Fragments of the book, “Deep Work. Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World”, written by Cal Newport.
Introduction
“If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. [If I instead get interrupted a lot] what replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time… there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons”.
A deep life is a good life.
Deep Work is Valuable
This Great Restructuring is not driving down all jobs but is instead dividing them. Though an increasing number of people will lose in this new economy as their skill becomes automatable or easily outsourced, there are others who will not only survive, but thrive – becoming more valued (and therefore more rewarded) than before. Bryanjolfsson and McAffee aren’t alone in proposing this bimodal trajectory for the economy.
Two 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.
The best students understood the role intensity plays in productivity and therefore went out of their way to maximize their concentration – radically reducing the time required to prepare for tests or write papers, without diminishing the quality of their results.
Leroy introduced an effect she called attention residue. When you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow – a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task. This residue gets especially thick if your work on Task A was unbounded and of low intensity before you switched, but even if you finish Task A before moving on, your attention remains divided for a while.
Deep Work is Meaningful
The idle mind is the devil’s workshop… when you lose focus, your mind tends to fix on what could be wrong with your life instead of what’s right. A workday driven by the shallow, from a neurological perspective, is likely to be a draining and upsetting day, even if most of the shallow things that capture your attention seem harmless or fun.
The implication of these findings is clear. In work (and specially knowledge work), to increase the time you spend in a state of depth is to leverage the complex machinery of the human brain in a way that for several different neurological reasons maximizes the meaning and satisfaction you’ll associate with your working like. “Ill live the focused life, because it’s the best king there is”.
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.
Ironically, jobs are actually easier too enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourages 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 much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.
The connection between deep work and flow should be clear: Deep work is an activity well suited to generate a flow state (to describe what generates flow include notions of stretching your mind to its limits, concentrating, and loosing yourself in an activity – all of which also describe deep work). And as we just learned, flow generates happiness. Combining these 2 ideas we get a powerful argument from psychology in favor of depth.
“We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals”. The book then elaborates that computer programmers must see their work in the same way:
“Within the overall structure of a project there is always room for individuality and craftsmanship… One hundred years from now, our engineering may seem as archaic as the techniques used by medieval cathedral builders seem to today’s civil engineers, while our craftsmanship will still be honored”.
The meaning uncovered by such efforts is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in craftsmanship – not the outcomes of their work. Put another way, a wooden wheel is not noble, but its shaping can be. The same applies to knowledge work. You don’t need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your job.
Work Deeply
“Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of the things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration”.
As Nietzsche said: “It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth”.
The problem with lag measures is that they come too late to change your behavior: “When you receive them, the performance that drove them is already in the past”. Lead measures, on the other hand, “measure the new behaviours that will driver success on the lag measures”. In other words, lead measures turn your attention to improving the behaviours you directly control in the near future that will then have a positive impact on your long-term goals.
The 4DX framework is based on the fundamental premise that execution is more difficult than strategizing.
“So we have scales that allow us to divide up people into people who multitask all the time and people who rarely do, and the differences are remarkable. People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand… they’re pretty much mental wrecks.
Quit Social Media
If you give your mind something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you’ll end up the day more fulfilled, and begin the next one more relaxed, than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in semiconscious and unstructured Web surfing.
Drain the Shallows
Another tactic that works well for me is to be clear in my refusal but ambiguous in my explanation for the refusal. The key is to avoid providing enough specificity about the excuse that the requester has the opportunity to defuse it.
The process-centric approach to e-mail can significantly mitigate the impact of this technology on your time and attention. First it reduces the number of e-mails in your inbox (…). Second, to steal terminology from David Allen, a good process-centric message immediately “closes the loop” with respect to the project at hand.
As the author Tim Ferris once wrote: “develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things”.
Marshall McLuhan declared that “the medium is the message”, but our current conversation on these topics seems to imply that “the medium is morality” – either you’re on board with the Facebook future or see it as our downfall.
The deep life, of course, is not for everybody. It requires hard work and drastic changes to your habits. For many, there’s a comfort in the artificial busyness of rapid e-mail messaging and social media posturing, while the deep life demands that you leave much of that behind. There’s also an uneasiness that surrounds any effort to produce the best things you’re capable of producing, as this forces you to confront the possibility that your best is not (yet) that good. It’s safer to comment on our culture than to step into the Roosveltian ring and attempt to wrestle it into something better.