Deep Work - Cal Newport
Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
Deep Work is Valuable
Core abilities for thriving in New Economy:
Quickly master hard things
Produce at an elite level in terms of both speed and quality
Both of these depend on the ability to perform deep work.
Deliberate focused practice leads to reinforcement of neural pathways and myelination. Distracted work leads to too many circuits firing simultaneously for any one to strengthen. Need long uninterrupted stretches.
Batching can happen at micro and macro levels
“Attention Residue”:
When switching between tasks, attention doesn’t immediately follow, a residue remains on previous task. The more intense the residue, the worse performance. [Sophie Levy: “Why is it so hard to do my work?”]. Constant glances at inbox/Slack can be devastating to deep work ability. Especially if emails not answered directly, leaves mind with attention on an unfinished task.
What about people who thrive on distracted work? E.g. CEOs, or general high level management?
They are “decision-engines”. Have developed repository of experience and instinct. Hire subordinates to think deeply about specific issues so they can make informed high level decisions. For others, constant connectivity might be most valuable currency. I.e. not every job is deep, but many are, even ones that might not seem so. See study of management consultants that were asked to disconnect one day a week and increased their productivity.
Deep Work is Rare
Given its high value, deep work should be highly valued by businesses/employers. Instead see a huge focus on the opposite, serendipitous collaboration, rapid communication and constant availability.
[bq] “Interruption, even if short, delays the total time required to complete a task by a significant fraction”
Huge amount of time simply spent on “moving around information” instead of the specialized tasks employees were hired for. Office workers are becoming mere “information routers”.
Problem with deep work: Impact can be hard to measure, no clear metric, similar to benefit of instant messaging or huge executive salaries.
“Metric black hole”: No clear metric for deep work so easier metric like busyness takes over. Lack of clear metric also hides the negative impact of distractions and “culture of connectivity”
Leslie Peslow study shows quick reply actually not that important: No connectivity on one day per week for team in Boston Consulting Group. Result: More enjoyment/learning and better service/product provided, and no complaints from clients.
“Principle of Least Resistance”: In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviours we will tend towards those behaviour that are easiest in the moment.
Culture of Connectivity: Easy to feel productive and experience quick sense of accomplishment. True deep work requires harder, more thoughtful approach. Same goes for meetings, highly visible easy “markers of progress”. Avoiding these creates suspicion.
[bq] "Busyness as Proxy of Productivity”: “In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable (like units produced at the end of the day in industrial setting), many knowledge workers turn back to an industrial indicator of productivity, doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.”
Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer banned employees from working from home because they didn’t log in to check their emails often enough.
But true knowledge work often at odds with busyness.
“Technopoly”: No discussion of tradeoff of new technology. If it is new, it’s good and we should use it. “Cult of the Internet”
Suggesting disconnectivity in an internet-centric age is like flag burning, “desecration, not debate”
Deep work relates to mastery, quality, craftsmanship, concepts that are extremely old fashioned and non-technical and require rejection of many things high-tech.
Given current trends, depth will become increasingly rare and thus valuable.
Craftsman’s work: Easy to define, hard to master/execute. Opposite for knowledge workers where tasks can be very hard to define.
Strategies to Ritualize Deep Work
Find the right “depth philosophy”
Monastic Philosophy:
Minimize any distracting obligation
Be constantly hard to reach
Requirement: Clear, discrete and individualized type of work, e.g. novelist
Examples: Donald Knuth, Neal Stephenson
Bimodal Philosophy:
Set aside stretches of time for deep work
Can happen at various scales: Long weekend, sabbatical, etc.
Minimum effective “unit”: at least a full day
Examples: Carl Jung, Adam Grant
Rhythmic Philosophy:
Establish a habit of regular deep work
Schedule certain time each day to remove decision when to start
Chain method: Record number of consecutive days a task was done. The longer the chain gets the more motivation to not break the chain
Tradeoff: Doesn’t allow for same level of depth as bimodal, but easier to integrate with life and might allow for larger number of total hours spent on deep work
Examples: Jerry Seinfeld
Journalistic Philosophy:
Fit deep work in wherever there is a bit of free time
Difficult to make sudden switches, takes a lot of willpower
Example: Walter Isaacson
Key Strategy: Ritualize
Main questions to be answered:
Where and for how long? Ideally determine a “sacred” deep work spot used for nothing else. Also set a clear end time/timeframe
Clear rules and targets during the session, e.g. no internet access; if possible use metrics like “number of words produced”
How to support work? E.g. start with a cup of coffee, have regular walks, organized work environment
The "Grand Gesture”
Establish an outrageous gesture around the deep work habit
Examples.:
Book a fancy hotel to work in (JK Rowling)
Build a cabin to work in
Buy business class return tickets and work the entire flights
Makes it easier to get in the zone and stay focused
How does collaboration combine with deep work?
Generating creative insights seems to be a collaborative endeavour
But collaboration seems to be distraction, not deep work (e.g. open office)
Truth: Chance encounters and discussions are needed, but the bulk of work needs to be done in isolation; open offices do not support this!
“Hub-and-spoke” office design: Expose yourself to new ideas in a hub (cafeteria, coffee machine, water cooler,…) then do the actual work in your own isolated spoke
But even deep work can occasionally happen as collaboration, especially in very small (2 people) teams
The 4 disciplines of execution; adapted from business to deep work
Focus on wildly important
Focus on a small number of ambitious outcomes
Help goal stoke motivation and crowd out interest in distractions
Act on the lead measures
Two types of metrics: lag and lead
Lag measures are the ultimate goals, but feedback on these too slow to directly act on
Lead measures: behaviours along the way that will ultimately determine the lag measures
Easy lead measure for deep work: number of hours spent on deep work
Keep a compelling scoreboard
Clearly visible (physical) display of the lead measure (i.e. number of hours)
Can be as simple as tick marks on a sheet of paper
Circle tick mark of hour where particular milestone was reached
Create a cadence of accountability
In business case: Have regular short meetings to check progress
Deep work: Do a personal weekly review
Enforce a work shutdown; the importance of forgetting work outside of work and down time:
Downtime aids insights
Subconscious mind can process ideas differently than conscious focused mind
Necessary for recharging energy for deep work
Attention is limited and needs recharging
Shutdown needs to be complete
No email, slack, etc reminding of work
Use a shutdown ritual
Review the day
Move unfinished stuff to next day’s schedule
Use a catchphrase, e.g. “shutdown complete”
Embrace Boredom
Ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained!
A mind that is dependent on distractions will struggle with this.
Fleeing the slightest hint of boredom is counterproductive to the training of concentration (like a pro-athlete who eats crap in his free time).
Constant attention switching has lasting negative impact on brain! True deep work becomes impossible.
Key goal: Overcoming desire for distraction
Don’t schedule breaks from distraction, schedule breaks from focus to give in to distraction
Strategy: Schedule in advance when internet is used and then completely disconnect until next scheduled break
Number and duration of blocks matters much less than actually sticking to them, even if it’s 5 minutes every 15 minutes
Even if some crucial info from internet is needed, must resist the temptation, otherwise it’s a slippery slope
Should stick to this even outside work
Must rewire the brain to be comfortable resisting tempting stimuli
“Roosevelt Dashes”:
Schedule intense sessions with hard and tough deadlines for deep work tasks once a week. HIIT for the mind and attention.
“Productive meditation”:
Use a walk or workout to think exclusively about a particular work problem. If mind wanders, bring it back.
Use card memorization to train “attention muscle”
“Quit” Social Media
Many sites get far too much access to our time and attention. Need to find a good middle ground to regulate this.
Can find many little benefits of networking tools as justification to use them but often completely ignore the benefits (“any-benefit mindset”)
Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection:
Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors outweigh the negatives.
Apply the law of the vital few to your internet habits
Identify the main high level goals, both professional and personal
For each, identify the two or three most important activities
Go through all currently used networking tools and assess whether their contribution to above activities is positive or negative
For identifying key activities, use Pareto’s law
“Extreme” experiment: Actually stop using all social networking for 30 days without announcing it to anyone.
After 30 days, ask yourself:
Would the last 30 days have been significantly better using a specific tool?
Did people care that I wasn’t using the service?
If “no” to both, quit it permanently
Treat leisure time as a “day within a day”. Even though work only occupies a fraction of the day, say 9 to 5, many consider this as “the day”.
Need to put more thought into planning leisure time as well, otherwise attention grabbing services will take over.
Misconception: mental faculties do not tire, they just want change, so having a demanding leisure time will not negatively affect the next days performance.
37 Signals/Basecamp experiment: 4 days workweek turned out to be just as productive as 5 days workweek. If you have fewer hours, you spend them more wisely, “draining the shallows”.
Draining the Shallows
Schedule your entire workday:
A lot of the time we operate on autopilot, very unconscious of what we’re actually doing, reactive.
At the beginning of the day, take one page in a notebook to write a schedule, using every other line for an hour, and then assigning tasks to the times in blocks of multiples of 30 min.
It’s okay if this needs to be revised several times a day, it’s more about being mindful/aware
Good question to assess whether a task is shallow or deep:
[bq] “How long would it take to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized skill in my domain to do this task?”
Set a shallow work budget!
Assess how much time each day should be given to shallow work (e.g. typically 30-50%) and stick to that. Possible measures to cut shallow work:
Don’t reply to every CC’ed message
Communication silence in the morning
Drop weekly status meeting and instead “let’s talk when there’s been significant progress”
Use fixed-schedule productivity!
Set a fixed limit until when to work and then work backwards to figure out how to achieve it (avoiding as much shallow work as possible and saying “no” to any request that generates a lot of shallow work if possible). Requires deeper thinking about what’s really important and also leaves more energy for deep work. See Parkinson’s Law
Become hard to reach!!!
Make people who send you email do more work
Establish a “sender filter” telling people to only message you (or expect replies) on very specific things. Also lower expectationDo more work sending or replying to emails
Instead of constant bouncing back and forth of quick emails that drain attention, identify the underlying project and how to bring it to a conclusion as quick as possible
Use a process-centric communication, outlining the problem at hand, and the next steps
Don’t respond
It’s the senders responsibility to convince the receiver that it’s worth their time to reply
Criteria for not replying:
It’s ambiguous or makes it hard to respond
Not a question or proposal that interest me
Nothing really good would happen if I respond, and also nothing bad if I don’t