Deep Work

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

Author: Cal Newport Year: 2016 Reading time of this summary: about 45 minutes

A psychiatrist locks the door

In 1922, on the northern banks of Lake Zurich, the psychiatrist Carl Jung climbed a wooded hillside in the Swiss canton of St. Gallen and began stacking stones for a tower. He called it Bollingen. There was no electricity. Light came from oil lamps. Heat came from a stone fireplace. After breakfast each morning, Jung would walk into a small private room, lock the door behind him, and write for two undisturbed hours. "In my retiring room I am by myself," he said of the space. "I keep the key with me all the time; no one else is allowed in there except with my permission." Afternoons were for meditation and long walks through the surrounding countryside. By ten in the evening he was in bed.

This was not a vacation house. In 1921 Jung had published *Psychological Types*, a book that put a clear, public crack between his thinking and Sigmund Freud's. Disagreeing with Freud in the 1920s was a bold professional move. To survive the fight he had picked, Jung needed a steady output of careful, original work. His Zurich practice paid the bills and kept him sharp on patients, but it also fragmented his attention. The lakeside retreat was the opposite of a break. It was the engine. The world owes Jung's commitment to analytical psychology, in part, to a stone room with no electricity and a key that stayed in his pocket.

Cal Newport opens *Deep Work* with this image because it is exactly the kind of behavior our modern professional life finds unreasonable. A successful working psychiatrist disappears into the woods for days at a stretch to read and write in silence. His patients wait. His correspondence waits. He chooses depth over availability, and the choice changes the shape of twentieth-century psychology.