Deep Work

Definitions

• Deep work: 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: Non-cognitively demanding tasks that are often done while distracted which are easy to replicate and do not create a lot of value in the world.
• The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.

Part 1: The Idea

• Deep work is valuable
  • 2 core abilities for thriving in the new economy
    1. The ability to quickly master hard things
    2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed
  • High-quality work produced = (time spent) * (intensity of focus)
• Deep work is rare
  • Principle of least resistance: in a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment
  • Business as a proxy for productivity: in the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner
• Deep work is meaningful
  • Flow
  • Stretching your mind to its limits, concentrating, losing yourself in an activity - being in a flow state generates happiness
  • You don’t need a rarified job; instead, you need a rarified approach to your work

Part 2: The Rules

Rule 1: Work Deeply

The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.

• 4 different philosophies of deep work - what works best for you?
  1. Monastic: maximize deep efforts by radically minimizing shallow obligations (not realistic for most)
  2. Bimodal: divide your time; dedicating clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leave the rest open to everything else
  3. Rhythmic: turn deep work sessions into a regular habit; find a regular rhythm for this work that removes the need to invest energy and thought into deciding if, when, and where you’re’ going to go deep
  4. Journalistic: whenever you can find some free time, go into deep work mode. Difficult and not feasible for most, especially beginners at deep work, because requires the ability to switch between modes (deep work vs. regular mode) instantly.
• Build a ritual to help you prepare for deep work and include:
  1. Where you’ll work
  2. For how long you’ll work
  3. How you’ll work once you start to work
  4. Planned breaks to help you recharge and refocus
• Make grand gestures - significant changes to your environment by investing time/effort/money to increase the perceived importance of a task helps improve focus and motivation
  • imo going to a coffee shop is enough of a grand gesture; no need to book a hotel room or anything
• Execute like a business by using the 4DX framework - based on idea that execution is more difficult than strategizing
  1. Focus on the wildly important - “the more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish”
  2. Act on the lead measures
     1. lag measures: metric you’re ultimately trying to improve (but they come too late to change your immediate behavior)
     2. lead measures: measure new behaviors that will drive success on lag measures (improving behaviors you can control now that will have a positive focus in the future/on your long-term goals)
  3. Keep a compelling scorecard (record and track lead measures publicly)
     • e.g. tracking hours spent working deeply will help calibrate your understanding of how many deep work hours are needed to get to a milestone
  4. Create a cadence of accountability
     • Team members must confront their scoreboard and commit to actions they will make to improve their score, and describe what happened to their commitments at the last meeting
     • if no team, create regular accountability for yourself; do a weekly review to look at your scorecard and see how you’re doing
• Be “lazy”
  • idleness if indispensable to the brain / our well-being
  • at the end of the work day, shut down work thinking completely; if you need more time, extend your workday
    • consider a shut-down ritual (e.g. check your calendar, check your inboxes, make sure there’s nothing urgent left to do for the day, plan out our next day ➡️ shut-down complete)
  • downtime aids insights! (note: balance between consumption and creation)
  • some things are better left to our unconscious mind to untangle

Rule 2: Embrace Boredom

• Schedule occasional break from focus to give into distraction
• Productive meditation: focus on a specific problem while doing something physical (e.g. running, walking)
• Try identifying a deep task, give yourself a self-imposed hard deadline that significantly reduces the time you typically allot for it, and work with intensity to complete the task by the deadline

Rule 3: Quit Social Media

• Don’t use the Internet to entertain yourself
• The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.
• The Law of the Vital Few: In many settings, 80 percent of a given effect is due to just 20 percent of the possible causes.
• Put more thought into your leisure time - give yourself something meaningful to do rather than defaulting to scrolling through social media after coming from work

Rule 4: Drain the Shallows

• Batch shallow work into groups (2-3 / day)
• Shallow work is not inherently bad; shallow work only becomes a problem if eats into your available deep work hours

Applying Deep Work

• I’ve started time-tracking my work using Working Hours (iOS app)
  • This practice may not be permanent, but I want to quantify how much deep work I actually accomplish in a day
  • I’ll try to gain some insights from the number of hours I spend working
• Scheduling time blocks a day in advance
  • I usually have a to-do list, so I know what I want to accomplish for that day, but scheduling things out has been helpful
  • It’s also been somewhat of a stressful practice because things usually never go to plan