Book Number 12: Deep Work by Cal Newport

It has been a long while that I have not posted any book reviews and summaries. Not that I get paid for doing that, but just to keep everything documented. Here’s an informative post about my recent read.

Book number: 12

Book name: Deep Work

Author: Cal Newport

Book Length: 304 pages

Time taken to read: April 29, 2020 – May 1, 2020

Genre: Self-help

After a Long Time with the Review

Also, I am asked by a lot of people for a book recommendation and it is not practically possible to remember all the time about the learnings and stories of a book.

As National Poetry writing month ended yesterday, I thought of posting my further journey. Lately, I have been reading a lot of different books and stuff of the Internet due to lockdown.

The Deep Work Story

Let’s now talk about the book now. This is actually one the great book so I have found because it doesn’t support multitasking. Yes, you heard it right! We all have been hearing about having the capability of doing multiple things together and ended up with nothing great. Those things will not have 100% attention. If we look at the history, Steve Jobs or J K Rowling used to use this technique of Deep Work. They would go to some silent place and do their work with full attention to it, and that is how Microsoft came, and that is how Harry Potter became the success.

You see how they kept their focus on one thing and ended up becoming pro at it. This book completely talks about that. I remember one of the incidences of my office when I used to create attractive marketing content for WhatsApp and keep on sending messages to my prospects with full the attention of each, as WhatsApp has the limit of only sending up to 5 people, and I always used my official WhatsApp on a PC, it took me hours to reach thousands of people. Once I was in the office till 10:10 pm whereby the leaving time is 7 pm.

Conclusion? The next morning there would be a new lead awaiting me, I’d call them up and the sale was done. I realized it now, it was nothing but my Deep work technique which I used by giving my 100% attention to my work. That is the power of Deep work.

Two types of Work Pattern

Shallow Work:

That kind of work which will always keep you busy but will not be always productive.

Example: Talking to a friend while doing some work, listing to music while doing household chores, or chatting while sitting with other people, scrolling on social media, checking out mails.

Anything that distracts you easily, which decreases your productivity and increases the wastage of time. All in all, multi-tasking will lead you to have a shallow working pattern, these will always be there even if you spend hours on them.

Deep Work:

Any work that you perform and have its full attention will be considered as Deep work. Just try to keep your focus on one place and it will lead you to have its importance. I have tried this method lot of times, being in sales profile I get frustrated at times, and to get rid out of it, I need some alone time, so I take a break and go to some park where I can have the solitude I need for my soul, the chirping of birds around, tree leaves making calm sound and I write. I feel good again.

There are 3 kinds of people who will survive after this lockdown

Since this is a global pandemic and all the economies are down and for now it is important to secure ourselves by having the power to deep work. There are three types of people:

• People who are rich and already financially secured
• People who are good with technology
• People who are Experts in their field.

We need to understand that if we keep on doing the work which everyone is doing for years, don’t you think we can be replaced anytime? If not by people, then surely by machines and robots in the coming time. The only thing which will protect is the uniqueness of an individual.

4 Methods of Deep Work

• Monastic Approach

In this method, you try to become a monk, leave everything behind and go for the work that needs to be done.

• Bimodal Approach

In this approach you get to have a balance of monastic and shallow working.

• Rhythmic Approach

In this method, you try to create a particular habit of doing the work.

• Journalistic Approach

In the journalistic method, you do a particular work when you get the time and have the focus on that until it is done. For instance, if you don’t get the time to read while working then you can utilize the time.

Recommended to: Anyone who is eager to work on him/herself for the personal growth.

Inspired me to learn about:
How doing less things can also make us more productive.

3 Takeaways from the book:

1. When you look for the change, see the people around who are already pro at doing that.
2. Sometimes, it’s not always big changes that you need to make, but a little change will make the big impact.
3. Summarizing the entire crux, there were a lot of things I have been doing but wasn’t aware about it till now.

SumitOfficial’s Ranking: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

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