What are we missing out on when we spend most of our time in meetings and answering emails? Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport answers this question, then helps us find time to do our most important “deep work”. This is not my first Newport book. I read another one of his a couple of years ago about getting rid of email. It was provocative and insightful. This one was even better.
What Is Deep Work?
Deep Work is the time you spend focusing intensely on something important – something that will really move the needle for your life or career. Newport has a formula he uses to describe the beneficial effects of Deep Work:
High Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent)×(Intensity of Focus)
In Deep Work, Newport makes a convincing argument that we, collectively as a society, are losing our ability to do deep work due to the influx of technological interruptions (texts, slack messages, emails, etc) and our tendency to fill our days at work with meetings. The beginning of the book describes what’s at stake if we lose this ability and the rest of the book describes how to get back to deep work.
With Diminishing Deep Work, What’s at Stake?
Our careers are likely suffering from lack of deep work. If we only have time to focus on shallow topics, we aren’t doing as many important tasks that help us actually reach our goals. Many people work evenings and weekends because those are the only times they can get into deep work — when no one else is around. This, of course, affects our personal lives. There is less time for relaxation and fun, which are necessary for recuperation and for doing our best work.
But we’re also missing out on fulfillment. Newport makes a convincing argument that deep work brings us fulfillment in life. Not only are we learning and growing during our deep work sessions, but we’re getting the work done that really moves the needle towards our goals. Working towards those goals can be deeply satisfying.
Less Deep Work = Less Fulfillment
Rules for Getting Back to Deep Work
After you’re convinced that deep work is important, Newport spends the rest of the book discussing a series of rules.
Rule #1: Work Deeply
There are several ways to work deeply in our connected world. The monastic approach is to simply to get rid of all correspondence with the outside world. Seems a bit much for most people, but apparently there are some writers and professors who have pulled this off.
The bimodal philosophy is when you work normally for a few days, weeks, months (with email, SMS, etc), and then go off and take a sabbatical of sorts for a couple of days up to a few months to work on deep work. Apparently Carl Jung would do this, rotating his life between his practice and the coffee shops of Zurich and a little retreat in the mountains.
The rhythmic philosophy is when you schedule large chunks of each day for deep work. This is what I do. I have two hours every morning blocked off so that I can get my most important things done before the avalanche of shallow tasks take over my calendar. I credit this practice as being the reason I’m able to work a full-time job, teach at a university, raise an awesome family, and publish a book. It’s all about prioritization of deep work.
Finally, the journalistic philosophy is to switch to deep work whenever you have time, typically for 20-60 minutes. This method, apparently, takes some training. Not all of us can get into deep work at the drop of a hat. I’m pretty sure this method would drive me nuts.
Effective creatives have developed rituals around their deep work and the rest of this chapter talks about how to create these rituals to ensure you have enough deep work in your life.
Rule #2: Embrace Boredom
We’re pretty bad at being bored these days. Each moment spent in line at the grocery store or waiting for a kid to get done with practice can be filled with smart phone activities. If that’s the case for you, Newport says you’re probably not getting enough deep work done. In this section, he offers a handful of helpful ideas to help you better schedule your time, including the idea of an internet sabbath (i.e. take a day off from the internet each week, like Tiffany Shlain suggests in her very good book, 24/6). You can also set hard deadlines that don’t leave you much time for distracting activities and schedule your internet time to leave the rest of your schedule free for deep work.
Rule #3: Quit Social Media
It’s hard to say no to tools that give us so many dopamine hits throughout the day. Newport’s got a unique argument on this front.
He says that it’s important to assess any tool in your life. Most have both pros and cons. When you’re thinking about the impact any tool, including social media, has on your life, ask yourself if this tool has a substantially positive, substantially negative, or neutral impact on your life. Any time a tool doesn’t have a substantially positive effect on your life, ditch it, and find something better. If we really think about it, for most of us social media does not fit into the “substantially positive” category. It was be actively harmful to our mental health and cultivates rather shallow relationships. We’re better off cultivating deeper relationships with the people we truly care about, instead of seeing updates flash before us from people we sat next to in one class in high school.
Newport implores us to try quitting social media for a month and see how it goes. It might not be as terrible as you think.
Note: I have not yet quit social media, but I have turned off all of my social media notifications. I’ve had them off for years. Now, I only go out on Facebook or Instagram when I want to, not when the service tells me I need to go check out someone’s cat picture.
Rule #4: Drain the Shallows
The general idea here is to try to do as little shallow work as possible. Do you really need to respond to that email? Could you discourage five back-and-forth notes with a well-crafted response? Might you be able to only check email and other shallow mediums a couple of times a day? Could you make yourself harder to reach? What’s it like to stop working at 5:30pm each day (and thereby force yourself to get your important work done before then)?
My personal favorite suggestion from this book, was to schedule your day. It seems incredibly rigid, but Newport suggests laying out your schedule in blocks each day to ensure you have enough time for the important things. Your schedule might look something like this.
This was my actual schedule last Thursday. (And before you point this out, no, I did not get my usual two hours of deep work in because it is performance review season.) I’ve been trying this technique for about a week and I have been a lot more productive than usual (and I thought I was already productive). Of everything I learned in this book, this is the thing I recommend trying ASAP!
Conclusion
Deep Work is a great book. In fact, I’d heard some of these tips already, most of them attributed to this book. I’m a little embarrassed that it’s taken me this long to read it. That being said, it’s never too late. I wholeheartedly recommend the book Deep Work by Cal Newport. I liked it enough to put the rest of his books on hold at the library this week too.
