This episode focuses heavily on the ideas from Cal’s latest book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. As Cal puts it, becoming adept at doing deep work is like having a superpower if you’re a knowledge worker – it gives you the ability to finish complicated work in a fraction of the time it takes other people. In this episode, Cal and I discuss the importance of building the skill of deep work, and also get into methods of doing it. To be sure, a determined mindset to work deeply is important – but you also really do need to be practiced at it in order to do it well. Most people don’t think about attention and deep work in this way instead, they’re apt to say, “eh, I probably don’t do enough of that,” and believe that they could work deeply right away if they just put their mind to it.Īccording to Cal, that’s really not the case. “You have to train your mind to concentrate, just like you’d train your muscles to be able to do a pull-up.”

One thing that Cal stresses in the episode is that deep work is a skill, and it must be acquired through practice. I’m once again talking with Cal Newport, who is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University, the author of five books, and a massive proponent of doing deep work.Ĭal defines deep work as the practice of focusing for a long time (well over an hour) on a cognitively demanding task without giving into any distractions whatsoever.

The opposite of that is deep work, which is the topic of today’s podcast episode. This results in an unfocused, ineffective style of working which takes far too long to get anything done. With so many distractions surrounding us, most of us spend more time than we’d like giving into their temptations.

Social media accounts, websites that provide shallow, momentary doses of novelty (as opposed to high-density fun), rectangular pieces of metal and plastic that live in our pockets and glow sometimes… we’re never more than a few feet and a few seconds away from something that can pull us away from our work. However, the more common culprit is the myriad of distractions we face on a daily basis. Sometimes, we’re just tired and can’t seem to muster the energy to truly concentrate. Almost all of us have trouble focusing on our work at times.

Deep Work instal the new for mac