I remember reading parts of this book a few years back. My takeaway from the book was to have dedicated time allocated to get a demanding task done or make good progress. I remember being very excited to try out this way of working, and I did manage to spend the next few weeks having dedicated chunks of time to make progress on the tasks in my list.
A few weeks later, though, I was back to my old habits. This email just got in, let me quickly reply and jump back to my task: a new slack message, a new WhatsApp message. Deep work took a backseat, and I did not think much about it until today.
A colleague at work spoke about the importance of deep work and with a few examples demonstrated how tasks take twice or three times as much to complete if you keep context switching. He spoke about this in terms of developers assigned tasks, but the same could hold for anyone trying to do any job. Context switching is not good. I am going to try deep work for the next month or two and report back.
