Deep Work by Cal Newport
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So I low-key hate productivity books, but I nonetheless keep reading them. Why? Because people keep recommending them to me. I have a longstanding rule that if someone I trust presses a book into my hand and asks me to read it, I'll do it eventually. Sometimes the books turn out to be great, but even if I hate the book it often teaches me something about someone close to me, which is usually worth the price of admission.
This book wasn't uniquely terrible, it just suffers from the general disease that all productivity books suffer from. It's tremendously self-important, reads like an aggregation of the work habits of specific "impressive" people, fails to distinguish idiosyncratic techniques that work for the author from more generally applicable methods, etc. To add insult to injury, the author periodically advocates for genuinely rude behavior that would likely be unacceptable in most workplaces (e.g. simply not answering email at all unless you want to).
If this was the first productivity book you ever read, or if you're a social media addict struggling to find a reason to peel yourself away, this book might have some useful ideas in it for you. The biggest problem with it, to repeat a famous phrase, is that what is good in this book isn't original, and what is original isn't particularly good. If you're interested in learning more about the ostensible subject of this book you could do much worse than to read two books that are both cited and lightly summarized in Deep Work:
- For information about the psychology and benefits of focused attention, I can highly recommend Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
- Alternatively if you're interested in improving your productivity in a durable, tools-agnostic way, I can also recommend Getting Things Done by David Allen.