Deep Work
Deep work definition: 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 skill and are hard to replicate.
Shallow work definition: Non cognitively demanding work that is often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value and is easily replicatable. Deep work hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare and also the value of performing deep work is increasing in our economy and the state of the world. Therefore, the few whole cultivate it will be able to thrive. There are three types of people that will survive technological advancements in our rapidly changing world.
Machines and the rapidly evolving technology around them are becoming increasingly more complex. The people who are willing to learn and adapt to these advancements will thrive in the future. To get to this stage, Cal implies that you require deepwork. Hence the chapter name of this book. With technology making communication throughout the whole world super easy. Those who are the absolute best in their field will thrive because The consumer (business) that needs work done will be able to select from a large pool of talent. Imagine a programmer that lives in a remote village in Italy. If he performs deep work and becomes really good at his craft, then he is able to get hired at companies that are in America. Because communication has become easy and remote work is on the rise.
Those that have the capital to invest and own parts of businesses that will impact the future.
Being an owner is difficult as it requires capital but the ability to become highly skilled and a superstar in a field is possible.
Two core abilities are needed to thrive in the new economy.
- The ability to quickly master hard things.
- The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both speed and quality.
It has been scientifically (neurologically) proven that to learn hard things you must focus singularly at the specific task at hand. That develops your ability to learn complex things. Having scattered focus reduces this ability.
High quality of work produced = (Time spent) x (Intensity of focus)
The type of work that optimises your performance is deep work. If you’re not comfortable going deep for long periods of time, it will be difficult to get your performance to the peak levels of quality and quantitiy.
A lot of companies have open office cultures where people can be easily distracted. New software tools are also coming up in professional workplaces where instead of emails, you have instant messaging. This is even worse as your device gets interrupted when you are working and this takes away your ability to focus on one task for a long period of time.
The principle of least resistant: In a business setting without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviours, we will tend toward behaviours that are easiest in the moment.
Things like answering emails quickly etc.
Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize winning Physicist said: To do real good physics work, you do need absolute solid lengths of time…it needs a lot of concentration… if you have a job administrating anything, you don’t have the time. So I have invented another myth for myself: that I’m irresponsible. I’m actively irresponsible. I tell everyone that I don’t do anything. If anyone asks me to be on a committee for admissions, “no,” I tell them: I’m irresponsible.
Cal describes the work for a swords craftsman and how he finds his work extremely meaningful. Making swords requires a lot of hours of deep work and any loss of concentration can put all the effort into waste.
Modern knowledge work can seem like you are repeating the same things over and over and thus finding meaning in depth might be difficult.
You experience life in what you focus on. This is a psychological view of proving that doing deep work is meaningful. If your working day is spent answering emails that hold no importance. E.g. replying to a scam, answering an admin question, responding to a negative comment etc then you will start to experience your working life as a negative experience.
On the other hand if you spend your days focused on doing deep, focused work then your working life will become something you see as meaningful.
A psychological study by a psychologist Csikszentmihalyi found that “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 worthwhile”.
This is what became known as flow.
Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow acitivities they ahve built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand is unstructured, and requires greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.
A study found that your body fights desires all day and throughout your life. One of the top desires is to stop working hard and concentrating. That’s why it’s very easy to get distracted.
Your body has a finite amount of willpower and it gets depleted the more you use it. Hence why it needs to be trained like a muscle.
This is why having routines and schedules can help you strengthen your willpower and not use it all the time. If you are structured, then you require less willpower to take action and start doing deep work.
Mason Currey, a journalist who spent half a decade looking at the habits of famous thinkers and writers. There is a popular notion that artists work from inspiration — that there is some strike or bold or bubbling up of creative mojo from who knows where…but I hope [my work] makes clear that waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan. In fact, perhaps the single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration.
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Focus on the wildly important When you enter a timeframe of deep work for yourself, have clear ambitious goals set that are concrete. Saying “I will work for 5 hours” is not good. Have clear goals.
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Act on the lead measures Once you have identified your important goals, figure out concrete ways to measure them. Record the time spent in a state of deep work that is dedicated to your important goal.
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Keep a compelling scorecard “People play differently when they are keeping a score”. Measure how many times you have been working deeply and for how many hours. Measure how many hours of deep work it takes you to reach an important goal.
Keeping scorecards like these would keep you in check and motivated.
- Create a cadence of accountability This can come in the form of a weekly review. Look at your scorecards and review it. Measure how much you have been working and is it sufficient to reach your important goals? What different strategies do you need to implement if things are not working properly?
Walking in nature boosts concentration.
Have a shutdown ritual for yourself. Working or thinking about work in the evenings is not helpful and in fact reduces productivity. Which is why having off time is extremely important. Whether that’s spending time with family, walks in nature etc.
Instead of practising not using your phone for one day of the week. Flip the switch around. Practice only using your phone 1 day a week. That is extreme. So what you can do is, practice using your phone between certain blocks of the day. Never at anytime else unless it’s absolutely necessary.
Focus is a muscle and it can be practised.
Learn to meditate productively. What this means is try to practice thinking about a problem when your body is occupied doing something physically. Example is thinking about a complex problem while you’re on a walk.
Improve your attention. Learn to increase your ability to pay attention for a long period of time.
There isn’t much to be said about how bad social media is for distracting us and pushing us away from our dream life.
A lot of people use the excuse of listing a benefit and saying this is why I need my facebook account or my twitter account. But the benefits they raise are very small compared to the huge negatives that come with it.
For this, you should take the approach of seeing social media as a tool and a lot of different social networks as different tools. Only pick a tool if it meaningful plays a part in helping you achieve your dream life. If not, be ruthless in subtraction.
As an experiment, get off of social media for 30 days. Without announcing it to anyone and without deleting accounts. Just uninstall the apps. After 30 days ask yourself if your life would have been better if you had the apps? Ask yourself whether you feel left out from important information. Chances are, answers to both will be No.
Don’t use the internet to entertain yourself. Put more thought into your leisure time.
Schedule every minute of your day. When you initially start this, you will realise that you overestimate how long it will take you for certain tasks. Overtime you get better at this.
