Deep Work

Definitions and Core Ideas

Deep vs Shallow Work

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: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.

Core Ideas

A commitment to deep work is not a moral stance and it's not a philosophical statement. It is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done.

The core ideas of deep work

• Deep work is valuable
• Deep work rare
• Deep work meaningful

The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare and 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.

Deep work is valuable

In this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage:

• those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines,
• those who are the best at what they do, and
• those with access to capital.

To be in the first two group, we need to possess the following two core abilities:

1. The ability to quickly master hard things
2. The ability to produce at an elite level in terms of both quality and speed

Both of these abilities depend on the ability to do deep work.

How to learn hard things

The core component of deliberate practice are usually identified as follows:

1. Your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you are trying to improve or an idea you are trying to master
2. You receive feedback so that you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it's most productive

It means that to learn hard things quickly, we must focus intensely without distraction.

How to produce

If you don't produce, you won't thrive - no matter how skilled or talented you are.

If you want to become a superstar, mastering the relevant skills is necessary, but not sufficient. You must then transform that latent potential into tangible results that people value.

To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. Put another way, the type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work.

High-quality work produced = Time spent $\times$ Intensity of focus

Deep work is rare

Busyness as 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

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Knowledge work is not an assembly line, and extracting value from information is an activity that's often at odds with busyness, not supported by it.

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But the metric black hole prevents such clarity and allows us instead to elevate all things Internet into Morozov's feared "uber-ideaology." In such a culture, we should not be surprised that deep work struggles to compete against the shiny thrum of tweets, likes, tagged photos, walls, posts, and all other behaviours that we're now taught are necessary for no other reason than that they exist.

Deep work is meaningful

Deep work is an activity well suited to generate a flow state, which generates happiness. Thus, if we build our working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work, we can reach deep satisfaction.

Your work is your craft, and if you hone your ability and apply it with respect and care, then like the skilled wheel write you can generate meaning in the daily efforts of your professional life.

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You don't need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work.

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To embrace deep work in your own career, and to direct it toward cultivating your skill, is an effort that can transform a knowledge job from a distracted, draining obligation into something satisfying - a portal to a world full of shining, wondrous things.

Strategies for Deep Work

Four rules of deep work:

1. Work deeply
2. Embrace boredom
3. Quit social media
4. Drain the shallows

Strategies for working deeply

One of the main obstacles to going deep: the urge to turn your attention toward something more superficial.

You can expect to be bombarded with the desire to anything but work deeply throughout the day.

The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intensions 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.

Strategy 1: Decide you deep philosophy

Four depth philosophy:

1. The monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling: maximizing deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations. Practitioners tend to have a well-defined and highly valued professional goal that they're pursuing, and the bulk of their professional success comes from doing this one thing exceptionally well.
2. The bimodal philosophy of deep work scheduling: dividing your time, dedicating some clear stretches of time to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else. During the deep time, the practitioner acts monastically. The minimum unit of deep work is at least one full day.
3. The rhythmic philosophy of deep work scheduling: the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit.
4. Journalistic philosophy of deep work scheduling: you fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule. Without practice, such switches can seriously deplete your finite willpower reserves. This habit also requires a sense of confidence in your ability - a conviction that what you are doing is important and will succeed. This type of conviction is typically built on a foundation of existing professional accomplishment.

Strategy 2: Ritualize

To make the most out of your deep work sessions, build rituals of the same level of strictness and idiosyncrasy as the important thinkers mentioned previously.

Three questions that any work ritual must answer:

1. Where you will work and for how long?
2. How you'll work once you start to work.
3. How you'll support your work.

Strategy 3: Make Grand Gesture

Grand gesture, such as changing the work environment completely for a while can force our brain to stop procrastinating and start producing.

Strategy 4: Don't work alone

The whiteboard effect:

For some types of problems, working with someone else at the proverbial shared whiteboard can push you deeper than if you were working alone. The presence of the other party waiting for your next insight - be it someone physically in the same room or collaborating with you virtually - can short-circuit the natural instict to avoid depth.

Strategy 5: Execute like a business

It is often straightforward to identity a strategy needed to achieve a goal, but what trips up companies is figuring out how to execute the strategy once identified.

4 rules of execution:

1. Focus on the Wildly Important: For an individual focusing on deep work, you should identity a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours.

   • Have a specific goal that would return tangible and substantial professional benefits to generate a steady stream of enthusiasm
   • Don't try to say no to the trivial distractions, try to yes to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else.

2. Act on the Lead Measures:

   • Lag measures describe the thing you're ultimately trying to improve. These metrics are too late to change your behaviour. When you receive them, the performance that drove them is already in the past.
   • Lead measures measure the new behaviours that will drive success on the lag measures.
   • For individuals focusing on deep work, the lead measure is the time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward the wildly important goal.

3. Keep a Compelling Scoreboard

   • The individual's scoreboard should be a physical artifact in the workspace that displays the individual's current deep work hour count.

4. Create a Cadence of Accountability

   • The final step to help maintain a focus on lead measures is to put in place a rhythm of regular and frequent meetings of any team that owns a wildly important goal.

   • During these meetings, the team members must:

     • Confront their scoreboard
     • Commit to specific actions to help improve the score before the next meeting
     • Describe what happened with the commitments they made at the last meeting.

   • For individuals focusing on deep work, we can use a weekly review to look over the scoreboard to:

     • celebrate a good week
     • Help understand what led to bad weeks
     • Figure out how to ensure a good score for the days ahead.

Strategy 6: Be lazy

You should inject regular and substantial freedom from professional concerns into your days, providing you with idleness that is paradoxically required to get deep work done.

The value of downtime:

• Downtime aids insights: your unconscious mind is like Google's vast data centers, in which statistical algorithms sift through terabytes of unstructured information, teasing out surprising useful solutions to difficult questions.
• Downtime helps recharge the energy needed to work deeply.
• The work that evening downtime replaces is usually not that important.

Strategies for embracing boredom

The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained.

Much in the same way that atheletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, you'll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing from the slightest hint of boredom.

Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction, Nass discovered, it's hard to shake the addiction even when you want to concentrate.

Don't take a break from distraction. Instead, take breaks from focus.

If you spend just one day a week resisting distraction, you're unlikely to diminish your brain's craving for these stimuli, as most of your time is still spent giving in to it.

Instead of scheduling occasional breaks from distraction so that you can focus, you should instead schedule the occasional breaks from focus to give in to distraction.

How the strategy of taking a break from focus works:

• Schedule in advance when you'll use the Internet
• Avoid it altogether outside these times. You can keep a notepad near your computer at work to record the next time you're allowed to use the Internet.

The motivation of this technique is that the use of distracting services itself does not reduce your brain's ability to focus. The constant switching from low stimuli / high-value activities to high-stimuli / low-value activities at the slightest hint of boredom or cognitive challenge is the one that teaches your mind to never tolerate an absence of novelty.

A full day of scheduled distraction therefore becomes a full day of mental training.

If your work requires a lot of hours online or answering to emails, it means that your Internet blocks will be more numerous thatn those of someone whose job requires less connectivity. The integrity of your off-line blocks is more important in this strategy.

Work like Teddy Roosevelt

How to work like Roosevelt:

• Identify a deep task (i.e., something that requires deep work to complete) that is high on your priority list.
• Estimate how long you'd normally put aside for an obligation of this type
• Give yourself a hard deadline that drastically reduces this time.
• Always keep your self-imposed deadlines right at the edge of feasibility. You should be able to consistently beat the buzzer, but to do so should require teeth-gritting concentration.

At this point, the only possible way to get the deep task done in time is to work with great intensity, with no email break, no daydreaming, no Facebook browsing, no repeated trips to the coffee machine.

Meditate productively

The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you're occupied physically, but not mentally - walking, jogging, driving, showering - and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem.

I have been applying this technique for my lunch time walks.

Memorize a deck of card to train our mind for concentration

As titled.

Quit social media

As titled

Don't use the Internet of Entertain Yourself

You both should and can make deliberate use of your time outside work.

Addictive websites thrive in a vacuum: If you haven't given yourself something to do in a given moment, they'll always beckon as an appealing option. If you instead fill this free time with something of more quality, their grip on your attention will loosen.

It is therefore crucial that you figure out in advance what you're going to do with your evenings and weekends before they begin.

If you give your mind something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you'll end the day more fulfilled, and begin the next one more related, than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in semiconscious and unstructured Web surfing.

Strategies for quiting social media

Accepting that these tools are not inherently evil, and that some of them might be quite vital to your success and happiness, but at the same time, also accepting that the threshold for allowing a site regular acccess to your time and attention should be more stringent, and that most people should tehrefore be using many fewer such tools.

The craftsman approach to tool selection

The craftsman approach to tool selection:

Identity 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.

Steps to apply the craftsman approach to tool selection:

1. Identify the main high-level goals in both your professional and your personal life.
   1. Identity the goals
   2. List two or three activities that help you satisfy the goal
2. Consider each tool against the activities that you identified, and see whether it has a substantially positive impact, a substantially negative impact, or little impact on your regular and successful participation in the activity?
3. Keep using this tool only if you concluded that it has substantial positive impacts and that these outweigh the negative impacts

The 30-day ban

To decide whether you should quit a social media, you can impose a 30-day ban, and ask yourself the following questions about each of the services you temporarily quit:

1. Would the last thirty days have been notably better if I had been able to use this service?
2. Did people care that I wasn't using this service?

Strategies for draining the shallow

Very few people work even 8 hours a day. You're lucky if you get a few good hours in between all the meetings, interruptions, Web surfing, office politics, and personal business that permeate the typical work day.

Fewer official working hours helps squeeze the fat out of the typical work week. Once everyone has less time to get their stuff done, they respect that time even more. People become stingy with their time and that's a good thing. They don't waste it on things that just don't matter. When you have fewer hours you usually spend them more wisely.

Strategy 1: Schedule every minute of your day

At the beginning of each workday, turn to a new page of lined paper in a notebook you dedicate to this purpose.

Down the left-hand side of the page, mark every other line with an hour of the day, covering the full set of hours you typically work.

Divide the hours of your work day into blocks and assign activities to the blocks.

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When you're done scheduling your day, every minute should be part of a block. You have, in effect, given every minute of your workday a job. Now as you go through your day, use this schedule to guide you.

If you schedule is disrupted, you should, at the next available moment, take a few minutes to create a revised schedule for the time that remains in the day.

• You can turn to a new page.

• You can erase and redraw blocks.

• You can cross out the blocks for the remainder of the day and create new blocks to the right of the old ones on the page.

Your goal is not to stick to a given schedule at all costs; it's instead to maintain, at all times, a thoughtful say in what you're doing with your time going forward - even if these decisions are reworked again and again as the day unfolds.

Strategy 2: Quantify the depth of every activity

How to quantify the depth of a task:

How long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task?

Once you know where your activities fall on the deep-to-shallow scale, bias your time toward the former.

Strategy 3: Ask your boss for a shallow work budget

Might note be relevant

Strategy 4: Finish your work by five thirty

Fixed-schedule productivity: fix the firm goal of not working past a certain time, then work backward to find productivity strategies that allow me to satisfy this declaration.

By ruthlessly reducing the shallow while preserving the deep, this strategy frees up our time without diminishing the amount of new value we generate.

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The limts to our time necessitate a more careful thinking about our organizational habits, also leading to more value produced as compared to longer but less organized schedules.

Strategy 5: Become hard to reach

How to use email effectively:

1. Make people who send you email do more work
2. Do more work when you send or reply to emails: "What is the project represented by this message, and what is the most efficient in terms of messages generated process for bringin this project to a successful conclusion?"
3. Don't respond

Professorial email sorting: do not reply to an email if any of the following applies:

• It's ambiguous and otherwise makes it hard for you to generate a reasonable response
• It's not a question or proposal that interests you
• Nothing really good would happen if you did respond and nothing really bad would happen if you didn't

Example of Deep Work

Cal Newport

I build my days around a core of carefully chosen deep work, with the shallow activities I absolutely cannot avoid batched into smaller bursts at the peripheries of my schedule.

Three to hour hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.

Adam Grant's approach

Adam Grant's approach to be highly productive in research:

1. Batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches.
   1. Batching all teaching into the fall semester, so that he can turn his attention fully to reserach in the spring and summer, and tackle this work with less distraction.
   2. During the semester dedicated to research, he alternates between periods where his door is open to students and colleagues, and periods where he isolates himself to focus completely and without distraction on a single research task.
   3. These deep work periods last up to three or four days.
2. Dividing research tasks into three parts:
   1. Analyzing the data
   2. Writing a full draft
   3. Editing the draft into something publishable
3. Enforce strict isolation until he completes the task at hand.