Book Review: Deep Work by Cal Newport
I didn't completely abandon it, but I certainly didn't read Deep Work by Cal Newport end to end.
Deep Work is not in the upper echelon of productivity books, which I think is limited to Getting Things Done by David Allen and Atomic Habits by James Clear. Those two are great books that inspired me, changed my mindset and provided useful tools and strategies I could adopt.
Instead, Deep Work feels like a series of 3 or 4 articles expanded into a book. The first part of the book is meant to convince skeptics that deep work matters and has benefits. In my Kindle version, that section goes until Page 92 - nearly a hundred pages to convince the reader that distraction-free work is valuable, rare, and meaningful.
Rarity is perhaps the only interesting aspect of that section. Many decisions informed by conventional wisdom ultimately result in less deep work. Examples of this are large news organizations making their correspondents post and engage with replies on Twitter and firms adopting open office plans to putatively foster collaboration.
Rule 3 in Part 2 is where I threw up my hands in annoyance. Newport, categorizing people's reasons for using Facebook, which included finding a like-minded community and staying in touch with old connections, as "surprisingly minor" and "somewhat random", proceeded to label those who claimed these benefits as suffering from an "any-benefit" mindset, where identifying any benefit of a network tool (e.g., Facebook) constitutes sufficient justification of its use.
Obviously, the utility of Facebook on some dimensions is not an overwhelming reason to spend an inordinate amount of time using it. This strawman "any-benefit" belief was dismantled over the course of the next 28 pages in the chapter, most of which I skipped over.
My overall sense is that, hidden in this book, there may have been a few genuinely useful techniques or principles. Unfortunately, the digressive, largely obvious earlier sections soured me on the book, and the later "Rule" chapters with limited actionable information were frustrating as well. This could have been pruned down to a short, sub-100 page book (a pamphlet, if you will).
Reading this felt like watching Season 3 of The Bear. You know they had some great ideas in there but they were forced to pad it out for sales reasons...