# Rules For Deep Work — Updated for 2026 \| Cal Newport

- Channel: [Cal Newport](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIhJnsJ0IHlVNnYfp-gw_5Q)
- Published: 2026-04-06
- Source video: [Watch on YouTube](https://youtube.com/watch?v=nPzFhkTe2Uw)
- Read on ReadTube: https://www.read.tube/p/videos/nPzFhkTe2Uw
- Language: English

## Summary

**Deep Work Gets a 2026 Update**

Cal Newport revisits Deep Work a decade later and says its core case for focus still holds, but the rules need major updates for 2026. He would add hybrid attention for teams, stricter boundaries around AI, stronger focus training habits, and a more realistic approach to social media as an addiction problem rather than just a tool-choice issue.

Cal Newport looks back at Deep Work and argues that its original premise remains valid: focused, distraction-free work is still rare and still highly valuable. But he says the world has changed enough that the book’s four rules would need substantial revisions if he rewrote them today.

For the chapter on working deeply, he would add a hybrid attention model: office days for meetings and collaboration, remote days reserved entirely for uninterrupted work with no email or chat. He also says AI now has to be treated as a major threat to depth, so workers should set clear rules that keep AI focused on shallow automation rather than replacing the cognitive strain of writing, thinking, and creating.

For the chapter on training attention, he would expand the advice with practical habits such as keeping the phone in another room at home, reading real books instead of scrolling on devices, doing focus-heavy hobbies, and taking distraction-free walks for reflection. The goal is to retrain both short-term attention and long-term motivation so deep work feels rewarding rather than punishing.

He says the social media chapter would change the most. What was once a debate about utility and tradeoffs is now, in his view, closer to sobriety: most platforms are engineered for passive consumption and addiction, not meaningful connection or professional value. In the final chapter, he keeps the case for time blocking and shutdown routines, but adds two newer ideas from later books: replacing the hyperactive hive mind with better collaboration systems, and managing workload explicitly so shallow overhead does not crowd out depth.

- Hybrid schedules should separate collaboration days from deep-work days.
- AI should automate shallow work, not weaken the cognitive effort of real work.
- Phones should be physically out of reach to reduce constant temptation.
- Reading, contemplation, and difficult hobbies train sustained attention.
- Social media should be judged less as a tool and more as a habit-forming distraction.
- Workloads must be limited, or shallow coordination will consume the schedule.

## Article

### What has changed since Deep Work

10 years ago, I published a book titled *Deep Work*. It argued that the ability to focus without distraction, the activity that I call deep work, was becoming increasingly valuable at exactly the same time that it was becoming increasingly rare due to distracting digital technologies like email and social media. The conclusion of my book was that this presents a huge opportunity: if you are one of the few individuals or organizations to prioritize depth, you will enjoy a big competitive advantage.

Now, the book hit a nerve. It became a bit of a word-of-mouth sensation. It has now sold more than 2 million copies in over 45 languages, and that number is still going up. Earlier this month, we sold the new language rights for the Sinhala translation.

> Sinhala is, of course, the language spoken by the Sinhalese people of Sri Lanka.

There is more language out there than you might guess.

But the book is now a decade old, which raises a natural follow-up question: do its ideas still hold in 2026? That is what we are going to explore today. I brought my first edition copy of the book with me. We are going to crack it open, reread its core ideas, point out what remains true, and identify what requires updates. Spoiler alert: I have a lot of new ideas to add.

So if you have felt like you have been drowning in distractions and are unsure whether there is any hope for escaping, this episode is for you. As always, I am Cal Newport, and this is *Deep Questions*, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world. We will get started right after the music.

All right, here is the game plan. *Deep Work* is divided into two parts. The first part makes my case for why depth is valuable, and the second part offers four rules for getting better at depth in your professional life. It is the second part that we are going to revisit. I want to go through each of those four rules from the original book one by one, summarize the 2016 advice, and then answer the question: what would I change if I were rewriting that chapter today in 2026?

#### Work deeply

Let us get started with the first of the four rules from *Deep Work*: **work deeply**.

In that chapter, I open by discussing my friend David Dwayne’s concept for the *udeimmonium machine*, a theoretical plan for an office centered on deep work as a primary activity. He described it as a one-story rectangular building where each room is connected to the others. There is no exterior hallway. You have to go from one room to the next.

The first room, when you enter the building, is the gallery, where you are exposed to interesting examples of work that other people have done. You get your creative juices flowing, and you feel a little bit competitive.

The next room you would proceed into is the salon. There would be couches and coffees and Wi-Fi. It was a place to talk with people, brood, think, and brainstorm.

If you continued into the *udeimmonium machine* plan, you get to the office space. There we have cubicles and conference rooms and whiteboards. You are sort of just doing the shallow work of work.

And then finally, if you kept moving into the building, you would get to what he called the deep work chambers, described as 6-by-10 rooms protected by soundproof walls, and that is where the real uninterrupted focus would happen.

I tell the story of this theoretical plan for this building to open the chapter. On a reread, I noticed a mistake that no one has flagged before.

> What do we got?

At the beginning of explaining the *udeimmonia machine*, I say Dwayne’s plan calls for five rooms in sequence, and then I go on to describe four rooms. I cut one of the rooms out, and I do not remember which one it was. I think there was an extra room, maybe an antechamber to the deep work chambers where you took a shower, faced yourself, and prepared your mind for deep work; or there might have been a room outside of the deep work chambers where you would reintegrate out of deep work mode. I think there was an extra room like that that I cut out. No one has noticed that. There you go.

Anyways, here is what I then wrote. Let me quote from the book:

> In an ideal world, one in which the true value of deep work is accepted and celebrated, we’d all have access to something like the *udeimmonia machine*. Perhaps not David Dwayne’s exact design, but more generally speaking, a work environment and culture designed to help us extract as much value as possible from our brains. Unfortunately, this vision is far from our current reality. We instead find ourselves in distracting open offices where inboxes cannot be neglected and meetings are incessant, settings where colleagues would rather you respond quickly to their latest email than produce the best possible results.

The goal for that chapter was to simulate the effects of David Dwayne’s theoretical *udeimmonium machine* in your actual, concrete, real life. I went on to give a bunch of advice for how to put in place rituals and routines to make deep work a protected, regular part of your professional life.

That is what I did in the *Work Deeply* chapter of *Deep Work*. What would I change or add in 2026? There are two major ideas relevant to exactly this question that have emerged in recent years of my work, and if I were rewriting this chapter today, I would add both of them.

The first idea is the notion of **hybrid attention**, a hybrid attention model of working. I first introduced this in an article I wrote for *The Atlantic* two years ago. The idea is that you have a hybrid schedule at your office, meaning some days are in the office and some days are remote. You synchronize it so that the remote days are mostly the same for everyone. That way, there is synchronization around when remote work is happening.

Then, and this is the key part of the hybrid attention model, I wrote in my *Atlantic* article:

> Declare that the day spent working remotely will be dedicated completely to actual uninterrupted work. No meetings, no email, and no chat. Each team should follow the same schedule, saving conversations about work for when everyone is in the office together.

So the idea is: deep work days at home, shallow work days, meetings, conversations, and office collaboration at the office.

Let me go on and give my rationale. Again, I am reading here from my *Atlantic* article:

> Given multiple days each week to do nothing but make progress on tasks, you’ll more easily contain your backlog of

### Setting team boundaries for focus and AI

Commitments. This model should also reduce the total number of incoming tasks you are asked to handle, because the days without email or meetings are days in which your colleagues cannot ask you to do more things. With less new work coming in and completed work going out faster, you will be more efficient and less overwhelmed. The ability to take breaks from the digital whirlwind will also make life more bearable regardless of its effect on your productivity.

So, I think this is a fantastic idea that can now be implemented at the team or office level that really would help you take advantage of the advantages of deep work in a simple to describe, implement, and maintain plan. It is just: when you are at home, I do not want to hear from you. When you are in the office, you can tell me all that stuff you got done when you were at home. And that is when we could have meetings and emails. People would adjust quickly. You are never more than one day away from being able to talk to someone. I think the rate at which high quality work would be completed in this model would be significantly larger. And it is much easier than having to negotiate each individual norm or habit or system or rule that is distracting people throughout the day. It is one rule that would immediately give you some pretty big deep work related benefits.

The second big idea, and this is something I have been talking about really just in the last year that I would add to a 2026 version of this chapter, is the idea of having clear rules for how you use and do not use AI to help make sure that these tools are not accidentally completely destabilizing your ability to go deep. Here is one example of an AI rule that I have been promoting, really two different things I did in March. So, a New York Times article I had last week, which we will talk about in the final segment, and in a *Chronicle of Higher Education* interview I did, I propose a rule in the work environment: do not let AI write for you. Write your own emails, write your own memos, write your own reports, create your own slides, make them concise and informative.

Grappling with the blank screen to produce something that is clear and informative taxes your brain in a way that gives you a better grasp over the material that you are dealing with and produces much better results. Yes, you can take a lot of strain off your brain by letting Chat GPT create drafts and kind of edit the drafts or go back and forth with it or have it write it all together, but now you are missing out on that key cognitive strain that keeps your brain really locked in on what your business is doing, which allows you to actually be better at your job. It also avoids what is known in the literature now as work slop, which is that written products produced with heavy use of AI might feel more efficient for the writer, but are often way less useful for the recipients. And the total amount of work required to actually get to an actual high-value outcome is reduced.

Now, that is just one rule among many that probably has many exceptions that you could add on to it. But the bigger point here is AI is emerging as the biggest threat to deep work that we have seen probably since Slack. And that is a big deal because unless AI can take over your job entirely, in which case we are all screwed, to have it come in here and make deep work harder and take off more of the peak strain of the deep work stuff you do is just going to make you dumber and make the total output coming out of your team, company, or individual much worse. So you need some sort of AI rules that push these tools, at least right now, much more towards automating the shallow than trying to make the deep easier. Be very worried about any use of AI that is primarily just trying to make deep work feel like it is less of a cognitive strain. There be dragons in the knowledge sector. It is like using pulleys to help you do pull-ups in military boot camp. You are missing the forest to try to save a few trees.

### Learning to embrace boredom and concentrate

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#### Embrace boredom

Rule number two from the book *Deep Work* was titled **Embrace Boredom**. This chapter was about the need to train your brain to get better at focusing.

### Concentration as a trainable skill

Don't just assume you're very good at concentrating without distraction. It is a skill you have to practice.

I open this chapter with the story of Adam Marlin, an Orthodox Jew with three Ivy League degrees, who in his 20s started practicing *heruta* — I said the Hebrew wrong — which is where you study either Torah or Talmud with a partner. You sit at the same desk and go back and forth, trying to do interpretations, debate, and argue. It is intellectually very intense.

I actually write about that later in *Deep Work*. I call it the **whiteboard effect**. It is true for many intellectual fields. When you are doing something synchronously with someone else, you get a lot more depth of focus out of it because you have to maintain your focus in order to keep up with the other person, and they push you on the edges. So actually working with a partner can be really mentally straining in a good way.

Marlin reports that he had thought of himself as a smart person when he began the practice of *heruta*. He had all these Ivy League degrees. But when he began working with people who had been doing this — other members of the shul who had been doing it for years — he said, and I quote, that **they could run intellectual circles around him**. That is when he realized there are two senses of being smart: one is, *I know a lot of stuff*; the other is, *I can apply my mental horsepower with incredible focus*. He recognized that he was missing that second part.

So he got really into the study. He would do it every day at 6:30 in the morning, because you do it before work. And over time he recognized that he started to see a difference in his ability to do cognitive efforts in his job beyond this particular practice.

Let me read you a passage from this chapter:

> After a while, Marlin began to notice positive changes in his own ability to think deeply. “I've recently been making more highly creative insights in my business life,” he told me. “I'm convinced it's related to that daily mental practice. This consistent strain has built my mental muscles over years and years. This was not the goal when I started, but it is the effect.”

Then I go on in that chapter to give a lot of other advice for how you might train your brain, such as the idea that you should think of yourself as taking breaks from focus to schedule some brief moments of distraction, as opposed to thinking about it the opposite way around. And you should do things like memorize a deck of cards, which is a shorthand for focus-requiring activities to get you used to focusing.

All right. What would I change if I was

### Four updated brain-training habits

### rewritten rule two from *Deep Work* in 2026

Over the years of talking about focus training and training your brain, I have a whole extended toolkit of suggestions that were not in that original chapter, but I would add today. I’ve picked out four. These are four brain-training things I’ve talked about pretty regularly in the last half decade that I would almost certainly add in an updated version of this chapter.

#### 1. Keep your phone in the kitchen

You’ve heard me say this a lot in the last year or so: when at home, keep your phone plugged in in the kitchen. If you need to use it, go there to use it. If you have to check it for a text conversation, go there to use it. If you want to listen to a podcast while you do the dishes, use wireless earphones.

This is really important because two things happen. First, there are a lot of circumstances where you would be fighting the urge to pick up your phone, and it would make it hard for you to lock in on something. But those circumstances are significantly made easier if the phone is not nearby, because if the phone is nearby, there are pattern-recognizing neuronal bundles in your short-term motivational systems like, “Oh, there’s the phone.” And then they fire and then they vote for, let’s pick up the phone. If the phone is in the other room, then they are not firing as loud. So you do not have as much of a clawing sort of distracting pull at your attention. You will focus better.

Over time, this then gives you experience with what it’s like to be without your phone. You sort of normalize and habituate to that. And now think about all the things you do at home that, if your phone was in the kitchen, you would now do with full focus. Simple things like: I’m having dinner with my family. You’re just going to be there having dinner talking to them. Or: I’m watching a movie with my kids. You’ll just be full out watching that movie. It’s a completely different experience.

Over time, the positive long-term returns will help reprogram your long-term motivation system to be like, “Oh, I really like what it’s like to watch a movie without distraction. I don’t even want the phone.” So there are all sorts of positive benefits.

#### 2. Read real books and take notes

Read real books, either in paper or on Kindle, but not on a phone or tablet. Do not do it in a digital environment that you also associate with other types of distractions.

If you’re reading nonfiction books, take notes in a notebook after every chapter to try to consolidate the big ideas so the information comes in in the reading. The writing of the notes helps cement it in your brain.

Reading real books triggers

### Deep reading in the age of digital tools

It helps build up what the researcher Maryanne Wolf calls **deep reading processes**, where you build connections between parts of your brain that are not normally connected. They would not have been in a pre-literate age. When these different parts of your brain are all connected together, it unlocks more sophisticated understanding and thoughts. It literally makes you smarter.

Reading, I mean this is like basic cardiovascular exercise to your physical health. Reading is to your mental health. Reading pages of books gives you a smarter brain than if you are not reading pages of books. And that smarter brain is going to understand your world better, understand yourself better, understand complicated ideas better, produce more complicated ideas. So that is absolutely important.

#### Focused hobbies and walks

Three, I would say find a hobby that rewards focus and punishes distraction. You just get used to being able to lock on something and get a reward feedback from it. There are a lot of sports to do this. Tennis does this. My wife is taking tennis lessons and was saying if her focus flags a little bit in tennis, you are done because you have to constantly be tracking what is going on and predicting what you are going to do next. Basketball is this. Golf, I assume, Jesse, right? If you are not locked in, before your swing, it is over.

> Yeah.

> Yeah,

> for sure.

If Jesse does not lock in, his typical 69 might flare up to 72, 73. Is that what happens?

> I wish.

Am I using the right golf lingo?

> Yeah, that was perfect.

Your birdies are going to become bogeys.

> Double bogeys.

> Double bogeys. There we go.

So, okay, that makes them mad. You will get used to locking in on focus.

Final thing I would say is self-reflection walks. I talk a lot about this. Walking without distraction, thinking about yourself, your life, what is going on. Just get used to the life of the mind. Get used to the inner dialogue voices in your mind. Get used to having noisy, clamoring, competing thoughts, picking out the important ones, sticking with it, making progress on it, finding insight on the other end. I call that type of mental activity contemplation. It is critical to a life well-lived. Best way to practice it is to do it. And the way you do it is you go for walks, be moving without a phone. Or if you have to have a phone for emergencies, put it on ring and in the back of a backpack so you cannot grab it without digging through some things so that you can think about what is going on.

All right, that was chapter two. Chapter three, the third rule in *Deep Work* was titled **Quit Social Media**. Now, back in 2016, that was a really provocative way to name a chapter. Now, a lot of people thought when they just skimmed through the book that what I was arguing back then is that people should stop using social media. That is kind of my stance now. Actually, that was not what I was arguing in that chapter. The *Quit Social Media* title for that rule refers to one of the specific strategies that I discuss, which is this idea of **quit social media for 30 days** to get a better sense of what value it is or is not creating.

So I had this suggestion of temporary breaks from multiple different social media platforms so that you better understood what value they were bringing. And if you found it had no value, then maybe you would quit permanently. Or if you found it did, you might adjust your usage patterns to maintain that value but maybe avoid some of the value that would be worse. That is an idea that I then developed in my next book, *Digital Minimalism*.

But the general point of that chapter was this idea that you need to adopt a more rational tool mindset for digital tools. I was arguing that for other types of tools we encounter in our life, we are not going to spend money to buy them or use them unless we have a clear use case. I talk about a farmer named Forest Pritchard, who I met here in the farmers market in Tacoma Park. He wrote a book, a cool memoir called *Gaining Ground*. And he told me, and I quote,

### Choosing digital tools with intention

This in *Deep Work*, I was talking about the complicated mental calculations farmers go through when deciding, *Do I need to buy this piece of equipment?* Here is how much it costs. Here is the benefit it brings. They all have some benefit, right? Here is the benefit it brings, here is how much it costs, is that benefit worth the cost? They are always thinking that through, and how to make that ratio more to their advantage. You would never just buy an expensive piece of farm equipment and think, *I am sure we will figure it out. It has got some uses. I do not want to miss out on it.* So we are used, in other parts of our lives, to being really careful and critical about if and when we are going to spend money on a tool.

And I said when it comes to the world of the digital, especially what I call network tools, things connected to the internet, we throw that out the window. We say it is not the creator of the tool's job to convince me that this is useful. In fact, if there is any possible benefit, I will invest huge amounts of my time and energy into using this tool. And that was definitely still the mindset around that time. This was the Apple Watch period, where you could launch a product like the Apple Watch and Apple literally was like, "We do not know what this is for. That is not our job. That is your job. All right, Apple monkeys, go buy this." And people were just like, "I guess we got to buy Apple Watches." People were literally trying to figure out the idea that people now use them for fitness and stuff like that. That came later. Apple was just like, "We built the watch," and people were like, "Give it to me and then we will figure out later what to do with it."

So we were in this mindset where, when it came to digital tools, we were being like the suckers at the county fair: *I will use any tool if there is any benefit.* So the main thing I was arguing in that chapter is: no, make a tool earn your attention. Make it make the case that this is generating way more benefits than cost. Here is what I specifically wrote:

> The use of network tools can be harmful if you don't attempt to weigh pros against cons, but instead use any glimpse of some potential benefit as justification for use of a tool. Then you're unwittingly crippling your ability to succeed in the world of knowledge work.

I then proposed an alternative approach, which I call the *craftsman approach to tool selection*, which I define as follows:

> Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweighs its negative impact.

So I was saying: be a much more wary consumer of tools.

#### Social media then and now

What would I change if I rewrote this in 2026? When it comes to social media in particular, which was a big example through that chapter of a tool that you should really weigh its value versus cost, our relationship with social media back when I was writing this book, which was really 2014, 2015, is very different than it is today, and it would change the way that I talked about it. If you go back to that 2014, 2015 period, which is when, by the way, I first began writing about skepticism around social media — my first post about this came out in 2014 — people were thinking about tools like Facebook or Twitter through a lens of personal positive benefits.

So if you said, "I do not know, I do not think you should use Facebook," they would come back and say, here are the benefits I am getting, right? I am keeping up with my friends. It is how I find business contacts and new sources I cannot get elsewhere, right? Twitter, they would be like, "This is important for my professional brand. If I do not have a voice online, I do not exist and it is going to be hard to get jobs." So we really were still at the tail end of seeing social media tools as being utilitarianly useful. I do not want to give up on benefits.

If you go back and watch my TEDx talk, *Quit Social Media*, that went viral and is at like 11 million views now, I recorded that the summer after *Deep Work* came out, I believe. Go back even then and watch that talk. I am mainly responding to people’s objections to quitting social media based on the value they think they are getting. So it is all responses to the types of things where people say, "I do not want to give up this value." And I would have to argue, like, that is not as valuable as you think, and the cost there is bigger than you think. It was definitely a utilitarian calculus people were applying to social media back then, which is why I approached it with this, like, let us weigh pros and cons. It is kind of like a quiet push, a quiet touch, to get people to use less social media.

Today, in 2026, that is not a relationship with social media. It has completely morphed away from value propositions and has leaned into sort of pure addiction. Think about a tool like TikTok and how different this is than 2014 Facebook. TikTok no longer is like, "Hey, this is about people you know." You are not following friends. You are not getting updates from people you know. TikTok, unlike early Instagram, is not about, okay, I have selected maybe more well-known people who I am very interested in and I want to hear their takes on things. So I am following an artist I like and I am following a writer who has inspiring quotes. TikTok is like, "No, no, you do not follow anybody. We are just going to show you stuff, right? We are just going to show you stuff that is engaging."

So you cannot tell yourself you are keeping up with people or that you are trying to follow people that you think are interesting. The huge change here — and this is so big compared to what came before, we forget this, but it is such a big change — none of these platforms are about posting anymore. They were entirely about posting back then. It was about your stuff, you posted, you wanting to put stuff out into the world, right? One of the original addiction hooks that Facebook introduced in their product was the like button. And I write about this in *Digital Minimalism*, which came out a few years later. This idea that I have an unpredictable indicator of what people think about me: I put a post out there and there is going to be this number, and if the number is low, that is like people being mad at me. If that number is high, then people are loving me. And that was like the most addictive piece of information you could imagine. Of course I have to go back to this device a lot. I have to see that number. The like button made mobile-enabled social media incredibly addicting. Right? This is what it was about.

### A 30-day break from social media

Deep work: quit social media for 30 days. One of the big things I wrote about was that you think people really care what you have to say, but you will notice when you quit for 30 days that no one even noticed that you were gone, right?

So posting was a big part of social media. Not today. You are on platforms like TikTok, and most of the time you are not there to post your own videos. You are just there to consume. You are on X, and you are just there to consume. You want to see the circus. You want to see the people, you know, the gladiators fight. You are on Instagram, and you just want to consume. You are no longer posting photos of your vacations as much anymore. It is just pure consumption that has been made to be as compelling as possible to keep you on the vice as much as possible.

So no one argues anymore, “Oh, I have so much value from this that I am going to miss out on all these opportunities and keeping up with friends.” No, they are just like, “I cannot help myself. It numbs me. It makes chemicals flow. Life is hard. This is my booze, basically.” So it is a completely different relationship.

So if you are writing a chapter now about trying to get rid of consistent, sort of optional digital distractions, you would write it more like a how-to-get-sober guide. That is where we are right now. We see it as something that is a little bit unsavory and we cannot help ourselves. It is like smokers in the early ’90s. You are like, “This is not good. We know this is kind of on the way out. I am trying to stop and I cannot and I could use some help.”

So I would completely change the way I thought — I would think about it. And this is where I would give my advice: you have to retrain your brain. You have to have the phone away from you more so that you are not firing those short-term circuits. You have to retrain long-term motivation circuits to learn that the deep reward of sticking with something without distraction is better than the short-term reward of looking at the phone.

You have to take all the stuff off of your phone that is going to give you high reward signals. Anything where people make money the more you look at it. You really got to make that phone dumber. Look at my video from our episode from what was, like, a month ago, Jesse, where we talked about how to simplify your phone and make it seem like an incredibly simple dumb phone while still having useful apps on it. That is all the type of stuff I would talk about.

This is no longer an argument about tool selection and pros versus cons. It is an argument about sobriety. So that chapter is one that I think would change drastically.

All right. The final rule in part two of

### Why shallow work must be contained

Deep work was called **Drain the Shallows**. This was the chapter where I tackled the problem of trying to contain the administrative and logistical tasks that, if left unchecked, make it really hard to find time for deep work or to remain focused during deep work sessions.

Here is what I specifically wrote, verbatim:

> The shallow work that increasingly dominates the time and attention of knowledge workers is less vital than it often seems in the moment. For most businesses, if you eliminated significant amounts of the shallowess, their bottom line would likely remain unaffected. As Jason Freed discovered, if you not only eliminate shallow work, but also replace this recovered time with more of the deep alternative, not only will the business continue to function, it becomes more successful.

Jason Freed is in there because the opening story of that chapter was about how Jason Freed, with his company 37 Signals — now called Base Camp — experimented with a four-day work week for certain times of the year, and they found that productivity went up. Then I talked about the controversy that followed, where a reporter wrote an article essentially saying, “Oh yeah, Jason Freed and his company are just making people jam five days of work into four days.” Great productivity tip. Jason Freed fired back. He said, “No, they’re not working more hours. They’re just doing less of the nonsense. There are fewer meetings. There’s less back and forth. People are just a little bit more on task. They’re not working more hours, but more stuff is getting done.”

The point was that we have a lot more shallow work in our schedules than we think, and it’s a lot more removable or optional than we think. That was the motivation.

### The five strategies from the chapter

I had a bunch of strategies in the chapter. I’m going to go through quickly the five particular strategies I mention, and for each one I’ll give a thumbs up if it held up and a thumbs down if it didn’t really work out or we don’t really do that anymore.

#### 1. Time blocking

That definitely held up. I think time blocking continues to be really the only way to manage your time and attention if you have a busy knowledge-work schedule.

#### 2. Quantify the depth of every activity

This was the idea of giving away a heuristic for how to numerically score activities so you could sort of see how much deep work each requires and prioritize the deep. That did not hold up. No one did it. That’s something that no one ever did.

#### 3. Work with your supervisor to establish an ideal deep-to-shallow ratio

The third idea was to work with your supervisor or boss to establish an ideal deep-to-shallow work ratio in a typical work week: what ratio of my hours should be deep work versus shallow work, and then measure it. If you’re falling short, talk to your boss about how to make changes because you had this target you thought would produce the most value for the company. That really held up. I threw that in as an after effect, and then I heard from a ton of people after the book came out that this was really successful. I really like that idea.

#### 4. Shutdown routines

Shutdown routines 100% held up. That really works out. Have a clear end of day, close the open loops, check a box, say a phrase, be done with your work when you’re done. Don’t let it bleed amorphously into the rest of your day.

#### 5. Becoming better at email

The final strategy was becoming better at email, and I gave a bunch of different strategies there. Some of those things work, some of them don’t. I’m going to get into that in a second.

One of the sub-suggestions there was the idea of just not replying more often. That triggered Adam Grant to write an op-ed in the *New York Times* saying that that’s actually a bad idea and that it’s rude. We ended up working this out in a good-natured way on an episode of Jesse’s podcast.

> Look at one of my appearances on *WorkLife* podcast with Adam, and we sort of, in a good-natured way, got into that.

### What I would add in 2026

If I were rewriting this chapter in 2026, there are two big ideas that showed up in subsequent books after *Deep Work* that should fit absolutely here.

#### Replacing the hyperactive hive mind

The first idea is **replacing the hyperactive hive mind**. This showed up in my 2021 book, *A World Without Email*, which was meant to be the immediate companion to *Deep Work*. I inserted *Digital Minimalism* between the two just because that book was more timely.

In *A World Without Email*, I said, “Okay, here’s what I got wrong in *Deep Work*. Here’s what I got wrong in that strategy about becoming better at email.” I was falling into the trap of imagining that the key to improving the role of email in your life is that you yourself have more discipline and better habits, and perhaps you shift some norms in your organization, like norms around response time.

In *A World Without Email*, after spending a couple of years looking deeply at the rise of email and its impact, I realized that won’t solve it. The problem with constant inbox checking in the professional setting has to do with collaboration strategies. A lot of our projects we coordinate with ad hoc back-and-forth messaging through tools like email, and then later Slack. If that’s how you’re collaborating, you end up in a strategy I call the **hyperactive hive mind** collaboration style.

You have to check those inboxes and chat channels all the time because ongoing back-and-forth conversations have to be serviced; otherwise things grind to a halt. So the real solution is not better habits yourself, like “I’m going to batch my email checks.” It is replacing ad hoc back-and-forth messaging with other ways of collaborating that require many fewer inbox checks or many fewer chat checks.

Even if those new modes of collaboration are more annoying and, in the moment, require more work, you want to minimize the need to keep checking channels. That’s an idea I did not have in 2016, and by 2021 it was a big part of my thinking.

#### Managing workload explicitly

The second idea I would add here is one I really laid out in my last book, *Slow Productivity*, which came out in 2024: **workload matters**.

We need rules and systems for explicitly managing workloads. If it’s just informally bouncing stuff back and forth in messages — “Hey, can you do this?” “Can you do that?” — we’ll take on too much stuff. And when we have too many things to work on at the same time, they each emanate their own overhead, their own shallow-work task to keep the project going. That aggregates. It’s uncompressible. It’s like water.

So if you do 10 things instead of five things, you have twice as much of this administrative overhead that you have to service. And there’s a tipping point you go past where the amount...

### Rethinking the book cover

The amount of administrative overhead required to service everything you are working on basically takes over your schedule, and then you can really only do work early in the morning or on the weekends. You end up in a state of extreme unproductivity, and you are also miserable and burnt out. It is just a terrible way to work.

If, instead, you have explicit rules for managing workloads in a team or a company so that you are only actively working on a small number of things at any one time, what happens? The amount of concurrent administrative overhead drastically reduces. You have more time for deep work. Those things get done fast. They get done well. And the overall rate at which you complete things goes up, and the number of things you finish per quarter also goes up. Doing fewer things now means you get more things done in the long term. And you are less miserable.

The role of overload in attacks on deep work, burnout, and workplace misery is critical. That is again something my book *Slow Productivity* gets into. I did not really have that connection yet when I wrote *Deep Work*.

All right, so there we go. I think, Jesse, it holds up pretty well. I mean, it is continuing to sell, but there are a lot of updates that I think would make it better. A lot of these updates are in my future books that follow *Deep Work*. A lot of these updates are here on this podcast. A lot of these updates are in my writing I have done for *The New Yorker* on these types of issues. So you can sort of think of a lot of my work going forward as revised and updated editions of *Deep Work*. That stuff is largely out there. I eventually write it down anyway, but this was sort of the seed that started a lot of the thinking that I have since been trying to elaborate and expand ever since.

#### Redesigning the cover

> If you had to redesign the book cover, what would you do for a second edition?

The quick backstory is that the design philosophy actually came from the book that preceded this, which was *So Good They Can't Ignore You*, the career advice book about not following your passions.

We were working on *So Good They Can't Ignore You* and getting back these bad covers. There was one with pencils on it. Pencils. I do not know what was going on there. Then the designer at some point gave us this super big, font-heavy design, and this was back in the day when Barnes & Noble was a big deal. I was like, yeah, that stands out: *So Good They Can't Ignore You*, good and you. That is where the design philosophy came from. Same imprint.

So we did *Deep Work* and said, “Yeah, we are going all in on big, just boom, big lettering.” It kind of started a cover trend. Then a bunch of books did this, and now the trend has kind of moved on. But there was a period where just being big and declarative was a cool way to do titles. So I would either do this.

And then *Slow Productivity* was more inspirational, with the picture.

> I want to do full bleed imagery.

This was me going in a completely different way. With *Slow Productivity*, I was like, I want to do full bleed imagery. This is more of a thing from the fiction world, and I was like, let’s bring this to nonfiction. I want to induce a psychological state in the reader just seeing the cover that is congruent with what the book is going to be about.

So you see the cabin up on a hill with a path leading to it, and your mind already goes to a narrative place of a life that is slower and focused on producing important things and is meaningful. It puts you in that emotional state, and then you are like, what is this book about? And it is like, hey, how to do that? Put those two things together, and you are like, boom, I want to go.

So, yeah, we have to keep evolving. I do not think this cover style is the right style anymore.

### Sponsor break and cover redesign chat

“Yeah, that’s why I kind of asked.”

“Yeah. Yeah, it’s kind of—”

“I was just, because I know that you’ve been evolving.”

“If I really was going to redesign it, I would either keep it there or basically just have the dinosaur from *Jurassic Park*, the famous skeleton. It’s a famous cover. Just play it back. No other explanation.”

“State has to give you those books for your new Map Maker Lab.”

“We got to reach out. I want first editions for the lab. I’m going to reach out. Maybe I’ll have you reach out.”

“I mean, you’re a huge fan.”

“Yeah, the Kiteon Foundation. I want first edition books, Kiteon books, for my lab. I’ll send them a picture. It’ll be great.”

“Then you can write the biography for Kiteon.”

“I know. I do want to write a Katon biography. There’s fewer words I could say, I guess, beyond, like, the only thing that would probably make my agent even more nervous than me saying I want to write a biography would be if I wanted to write a child’s picture book. I don’t know. I don’t know what would be worse from her perspective than be like, I want to write a biography of someone, unless it was like, you know what, you know what worlds have not come together enough recently? Pornography and cookbooks. You could probably do a good kids book on baseball.”

“See, she’s in cold sweats now. If she’s hearing this, she’s like, ‘Jesse, stop it. Do not plant these seeds in his mind.’”

“All right. Well, that’s enough hearing from me. Now it’s time to hear from you as we move on to the inbox segment to hear your messages. Before we get there though, let’s take a quick break to hear from some of our sponsors.”

Now, you all know that I’m a big fan of Wayfair. It’s the one-stop shop to upgrade your spaces with quality pieces that work within your budget. In fact, Jesse, I actually just bought a bunch of stuff from Wayfair as part of the renovation that we’re doing in the production office next door here in the Deep Work HQ, including, and I’m about to bring this over, a great rug. They had all sorts of selection, right? I could get exactly the size I want. And my wife and I looked at, like, a hundred options and found exactly the rug that I’m looking for. Ironically, it’s a giant picture of my face. Wayfair had that. That was pretty personal. Who knows about that? And the price was great. I was like, “Okay, I’m very excited about it.”

Here’s something that is timesensitive that I’m particularly jazzed up about at the moment: Way Day. All right. So this is from April 25th through the 27th. You can score the best deals in home, like up to 80% off, with free shipping; up to 80% off on some items with free shipping on everything. So whether you’re looking for a major overhaul of a space or just to spruce things up, whether it’s your bedroom, your kitchen, your office, or outdoor patio, you need Wayfair and in particular look forward to Way Day, which is coming up on April 25th. So remember, Way Day is the sale to shop the best deals in home. And we’re talking up to 80% off with free, fast, and free shipping on everything. Head to wayfair.com April 25th through April 27th to shop Way Day. That’s wyfir.com. Wayfair, every style, every home.

As longtime listeners know, I’m also a fan of Notion, an AI-powered connected work workspace for teams. Now, Notion brings all of your notes, docs, and projects into one space that just works. It’s seamless, flexible, powerful, and actually fun to use. I like Notion because it’s great for building custom workflows that can help you escape the hyperactive hivemind world of endless ad hoc emails and Slack and actually be much more structured in your collaboration. Now, here’s what’s been catching my attention recently: Notion has been integrating AI into their already useful product in really smart ways. With AI built right in, you can now spend less time switching between tools and apps and more time creating great work. And with their new custom agents, the busy work that used to take hours or never actually happened at all

### AI agents, productivity, and writing

can run itself. Now, here’s an example I saw recently that caught my attention. Someone customized what they called a status update agent that each week could look at the ongoing projects being tracked in Notion and automatically scan for progress and create a progress report to send to all of the team. Now, this is cool stuff, which helps explain why Notion is used by over 50% of Fortune 500 companies. So, try custom agents now at [notion.com/cal](https://notion.com/cal). This is all lowercase letters: `notion.com/cal` to try custom agents today. And when you use our link, you’re supporting our show.

All right, let’s get back to the show. All right, so now let’s get going and open up our inbox. Remember, if you have a question for me or a case study you want to share, maybe just an interesting article you want to try to get me to do a rant, the right way to do it now is send an email to `podcast@calport.com`.

All right, Jesse, what’s our first message today? The first message comes from Shelly.

> All right, Shelly, what we got here?

Shelley says: “I’m a product manager in health tech, and I keep getting pressure from friends and family saying I should have AI write my documentation, market research, business cases, etc. My position on this is that it will make me dumber. And if my job is to persuade people to do something, how can I do that live if I lose the ability to articulate it in writing and understand it deeply?”

All right, I’ve been hearing this a lot. I gotta say, Jesse, this whole “let AI do our writing,” “let’s collaborate with AI to help test our ideas and get our writing out” thing, I find it very depressing and anxiety producing. It’s like you spend years uncovering and realizing and clarifying the importance of cognition in the human experience and in the knowledge economy and in science and in everything, and then it’s just a lot of chirpy people out in Silicon Valley saying, yeah, just don’t do that, or just let computers do a lot of it worse. Won’t that be fun?

And of course people are like, sure, because this stuff is hard. Look, if you are at Marine boot camp and someone comes around and says, “Hey guys, I have this little car jack thing you put under you when you do push-ups and it takes a lot of weight off of it,” you’re like, yeah, push-ups stink. I don’t like doing all these push-ups, but yeah, let’s use that thing. This is great. In the time it used to take me to do 10 push-ups, I can now do 30 push-ups. But, guys, the whole point of doing the push-ups is discipline and strength because you’re soldiers. I feel that way about AI.

So I have two responses to Shelly. I mean, this whole thing is depressing and anxiety producing to me.

#### First response: read, think, write

Point number one: read, think, write is a cycle. Take in information. Think about information. Write something based on that understanding. It is a fundamental cognition loop that helps you make your human brain valuable and capable of producing valuable things, especially in the knowledge sector economically speaking. If you take one of those parts out or diminish it—if you say, I’m not going to really do much of the writing, or I’m going to do it in a sort of half way where I’m sort of writing but really just editing stuff the ChatGPT road—you’re avoiding any type of strain. That loop breaks, and your brain getting increasingly better at being able to produce valuable original thought gets worse. You get dumber, which is not what you want to do when half of our economy is based on advanced knowledge-sector types of companies.

#### Second response: productivity is not just speed

Point number two: no one understands anything about productivity. I mean, this was what my last book was about, the first part of my last book about the numerous ways in which we define productivity and knowledge work. Anything being easier or faster, we’re like, I’m more productive. Are you, though? Is this actually making you more productive? Let’s be specific here.

I talked about this two weeks ago in my episode about AI making us worse at work. Let’s look at Shelly’s example. Maybe you produce market research reports, as she mentions. Maybe this is a key part of your job. Is this the bottleneck? Is the literal time it takes you to write the market research report the main bottleneck on how much value you’re producing for your company? Almost certainly not.

You’re probably producing one of these reports like once a month. So let’s say, in absolute terms, you’re replacing: “Hey, if I was prompting AI and not really doing the thinking myself, I could make this report in 45 minutes; it otherwise takes me five hours.” In the course of a month, does that really matter? Is that really unlocking a lot more value for the company? The time required to produce that marketing report was not the bottleneck. The bottleneck was actually probably the sophistication, nuance, and value of what you put in that marketing report. In fact, triple your time might make you way more productive in the sense that this report is containing more value.

We often mistake ourselves. We think about efficiency because we have assembly-line thinking, but we’re not doing one thing on an assembly line. And when you’re not doing one thing on an assembly line, raw efficiency on task execution time doesn’t necessarily lead to more proverbial Model T’s being produced.

Now, if Shelly’s job was literally producing marketing reports back to back, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, that’s all I do—which is an absurd thing, but let’s just use this thought experiment—then maybe, if they got paid just literally, “here’s a report, got produced,” and someone’s like, it looks like a report, here’s some money, if that was the situation, then increasing the speed at which a report is produced would produce more money. But this is not the situation. I’m not writing marketing reports back to back to back to back.

I talked about this in one of my newsletters recently as well, where social science researchers are using AI agents to help analyze data and produce plots. It’s nice because that can be annoying, so it can make an annoying day less annoying. But, as I argued, it’s not the bottleneck on producing academic papers. Academic papers are not produced by: I sit here all day long analyzing data and produce charts. That’s it. I’m an assembly-line worker. That’s my Model T. And if I could do that faster, I produce

### Why productivity must mean real output

more papers. Like, well, no, you're writing one paper every three or four months. There's one day in there in which you're analyzing data. It's nice if you could do that in a half day instead, but it's not going to produce more paper. So we need to have the real definition of productivity, which is the quality and quantity of the final thing that goes out in the world is actually worth money. Making individual things faster does not necessarily increase that. So we have to focus on the things that really matter.

All right. Uh what we got next? We have a note from Ailio about AI and education.

> This is just going to make me more depressed, isn't it? I don't even know what it is yet, but I can assume AI and education. The note is not going to be like going great and just with a thumbs up and then we move on to the next one. All right. Feel like I should have like a bottle of bourbon with me. That would be a fun show. Jesse, we take every time we read something to Price AI, take a shot of bourbon.

> Ferris would do that at times back in the past
>
> with uh Kevin.

> Yeah,
>
> they do wine.

> Sometimes they do tequila.

> I can talk to Tim.

> But then I think they both quit and maybe they started again. I don't know. Try to keep track.

> They're old now. We're all old.

All right. Um, here we go. All right. I'm sure this is going to be uplifting.

The effects of AI and education, the effects of AI and education are frankly depressing. Oh, see, right off the bat, Jesse, he's previewing this is very depressing what I'm about to tell you. All right, let's hammer on. Get my bourbon ready.

I remember how much I struggled to come up with ideas and convey them in an essay, for example, and the deep satisfaction that came with it. Well-written text used to be admirable. Now I see my siblings and friends in university delegating almost all of their writing to ChatGPT, limiting themselves to curate text with prompts, and they love it. Of course they love it. It's easier. People don't like hard things.

One of my peers proudly said to me something like, I never ever write anything without AI, be it a large report or an email. Look, I write terribly even with spelling mistakes and just let ChatGPT fix it for me. We have to be thankful that we have these tools and take advantage of them. His senior project was written in this way, and he has got very good grades. He has arranged a PhD position after graduation while most of us are struggling to get any income at all.

I mean, you might as well just buy an essay online, right? Like yeah, the here's the challenge education is not okay we've set up this obstacle

### Writing as cognitive training

course for you, and if you do it the obvious way, it is going to be mentally hard. If you can minimize what we want to see is how much you can minimize your mental strain? Well, in the end, why not just hire someone else to write the paper for me, right? That is kind of where we are rapidly going.

Writing is taking the information that you ingested through reading and conversation and taking that ideas and then outputting original information based on those ideas. That act cements that information in your mind. If you go back and read my second book, *How to Become a Straight A Student*, where I studied a bunch of straight A college students who did not seem like they were grinds, what was the number one thing that unified how they approached studying? Active recall. How do I learn something? I ingest it. I think about it, and then I write it out. So, from scratch, it was all about producing answers from scratch without looking at your notes. There was no more effective way to get prepared for a test because writing is a key, key part of the information intake loop.

You have the information, it is in there, but it is not necessarily super accessible. When you write it, boom, those connections happen. It is how you get smarter. It is the entire point of education. Yes, you can have a machine that has taken in all of the writing on the internet, so it knows the structure of languages and topics. It has seen it all, and yes, it can use all that information to write for you. You could also copy things out of a book and hand it in. That is also less strain. You can go on the internet and Google it and copy and paste things from articles. That would also be less strain. But it defeats the entire purpose of writing in an educational environment.

Writing quality should be something that you admire, because the better writer you are, the more writing you have done, which probably means the smarter you are, because that is more time that you have actually spent cementing concepts in your head. Jesse, I was surprised. We will talk about more about this soon, but I had this big New York Times piece a couple weekends ago, and one of the most consistent pieces of feedback I got from all sorts of messages, one of the most consistent things I noticed, was how many people in their responses were surprised about, man, the writing was so good. And it was not even like this was brilliant writing. It is just I care about writing quality. It was a well-crafted essay because I care about that. I think 10 years ago that would not have caught anyone's attention. It would just have been the ideas. But today people are like, "Whoa, what was going on there?" I mean, this is just like, you know, it is essay.

### Why human writing still matters

#### The craft of writing

Craft has structure, clarity, callbacks, active sentences, and rhythm. There are clear things you do. We are just not used to writing quality anymore. So I am kind of going off in all sorts of directions here, but I do not like this idea of using AI to produce human text for consumption by humans. I think this is a fundamentally human endeavor. That is the stance I am coming down on. I know people are going to be upset about that, but I just think it is a fundamentally human endeavor.

Go back. Let us go back to the Bible. Let us go to Genesis, right? Right off the bat, metaphorically, what is the thing that defines humans? The thing that God gives humans right off the bat is the ability to have language. They name all the animals and plants, right? This is a metaphor for the development of the ability of language that humans developed about 50,000 years ago. Boom. We are capturing that in this ancient book. It is fundamental to the human condition.

And then the entire Abrahamic faiths, on which all the ideas we have of everything from liberal democracy to human values and modern ethics and morality come out of, are based around writing. Where do you get the Hebrew Bible? Where do you get Torah? These proto-Phoenicians in the Eastern Mediterranean were one of the first alphabetic languages, an alphabet-style writing system that emerges and allows much more widespread literacy. And in the ability to write, all of these ideas come out of it. It is the human thing.

There is some sort of Tower of Babel type of analogy here to what if we, instead of making this a deeply human important thing, build machines to try to take this ability away, take it away from God or whatever. So there is probably a religious argument here. I just think there is going to be a resistance to this.

I do not want to read stuff that a machine produced. If you want to use a machine to help you communicate, have it produce charts or tables or machine language, right? But English, or whatever language, the written language, this is humans transmitting a cognitive reality to another human. I think it is a deeply human endeavor, and it has all these practical benefits.

So I do not like this. That is not a small thing to say. It is not a small thing to say. It is like saying, you know, I make money by selling my organs. There is a deeply humanistic thing here that I do not think we are recognizing yet, but hopefully we will.

### A case study in life without social media

All right. Do we have anything more cheerful here? Don’t—what do we have?

> **Host:** We do.

All right. Here’s someone who successfully avoided social media with no real negative impacts.

All right. So, uh, we’ll say it’s from anonymous because I don’t know if they know they were sharing this as a case study. Um, all right, here we go:

> Having said that, I prescribe to what you write and talk about. I have no social media accounts nor watch Tik Tok or YouTube and basically just keep a LinkedIn profile to keep my business partner content. My standard excuse is that once I am able to return all emails, phone calls, and texts in a timely manner, I will then consider adding more forms of communication technology. In reality, I have no need and see others constantly distracted by them, I keep an open mind on most items, and someday may come when some form of these technologies make sense for me. In the meantime, I will stay out of the matrix for as long as possible.

All right, that’s a nice note to end on. That’s like straight out of *Deep Work*. Make the tool do the job of convincing yourself you need to use it. It’s not your job. You’re not a beta tester. You’re not a quality assurance tester. You’re not a product reviewer. You don’t need to go use all these tools and then try to back-justify why you have them. If they haven’t convinced you they’re useful, you don’t need them in your life.

So, all right, that made me feel a little bit better. All right, let’s move on to our final segment here where we check in on what I’ve been up to. All right.

So, I mentioned this New York Times article a couple times, and let me just bring it up briefly, Jesse. I should talk about it briefly. All right. So, I had an article, uh, not yesterday, but the Sunday before. Uh, it had a bunch of different titles, including “there’s a good reason you can’t concentrate.” Um, and it was an op-ed that basically made a call for—and this is a cool graphic—that’s Kristoff Neeman, who does, I like that, he does a lot of *New Yorker* covers as well. He’s a great graphic designer.

So, it makes the argument that we need a revolution in cognitive fitness like we had in physical fitness in the 20th century. We need to be, like, what we consume, digital information, and exercising our brain should be things we care a lot about, like we learn to care about what we eat and having to do exercise. So, um, it’s like a manifesto. It’s a long-form piece. It was my seventh op-ed I’ve written for the *New York Times*, but this one, Jesse, was my first lead opinion piece.

### The New York Times op-ed milestone

It was the entire cover of the Sunday opinion section that Sunday, and it got the feature in the opinion newsletter and their full brunt of marketing. That is basically the biggest audience left you can get now in American newspaper and magazine writing. The lead opinion piece is it. This is the last biggest thing you have. So I was proud about that. I bought the paper because it was a whole broad sheet with just this graphic of the brain lifting the whatever; the whole cover was that. Maybe we’ll frame it for the HQ.

> Yeah.

It’s good. It got a lot of good feedback about it. Really exciting. Hopefully you read it. Hopefully you liked it. It’s a call to revolution that I really believe in, and hopefully other people believe in it as well and we get a little bit of momentum here.

On the reading front, I finished the Sanderson book.

> What’d you think?

I finished it on March 30th, so I got my five in. I liked it. It’s a genre book, genre fantasy. And the thing I hadn’t done in a while: it’s a long book, 650 pages, short for Sanderson, but long for me. I hadn’t actually done that in a while. It’s one of those books where the whole point is that they do a lot of world building, and the whole point is just to get lost. You want to get into this state where you get lost in the world and you’re just in the world and stuff is happening. The movie is playing in your head. That’s the appeal of genre novels in particular: you get lost in these worlds.

I read a lot of nonfiction, which is much more getting lost in an intellectual world. You have ideas and you’re playing with them. This is much more empathetic, visual, action-based, or whatever. It’s fun. That’s a good experience. So I’ll probably read another one. Not yet. They take a while because they’re long.

> Your kid read it too, right?

Yeah, he read I think the whole *Mistborn* extended trilogy, and now he’s on the second of *Stormlight*, which...

> So he must like it.

Those are beast books. Those are like a thousand-plus pages. Yeah. He loves them. I told him we’ll find a way to go meet Sanderson at some point, and we’ll bring a copy of *The Name of the Wind* to get signed because you want signed copies; they’re worth a lot. Remember, all complaints about sci-fi references goes to Jesse. He wants to hear it.

So there we go. I got my five in just in time.

### Recent reading and book recommendations

gotta figure out, I have to — I finished last night, so I have to figure out my March, my April books.

> I was thinking about getting you a book. There's a new book about George Steinbrenner that just came out by Mike Ficarra from the *New York Post*.

That could be interesting. I might read it.

> Mad Dog read it.

I might read that notebook book as well. That came from a listener.

The history of notebooks. Yeah, yeah. I should probably read a baseball book now that the season's going. I should also warn everyone now that the Nationals are doing some interesting things. That'll be a — we're going to do a five-episode arc: analytics, lineup construction, and hit strategy. I don't know. Five-episode arc. Let's go.

Actually, the episodes are going to be — I think people want this is basically like live commentary. So, we just record you and I talking through the full two- to three-hour game, and then you go back and listen to us and like replay the games, analyze the new ABS system, analyze ABS. Like, we could do little fun aides about the technology and ABS or this or that. Reading between the lines, I think is what people want is more extremely long for super rapid quantity baseball content.

All right, well that's all the time we have for this week. We'll have another AI reality check episode coming out on Thursday and then another advice episode next Monday. So, as always, till next time, stay deep.

Hey, if you like today's discussion of my book, *Deep Work*, and want to read some more, check out episode 384 where I answer the question, what else should you read to have a deeper new year? Check it out. I think you'll like it.

So, we're going to do a deep dive on the question that I probably am asked the most by you, which is, "What should I"