‘Deep work’ – An introduction
We are constantly surrounded by distractions. It could be the ‘ting’ of an iMessage or Whatsapp, the chime of an email or that dreadful ringtone of a Teams call!
Irrespective of the source of distraction, they all achieve one definitive thing, it will break your flow from whatever important thing you were working on. Thus our important or creative enterprise we embarked on is fragmented by these non-stop and unimportant interruptions.
So, what is the way out?
how do we ensure successful completion of these cognitively intensive tasks?
How do we finish that blog we’ve been meaning to for so long….complete that difficult certification we’ve always wanted and the list goes on!
The answer is simple yet effective.
Deep work by Cal Newport brings us this revolutionary but age-old skill of working deep. It provides some respite to the average knowledge worker and solves the mystery as to why do we feel busy all the time despite accomplishing very little.
So, what is deep work?
“It is professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”
Hypothesis of deep work
“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.”
What is Shallow work?
“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”
The Idea
Deep Work Is Valuable
We are currently in an economy where winner gets all, no matter how small an edge the winner has over the other people. Hence ‘high-skilled workers’, ‘superstars’ and the capital investing ‘Owners’ are the only ones surviving in this economy, and since It is not really possible for all of us to be owners, so that leaves us with other two options, where we need to master hard skills fast, and produce outcomes at an elite level (both, in terms of quality and quantity).
Deep work enables you to do just that!
Deep Work Is Rare
More and more companies are encouraging their employees to be available on call and email for most or all of the work week.
McKinsey study shows that 60% of the time of knowledge workers is spent on electronic communications and nearly 30% of their time is consumed in reading and replying to emails alone!
Research mostly agrees that Network tools are disrupting our attention and fragmenting our intense work sessions.
All this evidence makes Deep work very rare and the person who pursues deep work as the only way to work, will be handsomely rewarded with an edge that will catapult their careers.
Deep Work Is Meaningful
Humans are most happy when they are engaged in the pursuit of something difficult and worthwhile. Consider this as an neurological argument for deep work:
Our brains construct our worldview based on what we focus on, and if we focus majority of our time on deep endeavours with an inherent gravity and sense of importance, our minds will then start seeing the world as rich in meaning and important.
The Rules
Rule #1: Work Deeply
All of us are generally aware at some level, that working deeply on something would yield good results and give us an edge over others who are riddled with other shallow things plaguing their schedule. This good intention of working deeply is not enough. Research suggests (2012 study by Wilhelm and Baumeister) that our will power to resist against temptation is finite, and gets depleted as we use it.
“The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimise the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration”
Cal Newport
The following 6 strategies help you maximise your deep working capabilities:
1. Decide on your depth philosophy
We need our own philosophy to integrate deep work into our daily lives, it could be one of the following, a mix of them or a completely different one altogether.
- The monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling: This encourages you to give up all communication with the outside world and focus deeply on your work that demands long un-fragmented hours. Writers and researchers can make use of it, and it a little extreme way to integrate deep work into your day.
- The bi-modal philosophy of deep work scheduling: This involves you going deep for a season (several months) on a yearly scale, and 3-4 days deep on a weekly scale.
- Carl Jung used to retreat to a stone house deep in the woods, where he would dedicate long hours to deep thinking. Bill Gates take a few weeks off from all his responsibilities to dedicate to reading books and to solve larger world problems. Outside of this break or retreat, they lead a very busy life for the rest of the year or week.
- The rhythmic philosophy of deep work scheduling: It wants us to have a set daily routine, and blocks of uninterrupted hours for deep wrk everyday. That reduces the burden of deciding when to work deep.
- The journalistic philosophy of deep work scheduling: This one is little tricky but necessary for some people. It requires us to go deep whenever you can over the course of your day. Finding small pockets of time to write that important article, or to mull over the solution for an important and difficult problem. Almost like the habit of writing a daily journal.
2. Ritualise
Build or develop strong ritual around your deep work routines. It should specify:
- Where you will work (an office, cafe with noise cancelling headphones ON, your room and so on),
- How you will work (rules and processes to structure your efforts, Wifi On/Off, notifications on/off and so on)
- How you’ll support your work: Coffee, healthy snack, hydration needs, air conditioning and so on
3. Make grand gestures
JK Rowling checked herself into the suite of a grand 5-star hotel to finish her final Harry potter book!
Just the grand gesture, or this radical change in your environment at a significant money or efforts will send your mind signals that the work you are doing is important.
This will impede ideas of procrastination and provide a strong of motivation and energy.
4. Don’t work alone
Despite preaching from the beginning about shutting yourself from the rest of the world, this book is not against collaboration. Working deeply with partner(s) exerts a healthy push on you to perform and provides an added dosage of motivation, while at the same time working alongside great and diverse minds can lead to serendipitous inventions. Workspace layouts should follow the hub and spoke model to enable deep work and serendipitous collaboration.
5. Execute like a business
To unleash the deep work monster unto yourself, follow the proven and tested ‘Four disciplines of execution’ or the 4DX.
- Discipline #1: Identify the Wildly Important Goal (WIG)
- Discipline #2: Act on the lead measures
- Discipline #3: Keep a compelling scorecard
- Discipline #4: Create a cadence of accountability
6. Be lazy
Have a solid shutdown mechanism to free yourself from the incomplete and attention hungry issues from work. After shutdown you will not think about work, or about how to solve any issues at work, just complete shutdown of mental faculties on work related entities.
This downtime aid in new insights, helps recharge mind for next deep work sessions and most importantly helps you realise that the work done instead of downtime is not that important after all.
Rule #2: Embrace Boredom
The ease and availability of distracting stimuli such as smartphones and social media has rendered our brains useless in doing nothing or just sitting idle. We bring out our phones the moment we have a second in between tasks, check out social media during the time it takes to fix a small technical glitch in an important meeting.
We assume that it will be easy or effortless to constantly switch between high value/low stimuli activity to an high-stimuli/ low-value activity. This constant switching or giving in to the high-stimuli activities weakens the brain and the mental muscles responsible for rationing our attention.
Train your mind to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli, embrace the boredom.
You can do this creating blocks of time in your daily schedule where you can use the internet or the social media.
This would ensure that, even if there are available block of time in between work you are still resisting from using internet. This will strengthen your mental muscles that will keep you from giving in to temptations.
Don’t Take Breaks from Distraction. Instead Take Breaks from Focus.
Cal Newport. Deep Work .
Rule #3: Quit Social Media
The world of deep-work seekers is categorised by two points, the first is that ‘Network tools’ are generally disruptive to our ability to concentrate and fragments our time. The second point is that, the only way to escape from the issue of network tools is to become a digital nomad and completely give up those tools and technology.
This binary and black & white response is too extreme to be useful. The solution lies in attaining a middle ground with network tools usage. You can do that by carefully selecting your network tools by diligently weighing its pros and cons, and if the pros outweigh the cons, go ahead and integrate them in your daily activities in a way that would maximise the desires outcomes from those tools.
For instance, if you’re considering using Facebook to make friends and keep in touch with friends and family. Then, consider these questions
- Is it not possible to make friends without Facebook
- Did you have friends before Facebook came around, how did you manage to keep in touch
- How much time are you spending on it, and what is the output from the time invested in the tool
- Are the relationships developed exclusively on Facebook strong enough?
If you carefully analyse those questions, you’ll naturally come to the conclusion that Facebook, despite being helpful in keeping in touch with friends and family takes up a lot of your time and fragments your attention and makes it difficult to pursue deep work
Rule #4: Drain the Shallows
Plan your day to the minute, and do not run your day on autopilot!
Average workday is around 8 hours a day, and even the best deep worker cannot manage more than 4 hours of deep work, and that leaves you with 4 hours of shallow work. Even though it seems like its pretty easy to manage, we underestimate the ease with which the shallow time is consumed, with meetings, breaks, emails, calls and so on, leaving very little time for deep work or crowding the deep-work blocks on your schedule.
To counter this, plan your day to the minute. Have every waking hour of your day scheduled on a planner or a notebook. Block out important activities on your schedule (use half-hour units) and assign them your hours. Batch all the shallow activities such as emails, calls to the periphery of these activities.
Its okay if your estimation for an activity is wrong, or if a new activity comes up and disrupts your schedule.
Let your schedule be a living document that you update as and when something new comes up. And, over time you’ll get better at estimating and you schedule will become more accurate.
Conclusion
Deep work is not some nostalgic affectation of writers, nerdy professors and philosophers. It’s instead a skill that has great value today, and if cultivated properly could help you achieve more in lesser time.
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