Deep Work's first maybe 3 chapters are all you need. Cal Newport is a master of writing some good blog posts on a topic, and then with padding them with 250 pages of boring drivel, and selling it as a book.

Check out “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World” by Cal Newport -- he talks quite a lot about managing your time and energy effectively. I've found his ideas supremely workable and his viewpoint refreshingly sensitive, intelligent and erudite.

https://www.calnewport.com/books/deep-work/

Do you mean Digital Minimalism? Cal Newport is the author of both Deep Work and Digital Minimalism but the latter book is the one that deals with the topic of the article.

Deep Work, by Cal Newport : to focus on what matters.
The talent code, by Danie Coyle : to understand the value of deliberate practice.
Brain at work, astonishingly useful mixing practical neuroscience and concrete situations.
Getting things Done : to adopt a good time management system (you can tweak the method).
Good luck !

I like Cal Newport's ideas and have read and liked his book Deep Work.

> Neither our economy nor the demands of a live well-lived dictate that everyone should aspire to be sitting alone at a desk in rural Narashino, crafting literature to the light of the rising sun. My growing concern, however, is that such real commitment to thought has become too rare.

With that said generalisations like the one quoted are not substantiated. I don't think real commitment/passion to anything was that popular to begin with if we take the general population. Even historically if we take education levels back then.

In every field there are people that excel, people that go by and people that shouldn't be there. All of these are based on an individual's choice and priority/circumstances. Do I want to be the person that excels and be one of the best in this field or not? Murakami decided he didn't want to be just a writer, but a great one. Whether he succeeded is another matter, but he tried because he could and wanted it. I've read only "South of the Border, West of the Sun" and it was ok, but not really something special (IMHO).

Slack destroying American companies is one of the core points of discussion in Ezra Klein's interview with Cal Newport, nominally about his new book "A World Without Email"[1][2]. Great conversation. We feel weirdly run aground at this minima, to me.

I think there's still an unresolved but asked question about how we got stuck here. I forget who observed, but worth noting that the workers themselves tend to demand the popular, already mainstream product, which entrenches tools like Slack.

But I think there's a general lack of willingness & interest in catering to more alpha geeks, in trying to enable humans, in giving them means to tool themselves up. Industrial software is, almost universally, highly massified in nature.

Worth noting that Ezra's already a fan of Cal's work. From 2017[3], discussing Cal's book "Deep Work",

> I was asked recently to name a book that changed my life. The book I chose was Cal Newport’s “Deep Work,” and for the most literal of reasons: It’s changed how I lived my life. Particularly, it’s led me to stop scheduling morning meetings, and to preserve that time for more sustained, creative work.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/05/podcasts/ezra-klein-podca...

[2] https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2021/03/15/one-step-closer-t...

[3] https://www.vox.com/2017/4/21/15382282/cal-newport-taking-li...

I'm very similar, or was. I was diagnosed with ADHD aged 30. If I'm working on something I enjoy or find interesting, I'm all in on it, obsessed. If I find it slightly dull or tedious, I'll have to fight with myself to get it done, just turns into relentless scrolling through hacker news, or get distracted with other things.

The trick, I've found, is to either find ways to enjoy what you're working on if you don't enjoy it. For example, gamifying it or finding some other challenge in it. Or try to insist on specialising on what you do enjoy working on more.

Read the following as well (if, of course you haven't already):
- Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
- Deep Work by Cal Newport
- Hyperfocus by Chris Bailey

Oh, and don't beat yourself up for not feeling 100% productive or enthusiastic all the time. Most of this expectation is a tech culture thing and it's just silly. Most jobs don't expect this, most jobs people assume you're sat around talking and eating biscuits several hours a day. Our brains aren't designed to work in well defined, lengthy chunks of time, it's absurd we expect that.

As a few others haven't mentioned as well, it's worth getting screened for ADHD if you haven't already, the meds can really really help. They were a revelation for me anyway.

> With that said generalisations like the one quoted are not substantiated. I don't think real commitment/passion to anything was that popular to begin with if we take the general population. Even historically if we take education levels back then.

If take this a slightly different way: I think it is common, very common, but that it's normally for some specific thing that isn't fashionable or going to produce a measure of fame. A helluva lot of people are experts at one thing (edit: that they care deeply about and devote huge amounts of time to), it's just "growing unfeasibly large marrows" or "fixing bikes" or "building model railway layouts" or "training dogs" or "cage fighting" or whatever don't have the mystique or social cachet of the underachieving creative who drops everything and isolates themselves to produce award winning novels.

I quite like Deep Work as well, but with this post he seems very taken by romantic ideals of creativity and stereotypes of modern life

> Cal Newport said it best in his book Deep Work: the ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.

The people who cultivate that skill, stay up late at night while everyone is asleep so they don’t get distracted. Then they come in late because they need sleep like every one else. As a consequence, deep thought workers are seen by their immediate and responsive counterparts as obtuse, eccentric, or worse: lazy and unable to manage their time.

This really comes down to the workers dilemma. Do you spend your time marketing your self to others and letting people know your accomplishments, or do you spend the time doing work that will benefit others? Deep thought workers will bias heavily towards work that will benefit others. This benefit is often non-obvious deep thought workers will run the risk that their peers, that are more connected and more reachable, will take the credit for the results.

Hypothesis: an underestimated reason why people don't want to go back to the office is not (just) because they like WFH, but because offices suck hard for knowledge workers when they need not. The reason why is based on a major historiological mistake, see the book Deep Work (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25744928-deep-work)

Starting off with new collaboration tooling integration is pretty on target for 2021!

Getting a big vibe of yesterday's "Slack Destroying American Companies"[1]. I didn't actually click through & read, which would have lead me to finding out it's Matt Taibbi having a discussion with Antonio Garcia-Martinez (who personally I am not interested in hearing from). But the title reminded me of a part of Ezra Klein interviewing Cal Newport about his new book, "A World Without Email"[2]. In the interview they spend quite a while discussing how it seems like the whole world is presently stuck with Slack, how there's so little visible mainstream competition. Cal has been engaged with this question of workflow & tech & collaboration for a number years, often from a somewhat anti- standpoint, with books such as "Deep Work" and "Digital Minimalism". Hearing two sharp minds talking about collaboration was incredibly enriching to me.

Notably, the collaboration tools shown at the beginning of IO are for explicit collaboration times. They're not marketed as always on communication devices, not a replacement for slack. But they both are about modern tech-enabled collaboration, which is an interesting topic, and one that seems like we're only just starting to really dive into. Long long long after Engelbart's Mother of All Demos (52.4 years after).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27191181

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/05/podcasts/ezra-klein-podca...