Lessons from the Deep History of Work
I am perplexed by the success Cal Newport has had with ideas that are either trivial or whose application is so context-dependent, such as the theme developed in this verbose article, that making parallels evokes the classic &quot;Oh, interesting&quot; response--without follow-up--from the reader.<p>I read his first books (3 or 4?).
&quot;Deep work&quot; - no kidding. Who in their life has ever heard the advice &quot;just get distracted, it will work for you&quot;? No one. 
The how depends very much on the context.<p>&quot;Be so good that they won&#x27;t be able to ignore you&quot; - sounds good, especially for a nerdy audience that has a hard time getting exposure, but it is often much better to get good enough and spend the remaining time working hard to get noticed, or &quot;playing the game,&quot; since there is always a game going on.<p>In this particular article, the hunter-gatherer remote work&#x2F;lifestyle parallel is so forced as to be simply puzzling. First, hunter-gatherer groups were small and required very little coordination, whereas modern companies, when they are larger than a few hundred individuals (I am generous, I might say larger than a few dozen) require coordination overhead--being &quot;on the same&quot; page is quite important--which completely changes group dynamics.<p>Of course, one might say, but how inefficient or ineffective are all these meetings, e-mails, notifications on Slack, etc., I just want to code or get my brilliant ideas accepted without further discussion. And we all agree there are better or worse ways to get things done at the organizational level (that&#x27;s an important point), and some companies work better than others and some stages of company life are more conducive to good work and good results. But the reality of group dynamics is that 30 people in a startup or hunter-gatherer groups to get a result at the organizational level (no one dies in the hg group or a product is shipped to the startup) need to work in ways that are very different from those that need to happen in a large organization.<p>Then leaving aside the caloric issue that inevitably makes the living conditions of a 30-hg group very different from those of thousands of people who depend on agricultural products.