My Notes on Deep Work by Cal Newport(part 1)

I have always wondered the reason behind the distributions of results, performance and excellence across people, Organisations and Nations. Why do people like Bach, Shakespeare, Maya Angelou, Newton, Einstein, David Oyedepo, Wole Soyinka, Julius Caesar, Alexander Hamilton, Apostle Paul and the rest, produce value at a crazy rate? Why are they more Productive? Were they different humans or species? Do they have more than 24 hours per day? This curiosity of mine made me read this book, and Cal Newport struck a nerve concerning intense Productivity, i'll summarise most of my thoughts while reading the book.

Newport defines deep work as the ability to learn and concentrate on hard things that change rapidly, and to produce quality work at an elite level with speed. I like to call deep work, "the major work of the work". If i wanted to be the greatest basketball shooter, surpassing Steph Curry, I'd need to practice at least 1,000 shots every day— that's learning — and make 500 threes per season — that's quality production. Making 2,000 layups every day might be good, but it wouldn't make me the greatest shooter. This naturally leads to the other type of work — shallow work.

Shallow work, while not necessarily bad, is any kind of work that consumes time and energy but doesn't contribute as much to our overall productivity. it can support our visibility or maintain our workflow, but it's not the core of our craft. Using the same basketball example, handling press conferences is part of the job — it offers visibility — but if i spent more time with the press than i did on court, the chances of achieving greatness would be very slim.

While the difference between deep and shallow work is obvious in that example, it's far trickier to distinguish in everyday knowledge work. Shallow work often disguises itself as deep work. As office workers, It's easy to think activities — such as attending every meetings, responding to every message and mails instantly, coffee talks — are signs of productivity. But while these activities may have some value, they might not be the essence of what moves a business forward. The purpose of a business is to provide value to customers, and the purpose of an employee is to provide value to the business — not to look busy within it.

We also underestimate how much time and energy shallow work consumes. What seems like a quick distraction can easily derail an entire day. We've all checked social media "Just for a minute" and stumbled on something that completely shifted our mood, making it hard to return to focused work. Newport warns about the dangers of context switching — when we move from one task uncompleted to another, our brain doesn't immediately clear out the previous task. we carry attention residue into the next one, making our effort shallower and less effective. This fragmented attention not only weakens our concentration but also drains our mental energy.

Shallow work creates the illusion of busyness, but not real productivity. The more fragmented our attention becomes, the more our brain gets rewires itself to prefer distraction, gradually losing its capacity for focus and depth. Deep work is like a muscle that must be trained. The more we indulge in easy, shallow tasks, the weaker the muscle gets— and the harder it is for us to sustain focus on things that truly matter. Another interesting fact, i discovered while reading — Our Brain naturally wants to do the easy and shallow things. There's always an inertia to do consistently, the meaningful things that will impact our lives. It's hard to go to the gym everyday, it's hard to practice that craft, it's hard to write regularly. It's uncomfortable, and so we procrastinate. Yet, meaningful achievements requires us to do the hard things, to be disciplined and to push beyond that inertia.

But discipline alone is not enough. One of Newport's most fascinating insights is that willpower is finite. That discovery(I stopped here) helped me understand why so many New Year's resolutions fades after a few months — we eventually run out of willpower. if we rely on our willpower alone, we'll likely to give in to shallow and less impactful work. The key, therefore, is to design systems and environments that make deep work easier and automatic, so that discipline becomes a by product of structure rather than constant struggle.