How to Get Better at Deep Work

“The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.” –Cal Newport¹

That’s from Cal Newport’s excellent book, Deep Work. Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University, and he’s a leading voice in the growing movement to stop incessantly checking email, put our smartphones away, and truly focus on the work that matters most.

He makes a compelling case that thriving in the modern world depends not on our ability to multitask or master social media but on our ability to unplug and do just one thing at a time. So we’re going to take an in-depth look at why deep work is so important, how to get better at it, and what it looks like to live a deep life.

First, we need to understand the difference between deep work and shallow work.

Deep Work vs. Shallow Work

In short, deep work is difficult cognitive work that requires great focus, such as writing, coding, or learning. Shallow work, on the other hand, is easy mental labor that doesn’t require great focus, such as data entry or email.¹

Here’s Newport’s definition of deep work:

“Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate. Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity.”¹

Take particular note of the phrase “distraction-free concentration.” He’s actually not saying that you can’t do the difficult cognitive tasks of your profession if you’re distracted. Rather, he’s saying you can’t do them well.

And here’s his definition of shallow work:

“Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.”¹

Note the phrase “easy to replicate.” Your unique skillset is not required to do shallow work tasks. Someone else could be hired to do it, probably for much cheaper than you like to be paid. It is therefore a poor use of your time (and company resources) for you to devote much of your time to shallow work.

Now, let’s be clear: Shallow work has value and is often necessary on a daily basis. You have to answer emails, respond to texts, input numbers into spreadsheets, and do chores. But this kind of work should be reserved for those times of day when your brain is not at its best. Or, if you have the means, outsource this work to people with less specialized training, so you can focus your energy on the high-value work that only you can do.

Why You Need to Get Better at Deep Work

Eric Barker called deep work “the superpower of the 21st century.”¹ That’s a bold claim, so let’s unpack the reasons why this is true.

Ironically, one of the reasons why slowing down to focus on your most important work is so critical has to do with the rapid pace of change in our economy. While our parents and grandparents might have been able to spend their entire adult lives in one career, most of us will need to switch careers many times. This means we’ll need to retool, reeducate ourselves, and “quickly master hard things.”¹ And you can’t master hard things quickly without the ability to focus deeply on them.

“We now know from decades of research in both psychology and neuroscience that the state of mental strain that accompanies deep work is also necessary to improve your abilities.”¹

Indeed, the optimal state of both performance and skill-growth is the flow state, and distraction-free focus is one of the key prerequisites for getting into flow.²

Another reason why deep work has become so important is the competitiveness of the modern, global economy. Since shallow work can easily be outsourced to countries with cheaper labor, deep work will become more and more important for residents of countries like the United States and Canada. Companies are increasingly looking for employees who can “produce at an elite level,” and this simply cannot be done without a capacity for deep work.¹

“To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. Put another way, the type of work that optimizes performance is deep work.” ¹

Furthermore, the rise of artificial intelligence will likely eliminate millions of shallow-work jobs entirely,³ so the need to get better at deep work is truly urgent. Eventually, perhaps, A.I. will overtake even those jobs that require creativity, but that seems to be a ways off. In the meantime, the ability to do creative work and find innovative solutions to difficult problems will set you apart from the average worker.

And what is main the source of creativity at work?

You guessed it.

Going deep.

Okay, So How Do You Get Better At Deep Work?

Well, for starters, you have to choose deep work over shallow work more often. At the same time, you need to cut yourself off from the deluge of distractions before, during, and after you spend time in deep work.

Perhaps that means spending more time with your phone in airplane mode, or with your phone in another room entirely.

Perhaps that means installing website-blocking software to prevent yourself from slipping off task.

Perhaps you should hide your to-do list of shallow work tasks until you’ve completed your deep work for the day.

Perhaps you’ll need to communicate with your family about your need for uninterrupted work time.

Perhaps, as Cal Newport suggests, you should quit social media.

However, it’s not as simple as just choosing to spend more of your time on deep work. If you’ve been spending most of your time on shallow work, your mind won’t even be able to sustain focus for long enough to do serious, high-quality work. Deep work is a skill that requires training.

Deep Work Training

“The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained. … It’s common to treat undistracted concentration as a habit, like flossing – something that you know how to do and know is good for you but that you’ve been neglecting due to a lack of motivation. This mindset is appealing because it implies you can transform your working life from distracted to focused overnight if you can simply muster enough motivation. But this understanding ignores the difficulty of focus and the hours of practice necessary to strengthen your mental muscle.”¹

What Newport is saying here is that focus is a muscle, and many of us are weak. Are you, for example, feeling fatigued right now because you’ve been reading one thing for three minutes? Are you feeling tempted to check your email or the news or the weather or social media? Well, if you are, that’s because your mental muscle for focusing is in need of training. Keep reading, resist those temptations, and you’ll get stronger.

Luckily, there are many ways to strengthen this mental muscle, and not all of them are work. Obviously, spending time trying to focus on your work will strengthen your ability to stay on task. But you can also practice yoga or meditation, both of which train focus and encourage you to embrace stillness. You can read, do puzzles, write, do art, or play music. Any activity in which you monotask rather than multitask for an extended period of time will improve your ability to focus.

Furthermore, we need to practice and even embrace being bored. It’s good to be bored. True downtime is when we process what we’ve been working on.

If you’re a beginner to deep work, and if you’re unpracticed with boredom, this will be difficult. But that’s okay because struggle makes you stronger.

The Neuroscience of Deep Work

Now, when I said that focus is a muscle, I was speaking metaphorically. It’s useful to think of the brain as a bunch of muscles that strengthen with use and atrophy with disuse.

Focus, in particular, is a skill performed by the prefrontal cortex, and the more time you spend in deep focus, the stronger your prefrontal cortex becomes. Monks who have meditated for thousands of hours, for example, have more grey matter in their prefrontal cortices than average people.⁴ Redirecting your attention back to the task at hand is a skill that improves with practice, and cultivating this skill literally changes your brain.

In addition, the individual skills related to the actual tasks you perform during deep work are also like muscles. When you initially learn a skill, your brain creates new neural pathways – connections between neurons.⁵ When you work toward mastering that skill, your brain wraps those neural pathways in a fatty insulation called myelin that dramatically increases their efficiency.⁶ And convincing your brain to devote resources to myelination requires deep work, as Newport explains:

“To understand the role of myelin in improvement, keep in mind that skills, be they intellectual or physical, eventually reduce down to brain circuits. This new science of performance argues that you get better at a skill as you develop more myelin around the relevant neurons, allowing the corresponding circuit to fire more effortlessly and effectively. To be great at something is to be well myelinated. … By focusing intensely on a specific skill, you’re forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire, again and again, in isolation. This repetitive use of a specific circuit triggers cells called oligodendrocytes to begin wrapping layers of myelin around the neurons in the circuits—effectively cementing the skill. The reason, therefore, why it’s important to focus intensely on the task at hand while avoiding distraction is because this is the only way to isolate the relevant neural circuit enough to trigger useful myelination.”¹

In other words, mastery is all about myelin, and myelination will only occur when you make “the specific relevant circuit fire, again and again, in isolation.” If you multitask, the relevant circuit won’t be firing in isolation, so you won’t master the skill.

Thus, dividing your attention inhibits your progress along the mastery path, while doing deep work accelerates it. So not only does deep work improve your performance in the moment, but it also improves your future performance by increasing your skills.

But Chris, Multitasking Makes Me More Productive!

This is a common counterargument against deep work, but it is mistaken.

Most people believe in the following two myths:

• Multitasking is possible.
• Multitasking is efficient.

First of all, when we believe we are multitasking, we are not. Your conscious mind cannot split its attention between two things at once. What it actually does is rapidly switch back and forth between the tasks we are doing. So a better term for this behavior is actually switchtasking.

If you’re on a Zoom call with someone, and you open a new tab to check the news, your brain stops paying attention to the person with whom you’re talking. You’re still aware of the sounds coming from them, but you’re not processing the words because you’re now focused on news headlines.

The second myth is especially pernicious. When we’re “multitasking,” we think we’re being really efficient. After all, we’re getting two or three things done at once! But since we’re actually switchtasking, we’re really just jumping around from thing to thing. And when we do that, we actually lose efficiency because each time we change tasks, we have to refocus, which takes time, as Newport explains:

“The problem this research identifies with this work strategy is that when you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task. … ‘People experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor performance on that next task,’ and the more intense the residue, the worse the performance.”¹

Thus, each time you switch from one cognitive task to the next – as long as these are tasks that actually require a moderate level of thought and attention – you lose time. If the tasks are fairly easy, then you might only lose a few moments, but if the tasks are difficult – if they are deep-work tasks – then you’ll lose minutes. Either way, all those moments and minutes add up to a lot of wasted time. So despite the feeling of productive efficiency you get from “multitasking,” it’s usually very inefficient.

Now, I don’t mean to say that switchtasking is inherently bad. This behavior sometimes makes sense when you’re doing shallow work. If, say, I’m running updates on my websites, there’s a lag time when sites have to load, and another lag time while the updates are running. So I don’t need to focus on just one website at a time. I can switch between all four of them with ease and efficiency.

What I am saying is that switchtasking isn’t functional for deep-work tasks. It prevents you from getting into the groove. As a result, your thoughts are less clear, you have fewer good ideas, and your projects take longer than they should.

(For more details, check out The Trouble With Multitasking.)

Staying Out Of The Shallows

Let’s turn now to the work of Nicholas Carr, who wrote the excellent book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

Carr explains the trade-offs involved in using the internet:

“The Net’s interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others. It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.”⁷

In other words:

“What we’re trading away in return for the riches of the Net—and only a curmudgeon would refuse to see the riches—is … ‘our old linear thought process.’ Calm, focused, undistracted, the linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts—the faster, the better.”⁷

As a result, our ability to stay focused is diminished and our attention span is shortened. We’re less patient, and we find it harder and harder to go deep.

And, just to be clear, this isn’t just something Carr believes. Many researchers agree:

“Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, educators, and Web designers point to the same conclusion: when we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. It’s possible to think deeply while surfing the Net, just as it’s possible to think shallowly while reading a book, but that’s not the type of thinking the technology encourages and rewards.”⁷

But the really troubling thing is that these effects are not limited to those times when we’re online. Spending so much time in a shallow-thinking environment changes our brains for the worse, with ill effects when we’re offline, as Carr explains:

And, thanks once again to the plasticity of our neuronal pathways, the more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted—to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention. That helps explain why many of us find it hard to concentrate even when we’re away from our computers.”⁷

In other words, spending lots of time online rewires our brains to expect the whole world to be like the internet. We can’t handle books because we’re used to YouTube videos. We can’t handle slow conversations because we’re used to tweets.

Newport has even gone as far as saying that spending a great deal of time in the shallows can “permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.”¹ I would argue that very little in the brain is permanent, and losing the ability to do deep work isn’t permanent either. The clay never dries.

However, Cal is absolutely right that the more time you spend in the shallows, the harder and harder it becomes to do deep work. You can slip into a downward spiral of avoidance in which doing deep is hard, so you avoid it, so it becomes harder, so you avoid it even more.

But such spirals can be reversed. It’s just that you have to struggle a lot at the beginning in order to cultivate some positive momentum. The same neuroplasticity that allows the shallows to rewire our brains makes it possible to reverse this process by, for instance, reducing distractions, practicing deep work, and meditating. You can even improve your mind’s ability to go deep by spending time in nature:

“A series of psychological studies over the past twenty years has revealed that after spending time in a quiet rural setting, close to nature, people exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory, and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper. The reason, according to attention restoration theory, or ART, is that when people aren’t being bombarded by external stimuli, their brains can, in effect, relax. They no longer have to tax their working memories by processing a stream of bottom-up distractions. The resulting state of contemplativeness strengthens their ability to control their mind.”⁷

The conclusions here are at least simple, if not easy to implement:

• Limit your time online.
• Keep your phone in airplane mode as much as possible.
• Spend time away from the hustle and bustle of modern life.
• Choose recreation and vacations centered around time in nature.

Less Input = More Output

Although we need to be aware of the dangers of the shallows, we’d be wise to focus on the upside of going deep: doing work that matters.

Each of us has important projects, goals, and hobbies that require deep work. And those pursuits are really about making something. They’re about output.

The shallows, on the other hand, are about consuming things. They’re about input.

So you could sum up the deep work philosophy with a simple equation:

Less Input = More Output

The less time you spend plugged into the infinite stream of inputs – television, social media, YouTube, podcasts, the news, etc. – the more time and mental energy you’ll have to produce valuable outputs.

And as much as I strive to practice continuous learning, I have to admit that much of the time I spend consuming inputs is not in the name of learning things that will help me master my craft. If I’m really honest with myself, I need to spend more time making my own things and less time consuming what others have made. I need to remember that doing is greater than watching.

Choosing the Deep Life

In order to be competitive in tomorrow’s economy, you need the skill of deep work. But while deep work is highly practical, I would argue that its value goes much deeper than that.

The good life, in my view, is characterized by continuous learning, mastery, creativity, and flow. And what do these pursuits have in common? They all require serious focus. That’s why Newport is right when he claims the deep life is the good life.

It is not, however, an easy life, as he explains:

“It requires hard work and drastic changes to your habits. For many, there’s a comfort in the artificial busyness of rapid e-mail messaging and social media posturing, while the deep life demands that you leave much of that behind. There’s also an uneasiness that surrounds any effort to produce the best things you’re possible of producing, as this forces you to confront the possibility that your best is not (yet) that good. It’s safer to comment on our culture than to step into the Rooseveltian ring* and attempt to wrestle it into something better.”¹

The deep life requires a change in priorities. Rather than striving to stay on top of things, you strive to get to the bottom of things. Rather than trying to keep up with the latest trends in our culture, you try to improve our culture. This will set you apart from most of your peers, but while they’re playing in the shallows, you’ll be enjoying the lasting satisfaction of going deep.

The deep life is also a life of vulnerability. When you create something and put it out there into the world, you open yourself up to judgment. It can be scary. But if you want to do work that matters and turn your ideas into reality, it’s the only option.

Your best shot at making a meaningful contribution to the world is through deep work, so I hope you’ll join me in choosing the deep life. You won’t regret it.

Read Next: This guide to establishing a deep work routine. 

*He is referring here to Theodore Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena” speech.

¹ Newport, Cal. Deep Work (Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World). Grand Central Publishing, 2016.

² Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (Harper Perennial Modern Classics). Harper Perennial, 2013.

³ Harari, Yuval Noah. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Spiegel and Grau, 2018.

⁴ Lazar, Sara W., et al. “Meditation experience is associated with increased cortical thickness.” NIH Public Access. US National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. February 6, 2006.

⁵ Merzenich, Michael. “Growing evidence of brain plasticity.” TED2004. 

⁶ Morell, Pierre, and Richard H Quarles. “The Myelin Sheath.” Basic Neurochemistry: Molecular, Cellular and Medical Aspects. 6th edition. Siegel GJ, Agranoff BW, Albers RW, et al., editors. Philadelphia: Lippincott-Raven; 1999. 

⁷ Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.