Une petite catharsis of anomie — a review of Deep Work by Cal Newport

Thursday, May 22, 2025

Deep Work is Cal Newport’s highest selling book. He published it in early 2016 and it made waves at the time since he strongly argues against social media. Cal is infamously not on social media (unless you count blogging and podcasting 😜) so it is a little ironic that the reason I finally decided to pick up this book was due to a post I saw on social media.

Although the book explores quite a few topics, to sum it up from my perspective, he introduces a term well known in software circles to a more general audience: context switching. Basically, this is the idea that constantly switching between tasks carries a cost to your overall productivity. This is true for computers, for software developers, and for knowledge workers. Furthermore, in our hypermedia world, where everything is vying for your attention, we really need to guard our focus if we want to do this thing called “Deep Work”. I am going to get into that definition in a moment, but to break the book down a little more, he argues:

  1. You need to train train your capacity for concentration
  2. You need to overcome your desire for distraction

For Step One he is full of the kind of productivity tips you have probably heard of elsewhere: aggressively scheduling blocks of productivity; bucketing the “shallow work” or figuring out how to delegate it away; pomodoro-like sprinting methods; deep work retreats; say NO!; getting proper sleep and taking proper downtime; etc etc. It’s all good stuff. If you have never read a productivity book this is a great place to start since he introduces you to lots of methods for you to pick and choose from.

Step Two includes things like scheduling your internet distraction time; spending time assessing how you spend your time and harshly cutting it down to only the stuff from which you get the most benefit; and other bit. He introduces a few techniques that help with self reflection, which I can always get behind. Mostly though, it is about quitting social media. He argues against the trend of the time that authors needed to be on social media to sell books. He thinks it is a giant time suck (not wrong!) and argues that social media benefits heavily from the ”Any Benefit Mindset”, which is when any positive benefit justifies the use of a tool, no matter the negative impacts. It reminds me of the old saying “free shit is still shit.” Social media has too many drawbacks:

A big chunk of the book goes through cost-benefit analyses of social media which made me at least feel a little guilty 😅. (Related: Checking in on online media usage)

There are a couple more things I would like to shout out in this book. Although he positively profiles lots of terrible people (eg DHH, Jack Dorsey, and Zuckerberg) he actually has a serious discussion about “internet as ideology” with reference to people like Neil Postman and Evgeny Morozov. This was a change from Slow Productivity which I was pretty critical of for not being critical.

Another topic that Newport returns to often is metrics, an important challenge in knowledge work that I think he covered well in Slow Productivity. In Deep Work he doesn’t spend a lot of time on the bigger argument, but defers to the 4DX Framework. To quickly review:

  1. focus on the wildly important. (no multitasking! Very “deep work”)
  2. focus on lead measures. (this is a great insight)
  3. keep a score card. (Eg Bullet journal, Leaderboards, etc)
  4. establish a cadence of accountability (periodic meetings to confront and review the scoreboard)

For the hardcore productivity tips there is a lot more in this book. You can read a breakdown from the productivity company Todoist here) if you want to get into more of that content. But I would like to turn away from the practical advice in the book and discuss how this book made me feel.

The Feels > Productivity

My hypothesis is one reason this book is so successful is due to anemoia, a neologism that means “nostalgia for a time or place one has never known.” I think this feeling afflicts many modern knowledge workers, and something that Cal Newport taps into in Deep Work.

Cal Newport defines “deep work” 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.

He peppers the book with references to concepts like ”craftsmanship”, encouraging you to take a more intentional approach to your work and the choosing your tools, “flow state”, and has a whole chapter intro dedicated to a room built for eudaimonia. Deep work is meaningful, important, a way to the good life. Shallow work is the opposite. He doesn’t quite go as far as Graeber in Bullshit Jobs but it smells similar.

What knowledge worker has not, at one time or another in their career, looked over at a craftsperson like a furniture maker with a sense of envy? Or think of the proverbial software developer that turns into a farmer? Those are “real” jobs, with “real” skills right? Not this weird thing we do shuffling around emails and kanban cards.

I think this is also the reason why so many knowledge workers refer to themselves as a “writer” — this title has way more connotations to craft than say an “operations manager” 😜

There is a widespread anomie in the white collar working class that I think Deep Work really gets. It is something that Cal Newport himself wrestles with, and I think the resulting emotions of trying to inject real meaning into our work is (one reason) why this book is so praised. It is kind of like that cathartic feeling of crying at a sad movie. Nothing has changed, but we do feel a little better after a good cry. 🥲 In the end, that is why I preferred this book to Slow Productivity. For all its practical productivity propositions, it encourages us to self-examine exactly what we are doing with our time each day, and whether it is worth it. (And usefully it does so with a lighter touch than Byung-Chul Han, which although is extremely valuable, can be a conversation-ender when talking to your virtual cubicle mates around the #water-cooler). A worthy read.

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