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Deep Work
Book Highlights
Title: Deep Work
Author: Carl Newport
Genre: Self-Help
Publisher: Piatkus
Pages: 263 Pages
Difficulty Level: Moderate
Deep Work: Book Review
Deep Work by Cal Newport is a self-help book in the new age of a connected world. The book guides through to give points on how to stay focused in a world full of distractions that it is today and what benefits one gains from it. It mentions how social media is not just connecting us but distracting us as well and thus reducing the quality of work we do.
The book follows a reasonable structural approach to establish its pointing on what “Deep Work” is, why it is needed, and how we can achieve it in today’s world. It provides great ideas to stay focussed, for example: Embracing boredom and not taking breaks when we get bored of a task but taking breaks when concentrated, or the idea of productively meditating while walking.
Although these are great ideas from the book, they seem outraged by the ‘Quit Social Media’ ideology, which I disagree with. Limiting something in life is important and social media has its negatives, but quitting social media in today’s time could also mean losing out on social life. As stupid as it may sound to a person from the 2000s decade, it is true today. The book focuses a lot on quitting social media, and a lot of the points mentioned in the book are right and are well known yet people use social media.
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I would have praised the idea better if they found a way for people to consciously limit their access to social media. Another idea from the book is to schedule every hour of your day so that one does not go on autopilot and can milk the most productivity out of the day. But with the uncertainty that life comes with, it is not possible to schedule every hour. Also, I feel if we even successfully implement this, we may lose our ability to think on our feet. Life can throw impromptu problems at us, but because it’s not in our schedule, we may feel we’re not ready for it.
Yet we need to remember that it is a self-help book, and looking at people practically; not everybody follows everything they read. So giving people unreal, impractical, extreme ways to work and focus can sometimes put them in the middle ground, where the practical focus lies. Not all books have to be worthwhile. Some set the bar of perfection. You don’t have to touch that bar, keep jumping and missing it by an inch. Things will fall into their place by themselves. Overall, I would call this book a one-time read as it has some great ideas towards the beginning before it starts to get too conscientious.
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