10 years ago, I published a book titled Deep Work.

It argued that the ability to focus without distraction, the activity that I call deep work,

was becoming increasingly valuable at exactly the same time that it was becoming increasingly rare

due to distracting digital technologies like email and social media.

Now, the conclusion of my book is that this presents a huge opportunity.

If you are one of the few individuals or organizations to prioritize depth, you will enjoy a big competitive advantage.

Now, here's the thing.

This book hit a nerve, became a bit of a word of mouth sensation. It sold now more than 2 million copies in over 45 languages. And that number still going up. Jesse, earlier this month, we sold a new language rights for the Sinhala translation. Nice. That's a course to language spoken by the Sinhalese people of Sri Lanka. There's more languages out there than you might guess.

Anyways, this is all great.

But this book is now a decade old, which motivates a natural follow-up question.

Do its idea still hold in 2026?

This is what we're going to explore today.

So I brought my first edition copy of the book with me. I'm going to crack it open. We're going to reread its core ideas. I'm going to point out what remains true and what requires updates. Spoiler alert, I have a lot of new ideas to add. So if you felt like you've been drowning in distractions and are

unsure if there's any hope for escaping, then this episode is for you. As always, I'm Cal Newport,

and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world. And we'll get started right after the music.

All right, so here's the game plan.

The book Deep Work is divided into two parts.

The first part makes my case for why depth is valuable.

And the second part offers four

rules for getting better at depth in your professional life. So it's the second part that we are

going to revisit. I want to go through each of those four rules from the original book one by one.

I'll summarize the 2016 advice and then answer the question, what would I change if I was rewriting that chapter

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