Deep Work Test

Readiness, not capacity

Cal Newport's argument in Deep Work is that concentrated, undistractable cognition has become both rarer and more valuable at the same time. The readiness check measures the three prerequisites rather than any mystical ability to concentrate: your environment (where you work and what it does to your attention), your rituals (how reliably you can start), and your attention baseline (what state your focus is in before you begin).

Why eight items are enough

Deep work fails for boring reasons — a phone on the desk, no defined start time, a baseline wrecked by a morning of switching. The check reads those failure points directly instead of inferring an abstract capacity score. Low readiness with high capacity is the most common profile: the ability exists, the setup never lets it engage.

What to do with a low score

Fix in order: environment first (cheapest, fastest), rituals second (takes two weeks to set), baseline last (the slowest to move, and the one that recovers with sleep and boredom tolerance). The eight-item read tells you which layer to start on.