Deep Work {MP3} + Digital Book Included!

Customer Reviews

Satisfyingly informational. Review by Aaron

Too many people listen to self help books and expect to hear some revolutionary method to instantly become a billionaire. Cal Newport did a fantastic job in this book to provide truly actionable options to improve your productivity. I'm glad to have listened to this book.

(Posted on 2/25/2024)

Good book about the meaning and value of deep work Review by Brent M.

Great book and very pragmatic. At times a little too specific to the lives of academics to be applicable to other knowledge workers
(Posted on 2/18/2024)

increasing sales is far more likely to be useful than doing taste tests Review by IAN. M

In 1995 the term “disruptive innovation” was coined by Harvard Professor, Clayton Christensen to describe how certain types of innovation change industries. But this is rare. Most innovation doesn’t amount to much, and fizzles out despite extensive quantitative research and Herculean advertising efforts.

In this book, Christensen et al, offer a simple but profound insight which they call the ‘Theory of Jobs to Be Done.’ The purpose of this insight is to shed light on why people adopt an innovation in large enough numbers to make it a success, and how to identify innovations that will be adopted.

‘The job to be done’, they assert is the causal mechanism for successful innovation. Using this insight enables companies not only to create but also to predict new innovations that will succeed. Phrasing the innovation in this manner allows for a deep understanding of the customers’ need at a more profound level.

To introduce this concept, the authors describe (among other examples,) the “job of a milkshake.” Why would someone “hire” a milkshake? What “job” is the milkshake expected to perform? “We all have jobs we need to do that arise in our day-to-day lives and when we do, we hire products or services to get these jobs done,” the authors explain.

If you can answer this question, increasing sales is far more likely to be useful than doing taste tests, demographic surveys and purchase studies.

When looking for an answer to this question (an actual case), the researchers were surprised to find that an oddly high number of milkshakes were sold before 9:00 a.m. to people who came to the fast-food restaurant alone. Doing taste tests, demographic surveys and purchase studies would not yield the quality of information that came from asking this question: “Excuse me, please, but I have to sort out this puzzle. What job were you trying to do for yourself that caused you to come here and hire that milkshake?”

It turned out that they had long and boring rides to work and needed something to keep the commute interesting. Coffee doesn’t do the job well because it gets cold too quickly, eating bananas makes you feel too full, but hiring a milkshake does the job well. It is thick enough to sip, lasts long enough, and remains pleasurable through the journey.

Approaching the study from the ‘job to be done’ perspective is quite different to fast-food restaurants asking a patron to give feedback in one of its customer surveys to the question: “How can we improve this milk shake so you buy more of them?” A single dad coming to a restaurant with his young son would answer the survey very differently to the same man when he buys a milkshake for his morning commute. The milkshake is hired for very different jobs, in two very different circumstances.

So how can one identify innovative opportunities if compiling data-rich models only makes businesses “masters of description but failures at prediction”? “We believe Jobs Theory provides a powerful way of understanding the causal mechanism of customer behaviour, an understanding that, in turn, is the most fundamental driver of innovation success,” the authors explain.

So how is Jobs Theory to be applied so that you create products that customers will not only want to buy, but will even be willing to pay premium prices for? Simply put, customers don’t buy products or services: they pull them into their lives to resolve highly important, unsatisfied jobs that arise.

Jobs are never simply about the function of the service or product. The circumstance is central to their definition, not customer characteristics, product attributes, new technology, or trends. Just think of how you would hire a baby-sitter – who would you trust with your children?

“It’s important to note that we don’t ‘create’ jobs, we discover them,” the authors explain. This is a 180 degree shift from viewing innovation as creating what no-one has ever seen before, and then trying to stimulate a need.

Jobs can be discovered in many ways. One is just watching the customers you do—and don’t—already have, and looking for the job that they want done. Do many DIY customers in your hardware store need technical assistance?

You can also learn much about a Job to Be Done from people who aren’t hiring any product or service to do the Job. Airbnb reports that 40% of their “guests” say they would not have made a trip at all, or would have stayed with family, if Airbnb didn’t exist. As such, Airbnb is not in competition with hotels. There may be an entirely new growth opportunity right in front of you.

Are people creating ways of working around a problem or just compensating for it? Banking giant ING saw the segment no bank wants, low net-worth individuals, who want a simple, inexpensive banking facility. They were being chased away by high banking charges and other barriers. ING created ING Direct that has no deposit minimums, is fast, convenient, and secures your money. Of course, you won’t see workarounds if you’re not fully immersed in the context of the consumers’ struggle.

There are probably more jobs people do not want to do than jobs they want to do. Negative jobs are often the best innovation opportunities. Because most people don’t want to go to the doctor if they don’t have to, there are now more than a thousand MinuteClinic locations inside CVS pharmacy stores in thirty-three states in America.

Innovation can also be identified in the unusual use of products. NyQuil had been on the market for decades as a cold remedy, but some consumers were using it to help them sleep, even when they weren’t sick. This led to ZzzQuil, which offers a good night’s sleep without the other active ingredients consumers didn’t need.

Growth can be found where none seems possible. It is dependent on knowing what to look for, and the question to be asked: What is the Job here?

There are gems in this easy-to-read book, with many examples of every point they make. No matter your line of work, this is a clever way to look for new business, but it must be done carefully and slowly.

Readability Light -+--- Serious
Insights High +---- Low
Practical High -+--- Low
*Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy and is the author of Strategy that Works. .
(Posted on 2/18/2024)

Mindset-changing Review by Kay

I hoped to have read this book when it was first launched. It contains a lot of dependable proofs for integrating deep work principle. Distractions are evil, but deploying deep work provides more than just eliminating evils from productivity, but also about wellbeing and being the best version of ourselves. I am now convinced to integrate deep work and looking forward to reap its fullest potential. Thank you for making this book!
(Posted on 2/18/2024)

Great book with practical insights Review by BestBookSales Customer

The book advocates dividing time between deep focussed work and superficial activities. The author shares process and examples where time taken for deep work has resulted in increasing output in multiples.
(Posted on 2/18/2024)

Deep Work is an essential component of a meaningful life in the information age Review by Duffy

Most personal development books advocate secret shortcuts to success. The 4-Hour Workweek, an extremely popular title from author Tim Ferriss, detailed strategies for “joining the new rich” and traveling the world by working as little as possible. Cal Newport’s latest book entitled Deep Work by contrast is refreshing in its emphasis on extremely cognitively demanding work as the key to success and personal fulfillment.

Deep Work is defined as “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.” Deep Work is contrasted with Shallow Work, defined as “Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.” Newport’s thesis is that the ability to actually concentrate on hard stuff is becoming rare due to addictive and distracting technologies from Facebook to Buzzfeed to email. Meanwhile, any job that can be replaced by a computer or someone in a developing nation will be, so deep work is actually more valuable than ever.

Deep Work is the knowledge workers’ version of “deliberate practice,” the sort of which leads to expertise as found by K. Anders Ericsson in studies of violin players, golfers, chess grandmasters, and so on. Sheer number of hours of very challenging practice with the aim to deliberately improve one’s skills correlates with the greatest expertise, hence the "10,000 hours rule" popularized by Malcolm Gladwell. Expert violin players practice 3-4 hours a day, whereas mediocre players practice only 1 hour a day or less. Similarly, knowledge workers who spend 30-50% of their work day in completely focused concentration on important, difficult projects produce more value than knowledge workers who spend most of the time checking email, sitting in meetings, and distractedly trying to get a few things done each day.

While Newport emphasizes the benefits in productivity and job security from Deep Work, I think the real benefits are in meaningfulness and life satisfaction. Newport has given a name to something vague I’ve felt was missing in my life. Now I not only have the vocabulary to talk about it, but also a model of how to live a deeply meaningful life in a sustainable manner.

I’ve had a belief that to do a high volume of good quality work, it was necessary to be a workaholic, a belief supported by the exemplars of high achievement in my life. Not wanting to experience the obvious negative effects of workaholism, I’ve instead chosen to be a slacker. Newport presents a golden mean between the extremes of workaholism and slacking, activity and rest; that of spending 3 or 4 hours a day sequestered in highly concentrated periods of challenging mental labor, 90-120 minutes at a stretch, never working after 5:30pm, and managing all this by ruthlessly eliminating the inessential.

This is a noble use of ruthlessness, versus Tim Ferriss’ ethic of ruthlessly cheating-within-the-rules or exploiting international labor markets for personal gain. The inessential ought to be eliminated; doing so ensures room for deep and important work. While Ferriss sometimes talks about eliminating the inessential, he frequently contradicts himself by recommending many unimportant things like expensive and needless supplements, or worthless accomplishments like setting a “world record” for number of tango spins in 1 minute, or cheating at kickboxing. Ferriss emphasizes laziness (“the 4 hour X”) and hacks that allow one to skirt effort, while Newport advocates hard, hard work for which there is no shortcut.

Ultimately Newport’s Deep Work is not simply about doing better work, it’s about living a better life, balancing many competing priorities, determining which technologies aid your most important labor, and valuing your energy and your time as the precious and non-renewable resources they are.

This book a must-read for anyone who does knowledge work of any kind and wants to live a meaningful life in our age of distraction.

That said, this book leaves me with some questions.

Deep Work is a book about finding meaning through work as well as success in life in Late Capitalism. The proposed solution to being outsourced or automated in a hyper-competitive global marketplace is to become indispensable by practicing in a way that leads to profound expertise. However, most new jobs in the economy are in the service sector. Quite a few service jobs won’t allow for Deep Work, for example Starbucks baristas, Amazon warehouse workers, Bus/Uber drivers, call center employees, administrative assistants, and so on. Do these workers have any opportunities to practice Deep Work on the job in a way that cannot be commodified?

Newport at one point suggests that these entry-level jobs do not, therefore the worker should develop deeper skills to increase their opportunities for deep work. But when and where can a service industry worker develop their skills, especially if they are already working full-time or more? The best time to develop skills is while you are being paid, and Newport advocates not doing anything work related after 5:30pm. It seems that the only way for such a person to get ahead would be to add an additional 3-4 hours of deep work into their schedule on top of their 8+ hours on the job, but this would necessarily lead to lower cognitive performance from overwork and inferior rest. Since expertise is about total hours spent in deep work or deliberate practice, an economy where the deepest workers thrive rewards the privileged.

Also by definition if rockstars are some of the only people in a field who will thrive, the system is inherently unjust, privileging a tiny minority while the overwhelming majority suffers. Is Deep Work only for the 1%, and therefore the 99% are destined to lead meaningless and shallow lives? Will Deep Work counter the trend towards increasing inequality, or will it further this disturbing phenomenon, or neither? Is there a way we can increase the opportunities for Deep Work for all workers, not just the professional elite?

Shallow Work is defined as basically busy work that presents a veneer of being productive, whereas Deep Work is the opposite: focusing on very cognitively demanding work that is personally and socially important. But some of the examples of Deep Work involve very showy displays of work such as number of published papers or (I imagine) lines of code written. Everyone knows it is easier to write 5 shallow books than one truly deep one. Could one be a better researcher by publishing fewer, higher quality papers? Does “publish or perish” really create better academic institutions? Does number of published papers make for a good researcher or professor? Does number of citations even make for a good paper?

Many paradigm-changing papers or works were ignored at first. As physicist Max Plank allegedly said, "Science progresses one funeral at a time." Is high craftsmanship always valued and appreciated in a field, or do other values make something more popular or financially lucrative? For instance, a better program might be one which is more elegant, requiring fewer lines of code to do the same thing. But lines of code is a showy metric that appears to be better, despite being more shallow. While Newport's official "lead" metric for success is hours spent in deep work, he also emphasizes the metric of number of academic papers published. Newport’s previous books were on academic success, which is largely defined as getting straight A’s in difficult classes. Is Deep Work just trying to get an “A” in life, or is it truly working on what is important, even if one is not rewarded externally as much as the person who plays to the crowd/rules? Is it “he who dies with the most published and cited papers wins?” or is it “he who writes the most meaningful and deep papers wins?” What if the crowd's values for success in your field are wrong or shallow?

Is Deep Work actually deep, or is it merely technical? It seems like many of the examples involve learning a highly specialized technical discipline, and/or perhaps inventing something new in a highly specialized technical discipline. But is technical skill and proficiency what truly matters in life? To take the example of masterful musicians who K. Anders Ericsson studied: is mastery in musical performance merely a matter of technical proficiency? Clearly without technical proficiency, one cannot reach a level of mastery in music, so some high degree of technical proficiency is necessary. But just as clearly, musical performance that only contains technical mastery is missing something equally as important, making this technical ability insufficient. Newport’s previous book was about developing skill instead of following your passion, but a technical musician who lacks passion makes for a cold and unmoving performance. Is Newport underestimating the importance of passion or heart in expertise because it is more challenging to measure or teach?

I know several people who are back in school right now. All of them spend many hours a day studying very cognitively demanding material in a highly focused manner, but none are superstars. Why is this? One (my wife) doesn’t even have a Facebook or Twitter account, and studies in a very focused manner for hours at a time, and yet is still very slow compared to her son, who can write a nearly good paper in literally 1/10th the time. (He plays hours of video games every day.) Is she lacking some crucial study skill? Another is a PhD candidate in the biological sciences and basically works round the clock. Why isn’t she a superstar in her field given her long hours of difficult study? (She is doing well, but not head-and-shoulders above similar PhD students.) Is she not resting enough or focused enough while she works? Hours spent in a highly focused manner on cognitively demanding tasks is clearly an important thing, but also clearly not the only relevant variable in producing outstanding results. What are those other factors that determine extreme results and are they learnable?

Is Deep actually compatible with More and Fast? In this book, Newport emphasizes being able to produce high volume of work quickly in order to survive and thrive in Late Capitalism. But does this emphasis on More and Fast sacrifice some level of depth that is only possible with Less and Slow? For example, in the psychological sciences as well as in pharmaceutical drug trials, it is difficult to get funding for longitudinal studies that track individuals over long periods of time, but deep and important information is found from these studies that cannot be replicated through short-term studies alone. Because of the lack of these studies (and their expense), we have lots of data on short-term effects of drugs but little information about the effects of these drugs after years of use…and many of these drugs continue to be used for years, such as SSRIs and other anti-depressant drugs. Deep Work does seem to eliminate much of what is unimportant, specifically mindless entertainment and needless technology. A life of Deep Work is certainly more focused and meaningful than one without. There are also some advantages to More and Fast. But what other Deep things are we missing out on by focusing on More and Fast work?

Despite my questions, I found the book very moving and important, and I highly recommend it. In my own life, I will be seriously considering ways to make my daily work life revolve around as much Deep Work as I can sustain.

(Posted on 11/22/2023)

So dang good! Realistic, eye-opening suggestions. Review by Elle

My summary of action items collected from this book plus ideas it inspired me to add:
#1: Distractions. Recognize that you are allowing yourself to be distracted (constantly checking in on your phone, email, Instagram). Set boundaries for your distractions; set a block of time for distraction-free deep work; have a piece of paper nearby to write down any distracting thoughts that pop up, then keep working. Quit/drastically reduce social media usage. Embrace boredom which trains your brain to stay on one track (and go deep).
#2: Make It a Daily Ritual. Schedule a block of time for deep work everyday and make it a ritual. start with 1 hour and work to increase it.
#3: Shut-Down Ritual. Perform an evening shut down ritual (like revisiting your to do list and making plans for tomorrow) after work and/or before going to bed.
#4: Attention Residue. Don't give in to multitasking or you'll suffer attention residue; where your attention on the new task is still smeared with thoughts of the other tasks.
#5 Ruthlessly say no to as much shallow work as possible. Rid as much shallow work from your daily set of obligations as you can (meetings, phone calls, emails, chatting, admin tasks). Unsubscribe from as many emails as possible. Choose to not reply to emails that dont meet the criteria described in the book. Get out of meetings that dont really need you there. Let coworkers chat with you a few mins but then tell them that you (or you both) need to get back to work. Take a hard look at your to do list, are there some tasks you can just not do and the world will still go on?

(Posted on 8/5/2022)

There's the Bible and then there's this book! Review by Mark Struczewski

I'm a productivity specialist. So, I am always on the lookout for new ways to be more productive. Having said that, I can tell you that after the Bible, no book has had a greater impact on me than Deep Work. It's so great that as soon as I finished listening to it once, I immediately started re-listening to it. As a direct result of this book, I have made some serious changes to the way I do my days. This is an incredible, must read book for anyone who wants to take their productivity to the next level.

(Posted on 7/9/2019)

I quit Facebook after reading... And I love it! Review by Toussaint Crawford

Cal Newport writes a wonderful argument for doing the things that really matter in your life. He wrestles with those that disagree in a way that is very compelling. I am making life changes because of this book. Hopefully it will make me wealthier, healthier, and happier. Perhaps more important: more fulfilled, which I see as different from happiness. Enjoy the book.

(Posted on 7/9/2019)

An essential resource for career success. Review by T. Rodriguez

this is an amazing resource for charting a path that leads to long term sustainable career success. The author author does an excellent job of giving you the reasons why and the steps to take to make that path a little bit easier.

(Posted on 7/2/2019)

2016, I'm addicted to being distracted Review by joey

the author hits the nail on the head of most if not all the issues problems of working with so many distractions

(Posted on 6/20/2019)

Chockful of Value Review by Gerald C Co

This book is perfect for people who are having a hard time concentrating. Cal gives you concrete tips on how you can improve the quality of your work and not only that, but also produce more.

This audiobook deserves at least 3 listens. buy it, if you are a knowledge worker, and just feel that you have too much on your plate, and want to get more your day.

(Posted on 6/19/2019)

Taking a stance! Review by KevinK

A great productivity book that takes a stance and offers concrete steps you can follow, to be more productive. *Productive* as in *increased creative output* – not "productive" as in David Allen's GTD, where productivity largely means "crankin' widgets and emptying your inbox" – a surefire system to "get busy – and *stay* busy – while feeling productive".

I recommend Cal's book to anyone entrapped in social media and/or email and IM. Especially those who're doing creative work like writing, artistic endeavours, innovation, etc.

If that's you, this book will set you free, unleashing your creative work, by giving it the space, time, energy and *respect* (from yourself) that it rightly deserves – and *needs* in order to thrive, evolve, grow, and be *shared* with the world, in a format that is *usefu*l to other people.

Drafts and ideas on your laptop is just that: drafts and ideas. To turn that raw material (of genius maybe) into something real and concrete: takes deep work. It is the *difficult* part. The crucial, tedious 80% of the creation process. Doing deep work requires dedicated time, space and energy. And taking a stance – respecting *yourself* and *your work* enough. To *do* the work. Your *deep* work.

(Posted on 6/12/2019)

Reality and Cost of Social Flow Review by Ed Shepherdson

The reality that shallow work pressures distract us from deep work has a significant impact on many people and organizations. Coming from the technology world where Agile development, open office, social collaboration is the trend, we need to be conscious of the impact this shallow work has on the deep work required to build strong foundations. The key to success will be finding the right balance.

(Posted on 6/12/2019)