Omar Usman – Deep Work Cal Newport 3 Things I Learned

In this video, I'm sharing 3 things I

learned from the book Deep Work by Cal

Newport. Now this is not a productivity book.

This is really a book about understanding

how your mind works, particularly

in the age of social media and in

an age where most of us are involved

in knowledge work and in this information economy.

And to understand deep work, it's important that

we understand maybe by defining the opposite first.

Shallow work

is, by definition,

the work that is not cognitively heavy. It's

the work that tends to really fill our

days. Things like emails, things like responding to

instant messages,

a lot of the, you know, repetitive meetings

that we have throughout the day. It's fragmented

work. Oftentimes, it's work that, you know, sometimes

doesn't need your full attention. A lot of

times, we will,

you know, be on our phone doing one

thing while responding to an email, or sometimes

we'll have a TV show on in the

background while we're working. And that's because it's

that shallow work that doesn't require full attention.

The important thing to understand about shallow work

is that shallow work is the default.

Meaning, unless you've intentionally

set aside time to do deep work or

it's part of your routine and your habit,

it's not going to happen. What will happen

without any effort is shallow work. It will

fill your time

unless you actively fight against it. Now the

first lesson that I learned from Deep Work

is, well, the value of Deep Work. And

when we understand

this idea, particularly, again, as I said, in

a knowledge in a knowledge job, in an

information economy,

the idea of someone

taking a problem, taking an issue,

just taking something

and focusing on it for hours and hours,

uninterrupted,

not fragmented attention,

but really letting their mind

tackle this problem, grapple with it, uncover,

you know, layers of complexity and get to

the root of the issue.

That type of thinking

is valuable

because that type of thinking, well, one, is

often not replicated. Right? Because most

people are involved in shallow work. Most people,

they haven't trained their mind to be able

to do deep work. Right? It's it's difficult.

A lot of us, we can't focus even

if we've got,

you know, a few minutes here and there.

We're checking our phone. We're checking our email.

So the idea of going deep on a

subject,

thinking about it,

pondering over it, reflecting on it, giving your

mind the space to

make new connections,

Connect that thing to other ideas. Maybe find

different ways of looking at it. Right? We

always talk about thinking outside the box. Well,

thinking outside the box really requires a lot

of deliberate effort looking at a problem

and going deep, connecting it to other ideas,

developing

insights

that other people might not be able to.

That's how you create your own values that

I'm able to take something, I can spend

more time on it than anyone else and

because of my ability to focus and to

go deep,

I'm able to think about this in ways

and develop insights

about this issue that other people are not

able to and that skill is rare and

because it's rare, that's what makes it more

and more valuable.

One thing that Newport mentions in the book,

he says, thriving in the new economy requires

the ability to master hard things and the

ability

to produce at an elite level in terms

of both quality and speed.

One way of doing that is with what

he terms deliberate practice.

Taking a skill that you wanna develop

and, you know, quite literally practicing it, but

practicing it with full attention,

getting feedback, iterating on it, and just, you

know, actually developing that skill.

One thing that he says is that shallow

work is something that prevents deliberate

practice

because the more that you try to spend

time focusing on a skill and developing it,

the more easily distracted you are, the harder

it's going to be. So the deliberate practice

that you need to develop new skills and

further grow yourself,

that requires deep work.

The second thing I learned was the idea

of embracing boredom.

Now if you if you ever read, like,

productivity books or heard productivity lectures, they always

talk about maximizing all of your time, making

the most efficient use of your time. You

know, I remember hearing one phrase that stuck

with me for a long time which was,

you know, make your car a university.

Meaning that when you're commuting, when you're driving,

don't waste that time. Listen to an audiobook

or listen to a podcast, listen to a

lecture, something to

benefit you you and grow you and so

on.

Now that we're inundated with information

all of the time,

it it becomes that much more important to

embrace boredom. See, when we especially with social

media and all of these things,

being at a red light sometimes we take

out our phone to check our email. Waiting

in line at the grocery store, we take

out our phone and we're

engaging in shallow work. Right? We're texting. We're

consuming content. We're reading things and so on

and so forth.

The net effect of all of that is

that our mind doesn't get time to rest.

The same way after a workout, your muscles

need time to rest,

the mind also needs time to rest and

to recharge. You know, one thing that's interesting

is you think about the idea of shower

thoughts that when people are taking a shower,

all of a sudden these amazing ideas come

to them. Well, part of the reason for

that is because we're giving our mind a

break. We're not actively on our phone. We're

not actively doing something else. The mind needs

time

to process all the information that you've been

giving it so that it can develop connections

and develop insights. And so to, you know,

counterintuitively,

to train ourselves to be able to do

deep work

means getting comfortable with the idea of being

bored, of going and taking a walk without

your headphones, without your phone, just

actively sitting and and doing nothing. If you've

seen that movie Office Space that, you know,

came out in the late 19 100,

you know, there's that famous line where the

guy says I did absolutely nothing and it

was everything I dreamed of.

So

in order to be productive, in order to

be able to do this deep, focused, valuable

work, you have to train yourself and almost

practice

being able to do nothing

and being okay with being bored. The third

thing I learned from deep work is, and

this is probably my favorite thing in the

book, is the idea of a shutdown routine,

which for me is much more important

than your morning routine.

See, what happens is after a day of

work, we we log out. Right? We log

out. We get away from our computer,

but work's not really done. We still check

our work emails on our phone. We're still

check you know, looking at our calendar.

We're replaying, you know, conversations in our head.

We're reliving meetings that we had during the

day. And even though, you know, you're doing

other things, maybe you're cooking dinner, maybe you've

gone out for a walk, you're you're doing

other things in the evening, but work is

still occupying real estate in your head. It's

still occupying brain space.

And,

occupying real estate in your head. It's still

occupying brain space. And one thing that he

says is that the more that that work

is, you know, that those unfinished tasks make

it hard for you to turn off work.

And so you engage in that shallow work

even at, like, maybe a very low level,

but you're engaged in shallow work and you're

not able to turn it off. In order

to turn it off, you need to somehow

signal to your mind that the workday is

done. One good way of doing this is

just having a routine

to end your workday. So it might mean

going back to your inbox,

clearing out your emails. Maybe you're organizing them.

Hey. Here's something I need to follow-up on

tomorrow, putting them maybe in a separate folder

so that your inbox is clean when you

come in in the morning. Maybe it's looking

at your calendar,

you know, before you log out, making sure

you've got the rest of the day set

up. It's taking stock of all the things

that you didn't get done and maybe you

make your to do list for the next

morning

before you log out from work. So that

way you you instill confidence within yourself

that

when I log in in the morning,

I'm not going to be worried about all

of these different things. I'm already going to

have a game plan for what I need

to do. That level of confidence,

that's what you need to signal to your

mind my day is done. I've shut down,

and now I no longer have to think

about work. One thing that Newport says in

the book, he says, you know what? Go

over the top. Maybe you close your laptop

and you just say out loud,

I am done working for the day. Right?

Have some type of a routine

that signals the day is done, and now

I'm going to stop thinking about work and

free my mind up for something else.

That's 3 things I learned from the book

Deep Work. If you enjoyed the video, please

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I'll see you in the next episode.