Most of us value efficiency. Depending on our circumstances, we could be trying to find the optimal balance between, among other things, studies, work, family, and social obligations. To reduce the stressors that accumulate from them, one thing we try to do is find ways to be more productive. As a result of this demand, books, videos, and courses have been created to help us with just that. One recent contribution that has stood out for its quality is Cal Newport’s Deep Work (2016).

Newport, thirty-four, is a tenured professor of computer science at Georgetown University. He earned his Ph.D. at MIT in 2009, spent two years as a post-doc there, and then took up his professorship at Georgetown in 2011. In his spare time, he authors books and writes about study hacks on his blog.

I first came across Newport on Talks at Google where he was giving a talk about another one of his books.

I wondered if his new book which I chanced upon while looking Newport up online could offer any useful insights to help me work faster and smarter.

This post summarizes my findings.

Newport’s book centers on the concept of deep work. Deep work refers to ‘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’ (p.3).

Deep work has historical antecedents from several contemplative religious traditions and has more recently received support from the findings of performance psychology. The repetitive and deliberate processes involved in deep work to train a skill or perform a task uses specific neuronal circuits in the brain. Their use trigger cells called oligodendrocytes to wrap layers of myelin, white tissue, around those neurons in the circuits, allowing them to fire faster and cleaner. This solidifies the skill or task in your brain, making it progressively easier to use or perform when the need arises.

He contrasts this with the kind of work that is far more common in today’s culture: shallow work, that is, work that is done in a state of fragmented attention which tends not to create much new value in the world and is easy to replicate (p.6). Newport argues that deep work is the key not only to productivity but also life satisfaction. His own credentials support these claims. Since graduate school, he has been able to publish peer-reviewed papers at a rapid rate, achieve tenure in a difficult field, author five books, run a blog, marry and raise children, and rarely work past five in the evening. He spends that extra time with his family or otherwise in a relaxed state. This, in turn, greatly benefits his productivity the following day.

Newport points out that many influential figures throughout history share a common commitment to deep work. He includes Carl Jung, Michel de Montaigne, Charles Darwin, Mark Twain, and in recent years, Woody Allen, J. K. Rowling, and Bill Gates among their number. Bill Gates in particular, as an undergraduate, would work so hard on his programming languages in his free time that he would often collapse on his keyboard while writing lines of code. That prodigious ability to concentrate allowed him to ‘start a billion dollar industry in less than a semester’ (p.258).

Newport argues that those who achieve the most success in today’s economy can either work creatively with intelligent machines or are stars in their field. Both require the ability to quickly master hard things and to produce at an elite level in terms of quality and speed. This means that in either case, deep work is necessary (p.28-29).

Since deep work is so valuable, why are so few able or willing to do it? Newport argues that the distractions of the internet in the 21st century have created an epidemic of fragmented attention which prevents us from doing deep work. The irony is that just when this burgeoning knowledge economy, which prizes the results of deep work (e.g., picking up new programming languages quickly, etc.) is growing, it is also the same time when the distractions created in the knowledge economy (e.g., social networking tools, email, etc.) prevent us from doing so.

In addition, shallow work has become more common in the business world because ad-hoc collaboration, constant communication, and the obligatory curation of social media are often prioritized over practices which facilitate deep work. The distractions caused by them create perennial attention residue in our brains.  

When we shift our attention from one task to another, part of our attention remains engaged with the previous task. These cognitive loads take up unnecessary space in our brain and prevent us from performing optimally on our new task. In addition, tests show that the more engaged people were in a previous task, the poorer they performed on a new task.

The result of prolonged distraction can also have lasting consequences on our ability to stay undistracted and perform at work. Newport cites communications research which reveals that people who flit their attention around constantly online cannot filter out irrelevancy in their work, have bad working memories, and remain chronically distracted. He writes: ‘if every moment of potential boredom in your life—say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives—is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain is likely rewired to the point where […] it’s not ready for deep work’ (p.159).

The principle of least resistance anticipated by the brain’s evolution and supported by today’s work culture predicts that most of us would choose to forgo the short-term discomfort of concentration and planning which can create real value for the artificial busy-ness of flitting from one shallow task to another. The problem is that the knowledge economy is not like an assembly line which rewards busy-ness. Value is created by focused work, not lengthy distracted work.

Deep work is not only related to workplace productivity but also life satisfaction. At face value, this might seem counter-intuitive. How can people find satisfaction in demanding work? There are several ways they can.

The first is via the connection between deep work and ‘flow,’ a mental state coined by researchers using the experiencing sampling method to determine when people are most likely to report the greatest satisfaction. Their results reveal that ‘the best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile’ (p.84). Common sense might lead us to think that satisfaction comes from less work and more leisure. But the results from the above studies reveal just the opposite: people self-report more satisfaction at work than elsewhere, especially if their work is challenging.

Deep work allows us to achieve a flow state, and flow gives us satisfaction. It follows that cultivating deep work is one terrific way to transform our jobs ‘from a distracted, draining obligation into something satisfying—a portal to a world full of shining, wondrous things’ (p.91).

The second is to realize that we become passionate about the things we choose to pursue rather than the other way around. The common motivational career slogan “follow your passion,” if interpreted to mean making a living out of your childhood or adolescent interests, is misleading advice. Our early passions are rarely static nor do they easily match up with a sustainable career trajectory.

Furthermore, psychological evidence suggests that many top performers did not attain their achievements by sheer passion. Rather, it was their punishing schedules, usually enforced by an involved mentor, that allowed them to build their skills and perform at elite levels before their passion for their craft grew. Newport offers the example of Bill McKibben, an untalented writer who through a decade of relentless practice became so good at writing that he could use his valuable skill to publish books on environmentalism, take control of his working life, and then find passion in what he did.

The third is that deep work often allows people to perform in such a way that they gain leverage to ask for more autonomy at work. Studies show a strong correlation between how much control you feel you have over your work and how satisfied you are with it.

Just imagine or recall what an entry-level job with low control felt like and this correlation should become apparent. By consistently creating value for the people who work for, you gain their trust and will likely be given more autonomy over what projects you work on and how you perform them.

The fourth is the fact that deep work often necessitates that we reduce shallow distractions like social media. Social media, like other kinds of digital media, including online games, are designed to be highly addictive.

And, like all addictive things, they can and will bring documented harms to your life. Studies show that they make people feel lonely, increase their rates of depression, and are correlated with anxiety related problems especially among students who use them on their phones. This is because using social media on a mobile device is like carrying a slot machine everywhere you go, exposing yourself to intermittent rewards throughout the day. This short-circuits your brain, which is not wired for that kind of stimulation and generates perennial anxiety which can cause lasting strain on your mental health.

Take Relient K’s advice on this: 

How then, can we do deep work? Answers to this question may be divided roughly into internal and external domains, that is, how to get into deep work and how to design our environment to facilitate that, respectively. On the internal domain, Newport divides deep work into four styles, each progressively fragmented to feasibly map onto workplace realities. Their unifying goal is to help minimize the willpower necessary to ‘transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration’ (p.100):

1. The monastic approach

2. The bimodal approach

3. The rhythmic approach

4. The journalistic approach

As “monastic” suggests, the first approach advocates the extreme cutting off of shallow obligations to do deep work for weeks or months at a time. Newport gives the example of Donald Knuth, a computer scientist who got rid of his email and only responded to posted correspondence on a schedule that depended on their urgency. He would spend the rest of his time in long hours of focused concentration.

The second “bimodal” approach divides deep work more feasibly into chunks of time that last for days rather than weeks or months. Newport points to the organizational psychologist Adam Grant, who would schedule most of his teaching obligations in one semester and use the other to do deep uninterrupted work.

The first two approaches, however, are infeasible and unnecessary for people who aren’t academics or scientists at the frontiers of their fields, aren’t expected to produce work that requires that level of focus, and don’t have the luxury of scheduling their time like that. This brings us to the next two approaches.

The third “rhythmic” approach, which is probably the most feasible and easiest to achieve, sets deep work as a kind of daily rhythm, with rituals that help to get you in and out of it. This is the most customary practice for deep workers in nine-to-five type jobs.

The fourth “journalistic” approach is the most fragmented and also the hardest to do. It necessitates getting into deep work whenever there are opportunities. This approach most fit people who operate on unpredictable and tight schedules like journalists, hence the name. Newport cites the journalist Walter Isaacson who was appointed Editor of Time because of his ability to do deep work and publish a crucially well-received book on Cold War policy outside of his day job as a magazine writer and editor. However, this approach can be very stressful for the brain and is not recommended for people trying out deep work for the first time.

When we start doing deep work properly, there are certain pitfalls to look out for. One is called looping. Looping happens when our brains refuse to take on a new challenge but instead replay everything it already knows about the subject in question (recall the principle of least resistance). In Newport’s own experience, when he was working on mathematical proofs, he would start to rehash easy preliminary results, again and again, to escape from the much more difficult work of building on those results toward a viable solution (p.172).

Finally, Newport emphasizes the importance of downtime to let your mind relax, passively consolidate the work you’ve been doing, and recharge you for the next round of deep work. Creating a shutdown ritual in the evenings and writing a to-do list for the next day will help you disconnect and get to sleep faster.

On the external domain, several steps can also be taken depending on your situation:

a. Schedule internet blocks and use filters to prevent you from going online so that you can protect your time and remain undistracted. This one, Freedom, comes well recommended from sources. 

b. Adopt a craftsman approach rather than an any-benefit approach to network tool selection. Determine if the net benefit of using some network or social media tool outweighs the cost in terms of time, effort, and possible strains on your mental health. Newport provides a test to help us determine whether or not to use social media tools in his book. I recommend buying it to find out more.

c. Make grand gestures to encourage deep work: Lock yourself in a room; buy expensive paper on which to solve mathematical proofs, practice languages, draft legal documents, etc. To complete The Deathly Hallows, J. K. Rowling checked into the five-star Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh so that she could spend all her time on undistracted writing. This costly investment allowed her to remain motivated and energized to complete her novel, close out the Harry Potter series, and meet fans’ expectations in good time.

d. Find out what are the skills most valued in your company or field and direct your deep work on those things.

e. Schedule every minute of your day.

Admittedly, not all jobs require deep work. A CEOs’ best use of their time will not include spending hours thinking deeply about a single problem. People who work sales, management, and head-hunting also probably won’t need to do that much deep work either. In addition, deep work of the kind Newport promotes seems to implicitly value certain kinds of knowledge production, i.e., STEM, academia, and creative writing, over others. Outside of these, a working life filled with shallow obligations might well be a path to success. Furthermore, it is likely that many find contentment with shallow work much more than they would deep work and aren’t too concerned about making an impact in the knowledge economy.

In the case of internet celebrities like YouTube stars, as a part of their craft, they need to create as much visibility as possible on any popular online platform they can find. For them, it seems like the any-benefit approach to network tool selection trumps the craftsman approach. There are several other caveats that come to my mind and no doubt to yours as well. These indicate that deep work and the external adjustments required to do it aren’t the be-all-and-end-all of success and satisfaction. Readers will have to exercise their own judgment and appropriate insights most relevant to their situation.

However, Newport’s philosophy of career and life satisfaction as intimately related to hard work, is, if anything, refreshing: you can work really hard and be satisfied at the same time! For this reason, I recommend his book and his talks to anybody who finds this post helpful. The appropriate links are given below.

 

Links

Here’s a link to the paperback version of Deep Work on Amazon. This version was used for the page citations listed in this post. 

Here’s a link to his talk on why “following your passion” is bad advice.

Here’s a link to his talk about why you should quit social media. For a more rounded perspective about the value of social media, check out this six-part Oxford Union debate on whether social media corrupts human interactions.   

Here’s a link to his interview with Brian Johnson on deep work.

His website and study hacks blog are already hyperlinked in the post.