Deep work

Rules for Achieving Focused Success in a Distracted World

Author Name: Cal Newport

Deep work is essential to extracting every last drop of value from your current intellectual abilities, and we now know from decades of research in both psychology and neuroscience that the state of mental effort that accompanies deep work is also essential to developing your abilities. Deep work, in other words, effectively expresses the kind of effort required to survive in any cognitively demanding field, such as academic psychiatry at the turn of the 20th century.
The term “deep work” is my own invention; Carl Jung did not use it, but his actions during this period were those of someone who had internalized the implicit meaning of the term. He built a stone tower in the forest to foster deep work in his professional life—a task that required time, energy, and money, and also took him away from more urgent work. As Mason Currie writes, Jung’s regular trips to Bollingen reduced the amount of time he spent on his clinical work, noting, “Although Jung had many patients who depended on him, he was not ashamed to take time for himself.” Deep work, despite the burden of being prioritized, was essential to his goal of changing the world.
In fact, if you study the lives of other prominent and influential figures from both distant and recent history, you will find that a commitment to deep work is a common theme. For example, the sixteenth-century essayist Michel de Montaigne preceded Jung in working in a private library he built in the south tower overlooking the stone walls of his French chateau, while Mark Twain composed much of *The Adventures of Tom Sawyer* in a cottage on Quarry Farm, New York, where he spent the summer. Twain studied in complete seclusion, so far removed from the main house that his family would ring a bell to draw his attention to mealtimes.