Deep Work — Cal Newport

Deep Work. This is my first in a series of book reports on things that I’m reading. Inspiration for this comes from Derek Sivers. Hope you enjoy.

“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 skills, and are hard to replicate [….] the state of mental strain that accompanies deep work is necessary to improve your abilities” (pg 3).

“The reason knowledge workers are losing their familiarity with deep work is well established: network tools [e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Slack, IM, E-mail]  [….] have fragmented most knowledge workers’ attention into slivers. A 2012 McKinsey study found that the average knowledge worker now spends more than 60% of the workweek engaging in electronic communication and Internet searching, with close to 30% of a workers time dedicated to reading and answering e-mail alone. This state of fragmented attention cannot accommodate deep work, which requires long periods of uninterrupted thinking” (pg 6).

The Deep Work Hypothesis: “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 lives, will thrive” (pg 14).

Deep work is valuable for two reasons:

  1. It enables you to quickly master hard things
  2. It is a prerequisite to producing at an elite level in terms of quality and speed

Ericsson: We deny that these differences between expert performers and normal adults are imutable… instead we argue that the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain. Deliberate practice core components are as follows:

  1. Your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you’re trying to improve or an idea you’re trying to master
  2. You receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it’s most productive.

The Science of deliberate practice: You get better at a skill as you develop more myelin around the relevant neurons, allowing the corresponding circuit to fire more effortlessly and effectively. To be great at something is to be well myelinated. By focusing on  a specific skill, you’re forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire again and agin, in isolation. This repetitive use of a specific circuit triggers cells called oligodendrocytes to begin wrapping layers of myelin around the neurons in the circuits, effectively cementing the skill. The reason, therefore, why it’s important to focus intensely on the task at hand while avoiding distractions is because this is the only way to isolate the relevant neural circuit enough to trigger useful myelination. By contrast, if you’re trying to learn a complex new skill in a state of low concentration you’re firing too many circuits simultaneously and haphazardly to isolate the group of neurons you actually want to strengthen. 

Rules for Deep Work:

  1. Work Deeply
    1. Decide on your Depth Philosophy
      1. Monastic – (e.g. Donald Knuth) Completely eliminate or radically minimize shallow obligations to an extreme. Need a well-defined and highly valued professional goal.
      2. Bimodal — (e.g. Carl Jung) Seek a monastic deep work philosophy during periods of retreat. Deep work can produce extreme productivity, but only if the subject dedicates enough time to such endeavors to reach maximum cognitive intensity. Minimum unit of time is one full day. Looks different depending on scales (i.e. one week could be 4 days, one year could be one season)
      3. Rhythmic — (e.g. Jerry Seinfeld) Easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit. The goal is to generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you’re going to go deep. Chain method is a good example because it combines a simple schedule (every day) with an easy way to remind yourself to do the work:  big red x on calendar. COuld also replace X with the same time every day.
      4. Journalistic (e.g. Walter Isaacson) Fit deep work wherever you can in your schedule. Not for novices.
    2. Ritualize — Answer the following questions
      1. Where will you work and for long?
      2. How you’ll work once you start to work? (e.g. ban on internet, maintain a metric)
      3. How you’ll support your work (e.g. start with a cup of coffee, integrate light exercise, have food to maintain energy
    3. Make Grand Gestures — Some examples:
      1. Expensive hotel room
      2. Build a log cabin
    4. Don’t Work Alone
    5. Execute Like a Business
      1. Focus on the wildly important
      2. Act on the lead measusers
        1. Lag measures desribe the thing you’re trying to improve
        2. Lead measures measure the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures
      3. Keep a compelling scoreboard
      4. Create a cadence of accountability
    6. Be lazy
      1. Think diffuse vs focused methods of thinking
      2. Embrace a shutdown ritual after work. List out goals for next day. Make it verbal “shutdown complete.”
    7. Meditate productively
    8. Memorize a deck of cards(?)
  2. Embrace Boredom
    1. Don’t take breaks from distraction, take breaks from focus: schedule when you’ll use the internet. Literally every minute. Do this at work and at home.The constant switching from low stimuli/high value activities to high-stimuli/low value activities teaches your mind to never tolerate an absence of novelty
  3. Quit Social Media — see cons of network tools above, embracing boredom
  4. Drain the Shallows
    1. Schedule every minute of your day (see 7 Habits planning)
    2. Quantify depth of activities (prioritize depth)
    3. Ask your boss for shallow work budget
    4. Finish work by 5:30 PM
    5. Become hard to reach. Put down your phone. [NT: Use Forest app more.]

“Deep Work is a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done. Deep work is important, not because distraction is evil, but because it enabled Bill Gates to start a billon dollar industry in less than a semester” (pg 258).

“To leave the distracted masses to join the focused few […] is a transformative experience [….] The deep life, of course, is not for everybody. It requires hard work and drastic changes to your habits. For many, there’s a comfort in the artificial busyness of rapid e-mail messaging and social media posturing while the deep life demands that you leave much of that behind. There’s also an uneasiness that surrounds any effort to produce the best things you’re capable of producing, as this forces you to confront the possibility that your best is not (yet) that good. It’s safer to comment on our culture than to step into the Rooseveltian ring and attempt to wrestle it into something better.

But if you’re willing to sidestep these comforts and fears, and instead struggle to deploy your mind to its fullest capacity to create things that matter, then you’ll discover, as others have before you, that depth generates a life rich with productivity and meaning [….] I’ll live the focused life, because it’s the best kind there is [Winifred Gallagher]” (pg 263).

Thoughts:

I liked this book, and I think the natural progression is to move on understanding the fundamentals of deliberate practice (Anders Ericsson, Peak). Rules #1 and 3 I liked. I think 2 and 4 are less realistic for my job. I want to schedule deep work every week, every day, using the rhythmic method. I need to turn it into a habit (ritualize, perhaps use Tiny Habits?).

More on this to come… currently reading: Grit