Regaining Focus With a Deep Reading Practice

• Jul 21st, 2026
• by Sascha

I don’t understand why headlines like The Film Students Who Can No Longer Sit Through Films aren’t inciting moral panics. Our ability to focus is under attack. We are losing our minds.

But it is possible to move right when everybody is turning left. (No politics here. The politicization of everything is yet another symptom of our failing minds. So, if you thought politics here, consider this another symptom of an underlying problem.)

Since I am getting more and more confident in the idea that our minds train and detrain similarly to our bodies, I think the solution to the problem is two-fold:

1. Remove harmful stimuli. Social Media, short-form content, multitasking, etc. (In health and fitness: Fast food, prolonged sitting, etc.) The more you can get rid of, the better your mind will work. Living in a harmful information environment hurts your mind.
2. Introduce beneficial stimuli. Deep work, long-thinking (yes, both are terms by Cal Newport), walks without any input or agenda, etc. (In health and fitness: Strength and endurance training, walks in nature, etc.)

There is one particular practice that provides a very high return on investment: Daily deep reading.

Deep reading means:

1. Read in a distraction-free environment. Or: Read at a place that you want to condition on deep focus. I read at my desk, which I typically don’t do. My idea is to “load” my desk with minutes of focus. It is a karmic idea: Focus is good karma, scatter-brain is bad karma. The better the karma of my desk, the better I feel and the better I work.
2. Read a physical book. A book will force you to focus on one topic and line of thought for a longer period of time. Physical books will keep you away from the screen.
3. Highlight with a pencil. The pencil is a signal to your mind that you don’t read for consumption, but prepare the book for processing.
4. Write spontaneous ideas on paper sheets. Paper sheets can be put into the book, and since you are not on the go, you don’t need a more sturdy writing solution. The benefit of loose paper is that you can put it in the book. The book with the paper sheets inserted becomes a unified entity. Physical paper will protect you from digital distraction.
5. Create a processing strategy. For this practice, I like to fold an A4 paper in half. The structure is the standard structure outlined in this article here. Start with a big paper sheet and then adapt the size to your needs. I opted for A4 because it is a standard size and readily available.
6. Read for an extended period of time. Since we are training our minds for deep and prolonged focus, we should push ourselves, but keep the practice sustainable.
7. Work with a timer. Depth will be a function of duration.
8. Keep the practice sustainable. Stimulate, don’t annihilate. If you could push yourself to sustain deep reading for an hour, go for 50 minutes. The quality of the experience is highly dependent on the most intense emotion and the emotional state in the end. This is called the peak-end rule. End each session with a positively stimulated state of mind, so you associate deep reading positively.
9. Prefer early morning sessions. A morning practice has two major benefits: first, it signals to yourself that you are serious. My mornings start at 4 am. After I get myself ready, I do 15–20 minutes of mobility and stability training and then start my deep reading practice. My subconscious learns from observing me: Wow, this guy is serious about his stuff. A story about one’s identity forms and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that you can choose for yourself. Second, if you make it, it kills one of the most mind-damaging habits of our age: Reaching for an easy reward. Morning coffee, cereals (often with sugar), and a smartphone. It creates a vicious downward spiral: You get a quick kick, you experience withdrawal, and your mind becomes occupied with the next quick kick. If you get your dopamine first, you make everything that follows harder. Doing something hard(ish) first in the morning will do the opposite. Everything afterward will feel easier.

What are the benefits of such a practice?

1. Focus. Obviously, we will train our minds to sustain a deep focus.
2. Thinking. Deep reading is not a monolithic activity. Each book will ask you to apply various thinking skills. Some books demand a lot of critical thinking, while others will invite you to build models.
3. Mental health. A scattered mind will produce a scattered emotional state. This scatteredness will increase anxiety, which is basically the purest of the negative emotional states.

Choose books worth processing. Each book poses a unique set of challenges when you read it deeply.

Deep Reading and the Zettelkasten Method

Luhmann wrote:

If you have to write anyway, it is pragmatic to exploit this activity by creating a system of notes that can act as a competent communication partner. Source

Active reading and note-taking are not entirely separate activities. They blend into each other. The Barbell Method of Reading is one way to organize the reading process so it builds a bridge from your reading practice to working with the Zettelkasten Method.

The core principle of implementing the Zettelkasten Method is to restructure what you are doing anyway (or should do) in such a way that you simultaneously build a Zettelkasten to unlock these sweet compounding gains.

If you implement a deep reading practice into your overall schedule, you will do an awesome job of preparing the book for later processing. Keep in mind that the main benefit is not to create notes for later retrieval. This is a nice byproduct. The main benefit is a trained mind and a thinking environment that improves over time and supports your thinking better and better.

Cal Newport recently created a podcast in which he presented a cognitive fitness program with the following five components:

1. Daily reading
2. Writing
3. Thinking walks
4. Remove the phone
5. Learn a hard skill

Processing what you read by creating and integrating notes into your Zettelkasten is a dedicated writing practice. However, it is way more specific than Cal Newport’s advice. There is a specific cognitive benefit to writing in your Zettelkasten. You don’t write to communicate. You write to think. If you practice atomic note-taking, you essentially train yourself to get to the essence of ideas and connect them. If these are not essential practices of a deep thinker, I don’t know what qualifies.

What’s the verdict then? Deep reading is a commitment to fight back against the full-on attack on our minds. What you can do is build a counterforce. A daily practice that reconstructs what is being dismantled. Deep reading does this with unusual efficiency because it trains the very faculty that everything else is trying to steal: the ability to stay with a single thing long enough to actually think.

Add the Zettelkasten, and you turn a training practice into a compounding asset. Build a thinking environment that gets more useful the longer you work with it. Two things are happening at once: a mind that can focus, and a system that rewards focus with accumulated insight.

The world is not going to slow down. The feeds will not run out of content. The engineers optimizing for your attention are not going to stop. Waiting for the environment to change is not a strategy. It is surrender by another name.

PS: I think the term “deep reading” only makes sense as long as our minds are in such a bad state. I think deep reading actually is just reading with a pen, deep work is just focusing, and long thinking is just thinking. I catch two birds with one stone here: Highlight the need for once ordinary practices and their temporary rarity, and give Cal Newport a hat tip until he starts his Zettelkasten journey.

Appendix I: What to Read

Beginner’s list:

The list with a bit more oomph:

Appendix II: My Morning Routine

This is my full morning routine for a couple of weeks now:

• 0400 Wake Up
• Brush teeth, go to the toilet, take 1 g L-Tyrosine, 20 minutes of full body mobility, 3–5 minutes of cold showering.
• Deep Reading until 0630
• A short, slow run (20–25 minutes)

I am observing quite some improvements in my focus and overall mood. The improvements took 2 weeks to become noticeable. My theory is that there is a positive feedback loop that works like that:

First, my mind resisted the low-stimulus environment, especially in the morning. I tried reading first thing in the morning some time ago and didn’t like it. In hindsight, I should’ve stuck with the reading.

Then I noticed I had developed an interesting mental immune reaction to certain types of content. Fast cuts became unpleasant. To me, this is a big deal because I actually like to be stimulated. Left with just my natural impulses and inclinations, I’d overeat on fast food and watch fantasy world-building memes on double speed on YouTube all day.

But I also preferred not to listen to a podcast, even when I did the weekly grocery shopping, when no very interesting episode was available. Before, I listened to the best episode in my feed, even though it wasn’t exciting.

There seems to be a noticeable improvement in my mood and emotional state as well. The practice has an after-glow effect.

As you may have noticed, I didn’t provide much empirical evidence for the various claims I made throughout the article. This is what I will do over the next weeks and months. I shifted my focus from the mechanics of the Zettelkasten Method to the material it targets: The ideas and the practice of working with ideas. So, expect this shift to be reflected in the articles here, too.