The New Self-Help

The Secret to Hyper Productivity in 3 to 4 Hours a Day

Cal Newport’s ‘Deep Work’ is a modern self-help classic

This story is part of The New Self-Help: 21 Books for a Better You in the 21st Century.

The humorist Mark Twain wrote the bulk of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer during a single summer vacation in the rolling hills of New York’s Southern Tier. While his extended family lolled around on his sister-in-law’s bucolic farm estate, Twain spent his days bunkered in a repurposed, octagonal shed with a panoramic view of the Chemung River Valley. There, the prolific author purportedly wrote most or all of three book-length travel narratives, two stage plays, dozens of essays and short stories, and four novels. Legend has it that Twain would become so engrossed in his work that, at dinnertime, his family needed to blow a horn to get his attention.

In his already classic book Deep Work, Cal Newport highlights Twain and several other figures, across disciplines, whose world-changing intellectual output came through focused, near-monastic production. Newport describes deep work as “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capacities to their limit.”