Rule 1: Work Deeply

People fight desires all day long. Desire is the norm not the exception and this takes up our willpower. Implementing routines and rituals decrease the willpower needed to work deeply.

Strategy 1: Decide on your depth philosophy

Monastic philosophy of deep work: People like Donald Knuth & Neal Stephenson attempt to completely remove distraction and shallowness from their professional lives.

Bimodal philosophy of deep work: Splitting large chunks of time (whole days to weeks to months) into deep work time and shallow work time (soft skills & networking). Ex. Carl Jung

Rhythmic philosophy of deep work: Jerry Seinfeld exemplified this chaining technique, whereby every day you accomplish a task which builds a chain. Think of a red X on calendar every day. Don't break the chain!

Eliminate scheduling decisions. Schedule deep work at same time every day. For many people, this is the most applicable philosophy, including me.

Journalistic philosophy of deep work: Being able to shift to a deep work mode ad-hoc. Not for the novice.

Strategy 2: Ritualize

To make the most out of deep work sessions, build strict, idiosyncratic rituals. Most effective rituals answer these items:

• Where will you work and for how long?
• How will you work once you start to work?
  • Implement rules such as no internet. Or set a chunk of time. Or a number of words. These aim at decreasing willpower litigation.
• How will you support your work?
  • Coffee? Long walks to think?

Strategy 3: Make Grand Gestures

Want to make hard work stick? Leverage a radical change in your normal environment, perhaps even pairing it with an investment of money. For example, stay in a hotel for the express purpose of working to achieve something in a new environment.

Grand gestures push goals to a level of priority that helps complete the task. Sometimes to go deep, you must go big!

Strategy 4: Don't work alone

This may seem counterproductive to the earlier strategies. Newport argues that you should still maintain the isolated spaces needed for deep work, but introduces the idea of a hub-and-spoke methodology. The spokes represent domains of deep work, the hub is the connections between peers that enable innovation and serendipity.

Whiteboard Effect: Working in tandem with someone in a shared space can sometimes lead to even deeper work. This can also help overpower the temptation to avoid deep work.

Strategy 5: Execute like a business

Identifying a solution is easy (the what), executing is hard (the how) => 4 execution strategies

1. Focus on the wildly important

   The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish. Aim execution at small but important goals. Let ambitious goals drive focused behaviors. Specific goals generate steadier streams of motivation.

2. Act on the lead measures

   Track and measure the success of goals using two key metrics: lag and lead measures.

   Lag measures: Describe the ultimate outcomes you're trying to improve. These are the final results.

   Lead measures: Describe the actionable intermediate steps that directly influence your lag measures.

   For example, a lead measure might be hours spent in deep work, while the lag measure could be project completion or output quality.

3. Keep a compelling scoreboard

   Keep a public place to track lead measures.

4. Create a cadence of accountability

   Schedule regular reviews to confront your scoreboard

All of these execution strategies drive you to perform more regularly rather than intensely!

Strategy 6: Be lazy

Completely shutting down from work from time to time will actually improve your ability to work deeper. When you take time to refresh, this can actually shift work to the unconscious mind.

Decisions that involve large amounts of information and vague constraints are well suited to the unconscious brain.

Quality rest allows focused attention mechanisms to replenish and improves brain function.

A good tool for allowing your brain to rest is a shutdown ritual where you plan for tomorrow and close out any work for the day. When you're done, be done!

Rule 2: Embrace Boredom

Constant attention switching has a lasting negative effect. Our brains have become accustomed to on-demand distractions. So the ability to concentrate is only as strong as your commitment to train it!

Don't take breaks from distraction, take breaks from focusing!

Digital Sabbath: Take a day or hours to deliberately be network free.

Schedule internet use so as to strengthen attention muscles in the brain.

Work like Teddy Roosevelt

Deep work requires levels of concentration most people aren't comfortable with. Experiment by setting a deadline for an intense piece of work you have. Commit to finishing it much sooner than you otherwise would. This forces work with great intensity!

These are called Roosevelt dashes!

Meditate Productively

Take a period where you are occupied physically (running, walking) and focus on a professional problem.

Memorize a deck of cards

A quirky task of memory; memory training is improvement in the general ability to concentrate. Literally done through visualization of cards to objects.

Rule 3: Quit Social Media

Stop distracting yourself. With the goal to take back control of your time and attention from the many diversions that attempt to steal them!

Identify a middle ground (moderation): networking tools can be vital to success and happiness in a connected world, but also accept that there is a threshold for allowing these tools regular access to your time and attention.

Any-benefit mindset: Any possible benefit (even tiny) or anything that you might miss out can justify the use of a network tool.

Craftsman mindset: Select tools like a craftsman. Identify core factors related to success & happiness. Adopt a tool only if it has positive impacts that outweigh the negative.

Here are 3 strategies to help adopt the Craftsman mindset vs Any-benefit:

1. Apply the Law of the Vital Few to your internet habits

   Three-step implementation:

   Step 1: Identify high-level, meaningful goals in both professional and personal domains.

   Step 2: For each goal, determine the 2-3 specific activities that contribute most significantly to success.

   Step 3: Evaluate each network tool you currently use by asking: Does this tool substantially support my key activities?

   The Law of the Vital Few: In many settings, 80% of a given effect is due to just 20% of the possible causes.

   When you invest time in lower-priority activities, you inevitably divert attention from what truly matters. Strategic focus means:

   • Identifying your vital 20% of activities
   • Ruthlessly eliminating tools that primarily serve the less important 80%
   • Concentrating your limited time on high-leverage tasks

   Remember: Your time yields substantially greater rewards when invested in high-impact activities.

2. Quit Social Media

   Quit all social media for 30 days. After this period, only return to platforms that provided substantial value to your professional or personal goals.

3. Don't use the internet to entertain yourself

   Make deliberate use of your time outside of work instead of defaulting to mindless browsing. Put more thought into your leisure time. Network tools are designed to keep you engaged without purpose. Dedicate advance thinking to how you want to spend your day.

   Structured hobbies provide good fodder for these hours and preserve your ability to resist distraction and concentrate.

Rule 4: Drain the Shallows

Shallow work is inevitable. It must be confined so it doesn't impede your ability to take full advantage of available deep work time (4 hours for most humans).

Strategies to help identify shallowness in your schedule:

Schedule Every minute of your day

Block your time into 30 minute intervals. Write what you want to do in every block. It is expected that these blocks will need revisions as the day throws challenges at you.

If disruptions happen, just make new blocks to the right of old blocks. Goal is to maintain a thoughtful say in your schedule. Use the schedule as a guide, some important insight can be a valid reason to ignore the schedule. When done, rebuild the schedule!

Quantify the depth of every activity

Shallow Work: Non cognitively demanding, logistical style tasks often performed while distracted. Efforts tend not to create much new value and are easy to replicate.

How long would it take in months to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task?

Use the thought experiment to weigh your tasks on a shallow-to-deep scale.

Ask your boss for a shallow work budget

Most commonly between 30-50%. This will help you say no to projects.

Gives you a shallow-to-deep ratio that allows you to say no to distractions guilt free.

Finish work by 5:30

Fixed Schedule Productivity: Fix a firm goal of not working past a certain time and look backwards from there.

Committing to working less forces your work time to be more productive, cutting out any time for shallow work.

Become Hard to Reach

Email seems ingrained in work culture, but you have every right to regain authority over your mental landscape.