Deep Work
Cal Newport
Work is becoming more complex, which requires more focus and attention. At the same time, the variety and prevalence of distractions has been rising. This book advocates that success, where knowledge work is increasingly critical, requires people to create conditions for deep work and to minimize shallow work. This is a significant challenge in modern organizations.
The author defines deep work as 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.* Deep work involves mental strain to complete and is contrasted to shallow work which is noncognitively demanding, logistical-styles tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate. Examples of deep work include writing a book, developing a strategy, analyzing data and preparing a scientific report. Deep work deals with ambiguous situations, uncertain futures and complicated inputs. Examples of shallow work include making a hotel reservation, checking Facebook or Twitter, and exchanging emails.
It is not hard to understand that work that requires concentration is hard to do when distracted or disrupted. These are the two main themes of the book: (1) our work practices make deep work harder to do and (2) we are forgetting how to work deeply as a result. In a world that increasingly rewards the ability to learn complex, new skills and apply them to deeper work, those who rapidly learn difficult things and then apply them at a high level of speed and quality will benefit disproportionately. In a similar way, organizations that can help their members with these efforts will also thrive.
The book addresses these two themes from a number of angles, but one stands out. There is a concept that has developed called “attention residue”. When you are doing a task, and you must move to another task, part of your attention remains on the first task. The attention residue prevents you from focusing completely on the second task and degrades your productivity. There are a couple of unintuitive aspects of this residue. First, low intensity, open-ended tasks create a greater residue. Second, imposing a deadline for the first task decreases the residue. According to research by Sophie Leroy1, the performance on the second task is measurably worse when people leave the first task incomplete compared to those who complete the first task. An aspect of why deep work matters is that people who devote blocks of time to focused work complete more tasks, eliminate attention residue and so are more productive on each subsequent task than a person who is “multitasking”. This suggests that even the performance of shallow work could be more productive if done in a deep work style.
The book briefly diverges to discuss the working style of Jack Dorsey (a co-founder of Twitter and Squarespace) who is a top executive in both companies. He spends his entire day in meetings or sitting in a central location being available to whoever walks up. Clearly, he has no time for deep work and is successful by most standards. The key is to understand his role - which is to decide. People present him options and he reacts. Most organizations have people in similar roles, but not very many people. The majority of employees are charged with routine, shallow work or a mix of shallow and deep work. The people who gain these top executive roles, probably did it because of their history of deep work output.
There are a lot of barriers to deep work in modern business. Open offices expose workers to visual and auditory distraction. People may be expected to drop their own work to help others without any advance notice (spontaneous collaboration) Organizations have norms about participation in (internal or external) social media, response time for messages, meeting participation and so forth. There is a constant concern about being too detailed or getting into the weeds that suggests that people embracing depth and detail are doing something wrong (shallow is being preferred over deep). A group within Boston Consulting tried decreasing their connectivity and found that they got more work done with less stress and created happier clients. Perhaps, consultants’ ability to focus on their work made a difference. Newport proposes a “principle of least resistance” that leads us to do what is easy (shallow work) instead of what may be hard (deep work). When we are constantly interrupted and expected to be interruptible, the easiest path for us is to do shallow work. So that is what employees do.
A large portion of the book details the foundation for these assertions and is quite interesting. But rather than summarize that material, approaches that you can use for increasing time for deep work will be described. Some of these are “extreme” and some non-obvious. It is best to start gradually to increase the time and effort for deep work. Like many other sorts of conditioning, you must get your “attention” into shape by building up deep work over time. Start with one thing and gradually add more as your capacity to focus increases. You have a finite amount of willpower and it becomes depleted as you use it. Your will…is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it’s instead like a muscle that tires….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 minimize the amount of your limited willpower. The following ideas focus on the creating the right conditions for deep work. There will then be some suggestions to improve your ability to take advantage of the time.
Create opportunity to work deeply
One hindrance to deep work is administrative work. A number of people cited in the book refuse administrative roles. One person (a Nobel Prize winner) declared that he was not competent enough to serve in such functions and convinced others of this.
A variety of people organize their schedules to concentrate their shallow tasks - leaving other blocks of time open for deeper tasks. For example, Adam Grant (a business professor) concentrates his teaching work in the fall semester so that he has the spring and summer semesters for deeper work. Some people concentrate shallow work into certain days of the week or certain parts of the day (no meeting mornings or Mondays).
People devoted to deep work often create special places for that work. For one person, the modification was to close his office door and turn out the lights. Carl Jung had a portion of his country house that he would visit to in order to work alone. Some people in the book did all of their deep work in a simple home office with minimal furnishings. A version of this for some was to work in a place without an internet connection to remove the temptation to seek diversion. One author actually writes his books on a manual typewriter for that reason. These physical cues all reinforce the idea that focus is the purpose.
Numerous people eliminate email or social media entirely from their lives. Part of the problem is that checking email/media is addictive and makes it hard to “not check” from a fear of missing out. This results in frequent interruption. According to author Neal Stephenson, The productivity equation is non-linear….If I organize my life in such a way that I can get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. He does not provide readers with an email or postal address to communicate with him; because he would feel the need to respond, he blocks communication up front.
There are some people who can rapidly get into deep work mode and they opportunistically focus when they have some open time. This approach feels like the opposite of everything else described here, but fits a particular style of work that Newport calls journalistic. This may particularly fit writers with journalism backgrounds who learn to gather information and then quickly convert that into written form. Their practice in writing creates the sort of muscle memory that can be applied to quick focus. They have trained themselves to utilize short periods of time.
Rituals are used by some to produce predictable periods for focus and predictable moments for shallow work. Darwin had a rigorous schedule each day that he followed. The author Robert Caro has his office strictly organized to create a visual rhythm to begin his work. Some writers use a particular notebook and pen, or a particular make of manual typewriter. These rituals become cues to focus the mind on the deep tasks to be done.
On occasion you must make a grand gesture that serves as a commitment-driving push. For example, J.K. Rowling once checked into a luxury hotel to finish one of the Harry Potter books. This was unusual for her, expensive, and temporary. But at $1000/night, she worked hard on writing to justify (to herself) the expense. This might sound extreme, but the author Peter Shankman took the idea further. He had to write a book in 2 weeks so he bought a first class round trip ticket to Tokyo. He worked on the way over, had an expresso at the airport in Tokyo and flew the same plane home. He arrived with the manuscript complete. Gestures like this drive commitment.
Everything written to this point emphasizes solo deep work (and all collective work has been deemed shallow). There is a form of collaborative deep work that is done by pairs. Over time, there have been a number of creative pairs that would spend considerable time together with each person driving the other deeper into the problem. The back-and-forth promotes depth. In the majority of cases, there is some kind of division as part of the interaction. The two people can do different tasks and only come together for a “handoff”. They may be physically separated and exchange progress. Perhaps crucially, the partners still need to avoid distraction to do their deep work and so the pair may create a barrier to distraction rather than the individuals. Partnerships of this type are deliberate attempts to become deeper than either person could achieve alone.
A barrier to deep work may be the absence of the right subject for the work. Many people may have a long list of worthwhile endeavors, but none that really feel important. One way to make deep work more interesting is to make the topic more interesting. As the book expresses it, focus on the wildly important. Instead of striving to say no to the trivial, strive to say yes to something that you can immerse yourself in. Once you’ve chosen the area to strive in, focus on the leading indicators of progress. This make take some thinking all by itself, because lagging indicators are often more clear. In particular, identify some behavioral measures that should lead to the desired outcome and track those measures. Perhaps it is number of four-hour work segments per week or hours of deep work per day. Once you decide on your measures, track them in a place that constantly reminds you. In you are tracking hours/day, put a chart of daily focus hours on the wall in front of you.
Another barrier to deep work can be the stress of working deeply itself. One strategy to promote deep work may involve being idle in a specific way. Perhaps there is a balance required to work deeply. The deeper that you want to go, the more you must be sure that you prepare for, and recover from the deep work by doing something completely different. A lot of really deep insights have been gained while exercising or going for a walk with the dog. It has been suggested2 (controversially3) that decision making is often done better unconsciously than consciously. Even without any special effect, a rested brain will work better than a tired brain. It is important to know when it is time for a rest. One of the tricks suggested is a shutdown ritual. When you reach the end of a deep work period, you should take a series of specific actions to end the session. One example was to write a series of next steps down so that you know where to restart. If you remember the attention residue effect described earlier, this next step list eliminates the residue. The more specific this list is, the greater the effect on the residue. When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done.
Newport devotes an entire chapter to the suggestion that social media is a giant barrier to deep work. Simply quitting would deny people of benefits they may enjoy, but affording time for deep work means that media use should be controlled. Two perspectives guide Newport’s advice. First, while social media may provide benefits, it is important to consider any costs at the same time. It is not enough that you gain “any benefit”; you should get the desired benefit at minimal cost. He cites the example of “Facebook friends” that you don’t really interact with. These shallow relationships may not give you much benefit in exchange for the effort of checking posts about them. The same benefit can be obtained by meeting weekly with a few friends to play golf or see a movie. A second perspective might be the craftsman approach to tool selection. Basically, this asks that you identify the tools that most directly accomplish what you want to accomplish. As in the example above, in-person meetings are a more direct way of keeping up with your core friends. Taken together, you should seek the minimal number of tools that serve your vital goals.
Your use of time involves a zero sum calculation. It does not matter if some activities are useful when the question should really be whether that activity is the best use of your time. If time is the most precious, non-renewable resource – how should you spend it?
A company called Basecamp decided to go from a 5-day to a 4-day workweek. This attracted considerable reaction; the stress of 4 ten hour days would wear down employees. The CEO quickly replied that they were going to 4 normalish 8-hour days. He went on to say very few people work even 8 hours a day. You’re lucky if you get a few good hours between meetings, interruptions…that permeate the typical day. Fewer official working hours helps squeeze the fat out of the typical workweek. Making less time available helps identify the shallow activities so that they can be eliminated. The company’s output was as good as before. They later took another step to drive focus by taking the entire month of June to use on employee-initiated projects. No meetings or administrative busywork distracted employees. At the end of the month, employees pitched their projects creating two new product launches, a number of new programming and data visualization tools. By concentrating their “undirected innovation” time, output surged. This idea is more of an organizational than individual one, but highlights the approach of making it easier to eliminate shallow work that detracts from deep work by modifying the work environment – specifically the time available.
Deep work is hard and most people can only do so much before hitting diminishing returns. Schedule your deep work early in the day and leave your shallow work for later when you are tired anyway.
There are a group of people who take this even further by scheduling every minute of the day. This has two effects. First, you will have a plan for what will be done when. You can schedule shallow work and deep work and you insure that you do both. Second, this gives you control, which reduces the energy you waste on getting control in the middle of things. Finally, your schedule allows manage unplanned requests for your attention; you have a schedule to keep and nobody needs to know what you scheduled. The purpose of this approach is not to lock you in, but to provide structure that gives you freedom to work. Events will disrupt your schedule when it makes sense to let them – just react and get back on schedule.
Most organizations create many opportunities for shallow work and most organizations treat this work as “cost-free”. Ask your boss for a shallow work budget. The impact of shallow work may not be apparent to your boss until you make it clear by asking what percentage of your time should be spent on that work. It is unlikely that your boss wants you spending more than 50% of your time on such low skill work, so the likely outcome is a maximum allocation under 50% and closer to 30%. This provide clarity and gives you permission to devote 50-70% of your time to deep work.
Electronic communication is disruptive to concentration. Newport suggests a variety of approaches to decreasing the negative impact. At one level, what you are doing is the opposite of the intent of modern communication – you want to become harder to reach. This involves making people do more work when they send you email. Think about creating a sender filter that lets people thinking about emailing you know what sort of email you’ll pay attention and respond to. In our modern culture, this is a fairly arrogant approach but it is actually fairer to your sender. They try to be upfront about their own goals and tell people upfront that uninteresting messages will be ignored. Interestingly, when you do reply to an email – make it longer and more complete. Many exchanges between people have many small parts – each requiring a bit of attention. Instead, think about your reply and anticipate the future exchange. If you can close the loop on the communication in one step then you can move on entirely. Finally, Newport observes that many emails give the recipient no reason to be interested and this means that not responding is a rational reply. If you only respond to emails that give a reason to respond – people will stop bothering you or raise the quality of their email. Since many emails don’t matter, responding to them does not matter either.
Build skills for deep work
If you accept the argument that the world is highly distracting, then you might think that a basic tactic is to take breaks from the distraction. This turns out to work poorly as it trains your mind to be distracted instead of focused. A better approach is to organize for focused work and take breaks from the concentrated work to relax. It seems that our brains adapt to distraction and build the structures that allow for frequent attention changes – and this seems to sacrifice the structures best adapted for concentration. In other words, being distracted gets easier over time. In order to rebuild the capability to concentrate, you must build those structures up over time – and this is a serious commitment. If you think about it, your brain won’t probably bother to rewire to adapt to a 10% intense effort or when you only spend the periodic hour in deep concentration. The metaphor is to athletic training; you won’t run a marathon by jogging a few miles every so often. The book suggests that large blocks of concentration will have the greatest effect on promoting rewiring; if switching between tasks frequently is the root cause of low focus brain wiring, then infrequent switching may be the antidote.
To protect the blocks of concertation time, schedule the blocks of shallow work. If your duties require you to check email hourly, set a time each hour to check and handle email. Make the non-focused time a block to (say 10 minutes), so when the interruption is over you return to your focused work. Schedule other non-focused time in a similar way so that you retain large blocks of time for focused work. For the distraction addict, it is tempting to change out of a concentration block early “to get the distraction out of the way”; don’t. Keep on task until the scheduled time.
When focusing – focus. The book describes the approach of Theodore Roosevelt to his college years. He did a remarkable variety of things and many of them quite well. He also did very well in his classes while spending a small amount of time on study. His approach was to take the day’s available hours (8:30-4:30), subtract lunch, athletics and class time from the schedule – and what was left was for study and only study. During these periods he concentrated very intensely.
Set deadlines that are right at the border of feasibility. The deadline pressure (and the attractiveness of closure) help keep the attention on the task.
One way to think about meditation is as a focused thinking process. In “conventional” meditation, you might strive to “not think” – which is a way to say think about one specified thing (like your breath or a word). This can be extended to think about all focused thinking as a meditation. One way to capitalize on this idea is by combining exercise (running, biking, etc.) with thinking about one problem. The rhythm of the exercise occupies enough attention that the rest of your mind focuses on the issue. This is less simple than it sounds. It is easy to rehash events or plans rather than going deeper. Recognize when you are looping over the same thoughts and focus on the next step rather than the same step. Another way to benefit is to structure the thinking by paying attention to the variable factors in the problem being considered. Are there other ways to think about them or details about them that should be focused on? The idea of structuring is to identify the next-step question to be addressed. Another object of focused thinking might be memorization. Memory has been extensively studied with the conclusion that people’s memories are essentially all similar, but people with a great memory are better at paying attention. The practice of memorizing builds the capacity to notice essential information.
Deep work has much on common with the idea of “flow”; the psychological condition where a person is totally tuned into their task and time seems to fly by. People working in this state report feelings of productivity, accomplishment, and enjoyment. An interesting feature of people who frequently work in flow is that they find “work” more enjoyable that “play”. This leads to a final observation. If we want to have more fun, satisfaction and success from our work, we need to find ways to carve out time for deep work.
Comment and interpretation:
- This book focuses on knowledge workers, but a few sections describe the application to a wide variety of “craft” jobs. Becoming physically competent in complex skills requires deliberate practice and focus. Musicians, artists, writers, athletes and the wide variety of skilled trades workers all become experts in this way. They develop “muscle memory” that allows them to trust that their bodies will do the right thing without much mental effort. In this context, thinking can be a craft. It makes me wonder about people in many ambiguous professions (marketing, law, strategy) who face a constant flow of meetings which prevent them from having productive blocks of time to get deep into their work.
- When successful people are offered as role models today, there seems to be a greater tendency to discuss their present behavior than their past behavior. Thinking about a person like Steve Jobs during the period when Apple was ascending might be less informative than thinking about the preceding events and behaviors. The book notes that Bill Gates goes on annual retreats to think about a topic deeply, because he can’t do this in his daily life. That is a current behavior, but it started long before he was the famous Bill Gates.
- I have been thinking about spontaneous collaboration recently, and thinking about how selfish it can be. When I interrupt another person with my problem, I am asserting that my outcomes are more important than theirs. In a world where everybody is doing shallow work, this may cause them a small loss in productivity due to attention deficit. But if they are making a knowledge-rich effort, I am taking a large bite out of their effectiveness because the deficit will be much greater. This makes me wonder about having designated work periods where different kinds of work are done. Maybe 8-12 is for meetings, 1-2:30 is for shallow work and spontaneous collaboration, and 2:30 till days’ end is for individual deep work. Of maybe there are even bigger blocks spread over days (no meetings on Tuesday or Friday).
- Many jobs involve use of tools. The book makes the obvious point that it takes a lot of practice to use physical tools (hammer, violin, soldering iron, etc.) well. Most knowledge work also involves tools, but it is interesting how little time people devote to learning and practicing to use them. We are presented with new tools to direct our thinking, discussions or decision making and then drop them after one or two tries. There is not much chance that we’ve learned how to use that tool with so little practice. I wonder if the widespread distrust of business tools is really a reflection of our incompetence using them due to lack of practice.
- Newport never really comments on what you would be doing while in deep work state. He describes examples of highly logical, complicated activities and a variety of artistic activities as suitable for this disciplined approach to working. I spent much of the book mapping his examples against examples from highly creative scientists and artists. It did not take me long to recognize that the advice given to individuals who want to improve their creative thinking meshes well with Newport’s approach. A key component of creative thinking is the ability to immerse yourself in the problem – and this can’t be done very easily when you are constantly being interrupted. Many famously creative people are also willing to cut themselves off from others. This trait is often placed in the context of introverted behavior and there have been many creative introverts. But creative extraverts also use this approach to protect their productive time.
1 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.183.1776&rep=rep1&type=pdf
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscious_thought_theory
3 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/unconscious-thought-not-so-smart-after-all1/
*Text in italics is quoted directly form the book
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