Table of Contents
Deep Work Summary
In “Deep Work” by Cal Newport We live in an era when distracted work is the norm. Multitasking is viewed as a valuable trait rather than an inability to fully commit to one thing. Most jobs value those who can be jacks of all trades rather than someone who is a specialist or expert in a specific area. Productivity advice looks to optimize our time by allowing us to force even more into the time we have. All of this, along with the many available distractions through social media, contributes to a society with a hard time with long periods of focused work.
Author and Professor Cal Newport proposes a focus on allowing time for deep work. This concept points toward tasks or work that cannot be completed quickly. Deep work requires several long chunks of focused time. When we devote time to deep work, we can become experts in a specific topic rather than a generalist. We can spend time truly researching a problem to develop the best solutions. We can find the time to use our knowledge to create instead of becoming knowledge hoarders. Newport also suggests creating barriers between work and personal time so that our minds can be highly focused and present in the context of our time.
Lastly, Newport discusses the concept of social media as a form of avoiding deep work. Social media provides us with chemical hits similar to drugs. When we are bored and choose to look at social media, it creates an addiction loop that makes it more difficult to sit with our boredom long enough to access deep work. Many of us would benefit from a social media detox where we prevent ourselves from accessing social media completely for a length of time or indefinitely to encourage ourselves to become accustomed to focused work without the possibility of distraction as an outlet.
Deep Work Notes
Part 1 The Idea
- As technology advances, more jobs will be replaced by machines. In the cases of jobs that require humans in many cases, remote work opportunities will allow businesses to hire stars rather than local workers, thus leaving the local talent unemployed and underemployed.
- Those who can work with and understand data from smart machines will thrive as the digital divide increases
- To be part of the group that masters hard things, you must be willing to do it again and again as technology changes
- American culture thrives on the idea of a prodigy rather than on practice
- Trying to learn a skill while distracted by other things like Facebook causes multiple unlinked neurons to activate, which reduces the ability of the ones needed for the skill to develop
- Research has identified a kind of lingering effect from our tasks. As we move from task to task, there is some residual brain power still focused on the original task
- Some higher-level executives live in a highly distracted state because that it where they contribute best to the organization. However, most others should not aim to idolize this style of work as it is not sustainable at other levels
- Trends that “increase” productivity of the business limit individual ability to focus on deep work to learn new things
- We pursue a workforce driven by our inboxes and our meetings because it is easier than other methods of work prioritization. However, when we measure productivity by the number of emails or meetings we do, then the true potential of each individual is lost.
- Efficiency and speed of task completion have led to busyness. We have begun to believe that this indicates success, but in reality, it makes us more replaceable by another person or machine.
- Note to self. I’ve been so wrong about productivity.
- Because the business push is for these productivity areas, it becomes easier and easier for a person who knows how to focus on deep work to learn new skills and become a top performer in their industry.
- Something we generally find is that craftsmen require depth to hone their crafts. They don’t have to deal with email and other distractions. This allows them to become masters over time.
- Contrary to popular belief, the outcomes of large scale are not necessarily as important to our well-being as what we focus our attention on. People with a fatal medical diagnosis can be happy by focusing on what makes them happy rather than the diagnosis.
- Many emails we respond to throughout the day are fairly shallow. So, building a habit of focusing on these shallow concerns ensures these shallow issues will mostly take up our willpower.
- According to the work of Czikszentmihalyi, we are happier when we are in a state of flow. This really only occurs when we do something challenging over an extended time.
Part 2 The Rules
- Our willpower is finite, and we cannot focus on deep work forever. Eventually, it is inevitable to give in to distraction.
- Because our willpower is limited, we must start a new practice or habit of deep focus, utilizing routines and consistency to make it a part of our everyday life.
- The monastic method of deep work is the most radical and shuns almost completely any form of shallow work that could come. This method best applies to novelists who can avoid email, meetings, or other distractions.
- The bimodal method is a split of substantial periods between deep work and shallow work. Sabbatical might be a good example of bimodal for an academic. It can also apply to someone who can take a few days per week for deep work only as well.
- The rhythmic method involves scheduling little chunks of time to focus on deep work every day. This tends to be used by many knowledge workers who can’t abandon the shallow work for days at a time.
- The journalistic method dictates that you can rapidly switch into deep work and flow at a moment’s notice. This method takes advantage of any free time–even just 15 minutes–to get into a flow state.
- In building a deep work ritual, you need to be able to answer the following questions.
- Where will you work and for how long
- How will you work once started
- How will you support your work
- Maintain energy to maintain the flow
- A strategy for going deep is the grand gesture. This is when someone makes a significant adjustment to their workspace to encourage focus because the expenditure is a source of encouragement.
- Collaboration is great for sharing ideas between individuals from different disciplines. This can allow for creative innovation. However, collaboration is best supported in the hub and spoke models rather than open office designs. This allows for creative collaboration but also allows for isolation for deep work.
- Identify several wildly important aspects of goals that would return tangible and substantial benefits. Focus your deep work on areas related to making progress in those areas.
- Measuring progress is important. However, the measure type determines motivation levels in pursuing the goals. Lag measures focus on the final products and are not always in your control. Since final products usually take a while to produce, it is hard to stay motivated. However, lead measures allow you to add measures to determine the progress that is being made and can be directly influenced by you, such as the number of hours put toward deep work.
- Tracking progress in a physical nature is also important. Creating a scoreboard allows you to see the progress occurring and allows you to note the milestones.
- Reviewing your scoreboard regularly is also important so that you can determine what went right and make corrections when things go wrong.
- Cal suggests the positives of a shutdown habit from work, where you make a clean break from work-related tasks and thinking once you leave the office.
- A shutdown gives our unconscious mind time to sift through all the decisions that need to be made. Without a shutdown, the queue is continually backed up, and the unconscious mind never gets time to catch up while the conscious mind is in control.
- A daily work shutdown also frees our minds to rebuild our ability to focus for the next day. A shutdown ritual will help get us in the right mindset to eventually free our minds from work thoughts after hours.
- Concentrating is hard when we seek entertainment at the slightest hint of boredom. These hits of looking at our phones function like a drug and prevent our ability to focus deeply.
- Setting online and offline blocks will help rewire your brain to handle the lack of novelty in the distractions. Even if your job requires a lot of internet access, you can still schedule offline blocks of time more often so that you also have more online blocks.
- While in an offline block, work on tasks or projects that allow you to be offline completely. If you need the internet to complete a project or task, force yourself to wait until your next online block.
- Productive meditation is doing a physical activity that doesn’t require mental effort and utilizing that time to focus all mental effort on one professional problem.
- While doing a productive meditation, when your mind wanders off the problem, you have to bring it back to the problem. Over time, this will help with distraction resistance.
- Social network detox frees us up and provides less distraction. When we think about some forms of social media, our uses for them are a large majority just distractions and could easily be dropped.
- Instead of any benefit approach, you can use the craftsman approach to tool adoption. This entails analysis of the tool and its benefits and negatives to the success and happiness of our professional and personal lives.
- The first step to tool decisions starts with defining your high-level goals. These have to avoid being specific. This they become more like values. For example, as a parent, I want to be a good parent and run an organized household.
- From here, develop two to three activities to work toward those goals.
- Lastly, analyze each tool you have and determine how it impacts these goals and activities. If they do not positively impact, then the tool should be dropped.
- Social media has been marketed as something we can’t live without, and if we do, we will miss out on so much. However, many find out that after a sabbatical from social media, they find that their lives would not have been notably better without social media and no one else noticed when they didn’t use social media.
- Sites that tend to fill a boredom void, such as Reddit, can be dangerous because the inability to be bored leads to the inability to sit with a thought for a longer period.
- To avoid the lure of distracting entertainment sites, it is important to plan out your leisure time. A planned out leisure time helps avoid those distracting sites and lets you make progress on hobbies or interests.
- Time blocking isn’t about constraint but about thoughtfulness. If you have an unexpected insight that creates a lot of value, you should be able to pursue that insight and come back and reschedule your day at a later point.
- A clever way to determine shallow work is to use the hypothetical concept of how long a new person would take to learn the tasks you are doing. If the time is short, then the tasks are shallow.
Source
Newport, C. (2016). Deep work: Rules for focused success in a distracted world.
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