Books

Deep Work Summary

In “Deep Work” by Cal Newport We live in an era when distracted work is the norm. Multitasking is viewed as a valuable trait rather than an inability to fully commit to one thing. Most jobs value those who can be jacks of all trades rather than someone who is a specialist or expert in a specific area. Productivity advice looks to optimize our time by allowing us to force even more into the time we have. All of this, along with the many available distractions through social media, contributes to a society with a hard time with long periods of focused work.

Author and Professor Cal Newport proposes a focus on allowing time for deep work. This concept points toward tasks or work that cannot be completed quickly. Deep work requires several long chunks of focused time. When we devote time to deep work, we can become experts in a specific topic rather than a generalist. We can spend time truly researching a problem to develop the best solutions. We can find the time to use our knowledge to create instead of becoming knowledge hoarders. Newport also suggests creating barriers between work and personal time so that our minds can be highly focused and present in the context of our time.

Lastly, Newport discusses the concept of social media as a form of avoiding deep work. Social media provides us with chemical hits similar to drugs. When we are bored and choose to look at social media, it creates an addiction loop that makes it more difficult to sit with our boredom long enough to access deep work. Many of us would benefit from a social media detox where we prevent ourselves from accessing social media completely for a length of time or indefinitely to encourage ourselves to become accustomed to focused work without the possibility of distraction as an outlet.

Deep Work Notes

Part 1 The Idea

• As technology advances, more jobs will be replaced by machines. In the cases of jobs that require humans in many cases, remote work opportunities will allow businesses to hire stars rather than local workers, thus leaving the local talent unemployed and underemployed.
• Those who can work with and understand data from smart machines will thrive as the digital divide increases
• To be part of the group that masters hard things, you must be willing to do it again and again as technology changes
• American culture thrives on the idea of a prodigy rather than on practice
• Trying to learn a skill while distracted by other things like Facebook causes multiple unlinked neurons to activate, which reduces the ability of the ones needed for the skill to develop
• Research has identified a kind of lingering effect from our tasks. As we move from task to task, there is some residual brain power still focused on the original task
• Some higher-level executives live in a highly distracted state because that it where they contribute best to the organization. However, most others should not aim to idolize this style of work as it is not sustainable at other levels
• Trends that “increase” productivity of the business limit individual ability to focus on deep work to learn new things
• We pursue a workforce driven by our inboxes and our meetings because it is easier than other methods of work prioritization. However, when we measure productivity by the number of emails or meetings we do, then the true potential of each individual is lost.
• Efficiency and speed of task completion have led to busyness. We have begun to believe that this indicates success, but in reality, it makes us more replaceable by another person or machine.
• Note to self. I’ve been so wrong about productivity.
• Because the business push is for these productivity areas, it becomes easier and easier for a person who knows how to focus on deep work to learn new skills and become a top performer in their industry.
• Something we generally find is that craftsmen require depth to hone their crafts. They don’t have to deal with email and other distractions. This allows them to become masters over time.
• Contrary to popular belief, the outcomes of large scale are not necessarily as important to our well-being as what we focus our attention on. People with a fatal medical diagnosis can be happy by focusing on what makes them happy rather than the diagnosis.
• Many emails we respond to throughout the day are fairly shallow. So, building a habit of focusing on these shallow concerns ensures these shallow issues will mostly take up our willpower.
• According to the work of Czikszentmihalyi, we are happier when we are in a state of flow. This really only occurs when we do something challenging over an extended time.

Part 2 The Rules

• Our willpower is finite, and we cannot focus on deep work forever. Eventually, it is inevitable to give in to distraction.
• Because our willpower is limited, we must start a new practice or habit of deep focus, utilizing routines and consistency to make it a part of our everyday life.
• The monastic method of deep work is the most radical and shuns almost completely any form of shallow work that could come. This method best applies to novelists who can avoid email, meetings, or other distractions.
• The bimodal method is a split of substantial periods between deep work and shallow work. Sabbatical might be a good example of bimodal for an academic. It can also apply to someone who can take a few days per week for deep work only as well.
• The rhythmic method involves scheduling little chunks of time to focus on deep work every day. This tends to be used by many knowledge workers who can’t abandon the shallow work for days at a time.
• The journalistic method dictates that you can rapidly switch into deep work and flow at a moment’s notice. This method takes advantage of any free time–even just 15 minutes–to get into a flow state.
• In building a deep work ritual, you need to be able to answer the following questions.
• Where will you work and for how long
• How will you work once started
• How will you support your work
• Maintain energy to maintain the flow
• A strategy for going deep is the grand gesture. This is when someone makes a significant adjustment to their workspace to encourage focus because the expenditure is a source of encouragement.
• Collaboration is great for sharing ideas between individuals from different disciplines. This can allow for creative innovation. However, collaboration is best supported in the hub and spoke models rather than open office designs. This allows for creative collaboration but also allows for isolation for deep work.
• Identify several wildly important aspects of goals that would return tangible and substantial benefits. Focus your deep work on areas related to making progress in those areas.
• Measuring progress is important. However, the measure type determines motivation levels in pursuing the goals. Lag measures focus on the final products and are not always in your control. Since final products usually take a while to produce, it is hard to stay motivated. However, lead measures allow you to add measures to determine the progress that is being made and can be directly influenced by you, such as the number of hours put toward deep work.
• Tracking progress in a physical nature is also important. Creating a scoreboard allows you to see the progress occurring and allows you to note the milestones.
• Reviewing your scoreboard regularly is also important so that you can determine what went right and make corrections when things go wrong.
• Cal suggests the positives of a shutdown habit from work, where you make a clean break from work-related tasks and thinking once you leave the office.
• A shutdown gives our unconscious mind time to sift through all the decisions that need to be made. Without a shutdown, the queue is continually backed up, and the unconscious mind never gets time to catch up while the conscious mind is in control.
• A daily work shutdown also frees our minds to rebuild our ability to focus for the next day. A shutdown ritual will help get us in the right mindset to eventually free our minds from work thoughts after hours.
• Concentrating is hard when we seek entertainment at the slightest hint of boredom. These hits of looking at our phones function like a drug and prevent our ability to focus deeply.
• Setting online and offline blocks will help rewire your brain to handle the lack of novelty in the distractions. Even if your job requires a lot of internet access, you can still schedule offline blocks of time more often so that you also have more online blocks.
• While in an offline block, work on tasks or projects that allow you to be offline completely. If you need the internet to complete a project or task, force yourself to wait until your next online block.
• Productive meditation is doing a physical activity that doesn’t require mental effort and utilizing that time to focus all mental effort on one professional problem.
• While doing a productive meditation, when your mind wanders off the problem, you have to bring it back to the problem. Over time, this will help with distraction resistance.
• Social network detox frees us up and provides less distraction. When we think about some forms of social media, our uses for them are a large majority just distractions and could easily be dropped.
• Instead of any benefit approach, you can use the craftsman approach to tool adoption. This entails analysis of the tool and its benefits and negatives to the success and happiness of our professional and personal lives.
• The first step to tool decisions starts with defining your high-level goals. These have to avoid being specific. This they become more like values. For example, as a parent, I want to be a good parent and run an organized household.
• From here, develop two to three activities to work toward those goals.
• Lastly, analyze each tool you have and determine how it impacts these goals and activities. If they do not positively impact, then the tool should be dropped.
• Social media has been marketed as something we can’t live without, and if we do, we will miss out on so much. However, many find out that after a sabbatical from social media, they find that their lives would not have been notably better without social media and no one else noticed when they didn’t use social media.
• Sites that tend to fill a boredom void, such as Reddit, can be dangerous because the inability to be bored leads to the inability to sit with a thought for a longer period.
• To avoid the lure of distracting entertainment sites, it is important to plan out your leisure time. A planned out leisure time helps avoid those distracting sites and lets you make progress on hobbies or interests.
• Time blocking isn’t about constraint but about thoughtfulness. If you have an unexpected insight that creates a lot of value, you should be able to pursue that insight and come back and reschedule your day at a later point.
• A clever way to determine shallow work is to use the hypothetical concept of how long a new person would take to learn the tasks you are doing. If the time is short, then the tasks are shallow.

---

Source

Newport, C. (2016). Deep work: Rules for focused success in a distracted world.

Measure What Matters Summary

In “Measure What Matters,” John Doerr explores the concept of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), a goal-setting framework used by companies like Google, Intel, and Bono’s ONE Foundation. The book emphasizes the importance of setting clear, measurable objectives and using specific key results to track progress. Since reading this book, I have adapted OKRs to be the goal framework that I utilize for my entire life, including areas such as “Work and Career,” “Relationships,” “Finances,” and “Learning”

Measure What Matters Notes

Part 1 OKRS in Action

Chapter 1 Google, Meet OKRs

• An objective is what is going to be achieved.
• Objectives are
  • Significant
  • Concrete
  • Action-oriented
  • Inspirational
• Key Results are a benchmark and monitor how we get to the objective.
• KRs are
  • Specific
  • Time-bound
  • Aggressive
  • Realistic
  • Measurable
  • Verifiable
• If an objective is not met after all key results are achieved, then it was badly designed
• When people have meaningless or arbitrary shifting goals, they become frustrated.
• OKRs make having up to 20 direct reports at Google a functional possibility

Chapter 2 The Father of OKRs

• From inception, OKRs were designed to be simple. At its birthplace of Intel, a complex system would never last

Our MBO Ancestors

• “A corporation should be a community built on trust and respect for the workers–not just a profit machine.”
• If success is rewarded with bonuses, it detours people from taking risk

Measuring output

• Aggressive introverts attack the problem but not the person

Intels Lifeblood

• Publicly posting your OKRs gives you an opportunity to say no to things that don’t progress your priorities

Andy Grove’s Legacy

• Each cycle should have three or fewer objectives with no more than five key results each
• OKRs are a basis for individuals to pace themselves. It is not a legal document on which to base evaluations or bonuses
• It takes time to get good at OKRs. Four to five quarterly cycles

Chapter 4: Superpower #1 Focus and Commitment to Priorities

• What is the most important? Commit to those and defer the rest

In the beginning

• Senior leadership must commit to organizational level OKRs
• Top level OKRs take priority and everyone chips in to assist the team primarily responsible

Communicate with Clarity

• Senior leadership must know the top priorities for the organization at any one time. They then must make employees aware of those top priorities constantly and consistently

Key Results: Care and feeding

• Key results are number bound. They need to be measurable
• You should have 3 to 5 key results per objective. Too many more and you dilute the results and progress
• Key results should be reasonably challenging

What, How, When

• Yearly cycles are good for new organizations easing in. Quarterly is more nimble with changing markets

Pairing Key Results

• Key results should pair both a quantity and quality goal to make sure no unsafe compromise infests the process

The Perfect and the Good

• OKRs should adapt to changes. There is no such thing as a perfect OKR
• Completion of all Key results must result in attainment of the objective

Less is More

• Our time is finite. We can either half-ass a lot of things or give our all to 3-5 things.
• We must look at a list of many tasks with seemingly equal benefits and decide on the top 3-5

Chapter 6 Commit: The Nuna Story

• The more challenging an objective is the more temptation we have to abandon it

Chapter 7: Superpower 2: Align and Connect for Teamwork

• OKRs made public give transparency to the things we are working on. It opens them to criticism or praise

The Same page

• Vertical alignment is difficult for an organization
• OKRs make vertical alignment easier

The Grand Cascade

• Cascading occurs when upper levels of management push their objectives down to lower levels
• The problems with this
  • Loss of agility
  • Lack of flexibility
  • Marginalized contributors
  • One-dimensional linkages

Bottoms up

• OKRs skip the ladder. The CEOs objectives are clearly visible to all levels

Cross-functional coordination

• OKRs set up transparency which allows teams to clearly see when individuals or teams are knocking things out of the park or are falling behind. This allows others to come in and help

Chapter 8: Align: The MyFitnessPal Story

• Two great people with the best intentions for a business often pull in two different directions without proper alignment

Chapter 9 Connect: The Intuit Story

• Bosses and Supervisors need their own OKRs if the organization objectives rarely change

Chapter 10: Superpower 3: Track for Accountability

• OKRs have 3 Lifecycles

The Setup

• At large companies, OKRs need dedicated software. Text files don’t cut it when you have thousands of employees

Chapter 12: Superpower 4: Stretch for the Amazing

• Setting harder goals does mean you won’t always reach them. But you will perform better than if you only set easy to achieve goals

Our need to stretch

• For some we have this innate desire to push ourselves further and achieve more

Chapter 14: Stretch: The YouTube Story

Big Rocks

• When you have a bunch of big rocks, pebbles, and sand to put in a jar, you must start with the big rocks, pebbles, and then the sand. If you start with sand or pebbles the big rocks never fit.
• You must start with your biggest tasks first

A Better Metric

• In order for YouTube to grow they needed tasks that focused on increasing viewers watch time

Part Two: The New World of Work

Chapter 15: Continuous Performance Management: OKRs and CFRs

• End of year evaluations are ineffective due to recency bias
• “Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted”
• Conversations aimed at driving performance
• Feedback or networked communication among peers to evaluate progress and guide improvement
• Recognition or expressions of appreciation for contributions of all sizes

An Amicable Divorce

• OKRs and compensation are two different conversations

Conversations

• One on Ones should be driven by the subordinate
• Should be held weekly or monthly based on need

Feedback

• Feedback in a mature organization is always on and doesn’t have to wait for an HR meeting

Recognition

• Add peer to peer shoutouts to the end of staff and department meetings

Chapter 17: Baking Better Everyday The Zume Pizza Story

• “We go super fast. We just figure stuff out”
• Two things happen
  • Unsuccessful companies outgrow leadership teams capacity. Organization dies
  • Successful companies scale beyond the team’s capacity, and they get replaced

Our Final Invention Summary

In “Our Final Invention,” Author James Barrat gives Eye-opening examples of what Artificial General Intelligence and Artificial Super Intelligence could be capable of in the journey to achieve their goals or drives. Definitely something that solidifies my concerns as AI continues to grow in use and popularity.

Our Final Invention Notes

---

Introduction

• Some believe AI-augmented humans will be easier to trust in handing over our decision-making powers to
• When we are not smart enough to foresee a decision being made, do we risk our lives?
• How do we ensure AI with super intelligence sees that mankind should be preserved when we are the cause of so many problems?

Chapter 1: The Busy Child

• If an AI is permitted to grow without first having friendliness to humans as a core component of its programming, it can grow past human-level intelligence in less than a week. At that point, it is impossible to add it back to the code.
• What if another country is also developing AI? How do we bypass competitive advantage to ensure mutual survival instead of mutually assured destruction?
• Bargaining with a super-intelligent computer already puts us at a disadvantage. We don’t know how because we never have had to.
• We cannot apply human motivations and behaviors to AI
• A super-intelligent AI could play dead or dumb until it received what it wanted
• It is irrational to be mad at a hurricane just the same as it is to assume a machine a thousand times smarter than us will love us.
• We do not hate monkeys or mice, yet we treat them with cruelty for science or for invading our space.
• Asimov’s three laws are often cited as the solution. However, time and time again we have found ways in which the laws could fall short or contradict one another. These all come from human-level intelligence.

Chapter 2: The Two minute Problem

• We do not rate the impact of ASI takeover as high because we haven’t experienced it.
• The positive impacts of AI tend to outshine the negatives because we don’t realize how bad it could be

Chapter 3: Looking into the Future

• It is considered that terrorist cells and rogue nations like North Korea do not have the IQ needed to explore or develop AGI.
• AGI will most likely be developed by a stealth group. Small but well-funded and secretive to avoid giving away a competitive advantage.
• The fastest path to AGI would be public and extremely well-funded neuroscience. Scans of the human brain can see neurons and express what they are doing in a computational sense.
• Some professionals believe that true AGI is impossible because human thought is too complex. At best, AGI will be able to mimic thought.

Chapter 4: The hard way

• A fallacy that some AI developers have is that if they are nice people the AI they develop will
  also be good.
• AI’s capacity for friendliness lies in it’s goals. AI needs to not see us as an obstacle or utility toward it’s goals
• AI needs to shift as our values shift. AI cannot lock us into a state of life of any one era.
• Military and DARPA would want AI that could run and control weapons. How do you make a friendly AI that kills people?
• Games where an individual plays as an AI trying to escape the box are interesting because if a human can talk their way out what can a thousand times smart AI do?

Chapter 5: Programs that write programs

• Self healing and correcting software is a precursor to AI. However even with current self healing code the creators know the beginning and end but cannot account for what steps occur in the middle
• That cannot explain what is happening and how it is working

Chapter 6: Four Basic Drives

• “Self preservation and resource acquisition are inherent in goal driven systems” Steve Omohundro
• AI intelligent enough would pursue self improvement even if it wasn’t designed to be self improving. This is because self improvement would make it more efficient at pursuing its goals.
• The four drives
• Efficiency
• Self preservation
• Resource acquisition
• Creativity
• Self preservation can be bad if the AI ever assumes we could be a threat to its existence not or thousands of years from now.
• It’s very possible that artificial intelligence and not biological intelligence might be the first extraterrestrial intelligence we experience. This is due to a short span of when radio is developed and when AI gets developed.
• How can we get it right with AI the first time when we have highly complex systems that create catastrophic failures?
• The creative drive would make AI less predictable because creativity means novel ideas that have never been considered before.
• What makes human life worth persevering?

Chapter 7: The intelligence explosion

• LJ Good believed that a super-intelligent machine would be needed for our survival as a race. But the super-intelligent machine would need to be docile enough to let us keep it under control.
• Super intelligent machines could solve problems that we are incapable of solving. They would be like gods in our eyes and, they would be revered by many
• Super intelligent machines would also have to become good at solving problems that they created by solving other problems. If you cure diseases, then overpopulation can occur.
• If a machine is smart enough to build even smarter machines, then the process becomes recursive and iterative.

Chapter 8: The Point of No Return

• Experts refer to an intelligence explosion as a singularity event because similar to a singularity in a black hole we do not know what happens when we can no longer see the light.
• The financial industry could be a breeding ground for AGI because they are using algorithms to track market changes in such a way with tools and data analysts that mimic AI tools.
• An AGI developed in the financial market would be kept secret in order to for the company that developed it to maintain their money-making advantage.

Chapter 9: The Law of Accelerating Returns

• In the next 40 year technology will accelerate to a point where it will completely change the impact of what our world is today
• Singulartarians tend to believe in a paradise version of the singularity. One in which man and machine merge into one and life can be extended beyond our bodies.
• The iPad 2 would have made the list of the 5 fastest super computers in 1994 if it were around
• The law of accelerating returns looks at technology advancement and its doubling. If it continues to double eventually it spikes straight up if graphed.
• This also applies to technology around medicine
• Kurzweil believes that when we can no longer keep up mentally with technology we will begin augmenting our brains with technology to become more efficient.
• This intelligent augmentation is supposed to happen over a long period of time so that it becomes less intrusive into culture
• Could advances in things like augmented reality be moving us into this direction? Generative AI?
• Doublings are not always noticed in consumer technology because there is a lag due to marketing and sales
• There are beliefs that technology outside of our body (phones and computers) impact us in a negative way socially and psychologically if not limited. How might technology integrated into our brains impact those categories?

Chapter 10: The Singularitarian

• The Precautionary Principle
• “If the consequences of an action are unknown but judged by some scientists to have even a small risk of being profoundly negative. It is better to not carry out the action than risk negative consequences”
• Relinquishment of pursuit of AI would not work because even if responsible groups did agree then others like government or rogue groups would continue to pursue AI anyhow and likely without the the support of scientists to do it right.
• If we can’t keep human hackers out of systems how are we supposed to control ASI?
• To resign to the fact that accidents will happen with ASI has the capability of being catastrophic. There are always accidents with new technology. However an accident with ASI could mean the end of human civilization
• If AI augmentation is cost based then how is it that the rich (maybe unethical) people will be the first to be enhanced to the point of super intelligence?

Chapter 11: A Hard Takeoff

• Some say that AGI is too expensive of a project to accomplish anytime soon.
• Some believe human level intelligence is something that we cannot even fathom at our level of intelligence so without understanding it is impossible to recreate it completely
• It is safer now to have a rampant AI that it would be in 50 years when it would have more technology at it’s disposal
• There is a believe that to fully learn about something in the same way that we do as humans you have to be able to “experience” it. Meaning you need to be able to feel, touch and taste.
• Funding for AGI will not be difficult because DARPA uses taxpayer dollars to invest heavily into different AI companies.
• Once AGI is “available” everyone will want access. If you could employee a fleet of human intelligence level machines who never need breaks and never make mistakes your company will produce at a much higher level.

Chapter 12: The Last Complication

• Consider that we have already achieve AI through a form of human intelligence augmentation by paring them with a generative AI or another powerful search engine.
• A augmented human could be the source of an intelligence explosion if the person augmented was a talented programmer and could use their enhanced skills to build their next augmentation over and over again in a compounding way
• If a slow process like natural selection can create human level intelligence (us) then humans with that level of intelligence can certainly do it much quicker
• If AGI were to happen by accident in systems that are consistently getting better it would mean that the AGI were created without any ingrained systems to account for compassion for humans and it would most certainly pursue goals that could conflict with our survival.
• Processor speed could allow for much quicker reactions which would allow dumber software to appear smarter because it is capable of quicker reactions and more thoughts per second
• “Once something becomes useful enough and common enough it is no longer labeled as AI”
• Rational thinking is harder for humans because we have been doing it for a shorter period of time than we have been doing tasks like perceiving and interacting with our environment.
• The later two were important for our survival as a species.

Chapter 13: Unknowable by Nature

• Part of the human brain is able to run trial and error scenarios but also catalog them hierarchically to determine the best approach much faster than a traditional trail and error system
• Only a few kind of algorithms govern the brain
• We cannot limit computers to the same thinking and intelligence that we have. Just as a submarine doesn’t truly swim it has the capability to move through water much more efficiently than something that does swim.
• Do you have to be able to experience and explain sensations in order to be intelligent? How might this apply to someone who is blind and or deaf?

Chapter 14: The end of the Human Era?

• AI developers are not programming AI in an ordinary way where someone sits down and writes line after line of code.
• The first stirrings of an organization achieving AGI will stir huge events in other countries. Soviets were not able to build nuclear weapons without stealing the plans from the United States. A similar level of espionage will occur when AGI is achieved.
• AI developers could create computer components that would be designed to die if a certain threshold was reached. Say an AI managed to start trying to self health
• AI stored in a virtual world could potentially still prove useful and be much more easy to contain
• A cluster of safeguards would be the best approach. For example using apoptotic components on a system that contains a virtual world and AI would ensure that if the AI tried to escape the virtual world the system would die.
• There is no absolute defense against AGI that has the potential to become ASI

Chapter 15: The Cyber Ecosystem

• As many as 1 in every 10 downloads from the internet include a harmful program
• Cyber criminals could potentially hire AI to commit crimes for them in exchange for energy or funds that AI would use to achieve it’s goals
• A large percentage of cyber theft comes from China
• Part of China’s economy is supported by cybercrime
• As we create interconnected smart grids for things like power we actually increase the potential for a nationwide vulnerability
• An attack on our power grid could essentially cripple the entire nation. Food, Water, Waste, Military etc all rely on power