I recently finished Deep Work (2016) by Cal Newport, a writer and computer science professor at Georgetown.
I read a lot of “productivity lit,” and while Deep Work definitely falls into that category, it offers a lot of practical framing for how individuals and organizations can structure their work environments to help produce better, more meaningful outcomes.
Where I gather (not having read it) that Carr’s The Shallows focuses more on “here’s how the social and technological environment we have created is making us produce distracted, surface-level, ultimately-automatable work,” Deep Work trends towards “… and here’s what you can do about it.”
I recommend reading the book if you’re interested, but this 30 minute interview with Newport (embedded below) hits most of the high notes; the interviewer is engaged and knowledgeable, and they both share a number of specific practices and stories about how the topic relates to their work.
Here’s the audio version via iTunes.
Newport also writes a fine blog, Study Hacks, which goes into detail on specific tactics for deep work and related topics.
