Deep Work Summary by Rusty Bishop 2023

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 newton, deep work: rules for focused success in a distracted world

Buy it on Amazon – Hard Cover | Paperback | E-book |

Asymmetric results are defined as outsized benefits that pay off 10-1000X what normal results do e.g., you make a lot more from the same amount of work.

This is exactly what we want as Founders and Marketers. Outsized results!

Take a quick look at the introduction to my review of Atomic Habits and recall the concept of working only on things that keep working for us once they are done.

Now pair that with Deep Work which generates outsized results and Parkinson’s Law which I discussed at length in my 4 Hour Work Week Summary.

You’d end up with a process that looks something like this:

• Decide on what actions keep working and possibly deliver asymmetric results
• Carve out 4-5 hrs of Deep Work to focus on that action
• Schedule tight deadlines to keep you focused
• Do the Deep Work with no distractions and ship it
  

That’s a formal for success we can easily apply to generate assets that continue to pay us long into the future whether it’s in leads from a great Marketing asset or money from sales.

So let’s dive in. As always my Raw Book Notes can be found at the end of the Summary.

Deep Work Full Summary

First off, Deep Work is a fairly dry read. It’s fairly scientific in its style as the author is a Computer Science Professor and might drag for you if you’re that type of content consumer.

The book is divided into two parts: The Idea Behind Deep Work and How to Work Deeply.

Part 1 is a fairly exhaustive effort to provide evidence of the author’s hypothesis that Deep Work is a potential advantage in the modern distracted world.

The author defines it like this:

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.

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.

In a world where AI is growing exponentially in its ability to do easily replicated work, we should all be questioning if our jobs are “shallow work” or “deep work”.

(a shallow task, easily replicated) vs (a decidedly deep task, hard to replicate)

In effect, to achieve out-sized results we need to be applying a slightly weightier formula.

High-quality work produced = Time Spent x Intensity of Focus.

Part 1 also has some interesting stories and anecdotes on people engaged in Deep Work from professors to writers to people getting cancer diagnoses.

I especially like the concept from Mihaly Csikszentmihaly — People feel the best when they are engaged in something voluntary and meaningful (difficult and worthwhile).

This means doing deep work might even make you enjoy your job more.

Part 2 – Work Deeply

Part 2 of the book gets into the action steps and frameworks the author and others have used to actually do deep work.

Some highlights for me are things like starting with a grand gesture e.g., going to a cabin in the woods and locking yourself in until you get your book written.

Setting up your space to do deep work e.g., leaving your phone in another room so you won’t check it.

The author gives us his 4D Formula for Deep Work which is worth breaking down quickly here.

1 Focus on the wildly important. I covered this in the intro with some tips on how to do it.

2 Act on the lead measures – this means focusing on the leading indicators e.g., measuring how many hours of deep work you got done for the week vs. lagging indicators (output of work).

3 Keep a compelling scoreboard – something like a calendar where you tick boxes when deep work is completed. I used this technique to keep up my Duolingo Spanish learning in my first mini-retirement.

4 Create a cadence of accountability – that is take a few moments each week to review the scoreboard and tally your results. A good week would be 4 days x 4 hrs deep work = 16 hrs deep work which resulted in X output.

One concept I did not particularly agree with was the Shut Down Ritual which effectively means you end your deep work with a specific ritual each day like slamming your laptop shut.

I actually prefer to carve out time before bed to review big questions I’m working on so my brain can work on them while I sleep.

All in all part 2 does a good job teaching you how to do deep work along with some good tools to eliminate email, meetings, etc that distract from deep work.

Is Deep Work for Everyone? I highly doubt it.

Based on my experience leading teams it’s hard to get people to do even 2 hours of deep work much less 4 every day.

Time will tell if Cal Newport is correct in his hypothesis.

Personally, I’ve blocked off 6 hours every day Monday-Thursday for deep work during this mini-work period as an experiment. I’ll update you on how that goes in August.

Buy it on Amazon – Hard Cover | Paperback | E-book |

Part 1 – Book clips

Highlight(blue) – Page 6 · Location 101

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.

Highlight(blue) – Page 7 · Location 114

network tools are distracting us from work that requires unbroken concentration, while simultaneously degrading our capacity to remain focused.

Highlight(blue) – Page 8 · Location 122

Our work culture’s shift toward the shallow (whether you think it’s philosophically good or bad) is exposing a massive economic and personal opportunity for the few who recognize the potential of resisting this trend and prioritizing depth—

Highlight(blue) – Page 13 · Location 177

To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work. If you don’t cultivate this ability, you’re likely to fall behind as technology advances.

Highlight(blue) – Page 13 · Location 183

To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of producing—a task that requires depth.

Note – Page 13 · Location 184

Reminds of Naval

Highlight(blue) – Page 14 · Location 190

(a shallow task, easily replicated),

Highlight(blue) – Page 14 · Location 191

(a decidedly deep task, hard to replicate).

Highlight(blue) – Page 14 · Location 195

The Deep Work Hypothesis: 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.

Highlight(blue) – Page 15 · Location 200

I’ll take a moment to explain how I became such a devotee of depth. I’ve spent the past decade cultivating my own ability to concentrate on hard things. To understand the origins of this interest, it helps to know that I’m a theoretical computer scientist who performed my doctoral training in MIT’s famed Theory of Computation group—

Note – Page 15 · Location 203

Good phrasing for describing myself phd etc, deep work

Highlight(blue) – Page 16 · Location 218

Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.

Highlight(blue) – Page 17 · Location 227

I’ve committed this thinking to words, in part, to help you follow my lead in rebuilding your life around deep work—

Note – Page 17 · Location 228

I like this phrasing about committing to words

Highlight(blue) – Page 18 · Location 234

I’ll try to convince you to join me in the effort to build our own personal Bollingen Towers;

PART 1: The Idea

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 1: Deep Work Is Valuable > Page 24 · Location 281

Tyler Cowen summarizes this reality more bluntly: “The key question will be: are you good at working with intelligent machines or not?”

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 1: Deep Work Is Valuable > Page 24 · Location 283

Intelligent machines are not an obstacle to Silver’s success, but instead provide its precondition.

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 1: Deep Work Is Valuable > Page 25 · Location 296

Rosen explains as follows: “Hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance.”

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 1: Deep Work Is Valuable > Page 25 · Location 297

In other words, talent is not a commodity you can buy in bulk and combine to reach the needed levels: There’s a premium to being the best.

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 1: Deep Work Is Valuable > Page 28 · Location 322

In this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital.

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 1: Deep Work Is Valuable > Page 28 · Location 323

Great Restructuring identified by economists like Brynjolfsson, McAfee, and Cowen

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 1: Deep Work Is Valuable > Page 29 · Location 334

Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy 1. The ability to quickly master hard things. 2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 1: Deep Work Is Valuable > Page 30 · Location 343

CREATE VIEW cities AS SELECT name, population, altitude FROM capitals UNION SELECT name, population, altitude FROM non_capitals;

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 1: Deep Work Is Valuable > Page 32 · Location 370

If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 1: Deep Work Is Valuable > Page 34 · Location 391

deliberate practice.

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 1: Deep Work Is Valuable > Page 36 · Location 412

To be great at something is to be well myelinated.

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 1: Deep Work Is Valuable > Page 37 · Location 416

By contrast, if you’re trying to learn a complex new skill (say, SQL database management) in a state of low concentration (perhaps you also have your Facebook feed open), you’re firing too many circuits simultaneously and haphazardly to isolate the group of neurons you actually want to strengthen.

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 1: Deep Work Is Valuable > Page 37 · Location 419

Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges first wrote about using the mind like a lens to focus rays of attention,

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 1: Deep Work Is Valuable > Page 38 · Location 428

The reason Grant advanced so quickly in his corner of academia is simple: He produces.

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 1: Deep Work Is Valuable > Page 38 · Location 432

Give and Take,

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 1: Deep Work Is Valuable > Page 39 · Location 445

By batching his teaching in the fall, Grant can then turn his attention fully to research in the spring and summer, and tackle this work with less distraction.

Note – Chapter 1: Deep Work Is Valuable > Page 39 · Location 446

I like this ideavof batching into seasons, be greatvin each season

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 1: Deep Work Is Valuable > Page 40 · Location 455

law of productivity: High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 1: Deep Work Is Valuable > Page 46 · Location 523

To ask a CEO to spend four hours thinking deeply about a single problem is a waste of what makes him or her valuable. It’s better to hire three smart subordinates to think deeply about the problem and then bring their solutions to the executive for a final decision.

Note – Chapter 1: Deep Work Is Valuable > Page 47 · Location 525

This is why you need me to put in deep work when you want to sell your company

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 2: Deep Work Is Rare > Page 54 · Location 606

The result: He discovered that Atlantic Media was spending well over a million dollars a year to pay people to process e-mails, with every message sent or received tapping the company for around ninety-five cents of labor costs.

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 2: Deep Work Is Rare > Page 54 · Location 610

turns out to be really difficult to answer a simple question such as: What’s the impact of our current e-mail habits on the bottom line?

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 2: Deep Work Is Rare > Page 56 · Location 634

Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow found that the professionals she surveyed spent around twenty to twenty-five hours a week outside the office monitoring e-mail—believing it important to answer any e-mail (internal or external) within an hour of its arrival.

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 2: Deep Work Is Rare > Page 58 · Location 649

The Principle of Least Resistance: In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment.

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 2: Deep Work Is Rare > Page 61 · Location 690

Richard Feynman explaining in an interview one of his less orthodox productivity strategies: To do real good physics work, you do need absolute solid lengths of time… it needs a lot of concentration… if you have a job administrating anything, you don’t have the time. So I have invented another myth for myself: that I’m irresponsible. I’m actively irresponsible. I tell everyone I don’t do anything. If anyone asks me to be on a committee for admissions, “no,” I tell them: I’m irresponsible.

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 2: Deep Work Is Rare > Page 64 · Location 715

Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner. This mind-set

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 2: Deep Work Is Rare > Page 67 · Location 753

“Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World,” he argued in his 1993 book on the topic. “It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant.”

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 3: Deep Work Is Meaningful > Page 77 · Location 860

As Gallagher summarizes: “Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.”

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 3: Deep Work Is Meaningful > Page 79 · Location 879

Gallagher’s theory, therefore, predicts that if you spend enough time in this state, your mind will understand your world as rich in meaning and importance.

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 3: Deep Work Is Meaningful > Page 82 · Location 908

when you lose focus, your mind tends to fix on what could be wrong with your life instead of what’s right.”

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 3: Deep Work Is Meaningful > Page 82 · Location 913

“After running my tough experiment [with cancer]… I have a plan for living the rest of my life,” Gallagher concludes in her book. “I’ll choose my targets with care… then give them my rapt attention. In short, I’ll live the focused life, because it’s the best kind there

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 3: Deep Work Is Meaningful > Page 84 · Location 930

“The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 3: Deep Work Is Meaningful > Page 84 · Location 931

Csikszentmihalyi calls this mental state flow (a term he popularized with a 1990 book of the same title). At

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 3: Deep Work Is Meaningful > Page 86 · Location 953

This, ultimately, is the lesson to come away with from our brief foray into the world of experimental psychology: To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction.

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 3: Deep Work Is Meaningful > Page 87 · Location 967

“The Enlightenment’s metaphysical embrace of the autonomous individual leads not just to a boring life,” Dreyfus and Kelly worry; “it leads almost inevitably to a nearly unlivable one.”

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 3: Deep Work Is Meaningful > Page 91 · Location 1020

This represents a classic market mismatch: If you cultivate this skill, you’ll thrive professionally.

Part 2 – Book Clips

Highlight(blue) – Rule #1: Work Deeply > Page 95 · Location 1037

ancient Greek concept of eudaimonia (a state in which you’re achieving your full human potential),

Highlight(blue) – Rule #1: Work Deeply > Page 97 · Location 1057

He imagines a process in which you spend ninety minutes inside, take a ninety-minute break, and repeat two or three times—at which point your brain will have achieved its limit of concentration for the day.

Highlight(blue) – Rule #1: Work Deeply > Page 99 · Location 1080

As Baumeister summarized in his subsequent book, Willpower (co-authored with the science writer John Tierney): “Desire turned out to be the norm, not the exception.”

Highlight(blue) – Rule #1: Work Deeply > Page 99 · Location 1090

Roy Baumeister, has established the following important (and at the time, unexpected) truth about willpower: You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.

Highlight(blue) – Rule #1: Work Deeply > Page 103 · Location 1136

Practitioners of the monastic philosophy tend to have a well-defined and highly valued professional goal that they’re pursuing, and the bulk of their professional success comes from doing this one thing exceptionally well.

Highlight(blue) – Rule #1: Work Deeply > Page 104 · Location 1139

“I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study.”

Highlight(blue) – Rule #1: Work Deeply > Page 105 · Location 1151

The productivity equation is a non-linear one, in other words. This accounts for why I am a bad correspondent and why I very rarely accept speaking engagements. If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. But as those chunks get separated and fragmented, my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly.

Highlight(blue) – Rule #1: Work Deeply > Page 105 · Location 1154

Stephenson sees two mutually exclusive options: He can write good novels at a regular rate, or he can answer a lot of individual e-mails and attend conferences, and as a result produce lower-quality novels at a slower rate.

Note – Rule #1: Work Deeply > Page 105 · Location 1155

If this is true then why did he write such crappy novels for a while after writing so many great one? Do you need some change for a while from monastic life?

Highlight(blue) – Rule #1: Work Deeply > Page 106 · Location 1166

The Bimodal Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling

Highlight(blue) – Rule #1: Work Deeply > Page 110 · Location 1206

The Rhythmic Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling

Highlight(blue) – Rule #1: Work Deeply > Page 110 · Location 1213

“After a few days you’ll have a chain,” Seinfeld said. “Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”

Highlight(blue) – Rule #1: Work Deeply > Page 121 · Location 1328

(As Nietzsche said: “It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.”)

Highlight(blue) – Rule #1: Work Deeply > Page 130 · Location 1438

equivalent of Carl Jung’s stone tower. But it’s here that we must embrace more nuance in understanding what really generated innovation in sites such as Building 20 and Bell Labs.

Highlight(blue) – Rule #1: Work Deeply > Page 132 · Location 1456

Expose yourself to ideas in hubs on a regular basis, but maintain a spoke in which to work deeply on what you encounter.

Highlight(blue) – Rule #1: Work Deeply > Page 136 · Location 1498

What struck me as I read was that this gap between what and how was relevant to my personal quest to spend more time working deeply.

Highlight(blue) – Rule #1: Work Deeply > Page 138 · Location 1526

For an individual focused on deep work, it’s easy to identify the relevant lead measure: time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal.

Highlight(blue) – Rule #1: Work Deeply > Page 138 · Location 1530

When I shifted to tracking deep work hours, suddenly these measures became relevant to my day-to-day: Every hour extra of deep work was immediately reflected in my tally.

Highlight(blue) – Rule #1: Work Deeply > Page 151 · Location 1672

Another key commitment for succeeding with this strategy is to support your commitment to shutting down with a strict shutdown ritual that you use at the end of the workday to maximize the probability that you succeed.

Highlight(blue) – Rule #1: Work Deeply > Page 151 · Location 1676

(to end my own ritual, I say, “Shutdown complete”).

Highlight(blue) – Rule #1: Work Deeply > Page 152 · Location 1687

Zeigarnik effect.

Highlight(blue) – Rule #2: Embrace Boredom > Page 157 · Location 1733

This consistent strain has built my mental muscle over years and years. This was not the goal when I started, but it is the effect.”

Highlight(blue) – Rule #2: Embrace Boredom > Page 157 · Location 1735

Adam Marlin’s experience underscores an important reality about deep work: The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained.

Highlight(blue) – Rule #2: Embrace Boredom > Page 157 · Location 1739

But this understanding ignores the difficulty of focus and the hours of practice necessary to strengthen your “mental muscle.”

Highlight(blue) – Rule #2: Embrace Boredom > Page 158 · Location 1748

So we have scales that allow us to divide up people into people who multitask all the time and people who rarely do, and the differences are remarkable. People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand… they’re pretty much mental wrecks.

Highlight(blue) – Rule #2: Embrace Boredom > Page 161 · Location 1782

I propose an alternative to the Internet Sabbath. Instead of scheduling the occasional break from distraction so you can focus, you should instead schedule the occasional break from focus to give in to distraction.

Highlight(blue) – Rule #2: Embrace Boredom > Page 170 · Location 1888

adopt in your own deep work training: productive meditation.

Highlight(blue) – Rule #3: Quit Social Media > Page 187 · Location 2069

In other words, once you put aside the revolutionary rhetoric surrounding all things Internet—the sense, summarized in Part 1, that you’re either fully committed to “the revolution” or a Luddite curmudgeon—you’ll soon realize that network tools are not exceptional; they’re tools, no different from a blacksmith’s hammer or an artist’s brush, used by skilled laborers to do their jobs better

Highlight(blue) – Rule #3: Quit Social Media > Page 190 · Location 2105

“Soil fertility is my baseline.”

Highlight(blue) – Rule #3: Quit Social Media > Page 191 · Location 2114

The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.

Highlight(blue) – Rule #3: Quit Social Media > Page 193 · Location 2141

“It’s amazing how overly accessible people are. There’s a lot of communication in my life that’s not enriching, it’s impoverishing.”

Highlight(blue) – Rule #3: Quit Social Media > Page 196 · Location 2170

Professional Goal: To craft well-written, narrative-driven stories that change the way people understand the world. Key Activities Supporting This Goal: • Research patiently and deeply. • Write carefully and with purpose.

Highlight(blue) – Rule #3: Quit Social Media > Page 197 · Location 2191

The question once again is not whether Twitter offers some benefits, but instead whether it offers enough benefits to offset its drag on your time and attention (two resources that are especially valuable to a writer).

Highlight(blue) – Rule #3: Quit Social Media > Page 201 · Location 2225

The Law of the Vital Few*: In many settings, 80 percent of a given effect is due to just 20 percent of the possible causes.

Highlight(blue) – Rule #3: Quit Social Media > Page 210 · Location 2333

Bennett suggests that his typical man see his sixteen free hours as a “day within a day,” explaining, “during those sixteen hours he is free; he is not a wage-earner; he is not preoccupied with monetary cares; he is just as good as a man with a private income.”

Highlight(blue) – Rule #4: Drain the Shallows > Page 218 · Location 2419

“How can we afford to put our business on hold for a month to ‘mess around’ with new ideas?” Fried asked rhetorically. “How can we afford not to?”

Highlight(blue) – Rule #4: Drain the Shallows > Page 229 · Location 2544

How long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task?

Highlight(blue) – Rule #4: Drain the Shallows > Page 237 · Location 2640

Radhika Nagpal, the Fred Kavli Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University. Nagpal

Highlight(blue) – Rule #4: Drain the Shallows > Page 238 · Location 2648

Nagpal, in other words, deployed fixed-schedule productivity.

Highlight(blue) – Rule #4: Drain the Shallows > Page 240 · Location 2666

In turning down obligations, I also resist the urge to offer a consolation prize that ends up devouring almost as much of my schedule

Highlight(blue) – Rule #4: Drain the Shallows > Page 242 · Location 2692

Become Hard to Reach

Highlight(blue) – Rule #4: Drain the Shallows > Page 243 · Location 2706

Instead, I list different individuals you can contact for specific purposes: my literary agent for rights requests, for example, or my speaking agent for speaking requests.

Highlight(blue) – Rule #4: Drain the Shallows > Page 243 · Location 2708

If you have an offer, opportunity, or introduction that might make my life more interesting, e-mail me at interesting [at] calnewport.com. For the reasons stated above, I’ll only respond to those proposals that are a good match for my schedule and interests.

Highlight(blue) – Rule #4: Drain the Shallows > Page 245 · Location 2724

The inbox is now a collection of opportunities that you can glance at when you have the free time—seeking out those that make sense for you to engage. But

Highlight(blue) – Rule #4: Drain the Shallows > Page 246 · Location 2742

For those who make it past this step, Herbert enforces a small fee you must pay before communicating with him. This fee is not about making extra money, but is instead about selecting for individuals who are serious about receiving and acting on advice. Herbert’s filters still enable him to help people and encounter interesting opportunities. But at the same time, they have reduced his incoming communication to a level he can easily handle.

Highlight(blue) – Rule #4: Drain the Shallows > Page 247 · Location 2748

three promises:  I am not asking Antonio a style question I could find searching Google for 10 minutes.  I am not SPAMMING Antonio with a cut-and-pasting generic request to promote my unrelated business.  I will do a good deed for some random stranger if Antonio responds within 23 hours.

Highlight(blue) – Rule #4: Drain the Shallows > Page 249 · Location 2773

What is the project represented by this message, and what is the most efficient (in terms of messages generated) process for bringing this project to a successful conclusion?

Highlight(blue) – Rule #4: Drain the Shallows > Page 250 · Location 2777

To better explain this process and why it works consider the following process-centric responses to the sample e-mails from earlier:

Note – Rule #4: Drain the Shallows > Page 250 · Location 2779

Good example email replies to borrow

Highlight(blue) – Rule #4: Drain the Shallows > Page 252 · Location 2802

Second, to steal terminology from David Allen, a good process-centric message immediately “closes the loop” with respect to the project at hand. When

Highlight(blue) – Rule #4: Drain the Shallows > Page 254 · Location 2826

Hi professor. I’m working on a project similar to < topic X > with my advisor, < professor Y >. Is it okay if I stop by in the last fifteen minutes of your office hours on Thursday to explain what we’re up to in more detail and see if it might complement your current project?

Highlight(blue) – Rule #4: Drain the Shallows > Page 255 · Location 2832

Professorial E-mail Sorting: Do not reply to an e-mail message if any of the following applies: • It’s ambiguous or otherwise makes it hard for you to generate a reasonable response. • It’s not a question or proposal that interests you. • Nothing really good would happen if you did respond and nothing really bad would happen if you didn’t.

Highlight(blue) – Rule #4: Drain the Shallows > Page 255 · Location 2841

Tim Ferriss once wrote: “Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things.”

Conclusion

Highlight(blue) – Page 262 · Location 2912

I’m the first to admit that my year of extreme depth was perhaps a bit too extreme: It proved cognitively exhausting, and going forward I’ll likely moderate this intensity. But