Deep Work

Quite glad I read this. This was another case of me staying away from a book in part due to the “lore” in the media it has, out of the assumption that it might be too reliant on pre-existing tropes and not focused enough on nuance. There were certainly some instances of that offense here (I thought that some of the examples Newport used didn’t fully map to his overall thesis), but the majority of the book was very helpful.

The core insight I got from this is just how harmful “pattern-switching” of attention is; the act of sitting down with the intention of focusing on one task, then being taken control of by the demons of new emails, social media notifications, or other far less important distractions. This is so ubiquitous and engrained into our daily lives, and it is unfortunately incentivized by a lot of the culture of business today (open floor plans, ect.). Newport does provide concrete and implementable ideas on how to stimulate deep work for cognitively challenging tasks into one’s life to combat this.