Book I’m reading – Deep Work by Cal Newport

I’d read this book around 4 years ago but came back to it this week. I listen to audiobooks rather than read – I get them in on my almost daily walks around Malahide castle here in Dublin.

The book makes the argument that the most valuable type of work is deep work – the type where you lock yourself in a room or cut yourself off and actually WORK on something. 

For Sub box founders like us, this could be writing a sales email, building a website, or landing page or funnel, creating new ads, writing a business plan, working out projections etc.

Essentially doing work of Value that has a result at the end. This is the opposite of shallow work which usually involves the exchange of information but no value created at the end of it. An example would be meetings, emails, instant messaging and browsing the internet.

Oftentimes this is not just blindly procrastinating and scrolling Facebook, because if I fail to schedule deep work blocks I can sometimes find myself reactive all day. Replying to our team members, checking email 5x per hour (waiting to see something that needs to be replied to instead of doing Deep work).

So I decided to get back into this book because one of my goals for 2023 is to become more productive, with at least 4 hours of deep work per day on value producing activities.


My other goals are:

• Start getting up earlier to get more hours in the day
• Explore how to sell our Sub Box business
• Get 100 subscribers on Formify by March 31st
• At least 4 hours deep work per day
• Write 60 Mins per day
• Start a podcast
• Post a video on YouTube at least 1x per week
• Grow my social following to 5000 followers

In general I want to try and optimise and improve in the year to come. I’m not one for throwing out everything and starting afresh every January because usually you create unsustainable habits that are forgotten by Feb 1st.

I already have a lot of good habits like working out in the morning before work, getting out for a walk most days, eating healthy, sleeping well and drinking less.

So back to deep work, make sure the work you are doing is valuable – and my advice would be to add this – do work that gets you growth and subscribers. Sometimes you can spend a full week doing a ton of work and then look at your subscriber count and it hasn’t moved an inch. Working hard on the right things is hard enough, working hard on the wrong things is wasting your life.