[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.