This is the first I've heard the term "deep work". Is this a more common term or something coined recently?
http://calnewport.com/blog/2012/11/21/knowledge-workers-are-...
I think of it like getting in the zone with coding where you get deeply valuable work done without distractions.
Remember how in the late '90s, everything was e-/i-/cyber, even things that were only tangentially related to computers or networking? It feels like that.
Today, I've seen posts and ads for "deep work", "deep analytics", "deep thinking", (not using anything recognizable as deep learning), and a few other things. Most of these are more-or-less idiomatic, but I think they would have been called something else 5 or 10 years ago.
I mean, it's not even tangentially related other than that the author happens to be a computer science professor (who works on distributed systems, not AI).
People who needed to do serious work went to monasteries or lived in caves.
The biggest distraction for many people is other people. Solitude is the way to get real work done.
There's a lot of interesting stuff here: http://www.hermitary.com/articles/