Deep 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.

Current economic thinking argues that the unprecedented growth and impact of technology are creating a massive restructuring of our economy. 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.

Cal offers no advice for obtaining the third advantage, but he identifies two core abilities for thriving in this new economy: the ability to quickly master hard things, and the ability to produce at an elite level in terms of both quality and speed. These two abilities depend on your ability to perform deep work.

Side note: already, I'm sensing that after this book, or even halfway through it, I'm going to be compelled to spend all my time between coding and learning new technologies. I feel like I'm playing catch-up on technologies and need to be at the front of the pack.

To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensively without distraction. To produce at your peak level, you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. Attention residue left by unresolved switches dampens performance.

Distractions like an open office or an instant messaging system are hard to measure. Sure, they're distracting, but they encourage collaboration and quick communication. If it were clear these distracting behaviors were hurting the bottom line, they'd be out. But the metric black hole prevents this clarity and allows the shift toward distraction.

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 at the moment.

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.

Anything internet related, email, an active social media presence, and the rest, is understood by default to be innovative and necessary. These depth-destroying behaviors are lauded, while avoidance of these trends generates suspicion.

The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limit in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Csikszentmihalyi calls this mental state flow.

Implementing Deep Work: Philosophies

Monastic: radically minimize shallow obligations, like not using email.

Bimodal: divide your time into clearly defined stretches devoted to deep pursuits. Like four days straight of depth and three days of shallow work. Or all summer of deep work and three seasons teaching. Longer than a day, though.

Rhythmic: generate a rhythm or habit of when you get deep work done each day. Eliminate the need to invest energy deciding if and when you're going to go deep.

Journalistic: fit deep work whenever you can into your schedule.

Before going deep, he recommends deciding where you'll work and for how long, how you'll work, what is on or off limits, output targets like words per 20 minutes, and how you'll support your work through food, drink, and exercise.

The grand gesture is the idea that going somewhere exotic or isolating puts special emphasis on the work you're trying to achieve. Like J.K. Rowling booking a five-star hotel room to finish Harry Potter, or Peter Shankman booking a roundtrip flight to Tokyo just to write while flying both ways.

To execute on deep work

Focus on the wildly important. Hone in on what matters and don't get spread too thin.

Act on lead measures. Lead measures track new behaviors that will drive success on lag measures. Time spent in deep work is a good lead measure.

Keep a compelling scoreboard. Track deep work hours on a physical scoreboard.

Create a cadence of accountability. Build routine checks where you evaluate your performance and whether you got done what you said you would, what went well, what went poorly.

Shut down after your deep work so you can restore cognitive resources and solve in the background. Don't think about work stuff after you're done working. Create a shutdown routine to segue out of work mode. Plan the next day. Commit to a specific plan for a goal so you can free your mind from its duty to keep track of those obligations.

Once your brain has been accustomed to on-demand distraction, it's hard to shake the addiction when you want to concentrate. So any time a moment of potential boredom comes up, like waiting in line for five minutes, and you relieve that boredom with a quick glance at your smartphone, you train your brain away from depth.

Cal suggests setting a schedule for internet use and sticking to it by all means. Even if you really need something from the internet and it is blocking you from finishing your task, you should wait until the scheduled time to access it. Being able to resist the urge to be distracted is a form of mental calisthenics that improves your ability to do deep work.

It's incredibly valuable to just sit and be bored with your thoughts.

Practice intense dashes of focused study, the same way Theodore Roosevelt did at Harvard. Set deadlines that are just barely feasible, but only if you focus so intensely that success is possible. Leave no time for distraction and create a way to be held accountable to making the deadline.

Productive meditation: forcing yourself to resist distraction and return your attention repeatedly to a well-defined problem while you are doing something else productive. It could be during a run, walk, or workout. It strengthens your distraction-resisting muscles and forces you to focus deeper and deeper on a single problem.

Once you're in a distraction-free mental landscape and you have a hard problem in front of you, it's not always easy to know where to go from there. Here's a structure: first review the relevant variables for solving the problem and store them in working memory, then identify the next-step question you need to answer using these variables. Now you know where to focus your attention. Finally consolidate your gains by reviewing clearly the answer you identified and then start the process over.

Cal suggests scheduling every minute of your workday with 30-minute blocks on a piece of lined paper, for example. If you're not sticking to the schedule, no worries, just cross it out and reschedule. Your goal is to have a thoughtful say in what you're doing with your time going forward, even if the decisions are reworked again and again as the day unfolds.

Cal routinely ends his day at 5:30. He calls it fixed-schedule productivity. He sets a firm goal of not working past a certain time and then works backward to find productivity strategies that allow him to satisfy this declaration. He ruthlessly reduces the shallow while preserving the deep and is incredibly protective of his time. He will say no with vague explanations as to why, even to small shallow commitments that seem harmless in isolation, like getting coffee or hopping on a call.