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Comment by Loic | Hacker News Reader

Deep Work is maybe the first book I wanted to through out of the window in a long time. The complete book can be resumed in a sentence: "Secure big chunks of time to reach and be in the flow state".

But of course you cannot write a full book out of one sentence, so it repeats itself until it achieves to contradict itself by telling you that if you are a writer/journalist you can achieve the state of flow in chunks of 10 minutes spread over the day and happily switch tasks.

So, no, really, you can save yourself this book.

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Contrariwise, I just read and loved Deep Work: it's made me more purposeful about directing my attention, and aware of how my environment and lower desires work against this focus.

The journalistic model of doing deep work does seems different than the others, but he's not recommending it, just pointing out that there are outliers who can train themselves to reach intense focus states quickly and do deep work in short periods of time. Not sure why this would bother you -- if it doesn't apply to you, ignore it!

I felt like there was a ton of value here. Recommended for all!

Glad it helped you! In my case, as I was already exposed to the concept of being in the flow[0] while coding and the basic rule of reserving the biggest chunk of time to my most long term or important work in my day, it was a waste of time.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

I had the opposite experience. In general most self-help books do what you describe, but I thought Deep Work went into quite some detail on how to actually achieve it.

For instance the idea of how you deal with short moments of boredom in general (also outside of work) has a lot of influence on how good you are at ignoring distractions during work was an eye opener for me, and goes deeper than "secure big chunks of time to reach and be in the flow state".

Learning to tolerate boredom again has been a real eye-opener for my own sense of self.

I'm glad to have read your comment. I almost thought of buying the book.

I read "So good they can't ignore you" from the same author and was really underwhelmed by it. It came across as repetitive and formulaic (i.e. have some basic principle, then interview interesting people who employ this principle somehow).

I agree with the GP. The book just went round and round on the same topic. You'll be better off reading a summary on Blinkist or elsewhere.

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