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For those who don't know who Cal Newport is, here's a quick intro. Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University. He's the author of multiple high school and college themed success books. I've read most of them, and I highly recommend each one.

Newport also publishes articles regularly on his popular blog Study Hacks: Decoding Patterns of Success. I stumbled across Study Hacks several years ago when I was in undergrad, and I found his advice tremendously helpful. 

Before you start thinking I'm a Study Hacks fanboy, let me just say that there's some advice Newport teaches on his blog that I don't agree with. But today's not the day to talk about this. Today's topic is Newport's latest book Deep Work—and I have to say, I'm impressed.

Deep work is simply "the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task," according to the inside cover. In and of itself it's far from a novel concept, but Newport's take on it is something special. 

If you look at the reviews on Amazon for Deep Work before you read it, it's easy to go into it thinking it's literally going to be 200 some pages of Newport preaching at you to quit social media. Yes—this is part of the book. But there's so much more here that I'm honestly not sure why some readers are so focused on this aspect.

Before I get into the positive aspects of this book, let me come right out and talk about two gripes I had. For one thing, Newport uses J.K. Rowling as an example.

I'm a Harry Potter fan (Pottermore house Ravenclaw), so I thought this was cool. My gripe is that he says Rowling "was famously absent from social media" while she was writing the Harry Potter series.

First of all, the last Harry Potter book was released in 2007. Facebook had only been out for about 3 years at that point. Likewise, Twitter was hardly a year old. When I think back to 07', I remember Myspace being a big deal. But I don't remember many people using Facebook— let alone Twitter. 

I'm sure some people reading this will disagree. That's fine. I'm sure there are lots of facts out there showing that I'm wrong. I really don't care though. Speaking from my own experience, Facebook and Twitter just weren't that big of a deal yet to the average person— at least not at my school. Maybe this was why she wasn't very active on social media then...

Now in all fairness, Newport does cite a tweet Rowling wrote basically saying that her writing was a bigger priority to her than tweeting. This was the only tweet she wrote for about a year and a half starting in 2009.

But again, social media wasn't nearly as big of a deal as it is now. Rowling tweets all the time now, and she's still writing and working on projects. For these reasons, I don't think Rowling was the best example Newport could have used to illustrate his deep work philosophy. 

After using Rowling as an example, Newport dedicates a decent number of pages to holding up Nate Silver as the next example of his deep work philosophy.

Sure, Silver has made some big predictions that have turned out to be right. But he's flopped badly on other major political and sports predictions. Like Rowling, I think using Silver works against Newport's arguments for deep work rather than for them.

There's room for debate about both Rowling and Silver. My opinion's clear though. Both of these gripes are pretty trivial. But how much fun would reading this really be for you though if I didn't tell you what I really thought? 

What impressed me the most about the rest of the book was how much actionable advice Newport packed in. My regular Test Prep Champions readers already know I've written multiple articles on how to maximize focus. This has been a research area of mine for quite a while, yet I still picked up a solid number of new tactics here. I'm not going to spoil any of them, so read the book and you'll see what I mean!