Cultivate the Skill of Undivided Attention, or “Deep Work” (2019)
Caveat: I&#x27;m, of course, being a bit flippant here and there are of course people who&#x27;ve genuinely found a lot of this helpful. I&#x27;m actually a huge fan of Cal Newport as an author in general, but the deep work idea always didn&#x27;t quite resonate with me.<p>Having looked at this topic quite a bit and generally being interested in productivity, I&#x27;ll say this:<p>Deep work isn&#x27;t complicated, in the same way that losing weight isn&#x27;t technically &quot;complicated&quot;: Eat better&#x2F;less&#x2F;etc. and maybe also exercise more. The difficult part is, of course, forcing yourself to stick with it.<p>Want to do deep work? Remove all distractions (physically, if necessary) and don&#x27;t engage in any of them for a period of time. Have a goal in mind for this period of time. If you find your mind wandering, gently bring it back to the task. There, done. You&#x27;re doing deep work.<p>Of course if one had the level of discipline to not indulge that urge to say, check HN, to begin with it&#x27;s likely they don&#x27;t need any concept of deep work in the first place (other than perhaps to remind oneself to engage in more thoughtful tasks).<p>That&#x27;s not to say there aren&#x27;t interesting tidbits here: Mindfulness is obviously a really useful skill, and sometimes physically removing distractions can be helpful in the same way that removing junk food from your household can be helpful in losing weight.<p>Still, it&#x27;s a lot of discussion for something that ultimately boils down to &quot;stop surfing reddit 4head&quot;.