Deep Work

I recently finished reading the book Deep Work by Carl Newport. The book is a practical guide on how to be focused in a distracted world. Newport has coined the term Deep work that he defines as: 

Professional activity 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.

He spends the first part of the book explaining why deep work is important. He argues that in our current economy, there are three groups of people that will do well: 

• Those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines
• Those who are best at what they do
• Those who have access to capital

The core abilities for someone to thrive in the new economy is to quickly master things and produce at elite level, in terms of quality and speed. 

Newport uses the following formula for producing high quality work:

high quality work produced = (time spent) X (intensity of focus)

and as such, argues that we can maximise quality of work by maximising intensity of focus. This is where deep work comes in. 

The author claims that most of us follow the principle of least resistance-  "in business setting without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviours to the bottom line, we will tend towards behaviour that are easiest in the moment."

In today's work place, we use busyness as proxy for productively. That is, in the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in our jobs, we turn to an industrial indicator of productively: doing lots of stuff in visible manner - keeping busy! 

In the second part of the book, Newport provides four rules to build deep work into daily life: 

1. Work deeply
2. Embrace bordom
3. Quit social media
4. Drain the shallow

Work Deeply

One of Newport's claims is that deep work isn't something we can just do. It's a skill and a muscle we need to build. It's not as easy to just have the motivation to want to work deeply on something. 

Our brain has a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as we use it. The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals. The more we minimise the amount of limited willpower we have to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration, the more successful we will become in building a deep work habit. 

Newport spends many pages talking about many famous people and how they have deep work built into their schedule. I am going to skip summarising all of that and instead highlight some of the tips that will be more applicable to my daily work. There are four different types of deep work: 

• Monastic philosophy - This philosophy attempts to maximise deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimising shallow obligations. In practice, you will focus nearly all your time on deep work 
• Bimodal philosophy - This philosophy asks you to divide your time dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else. In practice, you may devote fall and winter to deep work and summer and sprint to shallow work
• Rhythmic philosophy - This philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work session is to transform them into a simple regular habit. In practice, you will have scheduled deep work every morning for example
• Journalistic philosophy - This philosophy fits deep work wherever you can into your schedule. In practice, you may schedule deep work if a meeting gets cancelled

For my type of work, I can see myself applying journalistic philosophy and perhaps try to incorporate rhythmic philosophy where possible. 

Regardless of which philosophy you pick, here are some tips to help you build deep work in your schedule: 

Build a ritual

In order to build a deep work ritual, there are a few questions you must address: 

• Location - identify a space to do deep work that is free of distractions. Be sure to indicate to others that you are not to be disrupted 
• Duration - provide a specific timeframe to keep the session a discrete challenge and not an open ended slog
• Structure - define a set of rules and processes to support your work. For instance, you may want to ban the use of internet, you may want to maintain a metric such as number of words produced per min. Anything that will help you keep your concentration honed. Without a good structure in place you will have to mentally litigate again and again, draining the willpower reserves
• Requirements - identify what you require to support your work. This may be a good cup of coffee, music, food, access to specific software, etc.

 

Execute like a business

Newport argues that division between how and what is crucial but often overlook. It's easier to identify a strategy to achieve a goal than it is to execute on the strategy. Newport draws from the 4 disciplines of execution: 

1. Focus on the wildly important

The more you do, the less you accomplish. Execution should be aimed at a small number of wildly important goals. Direct your effort at your most important goals during deep work. 

2. Act on lead measures

There are two types of metrics: lag measures and lead measures. 

Lag measures describes things we ultimately want to improve. For example, we may want to improve customer satisfaction score of our bakery.

Lead measures describes the new behaviour that will drive the success on the lag measures. For example, giving out free samples to customer may increase our customer satisfaction score. 

The idea here is that by the time you measure the lag metric, it's too late. You want to focus on thing you can do to improve while working towards the lag measure. Lead measures give you the ability to do something about it now. 

Lead measure for deep work would be time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal. 

3. Keep a compelling scoreboard

Keep a visual scoreboard of your lead measures and track how many hours you've spent in deep work.  Newport suggests keeping a pen and paper tally of how many hours you spent on deep work. 

4. Create a cadence of accountability 

Every week review the scoreboard. Celebrate the good weeks, figure out what led to the bad weeks and how to ensure good scores for the days ahead. 

Be lazy

Newport argues the importance of disconnecting from work when work is over. For one thing some decisions are best left to the unconscious mind to untangle before you revisit it again. Also, downtime helps recharge energy needed to work deeply and since we have limited attention and willpower reserve, the work we end up doing in the evening are usually not that important. 

The key to let go of work is to deal with incomplete tasks/goals/projects by either creating a plan to complete them or capturing them in a place where they can be revisited next. Once Newport reviews and plans for his incomplete task, he has a ritual of saying "shutdown complete." 

Embrace Bordem

As mentioned earlier, the ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained. That's why mustering enough motivation to switch from being distracted to being focus doesn't really work and why we need to put in place rituals to build this mental muscle. 

However, just like athletes need to take care of their bodies outside of training by eating healthy, we will struggle to achieve deepest level of concentration if we spend the rest of our time fleeting the slightest hint of boredom. Newport argues that once our brain becomes accustomed to on-demand distraction, it's hard to shake the addiction even when we want to concentrate. For instance, while it may seem innocent to look at our phone when we are waiting inline or waiting for a friend, we are in fact feeding the addiction of finding something to be distracted with. Instead, Newport suggests to create a block of time where you will use the internet. This way, you have control over how much time you spend on the internet. As a general rule, Newport suggests we make focus our default mode. 

Rather than switching back and forth between distraction and work, lowering your ability to perform the latter, keep off distracting websites and apps for a predetermined amount of time. Simply put, make “offline” your default.

Newport also advocates for the practice of productive meditation: 

The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally—walking, jogging, driving, showering—and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem.

He argues that rather than listening to podcast or audiobooks while folding laundry or doing dishes, spend two or three times per week in the state of productive meditation, focusing your thinking on a single problem. This may be difficult at first and you may have to bring your attention back to the problem, but with enough practice you will learn to focus.  

Quit social media

Newport spends quite a bit of time arguing why you should quit social media. I am not going to summarise those arguments. Instead I am going to highlight some key takeaways.  

Social media is not necessarily bad. Like any tool it has its advantages and disadvantages. However, in today's economy many of use use the any-benefit approach to network tool selection. That is we justify using a network tool if we can identify any possible benefit to use it for anything we may miss out on if we don't use it. 

Rather than using the any-benefit approach, Newport suggests we take the craftsman approach to tool selection. Identify core factors that determine success and happiness in our professional and personal life and then adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on those factors substantially outweighs its negative impact. 

Identify a goal that is specific enough to allow you to clearly picture doing it but also general enough that is not tied to onetime outcome. For instance, your goal may be to regularly read and understand cutting edge results in your field. Then consider professional tools available and see which one will best support this goal. Remember you want to use the craftsman approach and not any-benefit approach. 

Newport also highlights the importance of being thoughtful when it comes to leisure time. When it comes to relaxation don't default to whatever grabs your attention at the moment, but instead dedicate some time in advance thinking about how you want to spend your day within a day. For me, this idea is very similar to planning your food when dieting. If you don't plan in advance what you want to eat, you take the risk of snacking on food you otherwise wouldn't have. 

Drain the shallow work

Shallow work is defined as 

non-cognitively demanding, logical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate 

If you are unsure if something is shallow work or not, Newport suggests to ask yourself how long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialised training in my field to complete this task? This question will help guide you in figuring out which tasks require more thought and attention from you. 

Some strategies to limit your shallow work include: 

Schedule your day

In order to drain shallow work, Newport recommends scheduling every minute of the day. He is very clear that the schedule here isn't about constraints. Schedules will be disrupted and we will underestimate the amount of time required for tasks. Instead, the idea about planning your day is thoughtfulness. It's a simple habit that forces you to continually take a moment throughout your day and ask "what makes sense for me to do with the time that remains?"

Todoist has an article on time-boxing that draws from Newport among other books and provides a nice visualisation for time-boxing. 

Limit your workday

Embrace the "fixed-schedule" productivity. Rather than working long hours to accomplish your goals, constrain yourself to a typical eight-hour work day. This will force you to be ruthless when choosing where you spend your time and energy. 

Make yourself inaccessible

Newport offers three suggestions to help deal with emails: 

1. Make senders do more work when they email you - I found this tip doesn't really apply to me. But the general idea is to not list your email address publicly and make senders work for your email addresses. Ask senders to filter themselves by having different contract forms for different queries. 
2. Do more work when you send or respond to email - Reduce the back and forth of emails by adopting a "process-centric approach to email." Send more thorough and complete correspondence so you can close the loop on a conversation more quickly. I know I can be lazy when sending emails and at times asking one line question. Using this technique will take me longer to draft a message, but should hopefully reduce a lot of the ping-pongs. 
3. Don't respond - Not every email that lands in your inbox requires a response. Newport argues we should adopt the mindset that "it's the sender's responsibility to convince the receiver that a reply is worthwhile". While this may or may not work in your current work, here are some criteria that you can think of when deciding if you should respond to an email: 
• It's ambiguous or otherwise makes it hard for you to generate a response
• It's not a question or proposal that interests you
• Nothing good or bad would happen if you don't reply