Deep Work

November, 2025

This week I read Deep Work by Cal Newport. It highlights the value of focusing on something for long period of time. This post contains some of the highlights from the book.

Rule 1: Work Deeply

There are different ways to do deep work

  • Work like a monastic
    • Stay away from the world to pursue your passions
  • Divide your time between deep work and shallow work
    • Take couple of days in the week to do deep work
    • Don't answer emails or attend any meetings. Pretend that you are out of office
  • Do deep work whenever you have time
    • Find blocks of time to focus and do deep work during the day
  • Make grand guestures that could help to do deep work.
    • Check into a luxury hotel to finish your work free from distractions
  • Work with partners who can support your deep work.

4DX Framework

  • Focus on the Wildly Important
    • Identify a smaller number of important goals that can support with deep work
  • Act on the lead measures
    • How to measure your success with lead measures
    • time spent on deep work
  • Keep a compelling score board
    • Keep a scoreboard to track lead measures towards your goals
  • Create a cadence of Accountability
    • Regular cadence meeting to review the score board
    • Understand what was your results for past week and why it happened

Disconnect from Work

  • To support your deep work during the day, have a clear downtime
  • Check emails, Note down unfinished tasks and tasks for next day
  • Then shutdown the work day, don’t do any work related things after shutdown.
  • Let mind relax and wind down, it will help prepare for the next day deep work sessions

Rule 2: Embrace The Boredom

Define Internet Access Blocks

  • Have specific time to access internet, beyond those times don't access internet
  • Practice this both during work hours and off hours

Work like Ted Roosvelt

  • Identify a deep work task
  • Setup a deadline that is shorter than how long it will take
  • Start with one session per week, then increase frequency.
  • Important to give shorter deadlines for these dashes

Structured Deep Thinking

  • Save relevant variables in the working memory
    • What are the main points you are trying to make
  • Define next step questions you need to answer from the variables
    • How I’m going to effectively open this chapter
  • Review clearly the answer you identified

Rule 3: Quit Social Media

Quit social media for 30 days

  • See if you really miss it. If it doesn’t keep continue to not use them, if it is get back to it.
  • The cultivating friendship requires investing time and effort for those friendships. It is more than social media can offer. Therefore free time from social media to accommodate what really matters to you.

Rule 4: Drain The Shllows

Schedule every minute

  • Create a detailed schedule for the day
  • Divide workday into one hour blocks and assign every block
  • Shallow work should be in tasks blocks, have many of them spread through the day
  • Don’t be rigid about the schedule, be flexible
  • Goal is to be intentional about allocating time for what’s important
  • Use overflow conditionals to handle uncertainties

Shallow Work

  • Not cognitively demanding
  • Logistical type of work
  • Can be done while distracted
  • Doesn’t create much value, can hire someone to replicate these work

Maintain a fixed schedule

  • Don’t commit to shallow work commitments
  • Radhika Nagpal has strategies to implement fixed schedule work life
  • Fixed Schedule - Don't work night and weekends. Be productive during work hours.

Useful email strategies

  • Make senders do more work, set their expectations that they might now get a response
  • Do more work when sending and replying to emails. It may require some upfront work, but it will reduce back and forth and save time
    • What is the project is this email addressing
    • What is the best way to bring this work to conclusion
    • This is the process based response to emails
  • For ambiguous and low value emails don’t respond