This book is more of a habit management book. Its premise relies on the philosophy of limiting distraction, such as social media and unnecessary emails. Towards the end, it discusses strategies to reduce back-and-forth emails by providing an extra two minutes to discuss following steps and action items to Complete the inquiry. It also discusses how most people do not need social media, and the time spent on that could be best. Used to build more personal meaningful relationships. Although he didn’t note that some good can come out of it such as business relationships.

Why to Deep work
To court abilities for thriving in the new economy:
To court abilities for thriving in the new
Economy. The ability to quickly master heart things. Two, The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

The author notes, a professor of informatics at the University of California Irvine professor Gloria Mark.

To do real good physics work, you need absolute solid length of time. It needs a lot of concentration.

Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities, they have built in goals, feedback, rules, and challenges , all of which encourage want to become involved in one’s work to concentrate and to lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.

The author cites, a Greek concept of EUDAIMONIA which is a state in which you achieve your full human potential. Also known as a state of deep human flourishing

The author sites the law of vital field. In many settings, 80% of a given effect is due to just 20% of the possible causes.

In my experience, if you give your mind, something meaningful to do throughout all your walking hours, you’ll end the day, more fulfilled, and begin the next one more relaxed, then, if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours, and semi conscious and unstructured web surfing.

Shallow work: non-cognitively, demanding, logistical style tasks, often perform while distracted. Easy to replicate.

The author concludes this reading by citing the story of Bill Gates, who was a young Harvard student in winter of 1974, who utilized deep work through hours of coding for a computer software. ( )

First Cal Newport book I've read. A bit underwhelmed as I've found some of his blog posts quite insightful - perhaps because his thinking has sharpened in the years since authoring this book in 2016?

Agree with some other reviewers that the book could have been a focused series of blog posts - it has a bit of a 'padded - out' feel at times.

Nonetheless, Cal makes some good points about the structure and methods to tame the madness of modern work. The biggest take away for me was getting work groups and individuals to reset their expectation of 'response time' when 'immediate' is the default. And 'immediate' is hardly ever the case for most people in most jobs. ( )

Despite saying that he isn’t, the author falls back on old man yelling at cloud quite a bit. Regardless, there’s a lot of good tips here. ( )

Amazing! Newport shows how to master our focus, and also gives convincing reasons of why to adopt the so called "Deep Work". ( )

Very helpful book. He tells a lot of stories and anecdotes to prove his point and persuade. So it’s not a purely strategic book. But the strategies in the book are super effective. The book is already dated in regards to social media &c, but still very applicable.

Would recommend if struggling with productivity and distraction. ( )