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by skadamat·2y ago·view on hn ↗
I've read all his books and many of his articles. I would say they are science-informed. He works with expert scientists in the relevant fields and weaves in his own experiences.

But honestly, most of his ideas IMO are...straightforward and un-controversial? He's doing a good job re-emphasizing them and making the case for why:

- Focusing on 1 task for a long time is hard, but as with most things in human life you can practice & get better

- Deep work = hard, focused work to produce outsized, unique, creative value

- Most knowledge work nowadays is too frenetic and it's hard to do deep work unless you fight for it

- Switching tasks / contexts quickly has a switching cost. Sure, there's some neuro / psychology research around this ... but also haven't we like all felt that?

Cal does a good job drawing from his own experience and from other leading deep work thinkers and he's distilled those learnings in a way the rest of us can embrace & adopt progressively.

But he's not trying to pretend that this is scientifically the best way to crush it in your career or something

2 comments
To me, it is "straight forward" in the same way that Dropbox was straight forward once it was successful (before their success, it wasn't so obvious). Once you read his material, you might think "oh yeah, of course," but there's far more value in his work than that. It sometimes seemed silly when I was reading his book Deep Work, because it's like "yeah man just put your head down and focus," but of course there is so much more to it than that. There is much more that could be said, but I need to get back to work :D I highly recommend his work.
The point about context switching being costly is definitely something that the general public doesn't get.

If you ask most people whether they can multitask, they will proudly say yes.

Bosses don't care about deep work either. I have been in jobs where they interrupted me every half an hour. I remember switching between 4 or more tasks trying to get anything done. It would all just get muddled in my head making it hard to keep track of what I was doing.