In this post, we’re talking about Deep Work, a book about achieving focused success in today’s distracted world.
Cal Newport wrote the best selling book on Deep Work. He defines deep work as the “professional activities performed in a distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit”. These efforts create value, contribute to learning and development and are hard to replicate”. Due to its value, we should aim to spend as much time as possible in this state.
On the other side of the coin, we have shallow work. Shallow work is defined as ”non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate”.
In this post, we’ll first discuss the importance of Deep Work – why it’s valuable and meaningful – before diving into the rules of Deep Work.
Why is Deep Work important?
Deep Work is valuable
There is a digital division occurring in today’s economy, where companies are more likely to purchase new machines than they are to hire new people. As jobs become increasingly automated, there are certain people who will not only survive, but become more valuable.
Valuables Workers of the Future
Three specific types of workers will benefit in the Intelligent Machine Age:
- High Skilled Workers
People able to work with increasingly complicated machines (e.g. data visualisation, analytics, high speed communications & data-driven reasoning) will thrive.
- Superstars
High-speed data networks and collaboration tools have destroyed regionalism in knowledge work. For example, hiring a full-time programmer becomes less appealing when considering office space, benefits, etc. Especially when you consider the time needed for the world’s best programmers to complete the project. These “superstars” often get better results for less money.
- Owners
The final group that will thrive in our economy are those with the capital to invest in the new technologies that are driving this great restructuring. Never before in history could so few labourers provide so much value. Remember when Instagram was sold to Facebook for £1 Billion and created by 13 individuals!
Thriving in the new economy
There are two core abilities at the center of new jobs:
- Quickly master hard things
- Produce at an elite level (quality & speed)
Both of these abilities require an ability to perform deep work.
Quickly Learn Hard Things
Most intelligent machines creating the new economy are significantly more complex to understand and master than Twitter and the iPhone. To learn requires intense concentration.
Deliberate practice requires focused attention and corrective feedback, and new skills cannot be learned with mounting distractions.
Produce at an Elite Level
Hard and important intellectual work can be batched into long, uninterrupted stretches of deep work for elite-level productivity.
(Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus) = High-Quality Work Produced
Though studies have focused on the negative effects of multitasking, Sophie Leroy claims it is more common to see managers working on multiple projects sequentially: going from one meeting to the next, starting to work on one project and soon starting the next. The problem with this reality is that when you switch to a new task, your attention does not immediately follow, a concept Leroy calls attention residue.
It might seem harmless to check your email every 10 minutes, but seeing new tasks you cannot deal with at the moment will force you to return to the original task with a secondary task unfinished. The attention residue left by such unresolved switches dampens your performance.
Deep Work is rare
There are three major trends in business that are associated impact an individual’s ability to focus:
- Open office concepts: “We encourage people to stay out in the open because we believe in serendipity – and people walking by each other teaching new things”.
- Instant Messaging: “Helping companies benefit from new productivity gains and improvements in customer response time.”
- Content producers (think novelists and journalists) are pushed to maintain a social media presence.
These three business trends highlight a paradox: New trends are often prioritised over deep work. The issue is that these trends lead to distractions that the brain responds to, whether you’re aware of it or not.
The Metric Black Hole
Tom Cochran, CTO of Atlantic Media, became alarmed at the amount of time he spent on email in 2012. The issue is usually Most people aren’t aware of how much time they spend on shallow work such as email, but Cochran was determined to quantify the problem. He calculated that in a typical week, he would receive around 511 emails and send 284.
Applying a 30 second average email read/write time quantified to nearly an hour and a half per day, spent on something that’s not a primary piece of the job description. Applying this methodology to the entire company, he discovered that the company was paying people over a million dollars a year to pay people to process emails.
Generally speaking, as knowledge work makes more complex demands of the workforce, it becomes harder to measure the value of an individual’s efforts.
The Principle of Least Resistance
In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviours to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviours that are easiest in the moment.
We live in a culture of connectivity where one is expected to read and respond to email quickly. In some companies, this habit even spreads into people’s free time where they feel they are expected to reply to an email once it is received. However, overall productivity drops when employees bring their work home.
Leslie Perlow tested connectivity and focus in a team at Boston Consulting Group by allowing each member of the team one day off without needing to respond to emails or IMs.
Losing their clients or jobs was their initial concern. But the consultants ultimately experienced more enjoyment in their work, better communication among themselves and more learning as a team. Ultimately, a better product was delivered to the client.
It’s easy to think that we’re doing our best work by working as hard as we can. Sometimes we just need to take a step back and understand what we’re working on. This topic also comes up in our post on Getting Things Done – Mindful Productivity.
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.
“Managers inhabit a bewildering psychic landscape, and are made anxious by the vague imperatives they must answer to.” – Matthew Crawford, social critic.
Many knowledge workers want to prove they’re productive members of the team, but they’re not entirely clear what this goal constitutes.
The Cult of the Internet
NYU professor, Neil Postman, calls our culture a technopoly, because ultimately everything high-tech is considered good and eliminates any alternatives to itself. Evgeny Morozov argues that we’ve made “the Internet” synonymous with the revolutionary future of business and government.
In other words, to suggest that social media is irrelevant for journalists is often considered a desecration. Deep work is at a disadvantage in a technopoly, because it builds on values like quality, craftsmanship and mastery.
Bad for Business. Good for You.
If the current trends continue, deep work will continue to become increasingly rare, and therefore increasingly meaningful.
Deep Work is meaningful
“The satisfactions of manifesting oneself completely in the world for manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy” – Matthew Crawford
A Neurological Argument
Skillful management of attention is the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience. – Winifred Gallagher
Our brains construct our worldview on what we pay attention to. Who you are, what you think, feel and do, what you love – is the sum of what you focus on.
Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen used an fMRI scanner to study the brain behaviour of subjects presented with positive and negative imagery. She found that young people’s brains fire with activity at both types of imagery, while the elderly’s fired only for positive imagery. Her conclusion was that older people are happier because they’ve rewired their brains to ignore the negative and savour the positive.
Gallagher’s theory predicts that spending enough time in this state will convince your mind that your world is rich in meaning and importance. And when you lose focus, your mind tends to drift into what could be wrong, instead of what is right.
Focusing on important things will make our work life feel more important and positive.
A Psychological Argument
Experience sampling method (ESM) – asking subjects to reply to questions at the moment they’re engaged in an activity. This method provided unprecedented insight into how we actually feel about our daily lives.
Czikszentmihalyi’s ESM study showed that people had their best moments when their body or mind was stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.
In other words, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time. That’s because jobs have built-in goals, feedback rules and challenges. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured and requires greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.
The feeling of going deep is, in itself, very rewarding. To build your working life around the experience of flow is a proven path to deep satisfaction.
A Philosophical Argument
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”. This frees craftsmen of nihilism by providing an ordered world of meaning.
Once understood, we can connect the sacredness inherent in traditional craftsmanship to the modern world of knowledge work.
Deep work is the key to extracting meaning from our work.
Homo Sapiens Deepensis
Deep work is becoming increasingly valuable at the same time it is becoming increasingly rare, which represents a classic market mismatch.
Cultivate this skill, and you’ll thrive professionally.
How can you harness Deep Work?
In this next section, we’ll run through the 4 components of Deep Work:
- Work Deeply
- Embrace Boredom
- Quit Social Media
- Drain the Shallows
Work Deeply
In an ideal world, our workspaces would prioritise the extraction of value from our minds. However, with the growing popularity of open plan office spaces and Instant Messaging in the workplace, this seems to be far from the case.
Unfortunately, working deeply is not as easy as it sounds. After all, we all want to be less distracted and more focused, but several factors impact our focus. One of the key reasons we don’t work deeply is decision fatigue. We have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as we use it.
The key to working deeply goes beyond good intentions. We need better habits to succeed. This is where rituals and routines come in. With a set time and quiet location to perform a sequence of actions, we signal to our brains that we’re about to focus.
Deciding on a specific Deep Work philosophy can help you work more deeply. There are four different philosophies of deep work.
Monastic Philosophy of Deep Work
The Monastic philosophy aims to maximise deep work specifically by removing our shallow obligations. Donald Knuth began following this philosophy in January 1990 when he deleted his email account to focus on physical mail. He’s suited to this philosophy because his core skills and competencies have revolved around becoming the “father of algorithm analysis”.
People who follow the Monastic philosophy tend to have a highly valued professional goal that they strive after. If this profile matches your profession, you might consider adopting this philosophy.
The Bimodal Philosophy of Deep Work
In the 1920’s Carl Jung began defining his own school of philosophy. He spent months at a time at a secluded cabin in the woods, where he would focus on developing his theory. The work produced at this cabin would eventually differentiate Jung from his mentor and contemporary, Sigmund Freud.
Jung’s philosophy differed from the Monastic, as he spent half his time in Zurich seeing patients and participating in the coffeehouse scene of the time. His time at the cabin revolved around his concentrated deep work.
The Rhythmic Philosophy of Deep Work
Jerry Seinfeld is famous for his approach to developing comedic jokes. When Brad Isaac asked Seinfeld for beginner advice to become a better comedian, Jerry responded with an obvious answer: “You need to write better jokes”. He followed up on that simple answer with: “and you write better jokes by writing every day.”
Seinfeld then shared his technique of marking a giant “X” on his calendar for everyday he wrote jokes. The idea is to keep writing and not break the chain.
This Rhythmic philosophy, sometimes dubbed the chain method, has become popular with writers and fitness enthusiasts who must perform difficult tasks as a regular habit.
The Journalistic Philosophy of Deep Work
Walter Isaacson is known for his method, where he focuses on deep work whenever he finds himself with free time. This philosophy is named after the profession. Journalists are known for their ability to shift into writing mode, whenever necessary, in a moment’s notice.
Define your Rituals
A ritual will have three components that you must define:
- Where you’ll work and for how long
- How you’ll work once you start to work
- How you’ll support your work
Making Grand Gestures
JK Rowling had a difficult time finishing the final Harry Potter book while working from home. However she found that renting a room in an expensive hotel helped her focus for two reasons.
Firstly, the hotel’s historic architecture reminded her of the Hogwarts setting. Ultimately, she found that spending a thousand pounds per day forced her to finish the book – sooner rather than later.
Peter Shankman did something similar by booking a round-trip business class flight to Tokyo. His goal was to finish writing an entire manuscript for a book on the flights. He wrote non-stop on the flight to Tokyo, landed and grabbed an espresso. After this coffee, he jumped onto the next flight. He finished the manuscript in a total of 30 hours.
Putting yourself in an exotic location to focus sends your brain signals that you are completely committed to the task.
Execute like a business with the 4 Disciplines of Execution
The 4 Disciplines of Execution are built on extensive consulting case studies to help companies successfully implement high-level strategies.
Discipline #1: Focus on the Wildly Important
The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.
Execution should be aimed at a small number of “wildly important goals”. This simplicity should focus an organisation’s energy to a sufficient intensity to ignite real results.
Discipline #2: Act on the Lead Measures
Lag measures describe the thing you’re ultimately trying to improve. Lead measures, on the other hand, “measure the new behaviours that will drive success on the lag measures”. This is the equivalent of focusing on what we can control and embracing what we cannot.
For example, in a bakery setting lag measures may focus on customer satisfaction rates, while lead measures may focus on how many free samples you’ve given out.
Discipline #3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard
People play differently when they’re keeping score.
A public place to record and track lead measures create a sense of competition that drives people to focus on these measures, even when there are other demands on the table.
A Deep Work-focused scoreboard might involve tallies counting the number of hours spent in deep work. You’d mark each hour that led to a significant breakthrough or completed task being circled.
Discipline #4: Create a Cadence of Accountability
The final discipline is “a rhythm of regular and frequent meetings of any team that owns a wildly important goal”. During these meetings, team members must confront their scoreboard, commit to specific actions for the next meeting and describe what happened with their commitments from the previous meeting.
Individuals with wildly important goals should perform a weekly review of their task priorities to plan for the week ahead.
Be Lazy
“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. […] It is paradoxically necessary to getting any work done.”
At the end of the workday, shut down your work considerations until the next morning (no checking email, mental replays of conversations, and no scheming about how to approach an upcoming challenge. If you need more time, then extend your workday, but once you shut down, your mind must be left free to rest and recharge.
There are three core reasons why downtime produces valuable output:
- Downtime Aids Insights (Unconscious Thought Theory)
- Downtime Helps Recharge the Energy Needed to Work Deeply (Attention Restoration Theory)
- The Work That Evening Downtime Replaces is Usually Not That Important
To succeed with this strategy, you must:
- Accept the commitment that once your workday shuts down, you cannot allow any professional concerns into your attention.
- Support your commitment with a strict shutdown ritual that involves (1) a plan for each ongoing task’s completion or (2) captured the task somewhere where it can be revisited later. This ritual illustrates the Zeigarnik effect, which involves incomplete tasks dominating our attention.
Embrace Boredom
The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained, and efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind away from distractions. In other words, you’ll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing any hint of boredom.
Don’t Take Breaks from Distraction. Instead Take Breaks from Focus.
Once you’re wired for distraction, you crave it.
Implement this strategy with the following focus:
Schedule in advance when you’ll use the Internet. Then avoid it at all costs!
The following three points can be used to implement seemingly-straightforward strategy:
- 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 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
Teddy Roosevelt juggled an “amazing array of interests” from boxing, wrestling and body-building to dance lessons, poetry reading and lifelong obsessions with naturalism during his time at Harvard. Roosevelt managed his studies alongside extracurricular hobbies due to an intense focus on studying between the hours of 8:30 am – 4:30 pm. Any time during these 8 hours not spent in lectures, athletic training and lunch was spent studying intensively.
Meditate Productively
Take a period where you’re occupied physically but not mentally (walking, jogging, driving, showering) and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem. This strategy is not necessary everyday, though recommended 2-3 times weekly, e.g. incorporate walks for this purpose into your work schedule.
As productive meditation is difficult for first-timers, here are two suggestions:
- Be wary of distractions & looping
- Structure your deep thinking (carefully review the relevant variables)
Memorise a Deck of Cards
Focusing on developing memory techniques (aka the memory palace technique) can have a significant impact on one’s ability to concentrate.
Front load your memorisation by memorising a route through a building/house you know well and identify 52 significant objects in the space. Next create a character/image related to each card in a 52 deck of cards. Learn to memorise decks of cards in 5 minutes by setting a scene associating the card representation with the objects in your home.
Quit Social Media
Cal Newport also recommends quitting social media. Before we go into the reasons for this, we’ll run through a historic framework for understanding the value of a tool.
There are two approaches to placing value on a tool.
The 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 on if you don’t use it.
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.
The craftsman approach simply asks that you give any particular network tool the same type of measured, nuanced accounting that tools in other trades have been subjected to throughout the history of skilled labour.
Apply the Law of the Vital Few to Your Internet Habits
The Law of the Vital Few: In many settings, 80% of a given effect is due to just 20% of the possible causes.
The first step of this strategy is to identify the main high-level goals in both your professional and personal life. Once you’ve identified these goals, list the two or three most important activities for each to help you reach the goal.
The next step in the strategy is to consider the network tools you use and ask yourself whether they have a substantially positive impact or substantially negative impact or little impact on your regular and successful participation in the activity.
Keep using the tool if you concluded that it has substantial positive impacts and that these outweigh the negative impacts.
Quit Social Media
Here’s a test: Ban yourself from using social media for 30 days; don’t formally deactivate, and (this is important:) don’t tell anyone you’ll be signing off – just stop using them. Only tell people if they contact you by other means to ask why your activity has fallen off.
After 30 days, ask yourself:
- Would the last thirty days have been notably better if I had been able to use this service?
- Did people care that I wasn’t using this service?
If your answer to both questions is “no”, then quit them permanently. If your answers are ambiguous, you decide (though it’s recommended to quit).
Don’t Use the Internet to Entertain Yourself
In his 1910 self-help book How to live on 24 Hours a Day, Arnold Bennett wrote that most people working a typical 9 am – 5 pm job, tragically, don’t realise the potential of a day. Bennet suggests that people see their 16 free hours as a “day within a day”. These are 16 hours where people are not wage-earners preoccupied with monetary cares, but free to follow one’s deepest passions and slightest whims.
Sites like Huffington Post, Buzzfeed and Reddit use carefully crafted titles and easily digestible content to maximise the attention they occupy. These sites are particularly harmful after the workday is over, when freedom should be at the centre of your leisure time.
Bennett had a solution 100 years ago: Put more thought into your leisure time. Don’t default to whatever catches your attention at the moment. Instead, dedicate time beforehand to think about how you want to spend your “day within a day”.
Adding structure to your hobbies with specific goals and actions will maximise the value of your experience and energise your mind throughout all your waking hours.
Drain the Shallows
In 2007, the company 37signals (now Basecamp) shortened their workweek from five days to just four. Their employees accomplished just as much in 4 days, and soon began working less than 8 hours per day in the 4 day week.
The secret? Employees learned to trim the shallow work from their schedule and focus on the activities that resulted in their core results and KPIs.
To take this one step further, 37signals gave their employees the entire month of June off to work deeply on their own projects – a month free of meetings, memos and presentations. At the end of the month, the company held a “pitch day” for employees to show what they worked on. The result? Two projects were soon adopted, that otherwise would likely not have existed otherwise.
The key takeaway of this chapter is to treat shallow work with suspicion, because its damage is often vastly underestimated and its importance vastly overestimated.
Schedule Every Minute of Your Day
We spend much of our day on autopilot, not giving much thought to what we’re doing with our time.
At the beginning of each workday, plan your tasks and breaks for the day using a makeshift calendar on a piece of paper. When you’re done, every minute of your day should be part of an assigned “task block”. Now go through your workday with this schedule to guide you.
When tasks take longer than expected or new obligations arise, of course you can work on these tasks. Just take a minute to update your schedule to reflect the change.
When you’re not sure how long a task will take, add another block following the task that can be used to complete the task if necessary. This block should also be planned for a non-urgent task, in case the original task is complete on time.
Be liberal with your use of task blocks. Having regularly occurring blocks to address surprises will keep this system running smoothly.
A good rule would also be that whenever an important insight arises, feel free to disregard your schedule for the rest of the day.
Quantify the Depth of Every Activity
A good indicator of depth can be assessed by asking yourself:
How long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialised training in my field to complete this task?
Once you understand how shallow/deep each activity is, lean toward the latter.
Ask your Boss for a Shallow Work Budget
What percentage of my day should be spent on shallow work?
If you have a boss, ask this question. You may need to explain what “deep work” means. Most people in knowledge work jobs typically answer between 30% – 50%. If you work for yourself, ask yourself this questions.
Settle on a specific ratio. Then make changes to stick to it!
The point of this question is to make positive changes in your core performance results without sacrificing the necessary shallow tasks inherent in most knowledge work.
Finish your Work Day by Five Thirty
End your workday at 5:30 to achieve fixed-schedule productivity.
A good method to getting back your leisure time (which is key in productivity) is to say “no” to tasks that don’t align with your core objectives.
Don’t be specific why you can’t do it. Something along the lines of “Sounds interesting, but I can’t make it due to schedule conflicts.” will likely suffice.
Fixed-schedule productivity is a meta-habit that’s simple to adopt but broad in its impact. This is a high priority for anyone looking to go deep.
Become Hard to Reach
Tip #1: Make people who send you email do more work.
If you have a contact page, clearly state which people will handle requests (publicist, speaking agent, etc.). Also make it clear what type of opportunities you are looking for and what sort of emails you will reply to. Mention that you are busy doing important work, and that if an email does not seem important, you will not reply.
Tip #2: Do more work when you send or reply to emails.
Make sure you have a clear idea of the next steps associated with the email and outline these in your reply. Be clear and comprehensive in your communication to reduce the number of emails sent on this subject in the future. In other words, adopt a process-centric response to your emails.
Tip #3: Don’t respond
It’s the sender’s responsibility to convince the receiver that a reply is worthwhile.
Do not reply to an email if any of the following apply:
- 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 didn’t.
Deep Work in a Nutshell
There we have it, that’s Deep Work in a nutshell. And I know that was a long post, so great job making it this far!
In this post, we discussed the importance of deep work in a distracted world, namely that it’s important, rare and meaningful. We also provided examples on how to adopt work deeply on a regular basis by focusing on our core objectives and structuring our daily schedules, among other methods.
The working world is becoming increasingly competitive, and knowing how to focus and work deeply will differentiate average workers from the superstars.