Increase your productivity with 3 lessons from Cal Newport's book "Deep Work"

Cal Newport's latest book, Deep Work, has a simple thesis: that deep work is valuable and rare. 

So what is 'deep work'? According to Newport, it's:

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 (p. 3).

In other words, deep work is what knowledge workers get paid to produce.

Here are 3 important productivity lessons from the book:

1. Deep work is rare. Newport reckon's amateurs can do 1 hour of deep work a day, pros can do 4 hours (these numbers are consistent with what I've found when using the Pomodorro technique). Makes you think, what do you do with the other 4-7 hours, maybe the Swedes are onto something with the 6-hour workday.

Wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity (p. 3).

2. Machines are killing deep work. Distractions kill deep work and our new-fangled digital tools are awfully distracting. It takes 23 minutes to get back into deep work after a distraction; with this in mind, the 30-60 distractions you experience during the average workday are a bigger problem you think. As a first step, Newport lobbies us to treat our addiction to email and quit social media.

Depth-destroying behaviours such as immediate e-mail responses and an active social media presence are lauded, while avoidance of these trends generates suspicion (p. 75).

3. Limit your work hours to get more done. Newport details anecdotes of hyper-productive academics who maintain 9-5 work-hours; he names their counter-intuitive philosophy 'fixed-schedule productivity'. The philosophy requires you to enforce unmovable (repeat, UNMOVABLE) start and end times to your work-day. By fixing your start and end times, he suggests you'll a) be more selective with what you agree to do; b) create urgency in getting your work done; and c) be more conscious of distractions.

Fixed-schedule productivity ... shifts you into a scarcity mind-set (p. 241).

Should you read it?

Yep. Some of his "Rules" are overkill (for example, 34 pages on Rule #3: Quit Social Media), but overall it's an interesting read and a simple yet powerful message that has practical applications for knowledge workers.

Luke Hurst is the Managing Director of Building 20; a Melbourne-based niche consultancy that delivers affordable, data-driven programs to organisations to reduce distraction and optimise productivity.