Deep work refers to concentrated, distraction free work for a long period of time. That is a kind of work that can add value and let us achieve our full potential.
Buy the book 'Deep Work' @Amazon
As we enter the changing world of technology the need for deep work becomes all the more important . However, this is the age of social media and email that causes distraction and hence people are losing their ability to do deep work.
Author contrasts the deep work with shallow work, where the work is interspersed with too many distractions. Scarily, as we indulge more and more in shallow work, we lose our ability to do deep work.
The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 explores the idea of deep work and
part 2 discusses the rules.
There are two aspects to deep work. One, putting in deep work to learn and continue to learn new things. Two, based on the new learning, putting in deep work to deliver something new, that will be useful for and widely accepted by the society.
In chapter 1, 'Deep work is valuable', author talks of 'Great Restructuring'. Technology is helping to automate many tasks and this spells bad news for the job market. However three groups of people
will thrive in this market. The first group that will thrive is the high skilled worker. New technology demands new skills like Big Data Analytics and Data Visualizations. Since intelligent machines will do a lot of work in future, those who have developed the skills to work with these machines will thrive.
The second group that will thrive are the superstars. Since technological advances will make remote work a common feature, those that can add value through remote work will be in major demand. As per economist Sherwin Rosen, talent is a factor with
‘imperfect substitution’, meaning adding a number of mediocre people cannot be a substitute for a talented person. With technology making remote work possible, the higher will be the demand of talent over mediocrity.
The third group who will thrive in the economy of the future are the owners, people with capital who can invest in the new technologies. The great restructuring is a good time to invest capital since the proportion of labour is less and hence a higher proportion of the returns will flow to the owner.
If you ignore owners for the time being, the common traits of a high skilled worker and superstars are, one, ability to quickly learn new things and two, ability to deliver output consistently at an elite level. Mastering skills by themselves is not sufficient. You must be able to provide output that people value.
How can deep work help in the above?
Psychologists have recently understood the relationship between deliberate practice, which is a focused effort to attend mastery of new skills, and achievements. Neuro-scientists have identified the concept of myelination, a process by which myelin, a layer of fatty tissue that grows around neurons, acting like an insulator, allowing the cells to fire faster and cleaner. You get better at a skill as you develop more and more myelin around neurons. As you do more and more focused work, more layers of myelin gets wrapped around neurons related to that skill. Doing focused work without distraction is the only way to isolate neural circuit enough to trigger useful myelination.
The next question is how does deep work help you produce at an elite level? As per the law of productivity high quality work output = time spend X intensity of focus. By focusing on a single task, you increase the chance of output quality per unit of time spent.
Focused work (Deep work) is also important from the concept of 'attention residue'. As you move from task A to task B, a residue of task A still remains leaving us unable to do task B effectively. Attention residue is higher if task A is unbounded and of low intensity ( like browsing the social media).
In summary, unless you do deep work for an extended period of time, it is difficult to perform at the peak levels of quality and quantity required to thrive in the new world.
In chapter 2, ‘Deep work is rare’, author discusses three business trends that discourage deep work. One, open office two, instant messaging and three, organizations encouraging employees to contribute to social media. These trends reflects a paradox. While deep work is required for the new economy, organizations are not prioritizing deep work as shown above. In fact, the above trends actively decrease one's ability to do deep work.
So why is deep work rare? Why are organizations prioritizing behaviours that actively discourage deep work?
One reason is the 'metric black hole'. There are no metrices that show the negative impact of shallow work. Collection of information to generate these metrices is tedious.
Here a study by Tom Cochran of Atlantic Media is relevant. He found that the company was spending over a million dollars on the time that the employees spend on emails alone.
This metric black hole encourage biases and mindsets pushing people away from deep work. One of the mindset is the 'principle of least resistance'. In the absence of a relevant metric, we do things that are ‘easier’ at the moment like sending an email for checking on Instant Messenger etc. This hampers our ability to do deep work.
Yet another reason why deep work is rare is that in many organizations there is no clarity on what constitutes productivity. In the absence of that clarity, their employees substitute 'being busy' as a proxy for productivity. 'Being busy' is the exact antithesis of deep work. In the absence of such clarity, they (employees in these organizations.) use 'doing lots of stuff in a visible manner' as a proxy for productivity.
Another interesting aspect is the prevalence of Internet. Every business want to be on the Internet. This draws away time from work and discourage the craftsmanship and mastery needed for deep work. Add to this the 'matrix black hole' and we have a clear explanation as to why deep work is rare.
To support the argument in chapter 3 that ‘Deep work is meaningful’, author provides three different view points. As per the neurological view, we form of world view based on what we focus on. Shallow work, by diffusing the focus, makes the world stressful. Deep work, due to its focus, makes for a happier worldview. There is a gravity and a sense of importance inherent in deep work. If you spend enough time in this state your mind will understand your state as rich in meaning and importance. On the other hand, if you lose focus through shallow work, your empty mind will focus on what is wrong.
Now for the psychological view. As per the psychology research the best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and valuable. This mental state is called flow. The more such flow experiences that we have in a week the more satisfied we become. While neurological approach focuses on the content, the flow approach is content agnostic.
Deep work creates flow. And flow generates happiness. It is very important for individuals to seek out opportunities for flow. Flow produced by deep work lead to deep satisfaction.
Finally, for the philosophical view for depth. Deep work produces outputs that are sacred. Any pursuit that supports high level of skill can guarantee a sense of sacredness. The meaning uncovered by craftsmanship is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in the work. To get meaning out of work, you don't need rarefied work, you need a rarefied approach to work. Life spend on deep work is a life well spent.
Part 2 consists of four rules to help you to work deeply. Rule number one, 'Work Deeply' provides six strategies to structure and ritualize your deep work habit. There are two reasons why you should create routines and rituals to do deep work. First is that human beings are faced with desires and temptations through the day. Without rituals to help you in deep work, it is very easy to fall for these desires. Second reason why one should have rituals is that they remove the need for day to day decision making and help conserve your limited source of will power.
The 6 strategies are:
Strategy number one, decide on your depth philosophy you can use one of the four philosophies discussed in the book or develop your own.
a) Monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling where you isolate yourself totally from outside world. Eliminate all the shallow work
b) Bimodal philosophy of deep work scheduling. Here deep work coexists with shallow work. In this, you go to monastic method at regular intervals and work normally during the others. For example you may schedule 4 days in a week for deep work. Here you divide your time, dedicating clearly defined periods for deep work. The minimum unit of time for deep work in this method is one day.
c) Rhythmic philosophy of deep work. Schedule a few hours everyday for deep work. You could use the chain method of Seinfeld or deciding on a start time to do deep work. By supporting rhythmic method with good routines one can achieve significant level of output.
d) Journalistic philosophy of deep work scheduling. Plan your work ahead and make progress as and when you get time. This is an ad-hoc approach and can work only if you are an expert and / or if you know exactly want you want to achieve and know how to go about it.
Strategy number two is to ‘Ritualize’. To get the most out of deep work sessions, create strict rituals around them. The rituals should consider the following.
One, where will you work and for how long identify a specific location only for Deep work
Two, how will you work once you start? Putting rules and processes to structure your work. Measure progress regularly
Three, how will you support your work? Ensure that all the tools are available nearby. Augment your deep work with regular nourishment and exercises at cetera Finding a ritual will need experimentation. Complicated rituals ensure a structure and commitment to deep wark.
Strategy number 3 is to make Grand gestures. Grand gestures is a significant change to your normal environment and provide motivational energy to deliver deep work. One example of that focus is when JK Rowling checked into Balmoral hotel when writing the last part of Harry Potter series. Another example is that of Peter Shankman who wrote the draft of a book by flying from US to Tokyo and back at time of 30 hours at a cost of $4,000 !!
Strategy number four is ‘Never to work alone’. There are two parts to accomplishing something. One is idea generation and refinement and two, deep work on the refined idea. Collaboration can help in the former. Deep work necessarily has to be an individual activity. The collaborative effort in idea generation is due to a theory known as the ‘theory of serendipitous creativity’. One way to design a work area for serendipitous creativity and deep work is to have a hub and spoke architecture. The hub (common areas) support serendipitous encounters and spokes (isolated areas) stimulate deep thinking.
Even deep work can be collaborative it's known as ‘the whiteboard effect’
Strategy number five is to ‘execute like a business’. The ideas covered in the book ‘4 disciplines of execution’ helps companies to successfully implement high level strategies. You can use the 4DX methodology to deliver deep work.
Discipline number one, ‘focus on the widely important’. Execution should be aimed at a small number of wildly important goals. This means that you should identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours.
“If you want to win the war for attention say ‘yes’ to the subject that arouses terrifying longing”
Discipline number two, ‘act on the lead measures’. Lag measures are post facto measures. Lead measures measure behaviour that will drive success of the lag measures. From the perspective of deep work the number of hours spend on deep work is a very good lead measure.
Discipline number three, ‘keep a compelling scoreboard’. Keep scorecard of the number of hours spent on deep work.
Discipline number four, ‘create a cadence of accountability’. As per 4DX method, a regular and frequent meeting of owners of wildly important goals in is necessary. From the perspective of deep work review the scoreboard regularly to find out what works.
Strategy number six is to ‘be lazy’. Keep strict boundaries for deep work. Ensure to remove fungibility of time spent on deep work.
Why is downtime important?
One, it aids insights: It is your right brain thing. As per ‘Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT), for decision that required application of strict rules, conscious mind can be involved. On the other hand for decision involving large amount of information and multiple weak and conflicting constraints your unconscious mind is well suited to tackle the issue
Two, down time helps recharge the energy needed to work deeply.
Three, the work that the downtime replaces is usually not that important.
Your capacity for deep work is limited. So if you complete your deep work target for the day, any pending work will be shallow work.
As a part of being lazy, have an end of the day ritual as follows
1. Review your task list plan for any pending tasks. Update the list with any new tasks. You should have it clear plan of action for all the pending tasks in the task list.
2. Make detailed plan for the next day
3. Keep the resources for tomorrow activities ready. JIT planning.
4. Say ‘Shut down complete’ and switch off the lights
‘Zeigarnik effect’ says that incomplete tasks will dominate our attention. What the shutdown ritual does is to plan for the tasks so that our cognitive resorts are made free.
Regularly resting your brain improve the quality of your deep work
Rule number two is to ‘Embrace boredom’
Ability to focus intensely is a skill that must be trained. However such efforts will not be successful if you simultaneously do not wean yourself away from distractions. To achieve deepest concentration you must be able to accept boredom during the rest of the time.
"People who multitask all the time cannot filter out irrelevancy"
The premise of this rule is that in order to improve your concentration you should be able to handle periods of boredom. It is important not to fill the periods of boredom with any distraction.
To strengthen concentration and weaken the distraction the author suggests some strategies
Strategy one, don't take breaks from distraction, take break from focus instead: The idea is to plan specific time packets for distracting activities like checking emails. Never do these activities except during those time packets.
a. This strategy works even when your work requires a lot of internet connectivity. Simple, schedule more buckets of time for these activities.
b. Anytime outside of internet block should not be used to browse the net
c. Scheduling internet at home as well as work will boost your concentration.
Strategy two, work like Teddy Roosevelt
Identify a deep task . give it a very less time than estimated to complete it and then work with high intensity to complete it. This will strengthen your concentration muscles
Strategy three, meditate productively
Take a task where you are physically occupied, like walking, and work on a professional problem. Focus on this problem. It can be a business plan, a chapter outline of a book... anything. Give it undivided attention till the task is completed. You must be careful about distractions and looping you can do this by structuring your thinking.
Strategy four, memorize a deck of cards
Any attempt to improve your memory also improve your attention span and your concentration
The third rule is to ‘Quit Social Media’. Many of us are on social media tools like Facebook, Twitter etc. We also browse and number of news-entertainment sites regularly. Together, author calls these network tools.
Most of us know the drawbacks of being on social media. However we are unable to get out of them. To justify our presence in social media we use what the author calls ‘any benefit’ reason. In other words we are in SM because it provides some benefit, any benefit. But such approach ignores two things. One, their negatives like the opportunity cost of the time and two, their interference with our long-term goals.
Author suggests that you choose social media like a craftsman will select his tools, after looking at the advantages and disadvantages and their fitment with his existing tool set. To select social media like a craftsman author suggests the following strategies.
Strategy One, ‘Apply the law of vital few, (Pareto principle) to our internet habits’.
a. Identify the main goals in your personal and professional life keep the list limited and keep the description at a high level.
b. List two or three key activities that will help you meet each goal. There should be general enough but should not be too specific or one time (example of a general activity, regularly read and understand the cutting edge research in my field)
c. Review each tool against each activity and rank their impact as substantially positive, substantially negative, little impact. Keep using the tool only if substantially positive impact outweigh any other negatives.
Strategy two is to ‘Quit social media.’
Try the following. Quit all social media for 30 days. Ask yourself two questions at the end of thirty days.
1, whether the last 30 days would have been better if I had used the service
2, did people care that I was not using the services
If the answer to these questions are 'No', which will be in my case, then it is time to quit social media.
Note: these services, if used without limit can be devastating to your quest for deep work
Strategy three, ‘don't use internet to entertain yourself’
Most people use internet as a filler. They don't know what to do with their free time. The antidote is to make detailed plan for using your free time. Have books to read, music to listen to, something new to learn etc. Give your brain quality alternative to browsing the web.
Rule number four, ‘drain the shallows’
It is very important to fill your day with more and more of deep, meaningful work and remove any unplanned, shallow work from your day. As you identify and remove shallow from your life, it is important to replace it with deep work. Remember, the damage of shallow work is often underestimated and the benefits of overestimated.
With this in mind rule, ‘drain the shallows’, gives you five strategies by which you can reduce the shallow in your life.
Strategy one is 'to schedule every minute of the day'. At the beginning of the day prepare an hourly schedule for your day. Divide the day into blocks and assign activities to the block. The minimum length of a block should be 30 minutes. This way you would have scheduled every minute of your day .
Two things can happen. One, tasks will over run the scheduled time, or, two, new task will appear on your plate. No problem, reschedule the rest of the day.
Author suggests three tactics to plan your day effectively. One, expect to underestimate the time taken for a task. Two, use of overflow conditional blocks. These can be used for task over runs. If the tasks completes early, this can be used to an alternate, non-urgent task. Three, be liberal with the task blocks. Deploy many through the day and make them longer than required to handle the tasks you planned in the morning.
The question is how to handle spontaneity. Won't the rigidity of hourly planning stifle it? There are two answers to this question. One, plan for spontaneity. Have a specific task block for creative thinking. In case a new creative idea appears, have the flexibility to reschedule your day. Two, studies show that the structure associated with daily plan will encourage creativity.
Strategy two is to ‘quantify the depth of every activity’. How do you identify if a task is deep or shallow? Ask a simple question. How long will it take to train a smart college graduate to do this task? Higher the time taken, the deeper the task is and lower the time taken shallower the task. Once you identify this, bias your time towards deep tasks (by this logic, the task of digitising my diary is a shallow task).
Strategy three is to 'ask your boss for a shallow budget'. Identify the proportion of time in a day that will be working on Shallow tasks. This should not be more than 50%. Sticking to this budget will mean changes to your behaviour. You may have to say 'No' more often. You may have to keep that mobile phone away and most importantly you may have to identify more and more deep tasks to replace the shallow ones.
Having a 'deep to shallow ratio' allows to prioritise even our shallow tasks.
Strategy four is to 'finish your work by 5:30'. The idea is to keep an end time in a day beyond which you will not work on your tasks. This is called 'fixed schedule productivity'. This will bring in the necessary discipline to efficiently work on your schedule this will lead to more deep work getting added at the cost of shallow and will lead to more value per unit of your time.
A commitment to fixed schedule productivity will lead you to scarcity mindset. Your default answer becomes 'No', the bar for access to your time rises and your schedule becomes hyper-efficient.
Fixed schedule productivity is a meta-habit that is simple to adopt but broad in its impact. If you have to choose one behaviour that reorients your focus towards deep this should be the one.
Strategy five is to 'become hard to reach'. Since most of the shallow work we encounter today are related to handling emails, this strategy provides 3 tips to handle email. Tip number 1 is to make the sender do more work by asking him to explain why his email merits a response. This strategy is called 'sender's filter' and makes the sender think and lot before sending an email. You can also create a sender's filter by having FAQ or asking him to answer a few questions before sending the email etc.
Tip number 2 is to do more work while replying to emails. This approach, called 'process centric approach' anticipates potential questions and try to answer them while replying to an email.
Tip number three is not to respond. If the issue is very important the sender will follow up.
The five strategies put together will help you take back the control over your time.
In conclusion, a deep life is not for everyone. It involves hard work and drastic changes to your habits. There is also an uneasiness around any effort towards producing the best you are capable of, as this forces you to confront the possibility that your best is not yet that good ..
If you are ready to sidestep these fears and struggle to deploy your mind to its fullest capacity to create things that matter, then you will discover that depth generates life full of productivity and meaning.
As said by the author Winifred Gallagher, "I will leave the focused life, because it is the best kind there is"
Buy 'Deep Work' @Amazon.com
Buy the book 'Deep Work' @Amazon
As we enter the changing world of technology the need for deep work becomes all the more important . However, this is the age of social media and email that causes distraction and hence people are losing their ability to do deep work.
Author contrasts the deep work with shallow work, where the work is interspersed with too many distractions. Scarily, as we indulge more and more in shallow work, we lose our ability to do deep work.
The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 explores the idea of deep work and
part 2 discusses the rules.
There are two aspects to deep work. One, putting in deep work to learn and continue to learn new things. Two, based on the new learning, putting in deep work to deliver something new, that will be useful for and widely accepted by the society.
In chapter 1, 'Deep work is valuable', author talks of 'Great Restructuring'. Technology is helping to automate many tasks and this spells bad news for the job market. However three groups of people
The second group that will thrive are the superstars. Since technological advances will make remote work a common feature, those that can add value through remote work will be in major demand. As per economist Sherwin Rosen, talent is a factor with
The third group who will thrive in the economy of the future are the owners, people with capital who can invest in the new technologies. The great restructuring is a good time to invest capital since the proportion of labour is less and hence a higher proportion of the returns will flow to the owner.
If you ignore owners for the time being, the common traits of a high skilled worker and superstars are, one, ability to quickly learn new things and two, ability to deliver output consistently at an elite level. Mastering skills by themselves is not sufficient. You must be able to provide output that people value.
How can deep work help in the above?
Psychologists have recently understood the relationship between deliberate practice, which is a focused effort to attend mastery of new skills, and achievements. Neuro-scientists have identified the concept of myelination, a process by which myelin, a layer of fatty tissue that grows around neurons, acting like an insulator, allowing the cells to fire faster and cleaner. You get better at a skill as you develop more and more myelin around neurons. As you do more and more focused work, more layers of myelin gets wrapped around neurons related to that skill. Doing focused work without distraction is the only way to isolate neural circuit enough to trigger useful myelination.
The next question is how does deep work help you produce at an elite level? As per the law of productivity high quality work output = time spend X intensity of focus. By focusing on a single task, you increase the chance of output quality per unit of time spent.
Focused work (Deep work) is also important from the concept of 'attention residue'. As you move from task A to task B, a residue of task A still remains leaving us unable to do task B effectively. Attention residue is higher if task A is unbounded and of low intensity ( like browsing the social media).
In summary, unless you do deep work for an extended period of time, it is difficult to perform at the peak levels of quality and quantity required to thrive in the new world.
In chapter 2, ‘Deep work is rare’, author discusses three business trends that discourage deep work. One, open office two, instant messaging and three, organizations encouraging employees to contribute to social media. These trends reflects a paradox. While deep work is required for the new economy, organizations are not prioritizing deep work as shown above. In fact, the above trends actively decrease one's ability to do deep work.
So why is deep work rare? Why are organizations prioritizing behaviours that actively discourage deep work?
One reason is the 'metric black hole'. There are no metrices that show the negative impact of shallow work. Collection of information to generate these metrices is tedious.
Here a study by Tom Cochran of Atlantic Media is relevant. He found that the company was spending over a million dollars on the time that the employees spend on emails alone.
This metric black hole encourage biases and mindsets pushing people away from deep work. One of the mindset is the 'principle of least resistance'. In the absence of a relevant metric, we do things that are ‘easier’ at the moment like sending an email for checking on Instant Messenger etc. This hampers our ability to do deep work.
Yet another reason why deep work is rare is that in many organizations there is no clarity on what constitutes productivity. In the absence of that clarity, their employees substitute 'being busy' as a proxy for productivity. 'Being busy' is the exact antithesis of deep work. In the absence of such clarity, they (employees in these organizations.) use 'doing lots of stuff in a visible manner' as a proxy for productivity.
Another interesting aspect is the prevalence of Internet. Every business want to be on the Internet. This draws away time from work and discourage the craftsmanship and mastery needed for deep work. Add to this the 'matrix black hole' and we have a clear explanation as to why deep work is rare.
To support the argument in chapter 3 that ‘Deep work is meaningful’, author provides three different view points. As per the neurological view, we form of world view based on what we focus on. Shallow work, by diffusing the focus, makes the world stressful. Deep work, due to its focus, makes for a happier worldview. There is a gravity and a sense of importance inherent in deep work. If you spend enough time in this state your mind will understand your state as rich in meaning and importance. On the other hand, if you lose focus through shallow work, your empty mind will focus on what is wrong.
Now for the psychological view. As per the psychology research the best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and valuable. This mental state is called flow. The more such flow experiences that we have in a week the more satisfied we become. While neurological approach focuses on the content, the flow approach is content agnostic.
Deep work creates flow. And flow generates happiness. It is very important for individuals to seek out opportunities for flow. Flow produced by deep work lead to deep satisfaction.
Finally, for the philosophical view for depth. Deep work produces outputs that are sacred. Any pursuit that supports high level of skill can guarantee a sense of sacredness. The meaning uncovered by craftsmanship is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in the work. To get meaning out of work, you don't need rarefied work, you need a rarefied approach to work. Life spend on deep work is a life well spent.
Part 2 consists of four rules to help you to work deeply. Rule number one, 'Work Deeply' provides six strategies to structure and ritualize your deep work habit. There are two reasons why you should create routines and rituals to do deep work. First is that human beings are faced with desires and temptations through the day. Without rituals to help you in deep work, it is very easy to fall for these desires. Second reason why one should have rituals is that they remove the need for day to day decision making and help conserve your limited source of will power.
The 6 strategies are:
Strategy number one, decide on your depth philosophy you can use one of the four philosophies discussed in the book or develop your own.
 |
| Deep work philosophies |
b) Bimodal philosophy of deep work scheduling. Here deep work coexists with shallow work. In this, you go to monastic method at regular intervals and work normally during the others. For example you may schedule 4 days in a week for deep work. Here you divide your time, dedicating clearly defined periods for deep work. The minimum unit of time for deep work in this method is one day.
c) Rhythmic philosophy of deep work. Schedule a few hours everyday for deep work. You could use the chain method of Seinfeld or deciding on a start time to do deep work. By supporting rhythmic method with good routines one can achieve significant level of output.
d) Journalistic philosophy of deep work scheduling. Plan your work ahead and make progress as and when you get time. This is an ad-hoc approach and can work only if you are an expert and / or if you know exactly want you want to achieve and know how to go about it.
Strategy number two is to ‘Ritualize’. To get the most out of deep work sessions, create strict rituals around them. The rituals should consider the following.
One, where will you work and for how long identify a specific location only for Deep work
Two, how will you work once you start? Putting rules and processes to structure your work. Measure progress regularly
Three, how will you support your work? Ensure that all the tools are available nearby. Augment your deep work with regular nourishment and exercises at cetera Finding a ritual will need experimentation. Complicated rituals ensure a structure and commitment to deep wark.
Strategy number 3 is to make Grand gestures. Grand gestures is a significant change to your normal environment and provide motivational energy to deliver deep work. One example of that focus is when JK Rowling checked into Balmoral hotel when writing the last part of Harry Potter series. Another example is that of Peter Shankman who wrote the draft of a book by flying from US to Tokyo and back at time of 30 hours at a cost of $4,000 !!
Strategy number four is ‘Never to work alone’. There are two parts to accomplishing something. One is idea generation and refinement and two, deep work on the refined idea. Collaboration can help in the former. Deep work necessarily has to be an individual activity. The collaborative effort in idea generation is due to a theory known as the ‘theory of serendipitous creativity’. One way to design a work area for serendipitous creativity and deep work is to have a hub and spoke architecture. The hub (common areas) support serendipitous encounters and spokes (isolated areas) stimulate deep thinking.
Even deep work can be collaborative it's known as ‘the whiteboard effect’
Strategy number five is to ‘execute like a business’. The ideas covered in the book ‘4 disciplines of execution’ helps companies to successfully implement high level strategies. You can use the 4DX methodology to deliver deep work.
Discipline number one, ‘focus on the widely important’. Execution should be aimed at a small number of wildly important goals. This means that you should identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours.
“If you want to win the war for attention say ‘yes’ to the subject that arouses terrifying longing”
Discipline number two, ‘act on the lead measures’. Lag measures are post facto measures. Lead measures measure behaviour that will drive success of the lag measures. From the perspective of deep work the number of hours spend on deep work is a very good lead measure.
Discipline number three, ‘keep a compelling scoreboard’. Keep scorecard of the number of hours spent on deep work.
Discipline number four, ‘create a cadence of accountability’. As per 4DX method, a regular and frequent meeting of owners of wildly important goals in is necessary. From the perspective of deep work review the scoreboard regularly to find out what works.
Strategy number six is to ‘be lazy’. Keep strict boundaries for deep work. Ensure to remove fungibility of time spent on deep work.
Why is downtime important?
One, it aids insights: It is your right brain thing. As per ‘Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT), for decision that required application of strict rules, conscious mind can be involved. On the other hand for decision involving large amount of information and multiple weak and conflicting constraints your unconscious mind is well suited to tackle the issue
Two, down time helps recharge the energy needed to work deeply.
Three, the work that the downtime replaces is usually not that important.
Your capacity for deep work is limited. So if you complete your deep work target for the day, any pending work will be shallow work.
As a part of being lazy, have an end of the day ritual as follows
1. Review your task list plan for any pending tasks. Update the list with any new tasks. You should have it clear plan of action for all the pending tasks in the task list.
2. Make detailed plan for the next day
3. Keep the resources for tomorrow activities ready. JIT planning.
4. Say ‘Shut down complete’ and switch off the lights
‘Zeigarnik effect’ says that incomplete tasks will dominate our attention. What the shutdown ritual does is to plan for the tasks so that our cognitive resorts are made free.
Regularly resting your brain improve the quality of your deep work
Rule number two is to ‘Embrace boredom’
Ability to focus intensely is a skill that must be trained. However such efforts will not be successful if you simultaneously do not wean yourself away from distractions. To achieve deepest concentration you must be able to accept boredom during the rest of the time.
"People who multitask all the time cannot filter out irrelevancy"
The premise of this rule is that in order to improve your concentration you should be able to handle periods of boredom. It is important not to fill the periods of boredom with any distraction.
To strengthen concentration and weaken the distraction the author suggests some strategies
Strategy one, don't take breaks from distraction, take break from focus instead: The idea is to plan specific time packets for distracting activities like checking emails. Never do these activities except during those time packets.
a. This strategy works even when your work requires a lot of internet connectivity. Simple, schedule more buckets of time for these activities.
b. Anytime outside of internet block should not be used to browse the net
c. Scheduling internet at home as well as work will boost your concentration.
Strategy two, work like Teddy Roosevelt
Identify a deep task . give it a very less time than estimated to complete it and then work with high intensity to complete it. This will strengthen your concentration muscles
Strategy three, meditate productively
Take a task where you are physically occupied, like walking, and work on a professional problem. Focus on this problem. It can be a business plan, a chapter outline of a book... anything. Give it undivided attention till the task is completed. You must be careful about distractions and looping you can do this by structuring your thinking.
Strategy four, memorize a deck of cards
Any attempt to improve your memory also improve your attention span and your concentration
The third rule is to ‘Quit Social Media’. Many of us are on social media tools like Facebook, Twitter etc. We also browse and number of news-entertainment sites regularly. Together, author calls these network tools.
Most of us know the drawbacks of being on social media. However we are unable to get out of them. To justify our presence in social media we use what the author calls ‘any benefit’ reason. In other words we are in SM because it provides some benefit, any benefit. But such approach ignores two things. One, their negatives like the opportunity cost of the time and two, their interference with our long-term goals.
Author suggests that you choose social media like a craftsman will select his tools, after looking at the advantages and disadvantages and their fitment with his existing tool set. To select social media like a craftsman author suggests the following strategies.
Strategy One, ‘Apply the law of vital few, (Pareto principle) to our internet habits’.
a. Identify the main goals in your personal and professional life keep the list limited and keep the description at a high level.
b. List two or three key activities that will help you meet each goal. There should be general enough but should not be too specific or one time (example of a general activity, regularly read and understand the cutting edge research in my field)
c. Review each tool against each activity and rank their impact as substantially positive, substantially negative, little impact. Keep using the tool only if substantially positive impact outweigh any other negatives.
Strategy two is to ‘Quit social media.’
Try the following. Quit all social media for 30 days. Ask yourself two questions at the end of thirty days.
1, whether the last 30 days would have been better if I had used the service
2, did people care that I was not using the services
If the answer to these questions are 'No', which will be in my case, then it is time to quit social media.
Note: these services, if used without limit can be devastating to your quest for deep work
Strategy three, ‘don't use internet to entertain yourself’
Most people use internet as a filler. They don't know what to do with their free time. The antidote is to make detailed plan for using your free time. Have books to read, music to listen to, something new to learn etc. Give your brain quality alternative to browsing the web.
Rule number four, ‘drain the shallows’
It is very important to fill your day with more and more of deep, meaningful work and remove any unplanned, shallow work from your day. As you identify and remove shallow from your life, it is important to replace it with deep work. Remember, the damage of shallow work is often underestimated and the benefits of overestimated.
With this in mind rule, ‘drain the shallows’, gives you five strategies by which you can reduce the shallow in your life.
Strategy one is 'to schedule every minute of the day'. At the beginning of the day prepare an hourly schedule for your day. Divide the day into blocks and assign activities to the block. The minimum length of a block should be 30 minutes. This way you would have scheduled every minute of your day .
Two things can happen. One, tasks will over run the scheduled time, or, two, new task will appear on your plate. No problem, reschedule the rest of the day.
Author suggests three tactics to plan your day effectively. One, expect to underestimate the time taken for a task. Two, use of overflow conditional blocks. These can be used for task over runs. If the tasks completes early, this can be used to an alternate, non-urgent task. Three, be liberal with the task blocks. Deploy many through the day and make them longer than required to handle the tasks you planned in the morning.
The question is how to handle spontaneity. Won't the rigidity of hourly planning stifle it? There are two answers to this question. One, plan for spontaneity. Have a specific task block for creative thinking. In case a new creative idea appears, have the flexibility to reschedule your day. Two, studies show that the structure associated with daily plan will encourage creativity.
Strategy two is to ‘quantify the depth of every activity’. How do you identify if a task is deep or shallow? Ask a simple question. How long will it take to train a smart college graduate to do this task? Higher the time taken, the deeper the task is and lower the time taken shallower the task. Once you identify this, bias your time towards deep tasks (by this logic, the task of digitising my diary is a shallow task).
Strategy three is to 'ask your boss for a shallow budget'. Identify the proportion of time in a day that will be working on Shallow tasks. This should not be more than 50%. Sticking to this budget will mean changes to your behaviour. You may have to say 'No' more often. You may have to keep that mobile phone away and most importantly you may have to identify more and more deep tasks to replace the shallow ones.
Having a 'deep to shallow ratio' allows to prioritise even our shallow tasks.
Strategy four is to 'finish your work by 5:30'. The idea is to keep an end time in a day beyond which you will not work on your tasks. This is called 'fixed schedule productivity'. This will bring in the necessary discipline to efficiently work on your schedule this will lead to more deep work getting added at the cost of shallow and will lead to more value per unit of your time.
A commitment to fixed schedule productivity will lead you to scarcity mindset. Your default answer becomes 'No', the bar for access to your time rises and your schedule becomes hyper-efficient.
Fixed schedule productivity is a meta-habit that is simple to adopt but broad in its impact. If you have to choose one behaviour that reorients your focus towards deep this should be the one.
Strategy five is to 'become hard to reach'. Since most of the shallow work we encounter today are related to handling emails, this strategy provides 3 tips to handle email. Tip number 1 is to make the sender do more work by asking him to explain why his email merits a response. This strategy is called 'sender's filter' and makes the sender think and lot before sending an email. You can also create a sender's filter by having FAQ or asking him to answer a few questions before sending the email etc.
Tip number 2 is to do more work while replying to emails. This approach, called 'process centric approach' anticipates potential questions and try to answer them while replying to an email.
Tip number three is not to respond. If the issue is very important the sender will follow up.
The five strategies put together will help you take back the control over your time.
In conclusion, a deep life is not for everyone. It involves hard work and drastic changes to your habits. There is also an uneasiness around any effort towards producing the best you are capable of, as this forces you to confront the possibility that your best is not yet that good ..
If you are ready to sidestep these fears and struggle to deploy your mind to its fullest capacity to create things that matter, then you will discover that depth generates life full of productivity and meaning.
As said by the author Winifred Gallagher, "I will leave the focused life, because it is the best kind there is"
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1 comment:
This is an excellent review and thanks for you taking time to read and post such an insightful article.
Great pointers.
Thanks
Krishna
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