Finished reading Deep Work by Cal Newport. It is a 250 page odd read.
I had high expectation from the book considering the aura, marketing created around it. Still I guess am able to recover price I paid for buying this book with some learnings.
Cal has circled around his profession, Carl Jung secluded house, BIll Gates ability to focus during early days in coding and many famous personalities along with tonnes of research paper citations just to tell us that In this distracted world of social media, e-mail carrying out productive work which requires extreme cognitive load is getting difficult.
So what is the way out:
- Cut social media completely.
- Start dividing time and hours of your day into deep work [complete distraction free time, when you are disconnected from the world] and Shallow work [where you are replying e-mails, making presentation slides, meeting someone or talking over phone]
- Decide and prioritize what kind of emails to reply and what to ignore. Make the process more clear so you know precisely what you want or sender wants.
Does this deserves as a book:
In my opinion, a nice 5-10 page blog would have been easy to summarize and saved millions of hours readers of this book spent on it.
My Learnings:
- Dividing my work schedule when am in deep work mode, no distraction.
- Layout a plan on being more aware about social media time consumption.
- Prioritize what meetings to take and what to reject [politely].
- Be more aware on replying emails and time consumed in cleaning inbox
If you have also read the book and got something more to add which I might have missed, please let me know.