Most tasks we do is beneficial to us in some way or the other. eg: social networking is crucial to keep in touch with friends, Netflix to relax the mind, office work to earn a living ..

But We can't do everything, So we only perform a few activities, while skipping and replacing others. We are always choosing one activity over the other.

We can categorize everything we do into 2 categories namely, Deep Work and Shallow Work.

• Deep Work - These include work corresponding to your wildly important goals (goals which maybe not be urgent nonetheless valuable for your success ) These improve your skills and are hard to replicate. eg: Self Study, Research Work, Highly Technical Work, Creating Products (software, media content, etc..)

• Shallow Work - These require no expertise. These are non-demanding tasks which can be done by any college graduate. These can be completed while being distracted. Or urgent but unimportant tasks. eg: Reading Books, Reading internet articles, Replying to Mails, socializing, chit-chat, meetings ...

Deep Work Significance: Now once you have divided everything into the above two categories. Realize that its the Deep Work that counts:

• Deep Work is Valuable!
• Deep Work is Hard!
• Deep Work is Meaningful!

Deep work Strategies:

• Spend at least 4 hours on Deep Work every day.
• Get away from distractions during deep work. Distractions are detrimental for deep work.
• Measure the amount of time spent on deep work. [create lag and lead measures] (A lag measure [number of blogs written] tells you if you've achieved the goal, a lead measure [time spent writing blogs] tells you if you are likely to achieve the goal.)
• Limit the Shallow work. It stands in your way of getting meaningful work done!!
• Batch the Shallow Works [reply to emails in batch, chit-chat in batch ..]
• Have Dedicated Downtime, Deep work is exhaustive so have a clearly marked downtime for replenishing your energy [Cal cites multiple successful people who stop working 5 pm onwards]

Highly Recommended Book! Read the book to know why deep work is valuable and more ideas on how to effectively do it.

Quotes from Book:

• [Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.
• To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. Put another way, the type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work.