Book Review: Deep Work

The author, Cal Newport, in the book Deep Work throws light on two types of work anyone can do:

• Highly attentive work which requires a high level of attention which he calls as “Deep Work”.
  • Examples of this would be tasks like
    • creating some content like authoring book,
    • writing a research paper,
    • blog post,
    • creating videos,
    • solving programming tasks and the likes.
• Casual work which doesnt require much of attention which he calls as “Shallow work”.
  • Examples of this would be tasks like
    • scrolling through twitter feed,
    • reading news on websites,
    • browsing youtube shorts,
    • instagram reels and so on.

The whole book is about the importance of allocating more time from one’s work schedule to deep work and the strategies one can follow to increase their time allocation to deep work. He also discusses the perils of shallow work and how one can avoid it.

All these have been explained by providing some real life scenarios and case studies which helps in easy understanding of the ideas the author has presented in the book.

He beautifully starts with descibring few successfull people and why they were successfull. Then he goes on to connect their success to the skills they have and the expertise they have developed over those skills which makes them irreplacable and highly valued in the market. He then connects this development of skills and expertise to attention levels which he then categories it into deep work and shallow work.

I would highly recommend this book and to apply atleast some of the principles listed by the author in their working life.

In this book, the author has stressed on dividing your time at work (i.e the time you spent at office/college) between deeep work and shallow work. There is another book of his called “Digital Minimalism” where the author explains how to reduce the dependence on digital tools and I feel you can start with this book first and come back to Deep Work because the major culprits for shallow work are these modern age digital tools.

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