Ep. 399: Is Deep Work Still Possible in 2026?

Ten 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 a word-of-mouth sensation. It sold now more than 2 million copies in over 45 languages and that number's still going up. Uh Jesse, earlier this month we sold a new language rights for the Sinhala translation. Nice. That's of course the language spoken by the Sinhalese people of Sri Lanka.

There's more linguers 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 ideas 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.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (64 minutes, 12,920 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.