Deep Work by Carl Newport Summary

Here’s my summary of my book Deep Work by Carl Newport. I have restructured the book into three broad sections for my time management and productivity tool kit -> 1. How to Plan? 2. How to Execute? 3. Strategies to plan and execute.

How to Plan?

• Schedule every minute of the day. (One of my mentors recommended the high-performance day planner. You might like it. I use stickies to lay out my goals for the day.)
• Put more thought into the free time.
• Ritualize.

How to execute?

• Focus on the process and behavior, not the outcome. Training the deep work muscle takes time.
• Focus on wildly important goals.
• Commit to a Specific Plan.
• Take Scheduled breaks. (i.e.) take a break from focus.

Strategies

• Fixed Schedule Productivity. Leave the office at 5:30 PM.
• Before sleeping, visualize each hour of the next day. (I’m not sure if this strategy is recommended in the book. Check up!)
• Memorize a deck of the card.
• Overflow conditional blocks.
• Respond to e-mails only in specific chunks in a day.
• Make grand gestures.

Check out my notes from the same book for a detailed expansion on these strategies. Happy reading!

Cheers,
Rahul Sekar