Newport’s main premise is that developing your ability to do Deep Work empowers you to focus for longer, be more productive, and learn new skills faster. When we looked at the data from 50,000+ RescueTime users, we found that at best, most professionals only spend around 38% of their workday on their “core” skills.

Unfortunately for most of us, our days are dominated by Shallow work with little room for anything else. The opposite of Deep Work is what Newport calls “shallow work”-the emails, updates, meetings, calls, and other busy work that is “often performed while distracted tends not to create much new value in the world…” These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.” In his book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Newport classifies Deep Work as “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. What is Deep Work? And how does it help you find focus?įor the unfamiliar, Deep Work is both a productivity strategy and book of the same name written by Georgetown University computer science professor, Cal Newport. RescueTime helps you stay focused by blocking distracting sites, giving you in-depth reports on how you spend your time, and more. We spoke with renowned web designer and author of Atomic Design, Brad Frost, to find out what happened when he started following the Deep Work doctrine. But this doesn’t mean it’s easy to implement into your own life. It’s a way to block distractions, break free from “shallow work” like emails, and focus intensely on meaningful work.Īs far as productivity strategies go, Deep Work is a superpower. There has to be a better option.ĭeep Work, is an antidote to our focus-fractured days. How can anyone be expected to do meaningful work in 5-minute chunks? The honest answer is, you can’t. In our own research, we found that the majority of knowledge workers are unable to go longer than 6 minutes without checking their inboxes.

Just think about your relationship with communication tools. From meetings to emails to calls to multitasking, our days are getting more and more scattered. In our increasingly distracted world, it’s hard to argue there’s any greater skill than focus.

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