For a while now, I have been wondering how to strike the right balance between shallow work like reading emails, answering instant messages, or following up with team members, and deep work like defining the roadmap for the next year, researching technical challenges, or writing technical design documents.

I read “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World” by Cal Newport about this challenge and how to approach it. Bruce Wang, director of engineering of API systems at Netflix, recommended it during his talk “The Pursuit of Impact for Engineering Teams” at the Elevate Winter Summit 2020 hosted by Plato.

Here is what I learned from the book:

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