Its day 22nd of 90 days daily writing challenge to improve my English writing and thinking skills. The aim of this challenge is to reach a level of proficiency where I can produce high quality articles effortlessly.
In this article I will be sharing what are my takeaways from the book Deep work by Cal Newport. Before reading any book I prefer going through its summary, I either watch a video explanation or I go through an article which has explained it well. For this one I have watched the summary from the author itself.
What do deep work mean?
Deep work refers to performing cognitive demanding task without distractions. Put simply, whenever we do hard things that requires thinking hardly and deeply without any context shifting and distraction we are performing deep work. Context shifting here means hopping from primary task to some secondary habitual task like checking phones or social media. Any work that’s not hard or doesn’t require deep thinking wont be considered as deep work. For example writing article is a hard task to me which makes me think hardly and I mostly write article without context shifting and distraction so it’s a deep work.
Why to do the deep work?
Deep work is crucial to produce valuable outcomes. It’s a great skill to master in order to reach an elite level in any field. As most of the people are accustomed to performing shallow work, deep work will give you a disproportionate competitive advantage over others. Deep work allows specific brain circuits to fire more effectively and effortlessly which helps us in producing better and clear thoughts.
How to get better at deep work?
As deep work requires intense focus it won’t be an easy to perform it specially when starting out. It requires a lot of practice to excel at performing deep work. In order to train oneself to perform deep work one need to indulge in lots of activities such as reading books, being distraction free on regular basis, solving professional problem in our head or playing games like chess which require intense focus. It would be hard to do deep work for long hours as a beginner so scheduling parts of the day into multiple small deep work session like 6 session of 10 minutes each will help reaching an hour of deep work.
My experience writing this article
Writing this article justified the whole deep work concept. It was hard to come up with the points on my own so I watched about the topic on author’s channel itself and tried framing whatever I have understood from it in this article. This article will serve as a record for whatever I have understood about the concept of deep work for now. Later on if I find any mistake in my understanding I will edit this article.
Time it took me to write this article
I am not sure about exact total time but I can estimate it took me a little more than an hour like 10-15 minutes more to finish this article.