Cultivate the Skill of Undivided Attention, or “Deep Work” (2019)
Caveat: I'm, of course, being a bit flippant here and there are of course people who've genuinely found a lot of this helpful. I'm actually a huge fan of Cal Newport as an author in general, but the deep work idea always didn't quite resonate with me.<p>Having looked at this topic quite a bit and generally being interested in productivity, I'll say this:<p>Deep work isn't complicated, in the same way that losing weight isn't technically "complicated": Eat better/less/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'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'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's likely they don'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's not to say there aren'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's a lot of discussion for something that ultimately boils down to "stop surfing reddit 4head".