Deep Work, along with David Allen’s Getting Things Done, are perhaps the only two books I care about on productivity. There’s this niche market for people who write about being productive and making awfully masochistic-looking morning routines, but I’ve done my best to steer away from reading that stuff.

Deep Work was a pleasantly-written book on the value of blocking off large chunks of time to do one important thing—the eponymous “deep work.” I have a gut sense that this is correct, since I find it easier to focus on a single thing once I’ve built up a sort of mental momentum. Chemistry problems are easier to solve once I’m already thinking about chemistry. Stereocenters pop out, I remember stereoelectronic effects better, and I can sometimes even see the disconnections in a molecule more clearly when I’m primed for thinking about synthesis. Something similar happens when I’ve stared at math problems long enough: I can pick up a pen, write out some topological definitions, and then follow them through to the end of a proof.

Not only does Newport’s writing ring true, it also avoids much of the tired tropes of the productivity genre: there’s no abstract “ideal routine” to aspire to. Instead, Newport provides actionable advice: set aside 3-4 hours in a day to try to focus on completing a single important task, like writing a paper or reading a chapter of a textbook. He also suggests tracking the number of hours spent focused on this one thing. As someone who likes tracking metrics, I think this is very motivating.

Over the past few weeks, I started to set aside about two hours in the morning to go into the lab and run experiments and churn out copy for proposals and fellowship applications. It definitely feels like I am doing more things, but I’ll have to keep track of what I get done—gotta have some kind of data for the testable hypothesis!