Review: Deep Work

Deep Work is Professor Cal Newport's book about how to achieve more maker time. Likes most of his other books (and perhaps a characteristic of books written by computer scientists and other technical people) is no-nonsense and straight-forward.

Newport spends way too much time selling you on the idea of maker time (or what he calls Deep Work). I think suffice to say, most people who would pick up a book with this name would already be convinced of the need for it, so I have no idea why he tries to sell it so hard. His examples (ranging from Carl Jung to Bill Gates) are decent, though perhaps not as impressive as he think they were. (Does anyone still think Jack Dorsey is the second coming of Steve Jobs?)

Let me to summarize what useful tips are in this book:

• Facebook/Twitter/Social Media is the tool of the devil for Deep Work. 
• Ration your use of distractions on a schedule. He recommends 50 minutes of Deep Work and then 17 minutes of distractions, since it's impossible for anyone to stay concentrated for more than that amount of time.
• Exercise your mental muscle in various ways (one odd suggestion is to practice improving your memory: he cites the author Joshua Foer, whose practice made him such a good student that he was accepted into stellar graduate schools for his PhD)
• When responding to emails, take the extra time to try to complete the loop right away, rather than let the task degenerated into a million e-mail threads. For instance, rather than end an email with: "Let's meet for lunch!", you can end with: "I'm available next Tuesday for lunch @ this place. If you're up for it, you don't have to respond."

There's lot of time spent railing against today's work environment, with open plan offices, and a huge mix of instant message, e-mail, and various random crap injected into the workplace for no productivity benefit. I've long contended that engineering organization that adopts and introduces Slack into their workflow is asking for a permanent 50% reduction in engineering productivity, so I'm of great sympathy to Newport's inclinations, but again, if you're going to read a book like this, you'd much rather get a bunch of tips on how to do this than a bunch of reminders as to how great it is once you can achieve this focus.

Wow. I started this review thinking very positively of it, and ended it realizing that I didn't get much in the way of what I started reading the book for. That means that despite my great alignment of sympathies with Professor Newport, I can't recommend this book.