THE LOST SUPERPOWER OF DEEP WORK

Bob Proctor once said: “2% of people think. 3% of people think they think and 95% of people would rather die than think.”?And that, my friends, is how Deep Work became the lost superpower.

Okay, let me qualify that. It’s not that people suddenly decided that they didn’t want to think. No, this has been a process that has been ‘forced’ onto the majority of intelligent and well-meaning people. How??By incessant external bombardment until they reach such a state of overload that they have to ‘not think’ as a self-protection.

Email. Social media. Deadlines. Chatter. Open plan office distractions. Time wasted looking for data. Miscommunications. Lack of communication. And on, and on….

In my opinion, it’s time to call it quits with the continual demands on our attention, take a deep breath and focus.?

In one of my previous articles , I referenced a quote by a leader whose team was involved in the Four Day Workweek experiment. This leader had set aside a few hours daily for his team to Deep Work. They banned distractions - no phone calls, no messages, no emails, no interruptions - just time dedicated to focusing on actual work. The result??

"[The team] started realizing that they were smashing projects that they had always put on the back burner"

I’ve never been a fan of multi-tasking and all the data I’ve read on the topic suggests that trying to do more than one thing at a time results in a loss of productivity. These days, however, it’s almost impossible for most of us to not have to cope with more than one thing at a time. In other words, we’re constantly bouncing between multiple activities with multiple requirements. The net result is exhaustion, burnout, frustration and, yes, loss of productivity.?

I did a little research on Deep Work to see what that term really meant and whether it could be a solution. In my research I came across this book by Cal Newport, “Deep Work: Rules for focused success in a distracted world ”.

I think the author's overview sums it up very nicely, so I’ll just quote it here rather than trying to explain it:

“ONE OF THE MOST VALUABLE SKILLS IN OUR ECONOMY IS BECOMING INCREASINGLY RARE. IF YOU MASTER THIS SKILL, YOU’LL ACHIEVE EXTRAORDINARY RESULTS.

Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep—spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there’s a better way.”

I can relate to that, how about you?

In another reference from ‘doist’ https://blog.doist.com/deep-work/ the writer states:

“Many of us have forgotten how to focus deeply on a single task, or never really learned to in the first place. In school you may have done well enough by practicing mostly shallow work on a day-to-day basis, with the occasional deep work session a few times per semester to write a last-minute paper or cram for a final exam.

Learning how to practice deep work requires you to be more intentional than you’ve ever been in sitting down regularly to concentrate on high-impact tasks. These strategies will help you select your preferred form of deep work, build a routine from scratch, and provide operating principles and tactics for embracing the power of directed focus.”

This article goes into some detail on the different types of Deep Work scheduling and their strategies. Each of the types has their own philosophy for want of a better description. What they have in common is the need to spend time regularly, preferably scheduled time, on focusing and concentrating on high value, high leverage tasks.

The key is to:

- Identify which are the highest priority tasks

- Schedule dedicated time to perform them

- Refuse to take on commitments that will derail this schedule

- Choose a space to do your Deep Work - somewhere where you can shut out distractions of any kind

- Decide ahead of time when you can take a short break within your scheduled Deep Work time

- Decide what supports will help make your Deep Work easier. For example, make sure you have a beverage on hand. If music helps you concentrate, then get that set up before you begin, etc.

- Go all in. Don’t think of it as something you’ll ‘try’ but if it doesn’t work, oh well… Make a serious commitment and stick to it. It's a learned skill.

- Create an accountability mechanism for the time you’ve scheduled for Deep Work

- Prioritize downtime to allow the brain time to creatively and subconsciously work on the topic. According to Newport, we have a limited attention span for Deep Work - maximum of 4 hours - after which our attention begins to wane.

An interesting angle to this is the synergy between Deep Work and collaboration. Deep Work is usually done alone, while collaboration is usually seen as a real-time event. However, using an on-demand collaborative work management system like Optevo , we can incorporate other’s work/research/suggestions into our own, as we need them, by drawing from the asynchronous data in our work pod or in our file management system. That’s not to say that we can’t collaborate in real time with a colleague also focused on the same topic and working in a Deep Work mode.

We should also be aware that, for many of us, Deep Work is something we have to learn to do.? We’re so used to being on the go all the time that settling down to one task for an extended period can feel highly uncomfortable at first. Begin with short periods of 15 to 30 minutes and work your way up. Don’t get frustrated if it doesn’t work perfectly to begin with. We each have to find our ‘happy place’ in terms of Deep Work. What works for us is often not the same as what will work for someone else.

Doist also suggests that we should work on developing our memory skills as it will greatly enhance our ability to Deep Work. They suggest simple memory trainers such as memorizing a song or poem, a list of words in a foreign language, or the order of a stack of books.

All of the above, however, is probably not going to be easy to implement unless the leaders in your organization agree as to the value of scheduling time for Deep Work as a corporate policy, or, giving team members the flexibility and autonomy to arrange their own schedules to incorporate Deep Work.

Perhaps, it’s another thing to challenge your organization to adopt for a limited time to test the validity and increased productivity of scheduled Deep Work. If it’s worked for others, there’s a good chance it will pay off for us as well!

#DeepWork #DesignThinking #Focus #Concentrate #FutureOfWork #Leadership #OpenPlanOffice #HybridWork #RemoteWork #Optevo #CWM #business #technology #innovation