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Ten 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. Now, the conclusion of my book is 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, here's the thing. This book hit a nerve, became a bit of a word of mouth sensation. It sold now more than 2 million copies in over 45 languages. And that number's still going up. Jesse. Earlier this month, we sold the new language rights for the Sinhala translation.
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Nice.
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That's of course, the language spoken by the Sinhalese people of Sri Lanka. There's more languages out there than you might guess. Anyways, this is all great, but this book is now a decade old, which motivates a natural follow up question. Do its idea still hold in 2026? This is what we're going to explore today. So I brought my first edition copy of the book with me. I'm going to crack it open. We're going to reread its core ideas. I'm going to point out what remains true and what requires updates. Spoiler alert. I have a lot of new ideas to add. So if you felt like you've been drowning in distractions and are unsure if there's any hope for escaping, then this episode is for you, as always. I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world. And we'll get started right after the music. All right, so here's the key game plan. The book 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. So it's 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. I'll summarize the 2016 advice and then answer the question, what would I change if I was rewriting that chapter today in 2026? All right, so let's get started with the first of the four rules from deep Work, which is work deeply. Now, I open that chapter by discussing my friend David Duane's concept for the Eudaimonium Machine, which was a theoretical plan for an office that was centered on deep work as a primary activity. Now, he described it as a one story rectangular Building where each of the rooms is connected to the other. There's no exterior hallway. You have to go from one room to the next. And he said the first room when you enter the building is the gallery where you're exposed to interesting examples of work that other people have done. You get your creative juices flowing. You feel a little bit competitive. The next room you would proceed into would be the salon. He said there'd be couches and coffees and wi fi. It was a place to talk with people and brood and think and brainstorm. If you continued into the Unimode machine plan, you get to the office space. Now we have cubicles and conference rooms and whiteboards. And you're sort of just like 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, which he described as being six by 10 rooms, protected by soundproof walls. And that's where the real uninterrupted focus would happen. So I tell the story of this sort of theoretical plan for this building to open the chapter. Interesting point, Jesse. I noticed on this reread a mistake that no one has flagged before. What do we got at the beginning of explaining the Eudaimonia machine? I say Duane'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 don't remember which one it was, but I think there was. David's gonna correct me. He listens to the show. I think there was like an antechamber to the deep work chambers where you took a shower, you effaced yourself. Prepare your mind for deep work and. Or there might have been a room outside. 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's noticed that. There we go. I noticed it anyways. Here's 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 Eudaimonia machine. Perhaps not David Duane's exact design, but more generally speaking, a work environment and culture designed to help us extract as much as possible from our brains. Unfortunately, this vision is far from our current reality. We instead find ourselves in a distracting open offices where inboxes cannot be neglected and meetings are incessant. A settings where colleagues would rather you respond quickly to their latest email than produce the best possible results. All right? And then I said, this is the goal for this chapter, is to simulate the effects of David Duane's theoretical Udemody machine in your actual concrete real life. And I go on to give a bunch of advice for how to put in place rituals and routines to make deep work work a protected, regular part of your professional life. All right, so that is what I did in the Work Deeply chapter of Deep Work. What would I change or add in 2026? Well, there's two major ideas that are relevant to exactly this question that have emerged in recent years in my work. And if I was rewriting this chapter today, I would add both of these two ideas. The first of these ideas 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. And here was the idea. You have a hybrid schedule at your office, meaning some days are in the office and some days are remote. Okay? You synchronize it so that the remote days. Most people are doing the remote days on the same day. So that way we have synchronization of when that's happening and then. And this is the key part of the hybrid attention model. And I'm going to read this from my Atlantic article verbatim here. 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. Right? So the idea is deep work days at home, shallow workdays, meetings, conversations, office collaboration at the office. All right, let me go on and give my rationale. Again, I'm 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 commitments. This model should also reduce the total number of incoming tasks you're asked to handle, as the days without email or meetings are days in which your colleagues can't ask you to do more things. With less new work coming in and completed work going out faster, you'll 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. 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's just when you're at home, I don't want to hear from you. When you're in the office, you tell me all that stuff you got done when you're at home, and that's when we can have meetings and emails. People would adjust quickly. You're 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's much easier than having to negotiate each individual norm or habit or system or rule that's distracting people throughout the day. It's one rule that would immediately give you some pretty big deep work related benefits. The second big idea, and this is something I've 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 don't 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've been promoting. Really two different things I did in March so New York Times article I had last week, which we'll talk about in the final segment and in a Chronicle of Higher Education interview I did, I propose a rule in the work environment. Don't 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's clear and informative taxes your brain in a way that gives you a better grasp over the material that you're dealing with and produces much better results. Yes, you can take a lot of strain off your brain by letting ChatGPT 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're 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's known in the literature now as work slopes, which is the 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's 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've seen probably since Slack, and that is a big deal. Because unless AI can take over your job entirely, in which case we're all screwed to have it kind of come in here and make deep work harder and take lop 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. 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's primarily just trying to make deep work feel like it's less of a cognitive strain. There be dragons in the knowledge sector. It's like using pulleys to help you do pull ups in military boot camp. You're missing the forest to try to save a few trees. Let's take a quick break to hear from some of our sponsors. Now I want to tell you about one of my secret weapons in the fight to stay healthy. 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Don't just assume you're very good at concentrating without distraction. It's actually a skill you have to practice. Now I opened this chapter on the story of Adam Marlon, who's an Orthodox Jew with three Ivy League degrees, who in his 20s started practicing Havruta. Sorry, I said the Hebrew wrong. Which is where you study either Torah or Talmud with a partner. So you sit at the same desk and you're going back and forth trying to do interpretations, debate and argue. It's intellectually very intense. I actually write about that later in Deep Work. I call it the whiteboard effect. It's true for like many intellectual fields, when you're 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. Now Marlon reports how he had thought of himself. He had all these Ivy League degrees when he began the practice of hiruta. He thought of himself as a smart person. But when he began working with these people who had been doing this, other members of the shul who had been doing this since for years he said, and I quote, they could run intellectual circles around him. And that's when he realized they're smart in the sense of, like, I know a lot of stuff, and then they're smart in the sense of I can apply my mental horsepower with incredible focus. And that he was missing on that part. So he got really into the study. He would do it every day, 6:30 in the morning, because you would do it before work. And he recognized that over time, 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 here. After a while, Marlon 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 the 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. And 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 of you should think of yourself as taking breaks from focus to schedule some brief moments of distraction as opposed to the opposite way around. And you should do things like memorize a deck of cards, which is a shorthand for, or focus requiring activities that get you used to focusing. All right, what would I change if I was rewriting Rule 2 from deep work in 2026? So over 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 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 an updated version of this chapter. All right, number one, you've heard me say this a lot in the last year or so. When at home, you keep your phone plugged in in the kitchen. If you need to use it, you go there to use it. If you have to check in on text conversations, you go there to use it. If you want to listen to a podcast where you do the dishes, you use wireless earphones. This is really important because two things happen. One, there's 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. Right. Because if the phone is nearby, there's 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're not firing as loud. So you don't have as much of a cloying, sort of distracting pull at your attention. So you'll focus, you're going to focus better. This over time is then going to give 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. Like you'll just be full out watching that movie. It's 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. Right. So there's all sorts of positive benefits. All right, number two, read real books, either in paper or on Kindle, but not on a phone or tablet. So not 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 idea so the information comes in in the reading. The writing of the notes helps cement it in your brain. Reading real books triggers all sorts of complicated processes in your brain. It helps you build up what the researcher Marianne Wolf calls deep reading processes, where you build connections between parts of your brain that aren't normally connected they wouldn't have been in a preliterate age. When these different parts of your brains are all connected together, it unlocks more sophisticated understanding and thoughts. It literally makes you smarter. So 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're 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's absolutely important. Three, I would say find a hobby that rewards focus and punishes distraction. So you just get used to being able to lock on something and get a reward feedback from it. There's 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're done. Because you have to constantly be tracking what's going on and predicting what you're going to do next. Basketball is this field golf, I assume Jesse. Right. Like if you're not locked in, you know, like before your swing, it's.