Deep work versus shallow work who are you rooting for? I find it disturbing, how difficult it is to convince people for the need of deep work. This book gives some clues, like for example how our brain gets simply addicted to those little treats. Checking social media, checking emails. Emails is a probable culprit. It might give the impression one is productive, woaw I reached inbox-zero look at that! On the other hand, processing those might have produced only little value. But we for some reason praise short response time and 24/7 availability. The lobby for open space offices is touched on too.

That’s refreshing to read an author who basically tells us that this and deep work is incompatible. If one’s goal is to go deeper, he’s gonna have to make sacrifices for example on social media and/or email.

A few take-away points for me:

• it boils down to basically plan every minute, that does not sound sexy but I get the point. I think it helps to stick to an activity that you knew in advance would make sense to complete. That should help to not give in to external or internal impulses for interruption.
• the capacity to concentrate can be trained (that connects very well with the concept presented in another book I read some time ago, Mindset).
• that goes hand-in-hand with another point, deliberately recognize that our brain might be addicted to interruptions, and thus the need to actively untrain that.
• a study around the myth of multitasking is mentioned, from Clifford Nass, I assume it’s this one on NPR: The Myth Of Multitasking. I’ll listen to it later.
• yet another time I stumble on the mention of Carl Jung over a short time, I’ve read a few quotes of him recently. In this book, the focus is on how he brought deep work in his busy schedule. He owned his own silence tower (located in Bollingen, St-Gallen). When he’d get there, he’d be the only one having the keys, impossible to be disrupted.

auf den folgenden Seiten werde ich Sie davon zu überzeugen versuchen, mich bei der Errichtung unserer eigenen Bollinger Türme zu begleiten… Ein Leben mit Tiefgang ist ein gutes Leben.

I read this one in German, as Nicole gave it to me after she first read it. Wouter focused more on the idea about getting used to boredom, a nice point too!