the reward. The same reach punishes mediocre work, because a better option is easy to find online. To see how this works, suppose, as an illustration not taken from the book, that two illustrators sell their work online. Buyers anywhere can compare them in minutes. The illustrator whose work is clearly the best in her style gets orders from many countries. The one whose work is merely acceptable is easy to pass over. Before the internet, the second illustrator might have done well simply by being the best in her town.
The author holds this view because he sees the economy moving from industrial work, where most people did not need to concentrate deeply, to information work, where more and more people do. He also says that decades of psychology and neuroscience research show that the mental strain of deep work is necessary for improving your abilities. That claim is contested. The chapter names no study for it. The research behind it, deliberate practice, is disputed, and the size of that dispute depends on the field. The marker in the clarified chapter gives the details.
Network tools have pushed most knowledge workers from deep work into shallow work, which keeps them busy while producing little that is hard to copy.
Network tools is the author’s broad label for three kinds of technology: e-mail and text messaging, social media, and sites that mix information with entertainment. Shallow work is his name for tasks that need little thinking, such as organising, replying and scheduling. It is often done while distracted, creates little new value and could easily be done by someone else. Answering a routine request to move a meeting is shallow work. Working out why a product is losing customers is not.
This explains a puzzle the author raises. Knowledge workers say they are as busy as ever, yet they do little deep work. His answer is that the busyness is shallow. Large tasks, such as a business strategy or a funding application, get broken into short, distracted bursts, and their quality suffers.
His main number is from a 2012 McKinsey report: more than 60 percent of the working week on electronic communication and internet searching, and close to 30 percent on e-mail alone. That figure is a single study. It also measures a narrower group than the chapter’s words suggest: “interaction workers,” meaning managers and professionals whose jobs consist mostly of coordinating with other people. The author also says that enough time in shallow work permanently reduces the ability to do deep work. The chapter gives no study for the word “permanently,” so that claim is marked unverified in the clarified chapter.
Why does the author hold this claim so firmly without arguing it at length? He treats it as already established by earlier books, above all Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. He asks the reader to stipulate it, meaning to accept it for the sake of the argument without proof in this book.
Someone who has lost the ability to concentrate can rebuild it, and the author’s example is Jason Benn.
Benn describes himself, in his finance job, as compulsively checking e-mail and the web. On some days he spent almost all of his time surfing the web, and a business plan his supervisor gave him never got written. To learn programming, he locked himself in a room with no computer, only textbooks, notecards and a highlighter. He highlighted ideas, copied them onto cards and practised them out loud. It was hard at first. Over time he reached five or more disconnected hours a day, and he read about eighteen books.
This point matters for the book as a whole. The second half of the book teaches rules for building depth, and those rules only make sense if the ability can be trained. Benn’s story is the Introduction’s evidence that it can.
It is also worth noticing that a loss someone recovers from sits uneasily beside the claim that shallow work permanently reduces the capacity for depth. Benn’s case is one person’s account, given to the author in interviews. It shows that such a recovery happened for one person. It does not show how often the same method works for other people.
The author’s argument is practical and personal, not a verdict on whether technology is good or bad for society.
The author describes a debate he chooses to stay out of. On one side are techno-skeptics such as Jaron Lanier and John Freeman, who suspect many network tools damage society. On the other side are techno-optimists such as Clive Thompson, who agree the tools change society but think the changes will leave people better off. The author gives an optimist’s example: Google may weaken our memory, but we no longer need good memories when we can search for anything instantly.
He says he has no position in that debate, because arguments about society’s long-term future open divides nobody can cross. His claim is narrower. Whether the shift toward shallow work is good or bad for society, it creates an opportunity for the individuals who resist it. So the book’s thesis does not ask you to believe that technology is harmful. It asks you to notice what the shift makes scarce.
Many influential people across centuries protected long stretches of undistracted work, and the author presents this as a common theme in their lives, not as the single cause of their success.
The chapter’s examples span four centuries. Montaigne worked in a library inside a tower of his château. Mark Twain wrote in a shed so far from the house that his family blew a horn at mealtimes. Woody Allen wrote forty-four films in forty-four years on a manual typewriter, without ever owning a computer. Peter Higgs was so disconnected that journalists could not find him when his Nobel Prize was announced. J.K. Rowling stayed off social media while writing Harry Potter. The last two examples, Bill Gates and Neal Stephenson, are there to show that deep work is not only for historical figures or people who reject technology.
The author’s hedges matter here, and the simpler version keeps them. He says there are “many reasons” for Jung’s success, and that deep work “almost certainly” played a key role. That is a claim about one important cause, not about the only one. The stories are selected cases of people who became famous, which is the survivorship problem described in the pre-context.
The author offers his own working life as a model: three to four hours of deep work a day, shallow tasks grouped at the edges, and rarely working past five or six p.m.
He reports that in the ten years after college he published four books, earned a PhD, wrote peer-reviewed papers at a high rate and was hired as a tenure-track professor at Georgetown. He says a compressed schedule made this possible, because he protected a core of deep work each day and pushed unavoidable shallow tasks into short bursts at the edges.
He also claims benefits outside work. He rarely touches a computer in the evenings, which lets him be present with his family and read widely. He says he is comfortable being bored. The chapter’s closing line, “a deep life is a good life,” points to that personal side, and the table of contents shows the book returns to it in “Deep Work Is Meaningful.” All of this is his own account of his own life, and it comes from inside an academic job with unusual control over its hours. He also says he wrote the book partly to push his own practice further, and he promises to report how that went in the Conclusion.
The clarified chapter
Section titled “The clarified chapter”Carl Jung’s tower: a retreat built to advance his work
Section titled “Carl Jung’s tower: a retreat built to advance his work”In 1922, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung began building a private retreat in Bollingen. Bollingen is a village in the canton of St. Gallen (a canton is a Swiss state), near the northern shore of Lake Zurich. Jung started with a simple two-storey stone house that he called the Tower. After a trip to India, where he saw homes with rooms set aside for meditation, he added a private office. Jung said that in this room he was alone. He kept the key with him at all times, and nobody could enter without his permission.
The journalist Mason Currey, in his book Daily Rituals, pieced together Jung’s routine at the Tower from several sources. According to Currey, Jung got up at seven a.m. and ate a large breakfast. He then spent two hours writing, without distraction, in his private office. His afternoons often went to meditation or long walks in the countryside. The Tower had no electricity, so in the evenings light came from oil lamps and heat from a fireplace. Jung went to bed by ten p.m. He said the feeling of rest and renewal he had in the Tower was intense from the very start.
It is tempting to see the Tower as a holiday home. The state of Jung’s career in 1922 shows it was not an escape from work. When he bought the land, he could not afford a holiday. A year earlier, in 1921, he had published Psychological Types. That major book made public many differences that had been growing for years between his ideas and those of Sigmund Freud, his former friend and mentor. Disagreeing with Freud in the 1920s was a bold move. To back up the book, Jung needed to stay sharp and publish a steady stream of strong articles and books. That work had to support and establish his new school of thought, which came to be called analytical psychology.
Jung was clearly busy in Zurich with lectures and with his counselling practice, where he treated patients. Being busy was not enough for him. He wanted to change how people understood the unconscious, the part of mental life a person is not aware of. That goal needed deeper, more careful thought than his hectic city life allowed. Jung went to Bollingen not to escape his professional life, but to advance it.
What deep work is, and who has practised it
Section titled “What deep work is, and who has practised it”Jung went on to become one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. The author accepts that there are many reasons for that success. What interests him is one skill that, in his words, “almost certainly” played a key role in it. He calls the skill deep work and defines it this way:
Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.
In plainer words, deep work is work you do for your job or profession, with no distractions, that uses your mental ability to its limit. “Cognitive capabilities” means your abilities to think, reason, understand and remember. The definition names three results of such work. It creates something new of value. It makes you more skilled. And what it produces is hard for anyone else to copy.
The author gives two reasons why deep work matters. First, it is how you get the most value out of the mental ability you already have. Second, he says decades of research in psychology and in neuroscience (the study of the brain and nervous system) show something more. According to that research, he says, the mental strain that comes with deep work is also necessary for improving your abilities. By this reasoning, deep work was exactly the effort needed to stand out in a mentally demanding field like academic psychiatry in the early twentieth century.
The author says plainly that “deep work” is his own term, not one Jung would have used. His point is that Jung acted like someone who understood the idea behind it. Building a stone tower in the woods to protect deep work cost Jung time, energy and money. It also took him away from more immediate demands. Currey notes that Jung’s regular trips to Bollingen reduced the time he spent on clinical work. Currey also writes that although many patients relied on Jung, he was not shy about taking time off. Deep work was a burden to make room for, the author says, but it was essential to Jung’s goal of changing the world.
The author then argues that the same commitment appears again and again in the lives of other influential people, from long ago and from recent times. The sixteenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne came before Jung. He worked in a private library he built inside the southern tower of the stone walls around his château, a French country castle. Mark Twain wrote much of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in a shed at Quarry Farm in New York, where he was spending the summer. The shed was so far from the main house that his family took to blowing a horn to call him to meals.
Coming closer to the present, the author turns to the screenwriter and director Woody Allen. In the forty-four years from 1969 to 2013, Allen wrote and directed forty-four films, and those films received twenty-three Academy Award nominations. The author calls this an absurdly high rate of artistic output. Throughout that period Allen never owned a computer. He wrote everything on a German Olympia SM3 manual typewriter, free from electronic distraction.
Peter Higgs, a theoretical physicist, also rejects computers. According to the chapter, he works in such disconnected isolation that journalists could not find him after it was announced that he had won the Nobel Prize. J.K. Rowling does use a computer. She was, however, famously absent from social media while writing the Harry Potter novels, even though those years saw social media rise and become popular with public figures. Her staff started a Twitter account in her name in autumn 2009, while she was working on The Casual Vacancy. For its first year and a half, the account held a single tweet. In it she said that the account really was her, but that people would not hear from her often, because pen and paper were her priority.
Deep work, the author adds, is not only for historical figures or for people who avoid technology. Bill Gates, as chief executive of Microsoft, famously held “Think Weeks” twice a year. During a Think Week he would go off alone, often to a cottage by a lake, to do nothing but read and think about big questions. During a Think Week in 1995 he wrote his well-known “Internet Tidal Wave” memo. That memo turned Microsoft’s attention to a young company called Netscape Communications.
In an ironic twist, Neal Stephenson is almost impossible to reach online, even though he is the celebrated science-fiction author who helped shape how people imagine the internet age. His website gives no e-mail address. It includes an essay about why he is deliberately bad at social media. Stephenson once explained the trade-off. If he arranges his life to get long, unbroken stretches of time, he can write novels. If he is interrupted a lot instead, what replaces the novel is not something that will last a long time. It is a pile of e-mail messages sent to individual people.
Why most knowledge workers are losing deep work
Section titled “Why most knowledge workers are losing deep work”The fact that so many influential people practised deep work matters, the author says, because most modern knowledge workers behave very differently. Knowledge workers are people paid mainly to think and to handle information. As a group, he says, they are quickly forgetting the value of going deep.
He calls the cause well established: network tools. This is his broad label for three kinds of technology. The first is communication services such as e-mail and SMS, the text messages sent between phones. The second is social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook. The third is what he calls the shiny tangle of infotainment sites, meaning sites that mix information with entertainment, such as BuzzFeed and Reddit. These tools have spread, and smartphones and internet-connected office computers make them available at every moment. Together, the author says, those two facts have broken most knowledge workers’ attention into thin slivers.
As evidence of how much of the week this takes, the chapter reports a 2012 McKinsey study. According to the chapter, it found that the average knowledge worker spends more than 60 percent of the working week on electronic communication and internet searching. It found close to 30 percent of that time goes on reading and answering e-mail alone.
Attention broken into slivers like this cannot hold deep work, because deep work needs long periods of unbroken thinking. Yet modern knowledge workers are not idle. They report that they are as busy as ever. The author explains that gap with a second kind of effort, the counterpart of deep work:
Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.
In plainer words, shallow work is work that does not demand much thinking, such as organising, arranging, replying and scheduling. It is often done while distracted. It tends not to create much new value, and someone else could easily do it instead. Answering a routine request to move a meeting is shallow work. Working out why a product is losing customers is not.
So, the author says, in the age of network tools knowledge workers increasingly replace deep work with shallow work. They send and receive e-mail constantly, like human network routers. A router is the device that passes data along a network without creating any of it. In between, they take frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction. Large projects that would benefit from deep thinking get broken into short, distracted bursts, and the quality of the result suffers. His examples of such projects are forming a new business strategy and writing an important grant application, meaning a request for research or project funding.
The author then makes a stronger claim, which he says makes matters worse for depth. He says there is increasing evidence that the shift toward shallow work cannot easily be reversed. In his words, spend enough time in a frantic, shallow state and you permanently reduce your ability to do deep work. He quotes the journalist Nicholas Carr, from a widely cited 2008 article in The Atlantic. Carr wrote that the internet seemed to be chipping away at his capacity for concentration and contemplation, and that he was not the only one. Carr expanded the argument into a book, The Shallows, which became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Fittingly, Carr had to move to a cabin and cut himself off from the internet in order to write it.
The idea that network tools push work from deep toward shallow is not new, the author says. The Shallows was only the first in a series of recent books on how the internet affects our brains and work habits. The later books include William Powers’s Hamlet’s BlackBerry, John Freeman’s The Tyranny of E-mail and Alex Soojung-Kim Pang’s The Distraction Addiction. All of them agree, more or less, on two things. Network tools distract us from work that needs unbroken concentration, and they also weaken our ability to stay focused.
The thesis: a practical opportunity, not a philosophical position
Section titled “The thesis: a practical opportunity, not a philosophical position”Because this body of work already exists, the author says he will not spend more of the book trying to prove the point. He asks the reader to stipulate that network tools harm deep work, meaning to accept it for the sake of the argument without proof in this book.
He also deliberately sidesteps any grand argument about what the shift means for society in the long run. He says such arguments tend to open divides nobody can cross. On one side are techno-skeptics such as Jaron Lanier and John Freeman. They suspect that many of these tools, at least in their current form, damage society. On the other side are techno-optimists such as Clive Thompson. They agree that the tools are changing society, but argue that the changes will leave people better off. The author gives an optimist’s example. Google might weaken our memory, but we no longer need good memories, because we can search for anything the moment we need to know it.
The author says he has no position in this philosophical debate. His thesis is narrower and more practical, and it is about individuals. Whether you think the shift toward shallow work is philosophically good or bad, he says, it is exposing a large economic and personal opportunity. That opportunity belongs to the few people who recognise it, resist the trend and put depth first. He introduces the opportunity through a bored young consultant from Virginia named Jason Benn, who took advantage of it not long ago.
Jason Benn: from human spreadsheet to programmer
Section titled “Jason Benn: from human spreadsheet to programmer”There are many ways to discover that you are not valuable in today’s economy. Jason Benn discovered it not long after taking a job as a financial consultant. He realised that most of his work responsibilities could be automated by a “kludged together” Excel script. “Kludged together” means improvised roughly out of whatever was at hand.
Benn’s firm produced reports for banks involved in complex deals. Making each report required hours of manually manipulating data across a series of Excel spreadsheets. When Benn started, this stage took him up to six hours per report. The most efficient experienced staff at the firm could do it in about half that time. Benn was not happy with this. As it had been taught to him, the process seemed clumsy and full of manual steps.
Benn knew that Excel has a feature called macros, which are small programs that carry out a sequence of steps automatically. He read articles on the topic and built a new worksheet wired up with a series of macros. The worksheet replaced the six-hour manual process with, in effect, the click of a button. A stage of report writing that had taken him a full working day now took less than an hour.
Benn had graduated from an elite university, the University of Virginia, with a degree in economics. Like many people in that position, he had ambitions for his career. He soon saw that those ambitions would go nowhere as long as his main professional skills could be captured in an Excel macro. He decided he needed to make himself more valuable. After a period of research he reached a conclusion and announced it to his family. He would quit his job as a “human spreadsheet” and become a computer programmer. As often happens with grand plans, there was a problem. Jason Benn did not know how to write code.
The author, a computer scientist, points out that programming computers is hard. Most new developers spend a four-year university degree learning the basics before their first job, and even then competition for the best positions is fierce. Benn did not have that much time. After his Excel discovery, he quit the finance firm and moved back to his parents’ home to prepare for his next step. His parents were glad he had a plan. They were not glad at the idea that he might be home for a long time. Benn needed to learn a hard skill, and he needed to learn it fast.
At this point, the author says, Benn ran into the problem that holds back many knowledge workers from moving into faster-rising careers. Learning something complex like programming requires intense, unbroken concentration on mentally demanding ideas. It is the same kind of concentration that sent Jung to the woods beside Lake Zurich. In other words, it is deep work. Most knowledge workers, the author says, have lost the ability to do deep work, and Benn was no exception.
Describing himself in the period before he quit the finance job, Benn said he was always getting on the internet and checking his e-mail. He could not stop himself; it was a compulsion. To show how hard depth was for him, he told the author about a project a supervisor once gave him: writing a business plan. Benn did not know how to write one. He decided to find and read five existing business plans and compare them to work out what was needed. It was a good idea, but Benn could not stay focused. He admits there were days in that period when he spent almost every minute, “98 percent of my time,” surfing the web. The business plan project was a chance to stand out early in his career, and it fell by the wayside.
By the time he quit, Benn knew about his difficulty with deep work. When he committed to learning to code, he knew he also had to teach his mind to go deep. His method was drastic, and it worked. He locked himself in a room with no computer, only textbooks, notecards and a highlighter. He highlighted the programming textbooks, copied the ideas onto notecards and then practised them out loud. These distraction-free periods were hard at first. But Benn gave himself no other option: he had to learn this material, and he made sure nothing in the room could distract him. Over time he got better at concentrating. Eventually he was regularly spending five or more disconnected hours a day in that room, focused only on learning this hard new skill. He estimates he read about eighteen books on programming by the time he finished.
After two months of studying in that room, Benn attended Dev Bootcamp. Dev Bootcamp was a famously difficult crash course in web application programming that ran for a hundred hours a week. While researching the course, Benn had found a student with a PhD from Princeton who called it the hardest thing they had ever done. Because of his preparation and his newly trained ability to work deeply, Benn excelled. He said that some people arrived unprepared: they could not focus, and they could not learn quickly. Only half of the students who started the course with Benn graduated on time. Benn graduated, and he finished as the top student in his class.
The deep work paid off. Benn soon got a job as a developer at a San Francisco technology start-up. The start-up had 25 million US dollars in venture funding (money invested by firms that back young companies in exchange for a share of ownership) and could choose among many candidates. Half a year earlier, as a financial consultant, Benn had earned 40,000 US dollars a year. His new job paid 100,000 US dollars. The author notes that in the Silicon Valley market this pay can keep rising, essentially without limit, as Benn’s skill grows.
When the author last spoke with him, Benn was thriving in his new job. Now a devoted practitioner of deep work, he had rented an apartment across the street from his office. That let him arrive early in the morning, before anyone else, and work without distraction. He said that on good days he could get four hours of focus before his first meeting, and perhaps another three to four hours in the afternoon. He stressed that he meant real focus: no e-mail, no Hacker News (a website popular with people in technology), just programming. This was the same person who once spent up to 98 percent of some working days surfing the web.
Why deep work is valuable in today’s economy
Section titled “Why deep work is valuable in today’s economy”The author draws a lesson from Benn’s story. Deep work is not an old-fashioned habit of writers and early-twentieth-century philosophers. It is a skill with great value today, and he gives two reasons for that value.
The first reason is about learning. Today’s information economy depends on complex systems that change fast. An information economy is one in which much of the work and the value comes from creating and handling information. Some of the programming languages Benn learned, for example, did not exist ten years earlier and will probably be outdated ten years later. Similarly, someone starting out in marketing in the 1990s probably had no idea they would one day need to master digital analytics, the measurement of how people behave online. To stay valuable in this economy, the author says, you must master the art of learning complicated things quickly. That task requires deep work. If you do not build the ability, you are likely to fall behind as technology advances.
The second reason is that the digital network revolution cuts both ways. If you can create something useful, the audience you can reach, whether employers or customers, is essentially unlimited, and that greatly multiplies your reward. If what you produce is mediocre, you are in trouble, because it is too easy for your audience to find a better option online. The author says this now applies whether you are a programmer, writer, marketer, consultant or entrepreneur. Your situation resembles Jung trying to out-think Freud, or Benn trying to hold his own at a fast-growing start-up. To succeed, you have to produce the very best work you are capable of, and that requires depth.
Suppose, as an illustration not taken from the book, that two illustrators sell their work online. Buyers anywhere can compare them in minutes. The illustrator whose work is clearly the best in her style gets orders from many countries. The one whose work is merely acceptable is easy to pass over, because something better is one search away. Before the internet, the second illustrator might have done well simply by being the best in her town.
The author says this growing need for deep work is new. An industrial economy is one where most work involves producing physical goods. In such an economy, a small class of skilled workers and professionals needed deep work. Most workers, though, could do fine without ever developing the ability to concentrate without distraction. In his phrase, they were paid to crank widgets, and little about their jobs changed over the decades they held them. As economies shift toward information, more and more people become knowledge workers, and deep work becomes a key currency. The author adds that most people have not yet recognised this.
Deep work, the author concludes, is not an old-fashioned skill fading into irrelevance. It is an essential ability for anyone who wants to get ahead in a globally competitive information economy. He describes that economy as one that tends to discard people who are not producing enough value. The real rewards, he says, do not go to people who are comfortable using Facebook, which is a shallow task that anyone can copy. They go to people who are comfortable building the innovative distributed systems that run a service like Facebook, which is a deep task that is hard to copy. Distributed systems are software that runs across many connected computers at once. Deep work is so important, the author says, that it might be called, in the business writer Eric Barker’s phrase, “the superpower of the 21st century.”
The deep work hypothesis, and the plan of the book
Section titled “The deep work hypothesis, and the plan of the book”The author has now set out two lines of thought. One is that deep work is becoming scarcer. The other is that deep work is becoming more valuable. He combines them into the idea that the rest of the book is built on:
The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.
In plainer words, fewer people can do deep work, and at the same moment the economy rewards it more. Therefore the small number of people who build this skill and put it at the centre of their working life will do very well.
The book pursues two goals, in two parts. Part 1 tries to convince you that the deep work hypothesis is true. Part 2 tries to teach you how to take advantage of it. It does this by training your mind and changing your work habits so that deep work sits at the core of your professional life.
How the author came to depth
Section titled “How the author came to depth”The author has spent the past ten years building his own ability to concentrate on hard problems. The interest began during his doctoral training in theoretical computer science. He trained in MIT’s well-known Theory of Computation group, which studies the mathematical foundations of computing. In that setting, the ability to focus was treated as an essential skill of the job.
During those years, the author’s graduate student office was down the hall from a professor who had won a MacArthur “genius grant.” The MacArthur grant is a large award given in the United States to people judged exceptionally creative. This professor had been hired by MIT before he was old enough to drink alcohol legally. It was common to find him sitting in the shared space, staring at markings on a whiteboard, with a group of visiting scholars sitting quietly around him, also staring. This could go on for hours. The author would go to lunch, come back, and find them still staring. The professor is hard to reach. He is not on Twitter, and if he does not know you, he is unlikely to answer your e-mail. In the year before the author wrote this, the professor published sixteen papers.
This kind of fierce concentration filled the atmosphere of the author’s student years, and he soon developed a similar commitment to depth. To the frustration of his friends and of the publicists who have worked on his books, he has never had a Facebook or Twitter account. He has had no social media presence at all apart from a blog. He does not browse the web aimlessly. He gets most of his news from a home-delivered Washington Post and from NPR, the US National Public Radio network. He is also hard to reach. His author website lists no personal e-mail address. He did not own a smartphone until 2012, when his pregnant wife told him he had to have a phone that worked before their son was born.
The author says his commitment to depth has rewarded him. In the ten years after he finished college, he published four books and earned a PhD. He also wrote peer-reviewed academic papers at a high rate. He was then hired as a tenure-track professor at Georgetown University, meaning a position on the path to a permanent academic appointment. He produced all of this while rarely working past five or six p.m. on weekdays.
He explains that this compressed schedule is possible because of two efforts. He has worked hard to reduce the shallow work in his life, and he makes sure he gets the most out of the time that frees up. He builds each day around a core of carefully chosen deep work. The shallow tasks he absolutely cannot avoid are grouped into short bursts at the edges of his schedule. Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of unbroken and carefully directed concentration, he says, turns out to produce a lot of valuable work.
His commitment to depth has also brought benefits outside work. For the most part, he does not touch a computer between getting home from work and starting the next workday. The main exception is blog posts, which he likes to write after his children have gone to bed. Being able to disconnect fully lets him be present with his wife and two sons in the evenings. The common alternative is sneaking in quick checks of work e-mail or frequent looks at social media. Disconnecting also lets him read a surprising number of books for a busy father of two. More generally, he says, having little distraction in his life quiets the background hum of nervous mental energy that seems to fill more and more people’s days. He is comfortable being bored, and he calls that a surprisingly rewarding skill. His example is a slow summer evening in Washington, D.C., listening to a Nationals baseball game unfold on the radio.
Why the author wrote the book
Section titled “Why the author wrote the book”The author describes the book as an attempt to put into words why he is drawn to depth rather than shallowness. He also wants to set out the strategies that have helped him act on that attraction. Part of his reason for writing is to help readers follow his lead and rebuild their lives around deep work.
He says that is not the whole story. He also wrote the book to develop his own practice further. Recognising the deep work hypothesis has helped him do well, he says, but he believes he has not yet reached his full potential for producing valuable work. As readers struggle with the ideas and rules in the chapters ahead, and eventually succeed with them, he says he will be doing the same. He describes that as cutting out shallow work ruthlessly and working hard to deepen his concentration. He tells readers they will learn how he did in the book’s Conclusion.
He closes by returning to Jung. When Jung wanted to transform the field of psychiatry, he built a retreat in the woods. Bollingen Tower became the place where Jung kept up his ability to think deeply. It was also where he applied that ability to produce work so original that it changed the world. The author asks readers to join him in three efforts. The first is building their own personal Bollingen Towers. The second is developing the ability to produce real value in an increasingly distracted world. The third is recognising a truth that the most productive and important people of past generations lived by: a deep life is a good life.
Recall
Section titled “Recall”Book shut, page collapsed, assistant off. Write what the chapter argued, in your own words. Then the questions you could not answer.
TODO — you write this. Book shut, page collapsed, assistant off, BEFORE reading the explanation layer below.
Then: the questions you could not answer.
The explanation layer
Section titled “The explanation layer”Where the author was standing
Section titled “Where the author was standing”TODO
What the author is actually saying
Section titled “What the author is actually saying”TODO
Where readers get confused
Section titled “Where readers get confused”TODO
The teaching pass
Section titled “The teaching pass”TODO
What real readers say
Section titled “What real readers say”TODO
What critics say
Section titled “What critics say”TODO
What’s been tested since
Section titled “What’s been tested since”TODO
How practitioners actually use it
Section titled “How practitioners actually use it”TODO
Where it doesn’t transfer
Section titled “Where it doesn’t transfer”TODO
The version to hold
Section titled “The version to hold”TODO
Dialogue
Section titled “Dialogue”What I asked
Section titled “What I asked”TODO
What it said
Section titled “What it said”TODO
What I then argued
Section titled “What I then argued”TODO
How the exchange went
Section titled “How the exchange went”TODO
Where we ended up
Section titled “Where we ended up”TODO
Concept map
Section titled “Concept map”TODO — one or two sentences: what this map shows, and how to read it.
flowchart TD A[TODO] -->|TODO| B[TODO]
Actions
Section titled “Actions”No actions recorded for this chapter yet. Every chapter carries between two and ten, each following from a claim the chapter makes.
The 30-second version
Section titled “The 30-second version”TODO — what you would say about this chapter in a lift, in complete sentences with no undefined term.
Open questions
Section titled “Open questions”Sources
Section titled “Sources”| Claim | Source | Read on | Tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| TODO | TODO | TODO | TODO |