Deep Work by Cal Newport
Many of us feel like we never get any real work done. We spend our time reacting to whatever happens - emails, meetings, crises, new projects and demands. Nothing ever seems to get the attention it deserves as we multi-task and juggle competing and conflicting priorities. What we do often seems like a sticking plaster, only just good enough for now. We know it is not our best work and it will likely come back to haunt us at some point.
If this is your experience, you are mainly doing "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." This is not what our boss is paying us to do, but we may well find ourselves in an environment where this is all we are able to do. That's not good for anyone. Here's what Newport has to say on this:
"The common habit of working in a state of semi-distraction is potentially devastating to your performance."
Newport quotes Clifford Nass - "People who multitask all the time can't filter out irrelevancy. They can't manage a working memory. They're chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand…they're pretty much mental wrecks."
"If you send and answer emails at all hours, if you schedule and attend meetings constantly, or if you roam your open office bouncing ideas off all whom you encounter - all of these behaviors make you seem busy in a public manner. If you are using busyness as a proxy for productivity, then these behaviors can seem crucial for convincing yourself and others that you're doing your job well."
"In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of our various behaviors to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviors that are the easiest in the moment."
"Constant connectivity and regular project meetings are two examples of activities that are easy but not adding much value while distracting people from deep work, thereby reducing the bottom line value produced by the company, that none-the-less thrive because, in the absence of metrics, most people fall back on what's easiest."
"If email were moved to the periphery of your workday, you'd be required to deploy a more thoughtful approach to figuring out what you should be working on and for how long."
If only we could find a way to spend more time on "deep work" - "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."
Cal Newport's book argues that we absolutely must find ways to achieve this and provides some practical suggestions for how to do it. But we know this is going to be really hard or maybe even impossible, so why should we even try? The answer:
"Deep work helps you quickly learn hard things, and produce at an elite level."
"The ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done."
"Like fingers pointing at the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioral economics to family counseling, similarly suggest that the skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience" - Winifred Gallagher, Rapt, 2009.
So how do we do it? How do we free ourselves from our current whirlwind workstyle to allow for deep work??
Newport cites examples that most of us cannot adopt like taking complete breaks to disconnect. While this is an ideal approach, in the real world, most of us will have to do our best to carve out deep work time every day. Newport advises that about an hour a day is all most people who are starting out will be able to manage. With practice, you might get to four hours a day of genuine deep work and that is most people's limit and we need down time to restore and recover our capacity for deep work and to allow the subconscious to process complex issues.?
Fortunately, he finds this is enough to make a huge difference to the quality of work we produce and the impact we are able to achieve. In fact, by going deep and reducing shallow, you will get more done in less time and have a better quality work / life balance.
1 Schedule deep work
Schedule time every day for deep work, and track how many days you stick to the schedule. It's generally better if you aim for the same time every day. Snatching whatever free time slots come up in your schedule requires much more skill and practice in dropping into deep work quickly and confidently, and is beyond most people's ability.?
2 Figure out your deep work ritual:
(i) where you will work and how long? - find somewhere quiet that you will not be disturbed
(ii) how you will work once you start? e.g. no emails or Internet
(iii) How you will support your work? - eg coffee / healthy snacks, exercise, raw materials
?3 Having a strategy is easy, but you need an execution plan
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Borrowed from Clayton Christensen, The 4 Disciplines of Execution:
(i) Focus on the wildly important - a small number of ambitious outcomes you want to achieve from your deep work
(ii) Act on lead measures - i.e. time spent in deep work dedicated to your wildly important goal - are you staying on track?
(iii) Keep a compelling scorecard - e.g. a physical artefact that displays your current deep work hours count to provide reinforcement and motivation
(iv) Create a cadence of accountability - e.g. a weekly review of your scorecard and use that to plan how to get a better deep work score in the week ahead.
?4 Quit all social media
Unless its positive impact on factors that determine your success and happiness in your professional and personal life outweigh its negative impacts (which in almost all cases they won't if you are being brutally honest). These tools are addictive for a reason, and helping you do deep work is not one of them.
Avoid using the internet for entertainment - "put more thought into your leisure activities" by considering how they support your wellbeing, rest, recovery, real personal connections.
?5 Try the four day week?
The idea is not to do 5 days of hours in 4 days but to keep the same length days so that we are forced to ration quality time. This means we have to plan how to use the reduced time available and focus on what we really need to accomplish in that time. This was first tried by Basecamp in 2007 and has been found to be extremely successful in retaining the same or better productivity. A large scale pilot is just getting under way at the time of writing.
?6 Schedule your time rigorously
Try scheduling your whole day into blocks of activity, including rest and recovery and buffers for slippage when things take longer than expected or unexpected things come up. Revise your schedule as stuff happens during the day. The aim not to stick to your plan every day but is to be intentional about how you use your time.
?7 Evaluate task depth
Apply the depth test of how long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training to complete the task? If it's only a few months, it's not deep work. Deep work is what draws on your depth of experience over a lifetime, where you are able to add maximum value and that is broadly speaking unique.
?8 Ask your boss for a shallow work budget -
Bosses will usually want you to be spending no more than 50% of your time on shallow work. But they also probably don't want you doing less than 30% shallow work as there is always some of this and they need you to be doing your share. Then cut out shallow activities to fit the budget, like regular catch-up meetings that don't actually progress projects. Use your scheduling plan to track how much time you are spending on shallow work and let your boss know if it is taking over your ability to do deep work.
?9 Say no to shallow work
Do not fall into the trap of offering a 'consolation prize' as a way of easing your guilt about saying no. E.g. Sorry, I can't join your committee but I'm happy to review draft proposals - that review could take nearly as long as being sully involved.
?10 Don't respond to emails if any of these apply (with reasonable, but few exceptions):
Don't send emails that just generate more emails! Be specific and ensure your email drives towards closure, not leaving things open for endless to and fro.
I personally think this is one of the biggest challenges we face in organisations today. Finding consistent,??uninterrupted time for deep work is a huge challenge, but one well worth taking on, both for our performance but perhaps more importantly for our mental health. Well worth a read - if you can find the deep work time to focus on it!