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Related tangent: Newport's book "Deep Work" is excellent. It makes a strong case that deep work is increasingly rare, valuable, and meaningful. But it goes way
by chrisweekly 8y ago
Related tangent: Newport's book "Deep Work" is excellent.
It makes a strong case that deep work is increasingly rare, valuable, and meaningful. But it goes way beyond the "what" and the "why", providing the "how", in the form of specific, pragmatic, actionable guidance for achieving just that. Anecdotally, it's been very helpful for me.
- _Microft 8y agoI can confirm/agree with that.
- Numberwang 8y agoDidnt someone do a summary of that book in like a single page somewhere? As in, there were good ideas but it could be summed up to a short paper. I can't find the link now.
- StavrosK 8y agoI found that you could do the same for many business books, and had made a site to provide summaries of the books. What sparked me to do it was reading "The No Asshole Rule", which was so devoid of actual content that it could be summed up by its title. It was full of anecdotes and statistics that ended up drawing the wrong conclusion.
- Something1234 8y agoWhats the site?
- dayglo 8y agoThere’s a good site that does this called Blinkist. https://www.blinkist.com/en/about/ https://www.blinkist.com/en/about/
- yata01 8y agoYou’ll need a subscription or trial to Blinkist if you want to view anything other than their daily freebie.
- StavrosK 8y agoThis was years ago, and there wasn't much interest so I took it down.
- abnry 8y agoSo I think this is true, but it is not necessarily a terrible thing. It is one thing to memorize a summary of a book. It is another to engage with and apply the ideas in the summary. The goal of a book is to hopefully give you enough time and space to do that.
- StavrosK 8y agoUnfortunately, most of the books I've read just have the extra material as filler, and don't lead to much engagement. It was just anecdotes like "the nurses in hospital X reported that their bosses were 30% assholes, and in hospital Y they were 96% assholes, so it's no wonder hospital X saved 49% more patients!" and other non-sequiturs like that.
- normal_man 8y agoYeah the book is good but I found it to be insanely padded and bloated.
- hackermailman 8y agoThree sentences: https://www.samuelthomasdavies.com/book-summaries/business/deep-work/ https://www.samuelthomasdavies.com/book-summaries/business/d... I think the author himself has a one page blog post summarizing it as well. I agree with him about the smartphone cancer that has crept into all our lives though I imagine there will be much worse distractions in the near future like deep learning phones that can tell us everything going on in a room the moment we enter it (since everybody else also has the same device). Permanent HUD like a James Cameron scifi
- walterbell 8y ago> deep learning phones that can tell us everything going on in a room What information would be on this HUD? Do you mean real-time voice analysis?
- hackermailman 8y agoIt was from slides in a deep learning CMU course with examples such as walking into a restaurant with group seating where staff immediately knows your name and preferences/allergies, and you immediately have information on what topic each table is talking about and in what languages (which are automatically translated) what seats are free to sit at, which order is currently being cooked, ect. The idea was a scenario where each room you walk into your device can tell you everything there is to know.
- thisisit 8y ago> I think the author himself has a one page blog post summarizing it as well. Link please.
- flying_kangaroo 8y agoIf you do a search across his blog there's various articles touching on different parts. Here's one such: http://calnewport.com/blog/2012/11/21/knowledge-workers-are-bad-at-working-and-heres-what-to-do-about-it/ http://calnewport.com/blog/2012/11/21/knowledge-workers-are-...
- kirubakaran 8y agoSure, and Woody Allen summarized War and Peace in one line: It involves Russia.
- Numberwang 8y agoAnd you could have made your comment even shorter by not writing it at all.
- mattmcknight 8y agoWould check with Derek Sivers: https://sivers.org/book/DeepWork https://sivers.org/book/DeepWork I think the point of reading the book is you will see the ideas in the summary, but may not believe they are true. The book is there to convince you through data, logical arguments, and stories that the ideas are true. In addition, repetition is one of the most valuable techniques for actually remembering things.
- swah 8y agoI read the summaries by Sivers before reading a book and after reading a book, many times. Of course, sometimes I skip the book.
- skorbenko 8y agoActually, I made something of the sort that you're asking for [1]. Thank you for checking it out, and I would love to hear some healthy criticism! [1] https://skorbenko.github.io/books/books/flow.html https://skorbenko.github.io/books/books/flow.html
- ishan1121 8y agoYes, it was, in fact, his advice on working in isolation is one of the best things I have taken. That book has improved my productivity by 12% (i measured)
- billfruit 8y agoReally though, I do found that the book is just stating the obvious most of the times, and I wonder at all the praise it is getting here. Some of his ideas on memorization and his methods to structure thoughts, were non-ideas, or perhaps just low level trickery, and nothing fundamental.
- keiferski 8y agoThis 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.
- HiroshiSan 8y agoThough 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. At least read the book before you trash it.
- nullproblemo 8y agoSeems like the state of flow, redefined in a professional context.
- carb 8y agoNewport make the same comparison in the book. I personally think about it such that "flow" is the verb to produce "deep work", the noun. I also highly recommend his book.
- goostavos 8y agoI 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. The book is almost entirely pointless fluff.
- sotojuan 8y agoThe book is good, but could've been one long blog post. It also sadly is not very relevant for many workers. Dr Newport is a tenured, famous professor. He sets his own schedule and probably works by himself. I'm an average tech worker in an open office. My office is quieter and more peaceful than most, but I can rarely get much "deep work" in. Meetings, Slack, etc. I have no door I can close and isolate myself with. I assume this is the case with most engineering roles so the usual HN advice of "find another job" doesn't apply. That said, I still get things done fairly well, so I'm not complaining. I've used his techniques and ideas in my free time when I read, program, etc.
- titanomachy 8y agoI have a similar office but I've made efforts over the years to engineer my environment to support deep work. I'd started doing this before I read that book but increased my efforts after. If you really believe it's important you can usually make it happen. I have good buy-in from my teams. Details: desk facing a wall or window. Failing that, a 3-sided divider. Earplugs plus headphones. Skim my emails once every hour or so and leave notifications off otherwise. When I'm not trying to do deep work, headphones off so people know they can approach me. Nuclear option: work from home one or two days a week. If you really think you can't get away with these things, then maybe you do need to find a new job where you're less micromanaged and more evaluated on results.
- yellow_postit 8y agoBlocking no-meeting times, scheduling times to check slack or email, staying vigilant about declining, shortening, canceling meetings are all techniques to help free up contiguous blocks of time for focused work. Though they shouldn’t have required a book I’ve seen Deep Work and PG’s Makers Schedule post be used to justify ICs making this space.
- SatvikBeri 8y agoHe's been writing about and practicing these ideas since he was a grad student with no publications, well before having tenure. I actually think his early blog posts are substantially better and more detailed than his later books, e.g: http://calnewport.com/blog/2007/07/ http://calnewport.com/blog/2007/07/
- rchaud 8y agoWhile Newport's idea is solid, the book really isn't worth reading past the first 50-75 pages, where the majority of the ideas are communicated. Unfortunately, bloat is a problem in almost all types of management/self-improvement books, so I don't want to single him out here. I have the same complaint about his earlier book, "So Good they Can't Ignore you".
- taude 8y agoI enjoyed the book, but when I was done, it felt like it really could have been a blog post. In fact, I pointed people on my team at some summaries of it, and then said if they need more, read the book....
- chrisweekly 8y ago(Replying to self, bc too late to edit.) "Newport's book "Deep Work" is excellent" -> Newport's book "Deep Work" makes excellent points. I've benefited meaningfully from reading it, but also agree w/ many commenters' view that it could've been much more concise.
- mark_l_watson 8y agoRight on - 'Deep Work' was very helpful in doing some self-evaluation and priority setting. I just ordered his new book, to be delivered in a week or so when it is released. Making good evaluations on 'opportunity costs' is key. As I get older I allow more fun time than I used to (I am almost 68).