My notes from Deep Work

by Cal Newport

4DX Framework

Division between what and how is crucial but is overlooked in the professional world. It’s often straightforward to identify a strategy needed to achieve a goal, but what trips up companies is figuring out ho two execute the strategy once identified.

Four disciplines of the 4DX framework:

1. Focus on the wildly important

The more you try to do, the less you can actually accomplish.

Execution should be aimed at a small number of wildly important goals.

Identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with you deep work hours.

Have a specific goal that would return tangible and substantial professional benefits will generate a steadier stream of enthusiasm.

2. Act on the bad measures

Once you’ve identified a wildly important goal, you need to measure your success.

Lag measures describe the thing you are trying to improve (customer satisfaction scores.) Lag measures come too late to change your behavior, the performance that drove them is already in the past.

Lead measures - measure the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures. This is the number you can directly increase. As you underrate this number, your lad measures will likely eventually improve as well.

Lead measures turn your attention to improving the behaviors you directly control in the near future what will then have a positive impact on your long term goals.

For an individual focused on deep work, it’s easy to identify relevant lead measure: time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal.

3. Keep a compelling scoreboard

Public place to record and tract lead measures. Reinforcing source of motivation. The individual’s scoreboard should be a physical artefact in the workspace that displays the individual’s current deep work hour count.

4. Create a cadence of accountability

Regular and frequent meetings of any team that owns a wildly important goal.

Confront their scoreboard, commit to specific actions to help improve the score before the next meeting, and describe what happened with the commitments they made at the last meeting. This can be only a few minutes but must be regular.

For an individual, this doesn’t exempt you from the need of regular accountability. Even when you retreat to a spoke to think deeply, when it’s reasonable to leverage the whiteboard effect do so.

Consider the use of collaboration when appropriate, as it can push your results to a new level.

Division between what and how is crucial but is overlooked in the professional world. It’s often straightforward to identify a strategy needed to achieve a goal, but what trips up companies is figuring out ho two execute the strategy once identified.

Four disciplines of the 4DX framework:

1. Focus on the wildly important

The more you try to do, the less you can actually accomplish.

Execution should be aimed at a small number of wildly important goals.

Identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with you deep work hours.

Have a specific goal that would return tangible and substantial professional benefits will generate a steadier stream of enthusiasm.

2. Act on the bad measures

Once you’ve identified a wildly important goal, you need to measure your success.

Lag measures describe the thing you are trying to improve (customer satisfaction scores.) Lag measures come too late to change your behavior, the performance that drove them is already in the past.

Lead measures - measure the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures. This is the number you can directly increase. As you underrate this number, your lad measures will likely eventually improve as well.

Lead measures turn your attention to improving the behaviors you directly control in the near future what will then have a positive impact on your long term goals.

For an individual focused on deep work, it’s easy to identify relevant lead measure: time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal.

3. Keep a compelling scoreboard

Public place to record and tract lead measures. Reinforcing source of motivation. The individual’s scoreboard should be a physical artefact in the workspace that displays the individual’s current deep work hour count.

4. Create a cadence of accountability

Regular and frequent meetings of any team that owns a wildly important goal.

Confront their scoreboard, commit to specific actions to help improve the score before the next meeting, and describe what happened with the commitments they made at the last meeting. This can be only a few minutes but must be regular.

For an individual, this doesn’t exempt you from the need of regular accountability.