Newport, C. (2016). Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. New York, NY: Grand Central Publishing.

This book is currently the most viral book in China, especially in the tech industry. However, I have a feeling that the author of this book has very little idea of how popular his book is across the Pacific. You will find out why the moment you finish reading the introduction section of the book. I stumbled upon this book accidentally when I was at a state in which I felt busy all the time at work but not really being productive. I wasn’t getting much satisfaction out of my busy work and more importantly, I felt something was missing but I did not know what it was. As I was writing this book reflection, I reviewed my personal objective and development plan for 2018 and realized that was also the time (late October) when one of my OKR (read 8 non-technical books by the end of the year) was at risk (I was at 3.5 out of 8 books). Deep Work came to my rescue. I finished reading it early November and went on to meet my OKR plus 2 extra books by December 17th. While I am happy that I was able to meet my goal and even stretched that a little bit, I know very well that I should care a lot more about the quality of my reading instead of the quantity. Again, deep work is all about quality and below is how it is being defined by Newport:

“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”

Living in the digital age, we are surrounded with everything except deep work. Almost all the social media products have one underlying logic: stimulate your shallow attention and try to keep that as long as possible in their apps so that they could maximize their profits. Try to think of the last time when you read a 140-character tweet or an Instagram post that pushed your cognitive capabilities to their limit and required a few hours of intense concentration from you to digest it. I honestly can’t. The closest that I could come to is some tweets shared by some AI scholars who shared important academic papers. But again, it is the academic papers that are of interest, not the tweet itself. I often saved the papers thinking that I would read them later, which in reality seldom happened. As with a lot of things, once something becomes dominant, the opposite of it becomes rare. Newport points out in the book that “spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work”. Does that mean to recover the capacity of deep work we have to get rid of social media and all the distractions of the same nature completely? The answer is not necessarily (although the author does prefer that extreme). It starts with acknowledging one important fact: one has a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as one uses it (I certainly resonate with this fact since I am just an ordinary people who can’t resist a lot of those temptations/distractions). Once we agree on that fact, then we take a strategy that align with that fact instead of against that fact:

“The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration”

For myself, I developed a routine in which I would block a few hours (usually from 7pm to 10pm) for my reading during the week. During those few hours, I would put my cell phone on vibration mode, put my noise canceling headphone on and then completely concentrate on my reading and note taking nonstop until I feel like my level of attention can not keep up any more. So far, this routine has been working quite well for myself and that’s basically how I managed to read 10 books in 2018. If you have the same struggles as I described at the beginning, I would strongly recommend you to read this book and see if there is anything that you could take away.