Deep Work

The author highlights a major difficulty that knowledge professionals are facing: while they come into increasing competition with artificial intelligence, they have in parallel increasing difficulties to find the necessary time slots for concentration, which would enable them to create, solve complex problems or yet make strategic decisions.

Moments of concentrated work help to create value. Yet, they are increasingly rare. Our attention is constantly solicited by emails, social networks, open space work. We thus find it difficult to dedicate time and energy to substantive work. We get the feeling at the end of the day that we were productive because we responded to many solicitations. In reality, we have mostly been reactive and busy, but only marginally productive on strategic activities. An IT director thus calculated that he was handling on average 160 emails a day, which were taking a total of 1.5 hours of his time in a discontinued manner. There can be no doubt that this information rerouting activity was not part of his strategic assignments!

Beyond this scary observation, the author shares four golden rules, drawn from his personal practice and interviews he conducted with highly productive persons as well as from studies. He thus recommends to set up slots of concentrated work by structuring our agenda in blocks to the greatest possible extent. He also recommends to intentionally keep slots of idleness and boredom to refuel and stimulate creativity, to leave the social networks, designed to capture our attention, and finally to drastically reduce the low added-value tasks.

A highly practical book, which encourages us to become conscious of the manner in which our working days really function.