This book follows the recent trend of: find obvious slightly un-talked-about idea, create a fancy sounding term to describe it (preferably with as few words as possible - one is best, like Blink or Outliers.) These words should be vague and have hundreds of meanings - 'work', 'deep', or 'source', for example. Then, while you could summarize the idea in a single page, write 100+ pages framing the issue as a fundamental shift in one's perception. Finally, go on a media tour to promote it.
Newport is on a 3-book contract[1] on more or less the same subject with slightly different framing. So he's obliged to drum-up attention about it. Also as someone else pointed out in a different thread, Newport places too much attention on "quantity"; it doesn't sit quite well with me.
Yes, his bigger point is entirely valid (and I appreciate him bringing it to our attention), but no—there is not enough material to write three damn books. Take inspiration from Kahneman, he condensed his 40-year work (in collaboration with Tversky) into one book.
As I've noted on HN before, I'd much rather recommend the book by the Hungarian psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's (or Prof. C): Flow—the psychology of optimal experience
Prof. C has defined the idea of "flow" (he discusses it in various contexts, including human well-being), and dedicated his entire life to studying it. IMHO, the signal-to-noise ratio is extremely high in this book—no wonder, it was Prof. C's seminal work.
I wholeheartedly second your opinion on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book. In fact, I liked the book so much I even tried to condense it into somewhat of a summary [1]. The book is thought to be a Modern Classic, and at least in my opinion, it deserves the title. Deep Work has some interesting ideas, but is not yet time-proven, whereas Flow is.
Does Prof. C also discuss the benefits of mixing focused time with communication and idea exchange time? E.g: closed door work with open work areas.
I encountered a similar idea in "The New Science of Building Great Teams" by Alex Pentland, where the concept of exploration is introduced: "The best team players also connect their teammates with one another and spread ideas around. And they are appropriately exploratory, seeking ideas from outside the group but not at the expense of group engagement".
Not quite. In my view, Prof. C's work is more fundamental in nature; he doesn't prescribe anything particular. But describes what works, based on his observations, and lets us judge for ourselves.
Among other things, he goes in detail (with studies backing up his points) on what provides "optimal experience" to humans. And covers topics like "order in consciousness", "sense of self", "entropy", "freedom", "purpose", and so on.
A couple of random quotes from my notes:
(1) "The inevitable consequence of equally attractive choices is uncertainty of purpose; uncertainty, in turn, saps resolution, and lack of resolve ends up devaluing choice. Therefore fredom does not necessarily help develop meaning in life—on the contrary."
(2) "There is one very important and at first apparently paradoxical relationship between losing the sense of self in a flow experience, and having it emerge stronger afterward. It almost seems that occasionally giving up self-consciousness is necessary for building a strong self-concept. Why this should be so is fairly clear. In flow a person is challenged to do her best, and must constantly improve her skills. At the time, she doesn’t have the opportunity to reflect on what this means in terms of the self—if she did allow herself to become self-conscious, the experience could not have been very deep. But afterward, when the activity is over and self-consciousness has a chance to resume, the self that the person reflects upon is not the same self that existed before the flow experience: it is now enriched by new skills and fresh achievements."
Thanks, yes, this.
Rel to your 2nd quote, an explanation might be found in the "experiencing self" vs "remembering self", which IIRC Kahneman mentions in the intro to "Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow."
Yes, that is is one my favorite stories from Kahneman. If you look up "The riddle of experience vs. memory", you can hear Kahneman himself narrating it.
Afraid, I completely disagree. How could you meaningfully "sum up" someone's lifetime's worth of work into a couple of pages and explain the related complexity? (Not talking about academic abstract-style summaries.) Prof. C is cited many thousands of times (did a quick look up on Google Scholar) in well-being and motivation studies. On the other hand, for Newport this is a "side hustle", because his primary work is supposed to be a "computer science professor".
Sometimes a fundamental idea is simple, but it takes repeated hammering into your mind before you adopt it. 95% of a book might seem like fluff, but when you read the 1 example, the 1 anecdote, or the 1 "way of saying it" that resonates with you - that's often when the idea sticks and becomes a more permanent part of your life.
Expanding an idea into book form helps more people discover that "aha" moment than a single blog post does. Plus, people just take books more seriously in general!
This is the reason I prefer books instead of blog posts.
With blog posts, you can surely cover the breath of multiple topics but its totally worth to go repeat an fundamentally important idea with multiple scenarios.
Though I completely agree with your sentiment, Cal explicitly defines the meaning of Deep Work, and I think it's an important thing society should think about as technology progresses. It helps to have the terminology to describe the state of our lives.
From page 3 of the book, Deep Work:
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.
I read 75% of it, does that make me qualified to trash on it? I thought it was complete garbage. Not the idea, mind you, the _book_. It's a blog post's worth of information that's comically stretched out in an early college I'm-trying-to-meet-a-word count way.
When I was in some philosophy classes in college I developed my "theory of bullshit".
Basically, when I'm reading your work explaining your theory, if I go through two full pages without encountering a new idea, your work is bullshit.
This doesn't apply to providing EXAMPLES of your theory, and a theory is often many new ideas so that explaining it will take many pages, but if I read 2 pages of explanation and don't find a single new idea - you're wasting my time and trying to build agreement without specificity.
Now, far too many years later, I am both amazed at the raw audacity of my younger self...and how accurate he was in finding which works would be more or less satisfying to read. While I generally prefer escapism in my reading, my virtual and physical shelves have no shortage of books that I've only read the first few chapters of, because of diminishing returns for the effort of reading them.
I had the exact same reaction to it. Some enormous fraction of all non-fiction is an essay-length idea stretched out into a book length. It's disrespectful to the reader, but it's what they need to do to make a sale. No one wants to buy a pamphlet
I thought it was a great read, fascinating, I learned a lot, it made me think, and I've been recommending it to selected people who I think would benefit as a must read etc. So I'm just wrong? You didn't learn anything, great, doesn't mean it's "complete garbage".
I don't understand this need (that I frequently see expressed on HN) to have the most packed into the absolute least number of lines. Do people hate reading or something? Sure, you could leave out the stories, the anecdotes about various places and styles of work..but what would be the point?! Indeed, leave out almost everything and almost nothing would be left. That is not surprising. That La Rochefoucauld or Mandeville can be summed up in a phrase doesn't make them less worth reading.
It’s garbage not for the ideas, but for all of the filler. There is no need for Newport to pad out a simple thesis and tips with anecdotes on modern day blacksmiths and tangents on how to memorize decks of cards. Maybe calling it garbage is harsh, but the book is definitely overrated and should be called out as such amidst all of the breathless hype for it on HN.
I also thought the topic seemed too thin to stretch into a full book, and I almost didn't read it. But I'm glad I did. I agree with other commenters that the signal-to-noise ratio was surprisingly high.
That describes every "self-help" type book, where you take a single positive but novel concept or attribute, and find a way to talk about it long enough to fill something that can be printed and sold in airport bookstores.
Eckhart Tolle has written a dozen+ books about being in the moment, for instance.
That's probably the worst aspect of Deep Work - it's written as a full-fledged pop psych self-help NYT bestseller, lacking the pithiness and the precision of his blog.
One hack around is to search the author on Youtube. You will usually find a 5-10 min interview during the book tour where the author has to distill the book into quick soundbites. You can then decide if the book is worth reading. For more complex topics on physics, biology you'll often find an hour long talk which covers all the material in the book. At 1.5x speed on Youtube you can
save a lot of time screening out BS.
I hear you. I even agree, that some parts of this book do, annoyingly, do exactly what you describe. But, on the whole, it's a compelling message from which many people (including myself) stand to learn, and benefit.
