If you do one thing to improve your life this year, subscribe to Dr. Newport's blog and start reading his books. I would suggest starting with "So Good They Can't Ignore You" and then read "Deep Work." They compliment each other. The first helps you sort out what you should be focusing on, and the second one tells you how to make sure what's important gets done. Over the years I've read lots of productivity books, and the related literature. But his approach to work impacts me everyday, and noth...

File under - Shallow writing that should have been a blogpost at best.This book is mostly random commentary on other people's work and content. Almost nothing is original and no studies have been conducted by the author himself. The author's contribution is simply - this researcher found this, I do it this way and you should do it too.The irony of this book is that the subject matter expert on deep work has produced such shallow content.

I kind of have been procrastinating a lot lately, even my reading has fallen off, this social distancing and shut down has really torpedoed my routines so reading this feels timely and a good reminder of the need to prioritize and cut out superfluous activities. I'm not sure that this book needed to be as long as it was to be quite honest and I felt similarly about the other Newport book I read. The book makes a lot of intuitive arguments and I think most of us know the importance of being more

A shallow, poor quality book about deep work. The central idea is about scheduling distraction free blocks of time to help you reach a state of flow with your work so you can achieve more. The useful content could be summed up in about 10 pages. The rest of it is mind-numbing padding. For a guy who doesn’t want his time wasted, he wasn’t exactly respectful of his reader’s time. I grew quickly tired of hearing about how awesome this author is. Some of his comments on business versus academia are

Deep work at a glance:✅Periodic isolation —week/days/hours (for reading, thinking, new ideas) [my beautiful Thursdays!]✅ Quit (or at least strictly manage) social media ✅ Go online when you have a reason! (Make a list)✅ 4-hour work/concentration law (+ cheat-hour)✅ Have a routine [took me about a year(since Jan, 2020)!]📌 ❓Have a ritual (start + end) ✅ Pomodoro technique📌 ‼️Have deadlines (shorter than anticipated)✅ Let others know about your personal routine/isolation 📌 🦠🚷Combining an activity

It is easy to lose yourself in shallow work - I'll agree with the author. Other than that, there is very little of value or substance in this book. You might want to review your excessive tweeting. You might stop using Facebook altogether. You might abandon email.The problem is that the real ideas (have sender filter their own email, take time away from office, take email sabbaticals) might work for specialists, freelancers, entry-level workers or academics, like the author. But not once does th...

This had a lot of valuable ideas about the importance of deep work and how to do it. Most people are going to buy into this concept easily enough, but Cal did a nice job further arguing it with some examples, various research, and so on...but this book also felt like a very good 100-page book that was stretched into a mediocre 260-page book. It's repetitive. And his research often relies on the "correlation = causation" mistake. For example, someone gives up social media, so instead of writing 4...

Ideal advice for folks whose top priority is to achieve elite levels of professional success by capitalistic metrics -- namely by jumping through golden hoops very swiftly. The author, for one, is a professor whose goals are to secure tenure, publish a ton of highly cited academic papers, and win the equivalent of a Nobel prize. If your life goals sound similar, he's got tips for making it happen.This book is less useful for people whose priorities include critiquing/reforming elitist institutio...

Background: Read this during the evenings while attending a scientific conference where I had to concentrate on lectures that I didn't understand 90% of, but still seemed fascinating.This is not a masterpiece, it's not even a self-help book. You would expect someone that advocates deep work to have put a little bit of deep work into a book about it. It doesn't seem so. Maybe the author was too busy writing and publishing the nine peer-reviewed articles that he keeps claiming to have published wh...

Amazing, amazing. This book is going to drastically help me reach the optimum level of productivity I've been seeking. This marvelous book provides you with a great mindset, valuing deep work resulting in astonishing achievements. The deep work book is organized in two sections: 1. The first convinces you of the importance and necessity of deep work in order to live a fulfilling and productive life. 2. The second part of the book begins to offer practical advices on cultivating a deep work rout...

Overview: the thesis is that deep work is both rare and valuable in todays world. That's about 1/3 of the book. The rest of the book is practical advice on how to pursue deep work.Part of me feels like a lot of what was said in the book is common sense. Particularly things that people know but can't find the willpower to do. I think that there is some truth to this. But there's also a difference between "knowing", and *knowing*. I think this book can help take a lot of people from "knowing" to *...

OVERVIEW:Deep Work was a solid self-help/productivity book. Being a podcast junkie, I had heard the majority of things that Newport preaches in his book. However, I really appreciated his practical applications of how to enter into Deep Work, or 'the zone' as I call it. STORIES TOLD: In Deep Work, the author tells a story of a young consultant who automates his work responsibilities using Excel macros. He then studied computer programming to increase his worth in the workforce. I, too, am a cons...

The ideas - as far as I read- were good. But the too many examples of white men that have used those ideas first and succeeded, plus the fact that the writer disregards other variables (like all kinds of privilege, economic status, personal preferences etc) made me lose interest to even skim it to the end.

Say you were shoring up an ideology of service. Where besides abstract idealism would you draw from? Well, America's "me first" set has some very practical things figured out. Habits of mind that help them get "ahead" in the workplace. This book is a great example of the kinds of literature they produce - it contains important information and some actually good critiques/ techniques for sharpening attention and the effectiveness of one's work. Newport is a very clear writer with a vast view of t...