What Reading Deep Work Actually Changed For Me
Cal Newport's book didn't just teach me about focus—it made me rethink how I approach product development, creative work, and the structure of my days.
I'd heard about Cal Newport's Deep Work for years before I finally picked it up. Like many books that get recommended constantly, I figured I already knew the gist: turn off notifications, work in blocks, protect your time. What I didn't expect was how much it would challenge assumptions I didn't even know I had—about what productive work looks like, how I structure my days, and especially how I approach building digital products.
This isn't a book summary. Instead, I want to share what actually changed for me—the uncomfortable realizations, the small shifts in my routines, and the bigger questions it raised. Maybe some of this resonates with you too.
#The Uncomfortable Truth About My "Productive" Days
Before Deep Work, I would have described myself as someone who gets a lot done. My days were full: meetings, Slack conversations, quick syncs, answering questions, jumping between tasks. I felt busy, and busy felt like working.
Newport's distinction between deep and shallow work forced me to look at those days differently. Most of what filled my calendar was shallow work—logistics, coordination, quick responses. These things are necessary, but they don't move the needle on the hard problems. The uncomfortable truth: I could have entire weeks where I never spent more than 30 uninterrupted minutes on the work that actually matters—thinking through product strategy, conceiving a new feature, really digging into a tricky challenge.
My first change was simple: I started tracking it. For a few weeks, I used Toggl to note how much time I actually spent in deep work versus everything else. The numbers were sobering. Maybe 10-15% of my working hours went to cognitively demanding tasks that required real concentration. Everything else was maintenance, communication, and what Newport calls "busyness as a proxy for productivity."
#Rethinking How I Build Products
The biggest impact of Deep Work wasn't on my work habits per se—it was on how I think about building digital products.
Making products is a strange mix of activities. There's strategic thinking: understanding user problems, deciding what to build, weighing tradeoffs. There's the creative craft: designing interfaces, thinking through flows, shaping ideas into concrete solutions. And there's coordination: syncing with the team, responding to feedback, adjusting plans.
I realized I'd been giving almost all my time to coordination and execution—while starving the strategic and creative thinking. The deep work of product development—really sitting with a problem, playing out different approaches, thinking through second-order effects—was getting squeezed into the margins. I'd try to think about product direction in a 15-minute gap between meetings, or while half-reading Slack messages.
Newport's argument: this kind of fragmented attention produces shallow results. And looking back at some of my product decisions, I can see it. The features I'd pushed through without deep thought were the ones that needed the most rework later. The concepts I'd hastily cobbled together were the ones that caused problems down the line.
Now I try to protect time specifically for product thinking—not just execution, but the upstream work of figuring out what to build and why. It feels almost luxurious in a culture that celebrates visible activity. But it pays off. An hour of real thinking about a product problem often saves many hours of building the wrong thing.
#The Attention Residue Problem
One concept from the book that stuck with me: "attention residue." When you switch from Task A to Task B, your attention doesn't fully switch. Part of your brain is still processing the previous task, sometimes for 20-30 minutes. This means rapid task-switching—the default mode for most knowledge workers—leaves you operating at reduced cognitive capacity most of the time.
I started noticing this everywhere. After a quick Slack exchange, I wasn't really back to full focus for another 15 minutes. After checking email "just quickly," my attention was scattered. The problem wasn't the individual interruption—it was the cumulative effect of dozens of small context switches throughout the day.
And here's the thing: once you're pulled out of flow, you don't just lose focus—you start drifting. Suddenly that new YouTube video looks interesting. TikTok "just for five minutes." A quick "break" that turns into twenty. The interruption isn't just the interruption itself; it's the door it opens.
For creative work and product development, this matters a lot. Good decisions require holding many things in mind at once: user needs, technical constraints, business goals, the existing product. If your attention is fragmented, you can't maintain that full picture. You make decisions based on whatever piece happens to be top of mind at the moment.
My practical response: batching. Instead of checking messages continuously, I check them at specific times. Instead of jumping between different projects throughout the day, I try to dedicate larger blocks to single areas. It feels less responsive, but the work itself is better.
Now, I know this isn't always possible. Some employers expect quick responses. You can't always tell your team you're only reachable two hours a day. But even small shifts help—checking messages every hour instead of every five minutes, or protecting just one morning per week for uninterrupted work. Perfect isn't the goal; less fragmented is.
#Learning to Be Unreachable
One of the harder lessons from Deep Work: protecting focus sometimes means being less available. In most work cultures, responsiveness is rewarded. The person who answers Slack within minutes is seen as engaged and helpful. The person who takes hours to respond seems distant or disorganized.
Newport argues that this constant availability has costs we rarely account for. Every time you interrupt deep work to respond to a message, you pay the attention residue tax. Multiply that across a day, and you've essentially prevented yourself from doing any sustained thinking at all.
For me, the shift was reframing "unavailable" as "doing my actual job." When I'm in a deep work block, I'm not slacking off—I'm doing the cognitively demanding work that actually creates value. Being reachable for every small question might feel collaborative, but it often means the important work never happens.
This required some communication. I started blocking time on my calendar for deep work and setting expectations about when I'd respond. It felt awkward at first, but the world didn't end. Most messages can wait an hour or two. The genuinely urgent things find a way through. And here's what I've learned: if you do your work—and do it well—most people come around. They start to see that slower responses don't mean worse results. Often the opposite.
#The Ritual of Starting Deep Work
Another practical change: developing a clearer ritual for entering deep work. Newport emphasizes that deep work requires a mode shift—you can't just drift into it while notifications are still pinging.
My ritual is simple but deliberate. I use OneTab to collapse all my browser tabs into a list, keeping only what I need for the current task. My phone goes in another room, or at least face-down with notifications off. I set my status to "focusing" so colleagues don't expect an immediate response. And I write down one sentence: what's the single thing I'm trying to accomplish in this session? (This pairs well with Gary Keller's The One Thing and the Pomodoro Technique—focused sprints with a clear goal.)
That last part turned out to be surprisingly important. Before I started doing this, my "deep work" sessions often became vague exploration. I'd sit down to work on something, get distracted by a tangent, and end up scattered. The one-sentence goal keeps me honest about what I'm actually trying to achieve.
#Quality Over Quantity
Perhaps the deepest shift from Deep Work: how I think about what I'm trying to produce. In a culture that celebrates shipping fast and iterating often, it's easy to optimize for quantity: more features, more output, more activity.
Newport's book reminded me that the most valuable work is often slow. A well-thought-out product concept might take a week of real thinking but save months of corrections later. A carefully considered feature might require stepping away from the screen entirely and sketching things out. Those who produce fewer things but of higher quality often create more lasting value than those who ship constantly but superficially.
I try to ask myself now: am I optimizing for looking busy, or for producing something genuinely good? The answer isn't always comfortable.
#What Hasn't Changed (And That's Okay)
Reading Deep Work didn't turn me into a monastic figure who spends six hours a day in perfect concentration. Real life—and real product development—involves meetings, collaboration, quick decisions, and yes, a lot of shallow work. Newport acknowledges this too; the book isn't arguing for eliminating all coordination, just for a more conscious balance.
What changed for me is awareness. I now notice when I'm doing shallow work and can choose it deliberately rather than just sliding into it. I protect deep work blocks more fiercely because I understand their value. And I've stopped feeling guilty about being "unavailable"—because that's when I'm actually doing the hardest part of my job.
If you've been putting off Deep Work because you think you already know what it says: pick it up anyway. The core ideas are simple, but there's something about engaging with them at length that makes them stick. For me, it was less about learning something new and more about finally taking seriously what I'd always vaguely known: that my attention is finite, that focus is a skill, and that the quality of my work depends on how carefully I protect the conditions that make deep thinking possible.