I’m trying to be a better reader. Part of that is taking notes. So now I have all these notes about ‘Deep Work’, a book by Cal Newport about why not being distracted is so important if you want to get anything meaningful done. I thought I might as well share them.
If you like what you’re reading, remember to buy Newport’s book. It’s much more eloquent and entertaining!
Why focus and time are so important
Newport’s proposition is that for a knowledge worker to thrive in today’s world, 2 abilities matter most:
- To quickly master new things: learn new skills, understand complex content, etc.
- To produce at an elite level: make quality stuff.
How do you quickly master new things? Through deliberate practice: instead of ‘putting in the 10k hours’, elite learning depends on training very specific behaviour relentlessly.
For any skill you’re trying to acquire:
- Focus on a specific part and train that.
- Receive feedback regularly, so you can adjust your focus to where it has the most impact.
So we covered ‘learning new skills’, let’s move on to ‘producing at an elite level’.
How do you produce at an elite level? You focus on the thing that’s important. Why is focus so important? When you learn a new skill, you’re teaching your brain to fire specific neurons. Imagine your brain is a little garden. The new skill is a little garden path you want to put in. Focussing only on the new task means only the relevant neurons are engaged: you put in a nice and tidy path. Distraction means lots of neurons are fired at the same time, and nothing gets cemented: you have bricks all over your little garden.
Quickly mastering new things and producing at an elite level require: undistracted lenghts of time to put in only the relevant work. Deep work.
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Exceptions to the rule
Newport is not an extremist (just kidding, he is), and he argues there are exceptions to this rule. For example, CEOs are not required or expected to sit in rooms for long, uninterrupted bouts of time. Devoting them to deep work is a waste of time, money and opportunities. They need to make decisions quickly.
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Is society optimised for lots of deep work?
Newport argues: No. ‘Traditional’ open office setups, email, Twitter and Instagram and TikTok, and instant messaging all in their own way diminish peoples’ ability to do deep work, sucking away your ability for DEEP WORK.
Also, humans resist deep work naturally, because it’s hard. In an ambiguous setting, like an office, where you don’t get immediate feedback on what value each activity contributes to the bottomline, it’s easy to choose for the path of least resistance: email (busy work), chat (instant gratification), a meeting (status quo). You might recognise this train of thought: ‘I can’t choose between sending email vs. concentrating on a task based on value added, because value is hard to quantify, so I’ll optimise for time, which is easily quantifiable: guess I’ll send another quick email.’
This thought process feeds into expectations around being always available/online.
Where this type of ‘always available’ behaviour is impossible or prohibited, you automatically need to improve your planning, writing, and organisational skills.
If society doesn’t organise to value and promote deep work, Newport argues, that simply puts people who can produce deep work consistently at an advantage.
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Deep Work and a meaningful Life
There’s more to it than just the productivity angle, though. Newport argues DEEP WORK also leads to a more meaningful life. He presents 3 arguments.
Neurological argument
In ‘Rapt’, Winifred Gallagher investigates the relation between focus and happiness. She finds people are, feel, think, act on what they focus on (there’s that word again).
Feeling drained after doomscrolling? Yeah, me too. Full of purpose and commitment after volunteering? Energised after going for a run? Etc.
Gallagher advises: for the best life, choose your targets carefully, then give them your complete attention.
Psychological argument
Flow: you feel best when stretched voluntarily to achieve something difficult but not impossible. (See also Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s classic: ‘Flow’.)
If you reconstruct your job so that it allows you to experience flow more often, as often as possible, you’ll feel better while doing valuable deep work.
Philosophical argument for Depth
God is dead, the philosopher will tell you. In the modern world, we tend to think there’s no magic or meaning, and we need to invent it (Nietzsche). Whereas a craftsperson does actually find meaning ‘out there’, in the material and how it confronts them with possibilities (and limitations) for whatever they’re trying to achieve with the material. Newport gives the example of the wheelwright: they have to select wood that’s right for the job, working with it to produce the best result. For the craftsman, the outside world is imbued with meaning.
Newport also argues this points to something else: don’t follow your passions, as if that will solve any problems with obnoxious colleagues, working hours, etc. Put in the hours to hone your craft, and immediately your life will gain more meaning.
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Rules for Deep Work
Distractions are distracting because they are easy. You have to actively create an environment where you’re not distracted, where it’s easy to focus. Develop rules, routines and rituals, to take the willpower out of your quest for time and space to do deep work, otherwise you won’t make it.
Tips for how to do more Deep Work
- Focus on the really important things, and cut out everything else as much as possible (be hard about it)
- Act on the leading indicators, the behavioural changes, instead of the results (actively create an environment and time for focus vs. sitting and waiting for focus to happen)
- Keep a compelling scoreboard (Have I done DEEP WORK RECENTLY?)
- Create a cadence of accountability: reflect on achievements, what behaviour led to success?, what blocked us from achieving success?
- Schedule in downtime, and keep to it. In the words of Newport: we don’t know why that works, but here are 3 possible reasons:
- For things that follow rational rules, the conscious brain is better. But “the unconscious mind is better at sifting large swaths of information”. You need downtime for that part of you mind to do it’s work.
- Your attention is a finite resource, and you need to replenish it (fe., with a walk in nature).
- “Even experts only have 4 hours a day of concentration available for deep work.” Why guarantee that you’re going to deliver low-value work by forcing yourself to work evenings as well as days?
- Implement a shutdown ritual: capture thoughts and ‘next steps’ to help you plan for the next day, and wrap up the ritual with a phrase.
- Expect DEEP WORK to be a commitment. It’s not a one-time decision, it requires practice.
- Take breaks from focus, not from distraction. Newport advises you to plan internet access.
- Become comfortable with boredom.
- Give yourself intense deadlines, so you can’t afford to be distracted. (what he calls the Roosevelt dash).
- Actively think on a problem while walking/surfing/running.
- Learn how to memorise a deck of cards, as the ‘Memory Palace’ memorisation technique trains the same attention span skills as DEEP WORK. –> If you’re interested in this technique check out ‘Moonwalking with Einstein’, highly recommended!
How to minimize dumb work
Everybody hates shallow work. However, you should realise:
- It will never go away. Email will always be part of your life.
- Deep work is exhausting. Shallow work is only dangerous if it crowds out your DEEP WORK. But you probably can manage shallow work better than you currently do:
- Schedule every minute of your day, so you have to consciously have to renegotiate when something new pops up
- Cap your working hours, so you can only focus on the stuff that truly matters.
- Become hard to reach by email (Newport gives tips, but you can read those yourself)