I am a knowledge worker with two masters degrees and years of work experience. But this is me every day:
I’m constantly and easily distracted, either by intrusions (office-drop-ins, pings and “emergencies”) or by my own weak attention span (what new thing is there on my news app?). And I don’t think I’m alone in this, given the online shopping and Facebook checking I see when I nosily glance at my coworkers’ screens.
But really, how are we to resist this? On most days I have 6.5 hours of meetings. What’s more, these are generally 30-minute meetings, scattered here and there, sometimes with travel to different conference rooms or buildings in between. This leaves me constantly switching between projects and tasks, with tiny bits of time confetti in between. Can I plunge into a data-driven campaign optimization in the 10 minutes I have before my next call? Nope. So might as well catch up with my email or zone out on Instagram for a few.
And this is how our days go. We save the important work for our evenings or weekends, or (commonly) we substitute this busyness for true productivity and call it good.
This quandary is what brought me to the book “Deep Work” by Cal Newport. Newport is a young (36 at the time of this writing) tenured professor of computer science at Georgetown University. He has a PhD from MIT and has written several books. And he also is married with kids. How does he get it all done?
In this post I’ll provide a quick overview of the key concepts Newport offers in “Deep Work.” And, while I highly recommend you go out and read (or listen to) the whole thing, I’ll share the 3 most helpful tips that should get you inspired.
What is “deep work”?
Newport defines this as: “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 other words, deep work is the type of work that will get you promoted, that will get you more visibility in your field, and will give you that important feeling of accomplishment.
You can also contrast this with “shallow work”, which takes up much of our days: “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.” In other words, this is work like setting up meetings, cranking out routine monthly reports, and so forth.
Newport’s book focuses mostly on the professional lives of “knowledge workers”, the increasingly large class of mostly white-collar workers who earn their living through mental tasks and professional know-how rather than physical production. This can mean attorneys, accountants, software engineers, financial planners, executives or college professors like Newport himself.
Newport argues that having the skill of deep work is important today because of the speed of change in business and technology. Even someone who was a top student in MIT’s computer science program is going to find herself, 15 years into her working life, having to rapidly learn and adapt to technical possibilities that did not even exist when she was in school. The ability to learn hard things quickly, along with the ability to work with intelligent machines, is becoming some of our most valuable career currency.
Newport’s deep work hypothesis is this: “The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare 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.”
About two-thirds of Newport’s book is spent offering practical guidance on how to train yourself to develop the focused attention skills to enable you to do this “deep work.” Below is a sampling of three of the many tips Newport offers:
- Focused work requires practice:
We have endless amounts of entertainment and information that’s just a click away. Social networking apps are engineered to be addictive. So those of us who came of age during the time of the Internet and smart phones will need to re-learn how to focus — part of this is re-learning how to be bored. Get used to boredom – don’t always seek distraction when you are sitting in traffic, or standing in line. Why? “Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distractions.”
A few other ways to get in the habit of focus include establishing Internet-free times, meditating, and setting focused work rituals (e.g. every morning at 6:30 a.m. I will make myself a big cup of coffee and spend 45 minutes in my home office…).
One way I’m trying to build my focus practice — along with daily meditations, which I’ve been doing for a while — is to use site tracking and blocking applications like RescueTime. I’ll let you know if this helps in a future post. Being aware of what our digital time-sucks are brings us nicely to our second tip.
2. Select your network tools with care:
As stated above, social networking tools are created to get us hooked. They require a habitual audience to succeed. The same might also be said of a variety of apps, communication tools and productivity software, many of which might be encouraged by our employers. Between email, texting, What’s App, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Evernote, Facebook, Twitter and so forth, I am constantly reachable and have several places to check for inputs.
Adoption of these tools is encouraged, Newport says, because we live in a “technopoly” where all gadgets and apps are seen as innovative and new and therefore good. We rush to be early adopters. We fear being left out. Above all, we don’t want to be thought of as old-fashioned, foot-dragging Luddites. This is surprising and all the more compelling coming from a computer science professor.
To reduce this scatter, Newport suggests a “craftsman” approach to network tool selection, rather than an “any benefit” approach. The “any benefit” approach is a low barrier to entry – you’ll adopt a tool if it has a single good feature, if not doing so will have you missing one conversation, and so forth. The more selective “craftsman” approach has you selecting the single best tool for the job. Some examples: If I own a bakery and want to promote myself on social media, maybe I don’t need to spread myself thin across Google Plus, Twitter, YouTube and everything else. Perhaps I have found that the bulk of my audience uses Instagram and Pinterest, and those formats are best suited to what I’m selling. In terms of productivity apps, Evernote is clever, but if it’s only adding one or two points of value, delete it. Radical, eh?
3. Schedule your free time:
Newport encourages scheduling as a tactic to ensure that you are using your time well and not frittering away hours on Web browsing or needless e-mail back-and-forth. In fact, he goes so far as to suggest scheduling every minute of your workday, even if shifting demands lead you to revising this schedule every hour or two. While I can see both pros and cons to this, I was most intrigued by his suggestion that one also have a structured schedule for one’s free time.
“You should and can make deliberate use of your time outside work.” As someone who values personal enrichment and learning, and who likes to have some productive projects going on outside of my day job, this resonated. Newport warns that with the internet, mindless web surfing, video watching and social network checking, our leisure time is degraded. When it comes to your leisure time, “don’t default to whatever catches your attention at the moment, but instead dedicate some advance thinking to the question of how you want to spend” your free time. Figure out what you are going to do with your free time – what friends will you see, what books will you read, what workouts will you do? If not, you might find your weekend lost in a Netflix binge.
To find out more, get “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Scattered World” by Cal Newport on Amazon.
