Derin Çalışma (Deep Work)

This is not an ADHD book either. It is recommended often because it is about focus.

Newport is a computer science professor, and the book's claim is this: deep work, which demands attention, is becoming rarer, and so it is becoming more valuable.

The distinction

Deep work: uninterrupted, mentally demanding, produces new value, hard to imitate.

Shallow work: open to interruption, mechanical, easy to imitate. Email, meetings, answering notifications, organizing files.

His thesis: shallow work eats most of the day and nobody notices, because being busy feels like working.

I read the first half underlining

The diagnosis is very good.

The cost of interruption. When you move from one task to another, part of your mind stays behind on the old one. Newport calls this "attention residue" and bases it on a piece of research.

For me this residue really does last. After glancing at one email, getting back to writing takes me five minutes, and I had never counted those five minutes.

Notifications producing constant interruption. His insistence on this is right, and on its own it pays for the book.

Shallow work seeming productive. Being busy all day and finishing nothing by evening. The false sense of completion that clearing an inbox gives.

The assumption of being open to everything. Newport says that being constantly reachable is a habit, not a choice, and that nobody questions it. He is right.

I lost him in the second half

Newport recommends blocks of three or four hours of uninterrupted deep work. He says no more than four hours of deep work a day is possible, so those four hours should be sacred.

I have no such block. I tried, and it does not work. After forty-five minutes I scatter, and when I force it the rest of the day is gone too.

This is not a matter of discipline. It irritated me that it is presented as if it were.

What really bothered me

Presenting boredom as a virtue.

Get used to boredom, he says. Do not look at your phone while waiting in line. Be bored. Over time your capacity to endure grows and deep work gets easier.

For me boredom is not a matter of habit. It can turn into a physical discomfort, and in that state there is no such thing as "getting used to it."

Newport does not know this, and does not know that he does not know. This is the weakest part of the book.

Whose life it was written for

Newport's suggestions assume a particular life: someone who can control their own time, who does not have to answer anyone instantly, and whose household chores and caregiving duties are invisible.

The names he gives as examples are the same: writers, professors, theoretical physicists. In one chapter he describes a thinker who worked in a tower far from the crowd.

Nowhere in the book is there a child. There is no one caring for a sick person. There is no one who works shifts.

What Woolf wrote ninety years ago holds here as well: not everyone has uninterrupted time, and not having it is not a flaw of character.

And also

Most of the suggestions rest on resolve. Yet the only thing that works for me is burying the decision in the environment: putting the phone in another room has proved far more reliable than trying to be resolute.

And he offers no version for bad days. Systems collapse exactly there, and the book does not recognize that collapse at all.

A warning about the book itself

Reading books like this can take the place of working.

I read this book to put off a task. While reading it I felt productive, and the task I was postponing just sat there.

I only noticed this when I finished the book, which is its own irony: reading a book about deep work in order to avoid deep work.

Summary

Take the diagnosis, shrink the prescription to your own size.

The suggestions on turning off notifications and limiting shallow work can be taken as they are. The suggestions on block lengths and enduring boredom need to be scaled down to your own measure.

It runs about three hundred pages, and the first half is worth much more than the second.