Recapitulate one of your typical workdays and you might find yourself wake up to the preset alarm o’clock on your smartphone, on which bombarding notifications automated by applications that you either use every day or barely use since their installation present themselves in the meantime. You do not have the luxury of time to check each of them at the moment, so you prepare yourself and commute to your workplace.
When there, you turn on your computer and attempt to resume the task you have left half-done from yesterday, but some of its details need confirmation with a colleague whose presence you have not seen yet. At this point, you take out your phone and try to send an instant message to the person, but your attention is intercepted by an internal e-mail from a coworker asking for a document to be discussed at the next weekly meeting, which is five days from the moment. You rampage through e-mail history on your computer to no avail, only to be salvaged by lunch break. You can finally take a breath and divert yourself with whatever is trending or viral on social media – a hilarious video, or a lifehack article, soothes your tension.
The afternoon is no difference, as you are navigated by similar trivia. When it is time to go home, you run into the colleague you have tried to contact in the morning. You tell him what you want, he tells you to leave it to the next day and go for a dinner. The evening is a relief, since you eventually have time to sneak into the late night, clearing off all the notifications you are unable to handle in the morning while savoring some TV episodes.
You wish the next day will be a fulfilling one, but the vortex starts over.
Whoever familiar with this scene should start reading Deep Work in no time, for the book proffers serious salve to such dilemma. I first came across the title while listening to You 2.0: Deep Work, one of inspiring episodes in the annual summer series of the podcast Hidden Brain, in which Cal Newport, the author of the book, was invited to expound his incisive thoughts about deep work. These thoughts have paved path to some of his achievements within the 10 years after his college graduation, including, up until the publication of Deep Work, publishing 5 books, producing academic papers at a high rate, earning a PhD, winning a tenure-track professor, a lifelong position, at Georgetown University. However, as professed in Rule #4 of Deep Work, he hardly works past five thirty p.m.
One way the book enriches its reading experience is through numerous anecdotes preceding most of the sections. Among all the renowned figures whose work styles are unfolded in the book, Teddy Roosevelt draws my constant attention. The later president of the United States had a seemingly capricious but indeed rigorous way of managing time invested in his schoolwork and hobbies. He fostered a wide range of interests in, to name a few, boxing, wrestling, dancing, poetry, and, more importantly, naturalism, which lent him edge to publish insightful books on animals as well as become an accomplished naturalist. During his Harvard period, he would only spend an exiguous amount of time – less than a quarter of a typical day – dealing with schoolwork, and still manage to get honor grades; let alone his improvement in hobbies. This is because he considered his day as starting from eight thirty a.m. and ending at four thirty p.m., during which he would deduct time from classes and affairs he deemed unnecessary so as to exploit this amount of time exclusively for schoolwork. Most importantly, his usage of time was infused with intensive concentration.
Such type of efficient time management is also endorsed by the English writer Arnold Bennett. Witnessing the rise of the white-collar class as a corollary of the Industrial Revolution, he lamented how much of the time during a workday was wasted by this sprouting class. In the early twentieth century, working from ten a.m. to six p.m., these white collars saw the eight hours as an entire day, neglecting all other sixteen hours in a twenty-four-hour range that they could leverage. Following Bennett’s reasoning, a back-of-the-envelope calculation gives a person eight hours at command, supposing the person sleeps for eight hours. Much resembling the situation in current century, these hours were squandered by some on shallow activities, instead of being utilized for more solid purposes such as self-improvement.
The type of work Teddy Roosevelt, as well as other exemplars mentioned in the book, endorsed, is called deep work. By definition, deep work includes
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.
In contrast, shallow work contains
Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.
To underscore the value of deep work to professional life – and private life alike, as one may find further through reading – the first part of the book is dedicated to convincing readers that deep work is of significant value. Because, firstly, it helps people to master hard things at fast pace. The neurological foundation of deliberate practice props this argument. Skills of any kind are actualizations of brain circuits, and these circuits trigger faster – hence the reinforcement of skills – when neurons are enveloped by more myelin as a result of deliberate practice. This is because intense focus stimulates oligodendrocytes to wrap myelin around neurons in certain circuits.
Deep work also capacitates people to produce high-quality results. When Newport was studying the cases of high-performance students in American colleges where competition is relatively fierce, he found that, counter-intuitively, they spent less time than those ranking right after them in terms of GPA. He surmised that the intensity of their concentration reduced the time they would have to spend studying. Moreover, concentration in the process of single-tasking makes the work efficient and the outcome of fine quality due to the absence of attention residue. As research shows, while switching from task to task, a residue of attention from the previous task would affect the performance of the latter, as it fuels the unfinished thinking of the previous task.
Therefore, two core abilities to thriving in the new economy
listed upfront in the book are as follows:
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 reality, however, is that these abilities and the positive prospect they generate are not noticed by many individuals. They tend to get either distracted by or addicted to tasks, errands, and pastimes including sorting files for meetings, checking off e-mails, liking social media posts, and so on. They appear to be busying grappling with everything visible in daily life. Fortunately, rules and their corresponding strategies are explicated in the book to mitigate the shallowness.
Much as distractions are ubiquitous in life and drain our willpower, whose amount is considered limited, as we scatter our attention on them, we can smooth the transition into deep work using strategies discussed under this rule. To me, two of them deserve more noticing.
Devotees of this philosophy follow a somewhat disconnected professional life, cutting themselves from the world that they think is mundane. They seclude themselves by, for instance, not providing on their websites an e-mail address or any other social media accounts via which unfamiliar people contact them. Their aim is sharp and clear: They must focus exclusively on what they excel at, and nothing else.
This is a milder philosophy contrasted with the last one. Though people of this philosophy focus on their work extremely well, but they also allow themselves certain amount of time for relaxing and socializing with others. From an objective perspective, they are both deep and shallow, though at different times. They might lock themselves in a suburban cottage for several weeks to complete a project, while the following month sees them partying with others. In other words, for this group of people, deep work is a scheduled session on their agenda.
The work pattern of Jerry Seinfeld is evoked to exemplify this philosophy. His insight into becoming a good comic is all about following what was later identified as chain method. More specifically, when something is done on a regular basis, it converts into a chain of habit. Jerry Seinfeld crosses out every date on the calendar when he finishes writing daily jokes. As such rhythm comes into being, it becomes irresistible, and not much effort is required to start tasks.
Journalist philosophy is a deep work scheduling haphazard at superficial level but necessitates professional training to execute. Journalists have to shift into a writing mode whenever possible so that they can catch the headline and deadline in time, which is the nature of this philosophy: To start deep work anywhere and at any time. However, most people are not tuned this way.
Veil the deep work with a layer of formality and solemnness by deciding:
Where you’ll work and for how long. Select a specific place to do the deep work where there is no potential interruption and set the timer.
How you’ll work once you start to work. Set rules regarding what you should do and should not do.
How you’ll support your work. Take advantage of conditions that facilitate the work.
For example, for me to enjoy reading in order to write an article, I would retreat to my study where both paper books and e-books are available, close my door and window to insulate against unexpected noise, and set the timer to an hour. During this time, I would hold back from peeking screens and use the Internet only when the need emerges to search for something in the book. I do not need much support for my reading, but earplugs can be reassuring; and to take notes and jot down thoughts in the margin, pens are also necessary.
Other strategies of this rule guides readers to invest, for instance financially, in their endeavors so that they cannot quit the work without cost, collaborate with others when the work reaches certain stage so that the results are perfected, execute the deep work like business so that every step along the way is accountable, and, equally important, rest when necessary.
Distractions sway our attention because they are tantalizing and hard to get rid of. Such nature, to some extent, accounts for their potency of permeating our deep work. While it is clear that sometimes digital distractions should be prohibited, few people realize that they are working for short periods between long periods of decadent digital immersion. The awareness that we should do the opposite is clarified in the foremost strategy of this rule and the comparison it adopts for exhortation.
If you eat healthy just one day a week, you’re likely to lose weight, as the majority of your time is still spent gorging. Similarity, 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.
To refrain from shallow distractions and train for controlled attention, readers are advised to memorize a deck of card. The underpinning rationale is the research finding that what distinguishes memory athletes from ordinary people in terms of memorizing an incredible load of information is not the capacity of their memory, but that they are extraordinary at maintaining focus on particular information, which, one could infer, is vital for deep work.
To do this, one may employ the method of loci, a mnemonic dating back to the time of ancient Roman and Greek. In a nutshell, executing this method, one has to attach pieces of information to a diversity of objects at a certain location, such as a lamp in bedroom. As one takes a mental walk around the location and visits objects in proper order, he or she recalls pieces of information one by one. The external presentation of this training is that one can memorize a lot of information.
Although this pretentiously simple rule might provoke doubts about its feasibility, the case of Baratunde Thurston would reassure any naysayer. Thurston, an American writer and comedian, is one of the most connected man in the world, as he felt exhausted by the connectivity to his online life, he decided to disconnect for twenty-five days. The experience turned out to be memorable and Thurston enjoyed life as it should be. When the twenty-five days end, he missed his disconnection.
Living with such absence from the online world can be difficult, but following the approaches pitched in the book is not. They provide channels to a simplistic mindset.
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 Any-Benefit Approach to Network Tool Selection: You’re justified in using a network tool if you can identify any possible benefit to its use, or anything you might possibly miss out on if you don’t use it.
To delineate this approach in a micro scale, I would like to
take the example of my composing this article. Before embarking on this intention,
I identified the core factors affecting my goal and happiness as:
Correspondingly, to address the first factor, I would have to rule out tools that require, for example, mastery of certain composing syntax, working within single dialog box (which prevents me from referring simultaneously to my notes while writing), running only on one type of operating system, and constant connection to the Internet. Also, it would be better if the results sieved from the first factor also live up to the second. Notepad or a stock word processing software such Word or Pages would suffice, though pen and paper, which meet the minimum demand of writing, could also enhance notetaking and outlining. In order for the article to be accessed by people in need, I would have to nail down a website where some of its visitors immerse themselves in digital experience while sacrificing productivity.
In other words, a computer with basic word processing software, a pen, the book Deep Work, and some sheets of papers are all I should have. In this particular situation, I do not need a whit of social media apps, hence the absolute elimination of them.
Similar to the fact that minimal assortment of tools is adequate to lever most tasks, it is encouraged that one should focus only on the most important few goals in life, since any insignificant task consumes certain amount of attention that could have been dedicated to ones that actually make difference in the long run. This is backed by the Law of the Vital Few, or, as some might already know, the 80/20 rule, which suggests that
In many settings, 80 percent of a given effect is due to just 20 percent of the possible causes.
Aiming to proceed toward these few goals without much cognitive burden, Newport goes a step further and proposes to quit social media. He takes the simplist Ryan Nicodemus’s simplified life as a comparison. As Nicodemus made too many impulsive purchases, his spacious house was taken up by things that he did not even use. To make life easier, he packed every item that came into his sight, only to take one out when he needed it. As a result, he found that he only needed a few of what were packed.
This overhaul has a straightforward message: We should gradually decrease our dependence on social media services that we can do without, and uninstall applications that remain untouched for ages. Only in this way, can we focus on the significant few.
I would solemnly urge those interested in this book to read this section the first thing they do the moment they get hold of the book.
This section firstly provides an approach to pragmatic time allotment that knowledge workers can readily adopt for their workdays and become more productive. In short, it shows readers how to manage a workday with half-an-hour intervals. But instead of generalizing the kernel of the approach, I would rather refer you to books that delve into such practice at a more thorough level, such as The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey (you can flip straight to Becoming A Quadrant II Self-Manager under Habit 3).
The fourth rule also illustrates other strategies that prospective deep workers are advised to consider. For example, how to estimate which tasks should be invested with more time, how to officially reduce shallow work, and how to define time for a day when you stop work and the rationale behind it. The last strategy, however, appears to be radical, and precludes undesired contact via e-mails by structuring sender filters, turning events mentioned in e-mails into projects that need systematic steps and collaboration with the senders to finish, as well as simply not responding.
In summary, for some, the book is a code for their existing deep work style; for others, it can be a touchstone of a new approach to their accomplishment; for still others, the book can be a treasure that bestows upon them the enlightenment that they can take shelter from digital cacophony whenever they wish.
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