Deep Work

January 14, 2026 · 6 min read

Another day, another doomscrolling. In today’s world full of distractions, watching tv without scrolling TikTok is almost impossible. That’s how messed up our attention span is. This problem really takes a toll on our daily lives. For students, how long does it take before we to start checking our phone during a lecture ? How often do we you feel that we don’t have the mood to do our assignment? Even when do start, how strong is the urge to just chatGPT our way through?

Attention is the new currency, and social media is engineered to harvest every bit of it. These platforms spend millions of dollars studying human behavior and psychology to achieve that. They scientifically designed the layouts, the colors, and the animations to make it as addictive as possible. And they sure do a great job. Social media is now a part of our daily life; in fact it is a huge part of it. Our brain craves for it all the time, making us hard to concentrate on productive activities.

In this context, I think the Idea presented in Cal Newport’s book, Deep Work is as relevant as ever. He argues that our society is way too distracted, making most of us unable to learn valuable skills or produce quality work. The human brain is capable of extraordinary things, just like Einstein on relativity and Khawarizmi on algebra. However, our attention is diverted to low-hanging stuffs, leaving our fullest potential unexplored.

Newport uses the tern deep work to describe the kind of work that is necessary to harvest our brain’s fullest capacity. It is defined as:

“Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”

Reflecting my own life as a student, sometimes (or many times) when doing an assignment, the end goal is just to get done with it. I’ll do it while listening to music, relying too much on AI, and taking multiple breaks to surf social media. In the end, I did finish the assignment, but it creates very little value to me in a sense that I didn’t learn that much from it. This is the complete opposite of deep work— The work was done with too much distraction and very little effort, hence the result produced is proportional to it.

This problem is made worse with the rise of AI tools. We’re not only constantly getting distracted, but these AI tools allow us and facilitate us to be so. Before AI, at some point, we need to give our maximum attention and focus to finish the work (deep work), especially when the deadline is around the corner. But with these AI tools, we can just prompt our way to finish the work, with little to none cognitive effort from our end. In the book, Cal Newport presents a hypothesis:

“The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive”.

Just like in natural selection, in a world of constant distraction, those who can stay focused will thrive, as they develop skills that allow them to produce high value outputs, while others remain mediocre. In Race Against the Machine, the authors argue that in this current era, there are 3 groups of people which will thrive.

  1. The high skilled worker. These are people that leverage technology to amplify their work.
  2. The superstar. These are the best of the best in their field.
  3. The owners. These are people with capital to invest in new technologies.

To become either number 1 or 2, we need the ability to to (1) quickly master hard things and (2) produce high quality output. For example, to become an elite level programmer, one has to master the software development process, from analysis to development and maintenance (quickly master hard things). And based on these skills, they must produce a good-quality software (produce high quality output). These abilities can only be achieved with deep work.

Is deep work exhaustive? Yes. Is it worth it? Absolutely. Deep work won’t only reward us economically, but it will give us a sense of satisfaction and make us feel better about ourselves. Our brain sole job is to think, and it is excellent at that. Unfortunately, it likes to steer to negative direction, overthinking certain things, and making us feel anxious out of no reason, just like the saying of Seneca:

“We suffer more in our imagination more often than in reality.” - Seneca

We may think that how we feel is based on what happen to us. But research reveals that, our feeling is based on what we focus on. Focusing on the good side of things will reflect positive feeling to us and vice versa. Similarly in deep work, we are solely focusing on doing positive stuff (working on something or learning a skill), hence we will be rewarded with feeling good on ourselves. Additionally, deep work will restrict our mind from wandering around thinking about unnecessary stuffs, that more often than not lead to overthinking.

Back to the hypothesis, “…deep work is increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable…”. It is because doing deep work is indeed not easy. But there’s a strategy presented by Cal Newport called The 4 Disciplines of Execution”.

  1. Focus on wildly important We need to set a clear goal on what to achieve by the deep work. For example, “To learn to code in C”.

  2. Act on the lead measure Once a goal is set, we have to measure our success. Based on the goal here, the success is clearly our ability to code in C. But that is a lag measure, which is the thing that we want to achieve, and it comes too late . A better way to measure is the time spent in a state of deep work (a lead measure). This is easier to measure, and it can give better insight on how we actually moving to the end goal.

  3. Keep a compelling scoreboard “You are your own competition”. Try to keep a scoreboard which records on how many hours we spent on deep work per day. It allows us to reflect on our progress, while also creating a sense of competition that drives us to perform better than we did previously.

  4. Create a cadence of accountability We need to do a weekly review on our scoreboard to reflect on our progress. Based on that, we can understand on what make a good or bad week and how to improve it.

The Deep Work book and the concept of deep work itself is such an eye opening to me. If you feel the same (or not), i think it’s worth reading.

Reference:

  • Deep Work - Cal Newport