Here’s a thought experiment. Pick the last five people whose professional work you’ve genuinely admired — not celebrities, but people whose output you’ve encountered and thought was unusually good. A writer whose books you couldn’t stop reading. A designer whose work stood out. An engineer who built something that actually solved a real problem. A teacher whose lessons you remembered years later.
Now ask yourself what their working lives probably looked like. Almost certainly, the people you’ve picked spent some serious amount of time alone, with their attention on difficult material, uninterrupted, for sustained periods. They didn’t produce the admired work in fifteen-minute windows between meetings. They didn’t produce it while also monitoring six communication channels. They produced it during the kind of sustained concentration that, in modern professional life, is becoming genuinely rare.
That scarcity — sustained focus becoming an unusual capacity rather than a baseline one — is the core argument of the American computer scientist and writer Cal Newport, whose 2016 book Deep Work has become one of the more influential productivity books of the last decade. Newport’s central claim: the ability to focus without distraction on cognitively demanding tasks is becoming both rarer (because the modern information environment erodes it) and more valuable (because genuinely good work increasingly requires it). People who develop the capacity for sustained focus will have, he argues, a significant competitive advantage in almost any field where quality of thinking matters.
The supporting research
Newport’s argument draws on several empirical traditions, and understanding what they actually show is worth the space.
The attention-research tradition, led by Gloria Mark at the University of California Irvine, has documented what actually happens when people try to work in typical modern office conditions. Mark’s research, conducted largely by observing knowledge workers across a day, consistently finds that people switch tasks far more often than they realise — often every few minutes — and that each switch carries a cost. The cost isn’t just time; it’s what Mark calls attention residue. Part of your mind stays on the previous task after you’ve moved on to the next one, degrading performance on the new task until the residue clears. In environments with constant switching, the residue never clears. You’re always partly on the last thing you were doing.
A related study by the American psychologist Sophie Leroy put specific numbers on this. In her research, participants who switched between tasks under time pressure showed meaningfully worse performance on subsequent tasks compared to participants who had been able to complete the previous task first. The effect was particularly pronounced for cognitively demanding work. Switching is cheap when the work is simple; it’s expensive when the work requires thinking.
Put Mark’s and Leroy’s research together with the multitasking findings we looked at earlier in the series, and a picture emerges. The typical modern workday, structured around frequent interruptions and multiple concurrent channels of communication, is almost precisely optimised to prevent the kind of sustained concentration that good cognitive work requires. This isn’t a moral failing of workers. It’s a structural feature of how modern work environments are built.
What Newport recommends
Newport’s practical recommendations are, intentionally, unglamorous.
Schedule blocks of time — ideally ninety minutes to several hours — in which you work on a single cognitively demanding task, with no access to email, messaging, social media, or other interruption-prone channels. Not occasional blocks; regular ones, several times a week. Treat them as non-negotiable.
Accept that during these blocks, you will feel bored, frustrated, or distracted, particularly in the first few weeks. The urge to check your phone or open a new tab is the ordinary response of a mind trained by years of high-stimulation environments. The urge doesn’t disappear through willpower; it diminishes through practice, as the mind adjusts to longer stretches of single-channel attention.
Build friction into the channels that normally pull you out of focus. Not willpower — friction. Phone in another room. Email closed during deep work blocks. Notifications off by default, on only when you deliberately turn them on. The environment is doing work here that willpower couldn’t sustain.
Protect the capacity to be bored. Boredom, in Newport’s framing, is training for concentration. A mind that reaches for a phone every time boredom arrives loses the ability to sustain attention when the work demands it. A mind that sits with boredom occasionally builds the attention capacity that deep work requires.
None of this is novel advice. What’s novel is Newport’s framing of why it matters. In a labour market where sustained focus is becoming rare, the people who have it will be meaningfully more valuable than people who don’t — not because they’re smarter but because they can actually complete cognitively demanding work that others can’t.
The counter-thread worth hearing
Before accepting Newport’s framework wholesale, a reasonable counter-case.
The psychologist Adam Grant at the Wharton School has argued that Newport’s emphasis on solo deep work underplays the importance of collaborative and iterative thinking. Much of the most valuable work in many fields emerges not from individual sustained focus but from conversation, exchange, and the kind of half-finished thinking that gets sharpened by interaction with other minds. The lone writer producing a masterpiece in isolation is one model of good work. The team whose ideas develop through rapid iteration and honest feedback is another. Grant’s research has documented that certain kinds of creativity, particularly in organisations, depend on the social dynamics that Newport’s framework tends to treat as interference.
This isn’t a fatal objection. Newport himself has acknowledged that deep work is one mode of cognitive work among several, and that some work is genuinely better done collaboratively. The pushback is about the relative weights. Newport frames solo deep work as the default valuable mode, with collaboration as sometimes-useful. Grant would reverse the weights in some contexts, or at minimum complicate the picture.
A related concern: “deep work” discourse has, in some circles, become its own kind of performance. People broadcast their deep-work routines on social media. They competitively describe their elaborate focus rituals. The practice, meant to produce output, has partially become a lifestyle brand. When the signalling of focus becomes more important than the focus itself, the original point has been lost.
So the honest picture is that sustained focus is genuinely valuable and genuinely rare, but it’s not the only way good work gets done. Some work is genuinely iterative and social. Some work is shallow but necessary. Some creative breakthroughs come from exactly the kind of distracted, mind-wandering states that Newport’s framework treats as dysfunctional. The right amount of deep work in a life is probably substantial but not total.
The older tradition
The contemplative traditions that have emphasised sustained attention have been doing so for much longer than Newport has. The Zen Buddhist tradition, the various Christian monastic orders, the Hindu yoga traditions, the Sufi mystics — all of these built elaborate practices for training sustained attention as a spiritual discipline, not as a productivity technique. What they recognised, millennia before the psychology labs confirmed it, was that attention is a faculty that can be trained, that most ordinary human attention is fragmented and reactive, and that sustained single-pointed focus is a specific cognitive skill that rewards cultivation.
This matters because it suggests that the modern attention crisis isn’t entirely new. Humans have always needed to train attention deliberately to maintain it against distraction. What’s new is that the modern information environment has made the baseline ambient attention much worse than it was in earlier periods, so more deliberate training is required to reach the same level of concentration.
The contemplative traditions also offer something the productivity literature usually misses — a sense of what attention is actually for, beyond output. Sustained attention to difficult material, they suggest, isn’t just a means to produce better work. It’s a way of being more fully present in a life, and it’s part of what makes a life feel like it was lived rather than skimmed. This is a richer framing than the purely economic one Newport sometimes uses.
What to actually build
For a student approaching Year 12 — or an adult trying to do genuinely valuable work in any field — the practical implications are reasonably concrete.
Schedule deep work before you need it. If you wait until an important deadline to find out whether you can sustain concentration, you’ll discover that you can’t, and the capacity can’t be built in a week. It’s built through months of regular practice. Start now, while the stakes are low.
Start with shorter blocks and build up. Ninety minutes of sustained focus is harder than most students can do in their first attempt. Forty-five minutes, if done cleanly, is genuine progress. Start where you can actually sustain it, not where you’d like to be.
Protect the conditions. The single biggest factor in whether deep-work blocks actually happen is whether the environment supports them. Phone in another room. Notifications off. A specific physical space used for this purpose. The work is hard enough without making it harder by keeping the normal distractions available.
Don’t make the ritual more important than the work. The point is to do the work. If the practice of deep work becomes a performance of deep work — elaborate routines, public accountability, obsessive tracking — you’ve probably lost the thread. Simpler is usually better.
Mix deep work with other modes. The student who does two hours of concentrated study followed by a real conversation with a friend, followed by some physical movement, followed by a bit of shallow task work, is probably doing better than either the student who does eight hours of attempted deep work (mostly poorly) or the student who never attempts any. The mix matters.
The question that remains
The deep thing Newport’s framework, at its best, points at is that attention is not an infinite resource and the modern environment systematically depletes it. You can either notice this and deliberately build the counter-capacity, or you can let the environment set the ceiling on the quality of thinking you’ll be able to do. The ceiling isn’t fixed — it moves upward with practice, downward with neglect — but it’s real, and it substantially determines what kind of work you’re capable of producing.
In a Year 12 where the difference between students is often not raw ability but the depth at which each of them is capable of actually engaging with material, the practice of sustained focus is among the most leverage-heavy investments you can make. Not because you need to become a monk. Because the capacity to think well about one thing for an hour is rare, and the kind of work it produces is the kind of work that matters.
The question worth carrying, next time you find yourself unable to focus on something important:
Is the inability to focus a fact about the task — or a fact about the capacity you’ve let erode, in small amounts, across the last year?
Key research referenced: Cal Newport, Deep Work (2016); Gloria Mark’s research on attention and task-switching (including Multitasking in the Digital Age, 2015); Sophie Leroy’s research on attention residue; Adam Grant’s counter-arguments on the value of collaboration; contemplative traditions on attention training.