Summary of 'Deep Work' by Cal Newport. (2 Summaries in 1: In-Depth Summary and Bonus 2-Page PDF.)

executives, are unique. The value of a CEO lies in the person's experience, judgment, vision and instinct to guide the countless decisions that a company must make every day. Spending hours thinking deeply about a single problem is a waste of that value. It would be better to hire smart people to think deeply about the problem and present possible

A good process-centric email does two things: Anticipates the conversation and tries to get to a resolution with the fewest possible emails. Maintains control of your schedule and puts the burden of work on the sender.

To solve this problem, schedule your entire day like this: On lined paper, mark every other line with the hour of day. Schedule all your planned activities for the day (work tasks, lunch breaks, meetings, etc.) on the paper. For larger tasks (over 30 minutes), put each task in its own block. For smaller tasks, create a generic "task block"

One solution to weaning yourself off of distraction is scheduling offline / online time blocks: a preset schedule for using the Internet. The rule is simple: you use the Internet only during online time blocks, while abstaining from Internet use during offline time blocks. Over time, if you adhere to the following 4 points regarding offline/online

Sophie Leroy, a business professor at the University of Minnesota, discovered in experiments that when people switch tasks, attention doesn't immediately follow. Part of the attention remains stuck on the prior task, resulting in worse performance on the next task. She called this effect attention residue, which becomes stronger in these instances:

By his third year as a professor, Newport continued to find ways to improve his deep work practice. He also started to write the 70,000 word manuscript for Deep Work itself. Newport pushed himself to an extreme, ruthlessly turning down any non-essential commitments, and finding isolated places to work free of interruption. He used productive medita

When time is limited, shallow work and time-wasters will be the first to get squeezed out, as Basecamp experienced when it moved to a four-day workweek.

The need for a shutdown ritual stems from the Zeigarnik effect, which is the tendency of incomplete tasks to continuously engage our thoughts. At the end of the day, your mind will continue to engage with these incomplete tasks, preventing mental rest. Fortunately, you don't need to complete all tasks to avoid this outcome. Experiments by Roy Baume

Saying "no" can be socially difficult since we generally want to be helpful and liked. Here are two tips on saying "No": Be clear about saying "No", but don't provide details about the reasons for refusal; the details may help the requester reframe the request to overcome your objections. When saying "No," do