Deep Work
Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on cognitively demanding tasks. It’s a true superpower of the 21st century, increasingly rare and valuable in a world of work full of shallow busyness and distraction.
Cal Newport in “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World” introduces the idea, goes on to prove that deep work is valuable, rare and meaningful, and offers four rules that help bring more depth into your work.
Introduction
Story: Carl Jung and "the Tower", Bill Gates' "Think Weeks"
Deep Work: Professional Activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.
Deep Work is increasingly scarce. Most modern knowledge workers are forgetting the value of going deep. The reason is network tools (email, SMS, social media networks, infotainment sites) - fragment our attention into slivers. And fragmented attention cannot accommodate deep work.
Shallow Work: non cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed when distracted. These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate. Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.
Deep Work is increasingly valuable. Our work culture's shift toward the shallow (whether you think it's philosophically good or bad) is exposing a massive economic and personal opportunity for the few who recognize the potential of resisting this trend and prioritizing the depth.
Two reasons for deep work value:
Capacity to learn. We have an information economy that's dependent on complex systems that change rapidly. To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things.
Reachable audience. If you can create something useful, its reachable audience is essentially limitless - which greatly magnifies your reward. To succeed, you need to produce the absolute best stuff you're capable of producing - a task that requires depth.
Deep work is the Superpower of the 21st century.
The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.
Part 1: The Idea
Chapter 1: Deep Work is Valuable
Examples: Nate Silver, David Heinemeier Hansson, John Doerr
Book: Race Against the Machine. The rise in technology is transforming our labor market in unexpected ways. Great Restructuring: our technologies are racing ahead but many of our skills and organizations are lagging behind.
Three groups will benefit from the Great Restructuring. The Great Restructuring is not driving down all jobs but instead dividing them. Though an increasing number of people will lose in this new economy as their skill becomes automatable or easily outsourced, there are others who will not only survive but thrive - becoming more valued (and therefore more rewarded) than before. Three groups will reap the benefits of the Intelligent Machine Age.
The High-High Skilled Workers: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines.
The Superstars: those who are the best at what they do. Once the talent market becomes universally accessible, those at the peak of the market will thrive while the rest will suffer. Talent is not a commodity you can buy in bulk and combine to reach the needed levels. There's a premium to being the best.
The Owners: Those with capital to invest in the new technologies that are driving the Great Restructuring.
Two core abilities for thriving in a new economy:
The ability to quickly master hard things
to learn requires intense concentration
"Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converging rays of attention; let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea". (Antonin-Dalmace Sertillange, "The Intellectual Life")
The notion of deliberate practice (K. Anders Ericsson). It requires the following two components:
(1) your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you're trying to improve or an idea you're trying to master. Deliberate practice cannot exist alongside distraction and requires uninterrupted concentration.
(2) you receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep you attention exactly where it's most productive
To learn hard things quickly, you must focus without distraction. To learn is an act of deep work.
The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.
example: Adam Grant. One idea central to his productivity: batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches. He does it at multiple levels: batches his teaching into one semester, batches his attention on a smaller time scale between periods of openness to communication and periods of strict isolation.
High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)
The problem of multitasking is the attention residue (introduced by Prof Sophie Leroy): when you switch from Task A to Task B, your attention doesn't immediately follow - a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task. People experiencing the attention residue are likely to perform worse on their next task.
To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. The type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work.
The two abilities depend on your ability to perform deep work.
There is however a group of individuals who thrive without depth.
One example is Jack Dorsey.
High-level executives in large companies are part of this category because the lifestyle is unavoidably distracted. The necessity of distraction is specific to their particular jobs.
To ask a CEO to spend four hours thinking deeply about a single problem is a waste of what makes him or her valuable. But you cannot extrapolate the approach of these executives to other jobs.
Don't be too hasty to label your job as necessarily non-deep: just because your current habits make deep work difficult doesn't mean that this lack of depth is fundamental to doing your job well.
Chapter 2: Deep Work is Rare
Three recent business trends:
the open office concept to pursue serendipitous collaboration
the rise of instant messaging & culture of connectivity for rapid communication
the push for content producers of all types to maintain a social media presence
There are flip sides to these three trends as they actually decrease one's ability to go deep, as they do so at the cost of "massive distraction"
2012 experiment by Tom Cochran quantifying the time spent on handling emails: how much time we spent on moving around information instead of focusing on specialized tasks we were hired to perform?
Even though we accept that distraction has costs and depth has value, these impacts are difficult to measure.
Thomas Piketty: it is objectively difficult to measure individual contributions to a firm's output".
The Principle of Least Resistance: in a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors on the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviors that are easiest at the moment. Deep work is hard, and shallow work is easier.
Cultures of connectivity persist because it's easier:
getting a quick response makes your life easier
it creates an environment where it becomes acceptable to run your day out of your inbox
Busyness as a proxy for productivity: in the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.
The Cult of the Internet. Ideas of Neil Postman from the early 1990s on the culture of technopoly: We're no longer discussing the trade-offs surrounding the new technologies. If it's high-tech and the Internet, we begin to instead assume, then it's good - regardless of its impact on our ability to produce valuable things. Technopoly makes the alternatives to itself invisible and therefore irrelevant.
Deep work is a a severe disadvantage in a technopoly because it builds on values like quality, craftsmanship, and mastery that are decidedly old-fashioned and non-technological. Even worse, deep work often requires rejection of much of what is new and high-tech and therefore struggles to compete against tweets, likes and other behaviors that we're now taught are necessary for no other reasons than that they exist.
Assuming these trends continue, depth will become increasingly rare and therefore, increasingly valuable.
Chapter 3: Deep Work is Meaningful
Story of a blacksmith.
The connection between deep work and a good life is familiar and widely accepted when considering the world of craftsmen.
For craftsmen doing manual work, professional challenges are easy to define but difficult to execute. Knowledge work does not have this clarity of definition.
In addition, there are many voices attempting to convince knowledge workers to spend more time engaged in shallow activities.
However, deep work can generate as much satisfaction in an information economy as it so clearly does in a craft economy.
There are three lines of argument for depth:
A neurological argument for depth
Ideas of Winifred Gallagher, "Rapt"
we construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to. So imagine the type of mental world when you dedicate significant time to deep endeavors - with the sense of gravity and importance.
When you lose focus, your mind tends to fix on what could be wrong with your life instead of what's right.
A Psychological Argument for depth
The experience sampling method by Csikszentmihalyi and Larson discovered the state of "flow": "the best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." The concept was groundbreaking then because most people assumed that relaxation equals happiness. Human beings are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.
Deep work is an activity well suited to generate a flow state. To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction.
A philosophical argument for depth
Dreyfus and Kelly, "All Things Shining", exploring the evolutions of the notions of sacredness and meaning. The role of Descartes's skepticism, and the radical belief that the individual seeking certainty trumped a God or king bestowing truth. The resulting Enlightenment and its embrace of an autonomous individual brought human rights, however, it stripped the world of the order and sacredness essential to creating meaning. To recreate the sacredness we seem to have lost, Dreyfus and Kelly go back to the idea of craftsmanship.
"The task of a craftsman is not to generate meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill of discerning the meanings that are already there.
Any pursuit that supports high levels of skill can also generate a sense of sacredness.
"We who cut stones must always be envisioning cathedrals" - you can cultivate a craftsmanship approach almost in any job. And cultivating craftsmanship is necessarily a deep task and requires a commitment to deep work.
A deep life is a good life, any way you look at it.
Part 2: The Rules
Rule #1: Work Deeply
In an ideal world, we would all have access to a work environment and culture designed to help us extract as much value as possible from our brains.
But isn't it enough to just start doing more deep work, once you accept that it's valuable? Do we need anything special to remember to concentrate more often?
When it comes to replacing distraction with focus, matters are not so simple.
People fight desires all day long: desire is a norm, no an exception. The most common desires: eating, sleeping, sex, but also ... taking a break from hard work. We have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as we use it.
The key to developing a deep work habit is to add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.
Decide on Your Depth Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling
The Monastic philosophy
Practitioners of this philosophy tend to have a well-defined and highly valued professional goal that they're pursuing, and the bulk of their professional success comes from doing this one thing exceptionally well.
When your contribution to the information economy is not so well-defined, this philosophy can make you defensive.
The pool of individuals for whom the monastic philosophy applies is limited. Examples: Donald Knuth, Neal Stephenson
The Bimodal philosophy
You divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else. On a scale of a week, you may dedicate several days to depth, the rest - to the open time; on the scale of a year, you can dedicate one season to contain your deep stretches (summer or sabbatical)
The minimum unit of time for deep work tends to be at least one full day.
This philosophy can work for people who cannot succeed in the absence of substantial commitments to non-deep pursuits.
Examples: Carl Jung, Adam Grant.
The Rhythmic Philosophy
This philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit. The rhythm removes the need to invest energy in deciding if and when you're going to go deep.
Implementation: chain method to maintain visual indicators of the work progress; or simply reserving the same hours of the day for deep work. Example: scheduling 90-minutes sessions every morning for deep work.
This approach works better with the reality of human nature.
The decision between rhythmic and bimodal comes down to self-control in such scheduling matters and the reality of the jobs.
The Journalistic Philosophy
You fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule. To do this, you need the ability to rapidly switch your mind from shallow to deep mode, and it doesn't come naturally. It also requires a sense of confidence in your abilities: a conviction that what you're doing is important and will succeed.
Example: Walter Isaacson, Cal Newport himself
Ritualize
Train yourself to be organized
David Brooks: Great creative minds think like artists but work like accountants
To make the most of your deep work sessions, build rituals of the same level of strictness and idiosyncrasy as the important thinkers did before you. The rituals minimize the friction of the transition to depth.
The general question a ritual must address:
Where you'll work and for how long
How you'll work when you start to work
How you'll support your work (good cup of coffee, access to healthy food, etc)
Make Grand Gestures
J.K. Rowling checked into a luxury hotel in front of the Edinburgh Castle to finish Deathly Hallows.
Bill Gates's Think Weeks in a cabin
Alan Lightman's retreats to a tiny island in Maine
Peter Shankman's booking business class round trip to Tokyo to finish his book
Don't Work Alone
The relationship between deep work and collaboration is tricky, however, properly leveraging collaboration can increase the quality of deep work in your professional life.
How to mix serendipitous creativity and deep work? Hub-and-spoke architecture that boosts serendipitous encounters and isolated deep thinking.
Expose yourself to ideas in hubs on a regular basis, but maintain a spoke in which to work deeply on what you encounter.
Example: Brattain and Bardeen collaboration in Bell Labs. For some types of problems, working with someone else on the "whiteboard" can push you deeper than if you were working alone.
For many types of work pursuing innovation, collaborative deep work can yield better results.
Execute Like a Business
Distinguish between WHAT to do and HOW to do it (story of Andy Grove and Clayton Christensen)
Execution is more difficult than strategizing
Referral to the book "The Four Disciplines of Execution"
Focus on the wildly important
Act on the Lead Measures
Keep a compelling scoreboard
create a cadence of accountability
Be Lazy
Tim Kreider: I'm not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know.
Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body.
Injecting regular and substantial freedom from professional concerns into your day provides you with the idleness required to get the work done.
Downtime aids insights
Downtime helps recharge the energy needed to work deeply
The work that evening downtime replaces is usually not that important
Introduce a strict shutdown ritual at the end of the workday. It will help your mind not struggle with unfinished things. Do it even if it adds extra 10-15 minutes to your workday. The rewards will be bigger.
When you work, work hard. When you're done, be done.
Rule #2: Embrace Boredom
To succeed in deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli. This does not mean you have to eliminate the distracting behaviors; it's sufficient that you instead eliminate the ability of such behaviors to hijack your attention.
Example: morning Talmud studies. "You cannot consider yourself as fulfilling this daily obligation unless you've stretched to the reaches of your mental capacity".
The ability co concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained.
On multi-tasking, by Clifford Nass: People who multitask all the time can't filter out irrelevancy. They can't manage a working memory. They're chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brains that are irrelevant to the task at hand... they're pretty much mental wrecks.
If every moment of your potential boredom in your life is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point it's not ready for deep work - even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.
The habit of deep work requires training and it's based on achieving two goals: your ability to concentrate intensely and your overcoming your desire for distraction.
Don't take breaks from distraction, instead take breaks from focus
Internet Sabbath (digital detox) intends to remind you what you're missing when you're glued to a screen.
breaks from distraction: schedule in advance when you'll use the Internet, and then avoid it altogether the rest of the time.
Assumption: the use of a distracting service does not, by itself, reduce your brain's ability to focus. It's constant switching from low-stimuli/high-value activities to high-stimuli/low-value activities, at the slightest hint of boredom or cognitive challenge, that teaches your mind to never tolerate an absence of novelty.
This strategy works even if your job requires lots of Internet use and/or prompt email replies.
Regardless of how you schedule your Internet blocks, you must keep the time outside of these blocks absolutely free from Internet use.
Scheduling Internet use at home as well as work can further improve your concentration training.
Work like Teddy Roosevelt
"The amount of time he spent at his desk was comparatively small, but his concentration was so intense, and his reading so rapid, that he could afford more time off from schoolwork than most."
Identify a deep Tak that's high on your priority list. Estimate how long you'd normally put aside for an obligation of this type, then give yourself a hard deadline that drastically reduces this time. Attack the task with every free neuron until it gives under your unraveling barrage of concentration.
Remember to keep your deadlines at the edge of feasibility. You should be able to consistently beat the buzzer, but doing so would require tech-greeting concentration.
Meditate Productively
Take a period when you're occupied physically but not mentally - walking, jogging, etc. - and focus your attention on a single, well-defined professional problem.
Like with any form of meditation, it requires practice to do well.
Be aware of distractions and looping.
Structure your deep thinking: review the relevant variables for solving the problem and then store those values in your working memory. Then, define the specific next-step question you need to answer using these variables. Then, consolidate by reviewing the answer you identified.
Memorize a deck of cards. Joshua Foes, Daniel Kilov. "One of the biggest differences between memory athletes and the rest of us is a cognitive ability that's not a direct measure of memory at all but of attention." A side effect of memory training is an improvement in your general ability to concentrate. We're not wired to quickly internalize abstract information, but we're good at remembering scenes.
Rule #3: Quit Social Media
"Network" tools fragment our time and reduce our ability to concentrate. Willpower is limited, and therefore the more enticing tools you have pulling at your attention, the harder it will be to maintain the focus on something important.
Reject the state of distracted hyper-connectedness.
The default process deployed by most internet users: ANY benefit approach to Network Tool Selection: you're justified in using a network tool if you can identify ANY possible benefit to its use, or ANYTHING you might possibly miss out if you don't use it.
The problem with this approach is that it ignores all the negatives that come with the tool in question.
The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.
Curate the tools that lay claim to your time and attention.
Apply the laws of the vital few to your Internet habits
identify the main high-level goals in both your professional and your personal life.
List for each the two or three most important activities that help you satisfy the goal.
Consider the network tools you currently use. Is Facebook the right tool to maintain deep connections to the people who are important to you? Rather, it is a lunch, long conversation, joint activity.
The Law of the vital few: in many settings, 80 percent of a given effect is due to just 20 percent of the possible causes.
Quit Social Media
Practice self-imposed social media isolation of 30 days
After thirty days of this isolation, ask yourself the following 2 questions:
would the last thirty days have been notably better if I had been able to use the service?
Did people care that I wasn't using this service?
If your answer is "No" to both questions, quit the service permanently.
Social media is built, among other things, on the fear of missing out.
Part of what fuelled social media rapid ascent is the ability to short-circuit the connection between hard work of producing real value and the positive reward of people paying attention to you. It has instead replace this timeless capitalist exchange with a shallow collectivist alternative: I'll pay attention to what you say if you pay attention to what I say - regardless of its value.
By dropping off these services without notice you can test the reality of your status as a content producer.
Don't use the Internet to entertain yourself.
Arnold Bennett (1910 Classic How to Live on 24 Hours a Day): "the great and profound mistake which my typical man makes in regard to his day, is that even though he doesn't particularly enjoy his work, he persists in looking upon those hours from ten to six as 'the day', to which ten hours preceding them and six hours following them are nothing but prologue and epilogue. Instead, a typical man should instead use this time as an aristocrat would: to perform rigorous self-improvement
Put more thought into your leisure time. When it comes to your relaxation, don't default to whatever catches your attention at the moment, but instead dedicate some advance thinking to the question of how you want to spend your "day within a day".
If you have not done so, the addictive websites will always beckon as an appealing option.
Give your brain a quality alternative
Rule #4: Drain the Shallows
Jason Fried: "Very few people work even 8 hours a day. You're lucky if you get a few good hours in between all the meetings, interruptions, web surfing, office politics, and personal business that permeates the typical workday. Fewer official working hours helps squeeze the fat out of the typical workweek. Once everyone has less time to get their stuff done, they respect that time even more. When you have fewer hours you usually spend them more wisely.
The company went even further: they give their employees the entire month of June off to work deeply on their own projects. This period is free of any shallow work obligations: no status meetings, no memos, no powerPoint.
"How can we afford to put our business on hold for a month to 'mess around’ with new ideas? How can we afford not to?
The value of deep work vastly outweighs the value of shallow, but this doesn't mean that you should pursue a schedule in which all of your time is invested in depth.
For one thing, a nontrivial amount of shallow work is needed to maintain most knowledge jobs: therefore, we should see the goal as taming shallow work's footprint in our schedule, not eliminating it.
Then, there is the issue of cognitive capacity for the amount of deep work to fit within a day
Treat shallow work with suspicion because its damage is often vastly underestimated and its importance vastly overestimated. This type of work is inevitable, but you must keep it confined to a point where it doesn't impede your ability to take full advantage of the deeper efforts that ultimately determine your impact.
Schedule every minute of your day.
Focus on task blocks.
If your schedule is disrupted, at the next available moment take a few minutes to create a revised schedule for the time that remains in the day.
This scheduling is not about rigidity, it's about thoughtfulness.
Quantify the depth of every activity
How long would it take in months to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task? This question is meant as a thought experiment, but the answers it provides will help you to objectively quality the shallowness or depth of various activities.
Ask your boss for a shallow work budget.
What percentage of my time should be spent on shallow work?
Finish your work by Five-Thirty
This commitment is fixed-schedule productivity's and you work backward to find productivity strategies that allow satisfying this declaration. You ruthlessly reduce the shallow while preserving the deep. It's a meta-habit that's simple to adopt but broad in its impact.
Become Hard to Reach
Make people who send you emails do more work. A sender filter: a special purpose email address that comes with conditions and lowers expectations that you'll respond.
Do more work when you send or reply to emails. Process-centric approach to email: before replying, pause for a moment and take the time to answer the following key prompt: "What is the project represented by this message, and what is the most efficient (in terms of the messages generated) process for bringing this project to a successful conclusion?" This approach reduces the number of emails in your inbox, this, in turn, reduces the time you spend on your inbox; and finally, this approach closes the loop with respect to the project at hand. In the moment, this might seem like you're spending more time on email. But it will save you much more time reading and responding to unnecessary emails later.
Don't respond
When it comes to email, it's the sender's responsibility to convince the receiver that a reply is worthwhile.
Do not reply to an email message if any of the following applies:
It's ambiguous or otherwise makes it hard for you to generate a reasonable response.
It's not a question or proposal that interests you.
Nothing really good would happen if you did respond and nothing really bad would happen if you don't.
Tim Ferriss: "Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don't, you'll never find time for the life-changing big things."
Conclusion
A commitment to deep work is not a moral stance and it's not a philosophical statement - it is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done.
Deep work is way more powerful than most people understand.
The deep is not for everybody. It requires hard work and drastic changes to your habits. For many, there is a comfort in the artificial busyness of rapid email messaging and social media posturing, while the deep demands that you leave much of this behind.
Depth generates a life rich with productivity and meaning.
"I'll live the focused life because it's the best kind there is."