Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

One of the great books that anyone can read. Highlights practical issues we face in our daily lives and how to overcome the distractions and be more effective. I really enjoyed this book.

nice book quality is also good

This was quite an inspiring but challenging read. Not challenging in the sense of difficult - the book is very-well written and flows easily - but it goes against the grain of so many current social and work habits and fads. In this reader at least, the book did provoke quite a profound sense of loss when I realized what I could and did achieve earlier in my life against what my current distracted self can achieve. The book falls into two broad sections: the first is the why - why deep work is good but why it doesn't happen; the second is the how - tips to make deep work happen in your life, with very different approaches depending upon the nature of one's life and work.The book does point out that deep work genuinely isn't for everyone - for different but related reasons, CEOs of huge corporations and carers of young children might be better off entirely working at the 'shallow' level. However, it does make excellent points about how routine administration, productivity checks and social discourse, especially using social media, are vampires of time and attention like nothing else. As well as being very useful for individuals, many managers could usefully read this book, to help empower workers to achieve more of real value and - and this point is not unrelated - stop constantly harassing them with administrative requests of little or no real importance. One important facet of this is it shows very persuasively how deep work is almost the opposite of long work, or overwork - working better decreases working time overall, with much better results. For employees, and intelligent employers, what is not to like about that? It really chimed in with my experiences in the organized working environment.So highly recommended for anyone interested in how to work better on an individual level, or how work might be done better on an organizational level. I suppose I can't say better than that I actually made one set of the recommended changes immediately on finishing the book...

I'm a self-improvement junkie who hates self-help books. Most self-help books (if not all) masquarades poor advice and wishful thinking as a path to self-progress. Every now and then I torture myself reading self-help books to reinforce my above thoughts about self-help books. Luckily I came across this book as strong recommendation from a twitter account which I really value a lot. And I'm glad that I took the recommendation.Deep Work is a common sense book than a self-help book. The crux of the book is that there are two kind of work we do. One is Deep work and the other is shallow work. Deep work is rare and hard. Shallow work is easy and ubiquitous.What is Deep Work? Deep work is concentrating on a cognitively demanding work with zero distractions to produce quality work. Its demanding and helps provide valuable things to society that are hard to replicate or replace.What Shallow work? Any work we do on auto-pilot. Replying emails , social media presence etc. These work are easy to replace and not valued much in society.The book is dividend into two parts. Part I is about why Deep work matter and its scientific backing. Part II is how to achieve Deep work.Part I doesn't have to try hard to convince us about the internet chipping away our ability to concentrate and contemplate. And provides all the necessary studies and research on internet and its effects on attention. Most of the critique are well ground and rational, and definitely not a luddite rant on the internet.Part II is how to achieve Deep Work.Discusses on what type of Deep work philosophy to choose.Ritualising Deep work: Identify Location and time to do deep work. Adhere to rules and process to deep work. (like no internet)4DX fundamentals: Focus unimportant things, Act on measures, Keep a scorecard, Create accountability.Embrace Boredom:Don't take break from distraction. Instead take breaks from Focus. Schedule your internet usage. Structure your deep thinking.Quit Social Media.Drain the Shallows: Schedule your day in blocks in advance to focus on Deep work.Although it follows the typical science/self-help format with familiar paragraphs like 'The Study conducted by University of X researchers on group of people in Y of the age Z in ABC environment agrees with my thesis', this is a potent work with strong common sense solutions to the ubiquitous problem of shallow work. My thoughts on self-help books remains unchanged. However I would highly recommend this book.

Genre: Productivity | Creativity | Hacks | Self Development | BusinessRating : 5/5Deep work is a book for everyone although the author emphasises it for knowledge workers. In my opinion it is for businessmen who wants to achieve their goals in their hectic schedule, teachers (faculties) who wants to pursue research despite their academic duties, or an entrepreneur who wants to increase the productivity and creativity of the team, or just some random guy who wants to spend some quality time with family but cannot. Books helps you to develop self discipline.This book can best be placed among books like Outliers/Mastery/Flow/Peak etc. where importance of work and it’s consequences are explained. Only thing is Deep work is more detailed in terms of strategies and bit less on psychology studies.The book is hardly 300 pages but will require some time to fully understand all hacks & strategies. Work habits of great people like Carl Jung, J K Rowling, Bill Gates, Walter Isaacson and many others are very well explained. The author also writes about his life and experience.After reading this book you will definitely be more productive, you might be able schedule every minute/hour/day of your life, you would be able to effectively choose your career job and not fall for dead end jobs, and lastly decipher what is fact from fiction when it comes to big companies.After completing this book and from my experience at different work places I think the book may be a bit ambitious for developing & undeveloped countries. This is because I think in this countries there is still lack of work ethics and your company/institute may not respond as the book says or they may not even consider deep work as meaningful. All in all deep work gives a positive experience.

I have read a lot of books on personal development and self help, most of them useless. This however is a true gem. I put it in the top 5 most useful books I have ever read. It is a great treatise on how to produce high quality work, and is becoming more relevant by the day (with our increasingly distracted world). I feel sorry for kids you are already addicted to their smartphones by age 10.Highly recommend to anyone, and it has wide relevance across many fields. Also very readable and entertaining. It is a joy to read and has plenty of interesting tales and case studies to make the book flow perfectly, whilst imparting the necessary wisdom.

A timely book that helped me immensely. The ideas are not really difficult to implement but our mind is so used to craving for distraction that it becomes difficult to continue in this deep work mode. And that is where the strength of the book lies in. It not only lists down the steps needed but already predicts what kind of obstructions will come up and how to handle those. Cal has really made it fool proof system if you can vow to follow it.To those saying that it is repetitive in the first part, I believe it is really necessary to convince us in all ways possible. Because everyone knows deep work is good just like everyone knows exercise and eating balanced diet are good but no one does them. You really need to be convinced in order to make permanent lifestyle change.