[chrisweekly]

Related tangent: Newport's book "Deep Work" is excellent.

It makes a strong case that deep work is increasingly rare, valuable, and meaningful. But it goes way beyond the "what" and the "why", providing the "how", in the form of specific, pragmatic, actionable guidance for achieving just that. Anecdotally, it's been very helpful for me.

[keiferski]

This book follows the recent trend of: find obvious slightly un-talked-about idea, create a fancy sounding term to describe it (preferably with as few words as possible - one is best, like Blink or Outliers.) These words should be vague and have hundreds of meanings - 'work', 'deep', or 'source', for example. Then, while you could summarize the idea in a single page, write 100+ pages framing the issue as a fundamental shift in one's perception. Finally, go on a media tour to promote it.

[kashyapc]

Newport is on a 3-book contract[1] on more or less the same subject with slightly different framing. So he's obliged to drum-up attention about it. Also as someone else pointed out in a different thread, Newport places too much attention on "quantity"; it doesn't sit quite well with me.

Yes, his bigger point is entirely valid (and I appreciate him bringing it to our attention), but no—there is not enough material to write three damn books. Take inspiration from Kahneman, he condensed his 40-year work (in collaboration with Tversky) into one book.

As I've noted on HN before, I'd much rather recommend the book by the Hungarian psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's (or Prof. C): Flow—the psychology of optimal experience

Prof. C has defined the idea of "flow" (he discusses it in various contexts, including human well-being), and dedicated his entire life to studying it. IMHO, the signal-to-noise ratio is extremely high in this book—no wonder, it was Prof. C's seminal work.

[1] http://calnewport.com/about/

[skorbenko]

I wholeheartedly second your opinion on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book. In fact, I liked the book so much I even tried to condense it into somewhat of a summary [1]. The book is thought to be a Modern Classic, and at least in my opinion, it deserves the title. Deep Work has some interesting ideas, but is not yet time-proven, whereas Flow is.

Just my 2 cents ;-)

[1] https://skorbenko.github.io/books/books/flow.html

[blub]

Does Prof. C also discuss the benefits of mixing focused time with communication and idea exchange time? E.g: closed door work with open work areas.

I encountered a similar idea in "The New Science of Building Great Teams" by Alex Pentland, where the concept of exploration is introduced: "The best team players also connect their teammates with one another and spread ideas around. And they are appropriately exploratory, seeking ideas from outside the group but not at the expense of group engagement".

[kashyapc]

Not quite. In my view, Prof. C's work is more fundamental in nature; he doesn't prescribe anything particular. But describes what works, based on his observations, and lets us judge for ourselves.

Among other things, he goes in detail (with studies backing up his points) on what provides "optimal experience" to humans. And covers topics like "order in consciousness", "sense of self", "entropy", "freedom", "purpose", and so on.

A couple of random quotes from my notes:

(1) "The inevitable consequence of equally attractive choices is uncertainty of purpose; uncertainty, in turn, saps resolution, and lack of resolve ends up devaluing choice. Therefore fredom does not necessarily help develop meaning in life—on the contrary."

(2) "There is one very important and at first apparently paradoxical relationship between losing the sense of self in a flow experience, and having it emerge stronger afterward. It almost seems that occasionally giving up self-consciousness is necessary for building a strong self-concept. Why this should be so is fairly clear. In flow a person is challenged to do her best, and must constantly improve her skills. At the time, she doesn’t have the opportunity to reflect on what this means in terms of the self—if she did allow herself to become self-conscious, the experience could not have been very deep. But afterward, when the activity is over and self-consciousness has a chance to resume, the self that the person reflects upon is not the same self that existed before the flow experience: it is now enriched by new skills and fresh achievements."

[chrisweekly]

Thanks, yes, this. Rel to your 2nd quote, an explanation might be found in the "experiencing self" vs "remembering self", which IIRC Kahneman mentions in the intro to "Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow."

[kashyapc]

Yes, that is is one my favorite stories from Kahneman. If you look up "The riddle of experience vs. memory", you can hear Kahneman himself narrating it.

[spectrum1234]

This is a good book but also could be summed up in a few pages.

[kashyapc]

Afraid, I completely disagree. How could you meaningfully "sum up" someone's lifetime's worth of work into a couple of pages and explain the related complexity? (Not talking about academic abstract-style summaries.) Prof. C is cited many thousands of times (did a quick look up on Google Scholar) in well-being and motivation studies. On the other hand, for Newport this is a "side hustle", because his primary work is supposed to be a "computer science professor".

Time will tell which book provides durable value.

[andy_adams]

Sometimes a fundamental idea is simple, but it takes repeated hammering into your mind before you adopt it. 95% of a book might seem like fluff, but when you read the 1 example, the 1 anecdote, or the 1 "way of saying it" that resonates with you - that's often when the idea sticks and becomes a more permanent part of your life.

Expanding an idea into book form helps more people discover that "aha" moment than a single blog post does. Plus, people just take books more seriously in general!

[mailjenil]

This is the reason I prefer books instead of blog posts.

With blog posts, you can surely cover the breath of multiple topics but its totally worth to go repeat an fundamentally important idea with multiple scenarios.

[HiroshiSan]

Though I completely agree with your sentiment, Cal explicitly defines the meaning of Deep Work, and I think it's an important thing society should think about as technology progresses. It helps to have the terminology to describe the state of our lives.

From page 3 of the book, 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.

At least read the book before you trash it.

[goostavos]

I read 75% of it, does that make me qualified to trash on it? I thought it was complete garbage. Not the idea, mind you, the _book_. It's a blog post's worth of information that's comically stretched out in an early college I'm-trying-to-meet-a-word count way.

The book is almost entirely pointless fluff.

[ergothus]

When I was in some philosophy classes in college I developed my "theory of bullshit".

Basically, when I'm reading your work explaining your theory, if I go through two full pages without encountering a new idea, your work is bullshit.

This doesn't apply to providing EXAMPLES of your theory, and a theory is often many new ideas so that explaining it will take many pages, but if I read 2 pages of explanation and don't find a single new idea - you're wasting my time and trying to build agreement without specificity.

Now, far too many years later, I am both amazed at the raw audacity of my younger self...and how accurate he was in finding which works would be more or less satisfying to read. While I generally prefer escapism in my reading, my virtual and physical shelves have no shortage of books that I've only read the first few chapters of, because of diminishing returns for the effort of reading them.

[peterkshultz]

You should check out the book "On Bullshit" by philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt. He develops a similar theory.

[staticautomatic]

Frankfurt's theory/definition of bullshit has literally nothing to do with fluff.

[Zanta]

I had the exact same reaction to it. Some enormous fraction of all non-fiction is an essay-length idea stretched out into a book length. It's disrespectful to the reader, but it's what they need to do to make a sale. No one wants to buy a pamphlet

[gnicholas]

It's especially disrespectful when the books are being market to people who want to be efficient.

[yesenadam]

>The book is almost entirely pointless fluff.

I thought it was a great read, fascinating, I learned a lot, it made me think, and I've been recommending it to selected people who I think would benefit as a must read etc. So I'm just wrong? You didn't learn anything, great, doesn't mean it's "complete garbage".

I don't understand this need (that I frequently see expressed on HN) to have the most packed into the absolute least number of lines. Do people hate reading or something? Sure, you could leave out the stories, the anecdotes about various places and styles of work..but what would be the point?! Indeed, leave out almost everything and almost nothing would be left. That is not surprising. That La Rochefoucauld or Mandeville can be summed up in a phrase doesn't make them less worth reading.

[Apocryphon]

It’s garbage not for the ideas, but for all of the filler. There is no need for Newport to pad out a simple thesis and tips with anecdotes on modern day blacksmiths and tangents on how to memorize decks of cards. Maybe calling it garbage is harsh, but the book is definitely overrated and should be called out as such amidst all of the breathless hype for it on HN.

[sotojuan]

This applies to almost every self help or business help book popular nowadays. I just listen to or read summaries.

[kevinskii]

I also thought the topic seemed too thin to stretch into a full book, and I almost didn't read it. But I'm glad I did. I agree with other commenters that the signal-to-noise ratio was surprisingly high.

[com2kid]

The few 'new idea' type books I've found to be useful are rather thin, printed on cheap paper, and have rather large text.

Even they are padded out, but at least a bit less so.

The problem is, I don't think people will pay $30 for a 50 page book, even if the ideas inside it are worth the money.

[HiroshiSan]

Yeah, Seth Godin is really good at writing books that pack a punch with few pages.

[nullproblemo]

Seems like the state of flow, redefined in a professional context.

[carb]

Newport make the same comparison in the book. I personally think about it such that "flow" is the verb to produce "deep work", the noun.

I also highly recommend his book.

[michaelchisari]

That describes every "self-help" type book, where you take a single positive but novel concept or attribute, and find a way to talk about it long enough to fill something that can be printed and sold in airport bookstores.

Eckhart Tolle has written a dozen+ books about being in the moment, for instance.

[Apocryphon]

That's probably the worst aspect of Deep Work - it's written as a full-fledged pop psych self-help NYT bestseller, lacking the pithiness and the precision of his blog.

[AareyBaba]

One hack around is to search the author on Youtube. You will usually find a 5-10 min interview during the book tour where the author has to distill the book into quick soundbites. You can then decide if the book is worth reading. For more complex topics on physics, biology you'll often find an hour long talk which covers all the material in the book. At 1.5x speed on Youtube you can save a lot of time screening out BS.

[andrei_says_]

Which is why I have trouble reading pretty much any of the top business books.

Fluff, fluff and more fluff. Repetitive anecdotes, personal experiences etc etc. I just can’t pretend I’m interested.

[deepaksurti]

Your definition also applies to Design Patterns!

[chrisweekly]

I hear you. I even agree, that some parts of this book do, annoyingly, do exactly what you describe. But, on the whole, it's a compelling message from which many people (including myself) stand to learn, and benefit.

[peruvian]

The book is good, but could've been one long blog post. It also sadly is not very relevant for many workers. Dr Newport is a tenured, famous professor. He sets his own schedule and probably works by himself.

I'm an average tech worker in an open office. My office is quieter and more peaceful than most, but I can rarely get much "deep work" in. Meetings, Slack, etc. I have no door I can close and isolate myself with. I assume this is the case with most engineering roles so the usual HN advice of "find another job" doesn't apply.

That said, I still get things done fairly well, so I'm not complaining. I've used his techniques and ideas in my free time when I read, program, etc.

[SatvikBeri]

He's been writing about and practicing these ideas since he was a grad student with no publications, well before having tenure. I actually think his early blog posts are substantially better and more detailed than his later books, e.g: http://calnewport.com/blog/2007/07/

[titanomachy]

I have a similar office but I've made efforts over the years to engineer my environment to support deep work. I'd started doing this before I read that book but increased my efforts after. If you really believe it's important you can usually make it happen. I have good buy-in from my teams.

Details: desk facing a wall or window. Failing that, a 3-sided divider. Earplugs plus headphones. Skim my emails once every hour or so and leave notifications off otherwise. When I'm not trying to do deep work, headphones off so people know they can approach me. Nuclear option: work from home one or two days a week.

If you really think you can't get away with these things, then maybe you do need to find a new job where you're less micromanaged and more evaluated on results.

[yellow_postit]

Blocking no-meeting times, scheduling times to check slack or email, staying vigilant about declining, shortening, canceling meetings are all techniques to help free up contiguous blocks of time for focused work. Though they shouldn’t have required a book I’ve seen Deep Work and PG’s Makers Schedule post be used to justify ICs making this space.

[billfruit]

Really though, I do found that the book is just stating the obvious most of the times, and I wonder at all the praise it is getting here. Some of his ideas on memorization and his methods to structure thoughts, were non-ideas, or perhaps just low level trickery, and nothing fundamental.

[rchaud]

While Newport's idea is solid, the book really isn't worth reading past the first 50-75 pages, where the majority of the ideas are communicated. Unfortunately, bloat is a problem in almost all types of management/self-improvement books, so I don't want to single him out here. I have the same complaint about his earlier book, "So Good they Can't Ignore you".

[ishan1121]

Yes, it was, in fact, his advice on working in isolation is one of the best things I have taken. That book has improved my productivity by 12% (i measured)

[mark_l_watson]

Right on - 'Deep Work' was very helpful in doing some self-evaluation and priority setting. I just ordered his new book, to be delivered in a week or so when it is released.

Making good evaluations on 'opportunity costs' is key. As I get older I allow more fun time than I used to (I am almost 68).

[chrisweekly]

(Replying to self, bc too late to edit.)

"Newport's book "Deep Work" is excellent" -> Newport's book "Deep Work" makes excellent points.

I've benefited meaningfully from reading it, but also agree w/ many commenters' view that it could've been much more concise.

[taude]

I enjoyed the book, but when I was done, it felt like it really could have been a blog post. In fact, I pointed people on my team at some summaries of it, and then said if they need more, read the book....

[_Microft]

I can confirm/agree with that.

[Numberwang]

Didnt someone do a summary of that book in like a single page somewhere? As in, there were good ideas but it could be summed up to a short paper. I can't find the link now.

[StavrosK]

I found that you could do the same for many business books, and had made a site to provide summaries of the books. What sparked me to do it was reading "The No Asshole Rule", which was so devoid of actual content that it could be summed up by its title. It was full of anecdotes and statistics that ended up drawing the wrong conclusion.

[abnry]

So I think this is true, but it is not necessarily a terrible thing. It is one thing to memorize a summary of a book. It is another to engage with and apply the ideas in the summary. The goal of a book is to hopefully give you enough time and space to do that.

[StavrosK]

Unfortunately, most of the books I've read just have the extra material as filler, and don't lead to much engagement. It was just anecdotes like "the nurses in hospital X reported that their bosses were 30% assholes, and in hospital Y they were 96% assholes, so it's no wonder hospital X saved 49% more patients!" and other non-sequiturs like that.

[Something1234]

Whats the site?

[dayglo]

There’s a good site that does this called Blinkist. https://www.blinkist.com/en/about/

[yata01]

You’ll need a subscription or trial to Blinkist if you want to view anything other than their daily freebie.

[StavrosK]

This was years ago, and there wasn't much interest so I took it down.

[mattmcknight]

Would check with Derek Sivers: https://sivers.org/book/DeepWork

I think the point of reading the book is you will see the ideas in the summary, but may not believe they are true. The book is there to convince you through data, logical arguments, and stories that the ideas are true. In addition, repetition is one of the most valuable techniques for actually remembering things.

[swah]

I read the summaries by Sivers before reading a book and after reading a book, many times. Of course, sometimes I skip the book.

[hackermailman]

Three sentences: https://www.samuelthomasdavies.com/book-summaries/business/d... I think the author himself has a one page blog post summarizing it as well.

I agree with him about the smartphone cancer that has crept into all our lives though I imagine there will be much worse distractions in the near future like deep learning phones that can tell us everything going on in a room the moment we enter it (since everybody else also has the same device). Permanent HUD like a James Cameron scifi

[walterbell]

> deep learning phones that can tell us everything going on in a room

What information would be on this HUD? Do you mean real-time voice analysis?

[hackermailman]

It was from slides in a deep learning CMU course with examples such as walking into a restaurant with group seating where staff immediately knows your name and preferences/allergies, and you immediately have information on what topic each table is talking about and in what languages (which are automatically translated) what seats are free to sit at, which order is currently being cooked, ect. The idea was a scenario where each room you walk into your device can tell you everything there is to know.

[thisisit]

> I think the author himself has a one page blog post summarizing it as well.

Link please.

[flying_kangaroo]

If you do a search across his blog there's various articles touching on different parts. Here's one such:

http://calnewport.com/blog/2012/11/21/knowledge-workers-are-...

[skorbenko]

Actually, I made something of the sort that you're asking for [1]. Thank you for checking it out, and I would love to hear some healthy criticism!

[1] https://skorbenko.github.io/books/books/flow.html

[kirubakaran]

Sure, and Woody Allen summarized War and Peace in one line: It involves Russia.

[normal_man]

Yeah the book is good but I found it to be insanely padded and bloated.