Deep Work | Cal Newport | Summary
This is a summary of Cal Newport's book, 'Deep Work' with doableActions.
Jung’s lectures and counselling practice kept him busy in Zurich.
But he wasn’t satisfied with busyness alone. He wanted to change the way we understood the unconscious, and this goal required deeper more careful thought that he could manage amid his hectic city lifestyle. Jung retreated to Bollingen, not to escape his professional life, but to instead advance it.
Carl Jung went on to become one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century.
In this book, we look at why it is important and how we can also do Deep Work.
‘Deep Work’ - is defined as - Professional activities performed in a state of distraction free concentration, that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit.
The author - Cal Newport - did his PhD at MITs computational lab and has had a tremendously successful academic career. He credits Deep Work, for this
If you study the lives of other influential figures from both distant and recent history, you’ll find that a commitment to deep work is a common theme. Woody Allen, Peter Higgs (the particle guy), J K Rowling (Harry Potter).
Today much of our work is around social media and email. Social media has fragmented our attention into shreds. Constantly Email does not create a breakthrough. Worse still, when you spend enough time, doing only these - you reduce your very capacity to do deep work.
If we do not consciously embrace deep work, we must at least remain aware that the shallow work that we do - lends itself well to easy replacement by cheaper less skilled replacements and by machine intelligence, which is fast emerging from the shadows.
There is also a Catch 22 here. To do deep work, we must have skills. To develop these skills, we should be able to do Deep Work. Doing shallow work over a period, reduces our capacity for deep work. What do we do?
doableAction Go on a retreat, to do Deep Work.
doableAction The other option is to proactively carve out an hour, every weekday and work uninterrupted on your plans. Day after day, without distractions. Arriving early to work, you can do this and beat the traffic too!.
Deep Work is a skill that has great value today. Except that nobody asks you to do it, on their own. They would rather you work on solving only today’s emergencies. Because Deep work is about your future capacity. So, there is increasing scarcity of Deep Work, inspite of its increasing Value.
We all rejoice in the presence of the internet. The convenience it brings to all of us. It is also a great leveller. Your competitor may be sitting in Siberia but internet brings him right there, next to you.
If you do not do Deep Work, he has more chances of defeating you! (Nasty assumption - in Siberia it is so cold, that either they can sit in their quilts and do Deep Work or they can chug Vodka!) :)
Going forward - and looking at the changing nature of work - there are two groups of people who will thrive. Those who can work creatively with intelligent machines. Those who are stars in their own fields. Both require 2 key abilities.
The ability to quickly master hard things.
The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.
Deep work is a pre-requisite for both these abilities.
Our doableActions will focus how you can train your brain and change your work habits to put deep work at the core of your professional life.
Adam Grant is a highest rated teacher at Wharton and winner of multiple teaching awards. He consolidates his work into intense and uninterrupted pulses. He is leveraging the following law of productivity:
High-Quality work produced = (Time Spent) X (Intensity of Focus)
At the workplace, Deep Work is Rare.
What happens when we multi-task - switching from one thing to another?
Sophie Leroy, a business professor at University of Minnesota talks about attention residue.
When you switch your attention from Task A to Task B, a residue of your attention remains, sticking to Task A. So in spite of best intentions, only a part of you is available in the beginning of Task B.
This is also explained by context switching in micro-processors. When cutting to a different thread - the processor must save all registers and states before switching over. This periodic saving - and restoration - is overhead.
At the workplace we are leaving our attention residues all over the place!
Let us now look at the Principle of Least Resistance - In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors to the bottom line, we will tend towards behaviors that are the easiest in the moment.
This drives the culture of connectivity in organizations.
Use of Slack and similar instant messaging tool, as the working glue in startups is common these days. It makes them agile. You can count on a quick response.
It makes your life easier too. It also gives you the instant satisfaction of productivity. Or does it?
Assume you are a manager. You have to make a decision. You take the whole thread and mark it to few colleagues, with a question, ‘Your thoughts please?’ It is easy for you.
You took the principle of least resistance. For colleagues, if they take it seriously, first they will need to context switch from what they are already doing - leaving an attention residue.
Later - if they are lucky - they will also have to context switch back to what they were doing in the first place.
Next they have to come upto speed on your context. Reply to it. Finally, they can get back to, what they were originally doing.
So now look at it again. Would it be more productive for the decision maker to do deep work and a planned meeting for inputs?
Busy-ness is not a proxy for productivity. In the absence of clear indicators of outcome, knowledge workers turn back towards an industrial indicator of productivity - doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.
More Deep Work, needs to happen in our workplaces, for the sake of productivity
Deep Work is Meaningful
The connection between deep work and good life is familiar and widely accepted while considering the world of craftsmen. Listen to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book, Flow - Living at the Peak of your Abilities to know more.
While writing an exam, or when being absorbed in an engrossing activity, you lose all track of how time has flown. That is Flow! In hindsight, it seems so desirable and you wish, more of it happened to you.
To Quote Winifredh Galagher, ‘I’ll live the focussed life, because it is the best kind there is.’
Also, as a knowledge worker, producing something of value, that stands the tests of time and scrutiny is deeply satisfying. Something that is useful and valuable to others because they can learn from it, because they can build on top of it.
This is an argument in favor of Deep Work.
The Rules for Deep Work
Rule#1 - Work Deeply
It is not easy to replace distraction with focus. Quoting an experiment, Cal Newport says, ‘People fight desires all day long. Eating, Sleeping, Sex, Taking a Break, are at the top.
You typically succeed only half the time unless you use Willpower. And Willpower is a muscle that tires with use. Regardless of your intentions.
The key idea therefore is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life, designed to minimise the needed willpower to get to work and stay working. (Yay! doableActions)
doableAction Decide how you will do Deep Work (and stick to it). Option 1 - Monastic, like Jung did. Seclude yourself, atleast for a portion of your time. Option 2 - Daily Rhythm, like coming to work early and working uninterrupted till everyone else comes in. Option 3 - Journalistic - Self impose a publish deadline and work back from it.
doableAction Ritualize. Add a ritual to the start of your Deep Work. Example: begin at a time fixed time. Or - Make a cup of coffee before starting. Or - First take a short walk. Or - Dress up formally. Or - Go to a different room.
Rituals signal to you, seriousness of your intent. It helps to set a habit in place. Just like how Pavlov's dogs would start salivating, the moment the bell was rung and well before the food was put in front of them.
Any ritual is OK, if it answers the following questions. One - where you will work and for how long? Two - How you will work, once you start to work? (Example - ban on internet?) Three - How will you support your work? (Leaving work open and available, from a previous session, ready to dive into?)
doableAction Make Grand Gestures. Check into a hotel to begin. Go on a retreat. Write in a Cafe! You are again signalling your seriousness to yourself, more than anything else. It need not be permanent.
doableAction Don’t work alone. Collaboration (and even chance encounters with others) and Deep work are inter-related. Balance the two. However there is a time to collaborate and a time to do deep work, but not both at the same time. Better still, you should be able to decide, when to do which.
doableAction Spend energy on refining your ‘What’. One - Focus on the important. Prefer small number of ambitious outcomes. Two - Track the Measures, that are leading indicators of your progress. Example - Track the daily number of your deep work hours. Three - Keep a visible scoreboard of your measures. Four - build a winning streak.
If every day of daily exercise wins you a tick-mark on your calendar - you would hate to see a missing tick-mark on your tracker and would probably go out of your way to make it happen.
doableAction Be consciously Idle. In idleness you can recharge your batteries to come back and continue deep work. Idle time also permits insights from your sub-conscious to germinate and surface.
If you have been doing deep work earlier in the day, chances are that by evening you will make mistakes - and rework later - on what you work on. Better to be idle then? :)
doableAction Strict endpoint to your workday. This is support on a daily basis, for your recharge (see point above). It helps to add a shut down ritual and empty your trays before your shut down.
We have Zeigarnik effect! It tells us that unresolved issues continue to dominate our attention. So bringing things to a full close is important at the end of the day, towards a better recharge for the next day. Check out Getting things done, for ‘Mind like water!’
Rule#2 - Embrace Boredom
The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained. Efforts to deepen your focus will fail, if you don’t simultaneously wean yourself away from a dependence on distractions.
If you are in the business of avoiding boredom, then distractions are your friends. Unfortunately, they will have to go!
doableAction - make a list of things you use to distract yourself. Identify your biggest culprit. Work on how to let it go. Stop inflicting that distraction on yourself.
If you can embrace boredom, you will significantly improve your ability to do deep work.
doableAction - do a digital detox. One day a week; stay away from internet. Completely! (also called the Internet Sabbath)
doableAction - schedule in advance, when you will use the internet. And no more! This strategy will work even if your work requires you to do a lot of internet. Simply schedule it accordingly, but do no more.
doableAction - adopt a productive meditation practice. This is an activity - such as walking, jogging, driving - where the body is involved, but the mind is free to focus on a particular problem.
Huge Bonus! - If you start going for walks when you feel the need to distract yourself (or getting on to the treadmill) - you will gift yourself good health too!
Before you start walking, be clear, what your mind will be ‘working’ on.
Not only do you get something done, it also improves the mind’s ability to think deeply. Because - atleast in the beginning - you are forcing yourself to resist distraction again and again and bringing yourself back to the object of your focus.
Watch out for ‘looping’ - your mind repeatedly coming back to what you had thought earlier too.
Rule#3 - Quit Socia Media
Social media - Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp and the likes fragment our time and reduce our ability to concentrate.
doableAction - Relook the doableActions in Rule 2. Digital Detox. Schedule Time only, Productive Meditation practice to speak to your need for distractions, instead of using social media to relieve it.
doableAction - Reflect on what benefit you get from a particular Social Media tool you use. Write it down. Review it, to decide, if this is worth the time, you are putting into it. If required, track the time you are putting into it for a 3 days, to get an accurate effort-to-returns ratio.
doableAction - Review your professional and personal goals and identify how much social media presence you actually need to succeed in your goals. Then Ration yourself accordingly.
doableAction - Quit Social Media. Simply Quit. Do a Detox. Then decide, when you are ready to come back.
Don’t use the internet to entertain yourself.
Rule#4 - Drain the Shallows
(Those of you, who are like me) Think back to the time, we used to work on Saturdays also. Then the switch to 5 day week came. In reality, there was no loss of productivity.
Why? Because only the amount of Shallow Work reduced. Not the Deep Work. In fact, if 2 days allowed us to be more recharged, there was a decent possibility of Deep work actually going up.
Very few people even work 8 hours a day! (real 8 hours)
doableAction - Review your time in Shallow work and strive to reduce it.
Here are some strategies to reduce your Shallow Work without compromising on things you do need to do, to make a living -
doableAction Schedule as much of your day with things you want to do on a planned basis. Your plans should allow for replanning.
Your goal is that every thing you do, should be done on a planned basis (even the routine things).
If you have a 100 mails in your mailbox, they need to be answered, but they should be answered not one at a time, but in batches, after a suitable delay for them to accumulate, for which you plan the time).
If you allow replanning, then you are not a servant of your rigid schedule. But you still can not take it for a ride, because your replanning must be based on some rule, you have for yourself.
Cal’s rule for replanning is, ‘If I have a new insight’ (and I want chase it) then it is perfectly OK to replan my day and work to a fresh schedule.
Mark Forster, has an approach of planning 5 things to do and applying replanning when you have struck 3 of them off.
Conclusion
In his book ‘The Innovators’, Isaacson talks about Bill gates.
“The one trait that differentiated [Gates from Allen] was focus. Allen’s mind would flit between many ideas and passions, but Gates was a serial obsessor.”
It is here, in this story of Gates’s obsessive focus - and his corresponding success - that we encounter the strongest argument in favor of ‘Deep Work’.