Deep Work - Image Credits: DALL-E

I got my hands on a Kindle recently. The first book I read on it was "Deep Work - Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World" by Cal Newport. It had been a tremendous realization for me to know how distracted our work culture is and what steps can we take to remediate it. This article is a summary of that book and an attempt to convince you to start deep work as well.

Deep Work

Carl Jung was a psychiatrist who had some opposing views with Sigmund Freud, who was once his mentor and one of the best neurologists in history. To solidify these differences, Carl Jung had to produce a seminal paper. Jung needed to stay sharp to backup his claims in the paper. To achieve this, Carl Jung used to retreat to a private office in his stone house where he spends undistracted time writing for two hours. In this time he locks himself in the room and keeps the keys with him. Among many other skills Jung used to achieve his goal, the following is the focus of the book "Deep Work" and this article.

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.

Shallow Work

Although deep work is ubiquitous among influential figures, modern knowledge workers are forgetting the value of going deep. The main reason for this is the network tools, which includes email, quick message services like Slack, social media and infotainment sites. These tools combined with convenient access to smartphones have fragmented the attention of knowledge workers to slivers. A study shows that at average, knowledge workers spend around 60% of their time in electronic communications and internet searching. However, workers are not idling either. They are busier than ever. These type of work falls into the counterpart of deep work.

Shallow Work: Non-cognitively 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.

The scarier part is that spending a lot of time in shallow work can permanently hinder the ability to do deep work.

Deep Work is Valuable

In the new economy of machines replacing humans, there are two main abilities that will decide who thrives in this market.

1. The ability to master hard things
2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both speed and quality

The first ability relates to machines and tools that are significantly complex to understand and master. There was a data analyst named Nate Silver who made a career out of predicting election results. He was later hired to do analytics for everything from sports to weather on ABC news and ESPN. For the election result predictions, he maintained a large database of poll results and ran a complex analytical software called Stata on it. To achieve this he had to be a master of statistical analysis and databases. These are not easy tools to master. And since these tools change rapidly, he had to master it quickly, again and again.

The second ability requires that it is not enough to master hard things, but you must also produce a valuable outcome from it quickly. Many developers can do programming very well. But it requires an elite level execution to produce something valuable. The book explains how David Hansson used his programming ability to produce Ruby on Rails, which is the foundation for many tech products including Twitter and Hulu.

The two core abilities just described depend on your ability to perform deep work.

Deep Work Helps You Learn Hard Things Quickly

To master a cognitively demanding task requires deliberate practice. One of the core components of deliberate practice is as follows. Your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you are trying to improve or an idea you are trying to master. This emphasizes that deliberate practice cannot exist alongside distractions. The reason why deliberate practice works is observed in neuroscience. It shows that a tissue called myelin grows around certain neurons, acting as an insulator making them fire faster. This science argues that you get better at a skill as you develop more myelin around the relevant neurons. This idea is important since it provides neurological foundation why deliberate practice works.

If you are comfortable going deep, you'll be comfortable mastering complex skills needed to thrive in this economy. Instead if you stay where distractions are ubiquitous, these skills will not come easy to you.

Deep Work Helps You Produce at an Elite Level

People who produce at an elite level batch their hard and important intellectual work into long uninterrupted stretches. They often do not work substantially more than their colleagues. Instead, they maximize the intensity of their focus when they work. This is also apparent in students who get higher GPAs. They do not work more hours than their friends. They understand the importance of intensity and maximize their concentration.

One other important concept to keep in mind is attention residue. This concept tells that when you switch from task A to task B, your attention does not immediately follow. A residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the previous task. This residue gets especially thick when task A was unbounded and low intensity.

By working on a single task for a long time, the negative impacts of attention residue can be minimized. The common habit of working in a semi-distraction is potentially devastating to your performance. A quick check on your inbox every ten minutes may seem harmless. But this introduces a new target to your attention. The attention residue left by these switches dampens your performance.

These observations leads to a conclusion that the type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work.

Deep Work is Rare

Even though deep work has so much value, so many trends in the professional world do not prioritize that. In fact so many of these trends decrease the ability deep work. Open offices and instant messaging are to name a few. A CTO of a company did a study on how much it costs to have constant email communications. He found out that his company spends roughly one million dollars per year to have employees manage their emails.

Another behavior we are expected to follow is attending to emails even outside office hours. On average, a knowledge worker spends 25 hours per week outside office hours checking the inbox for emails. But a study found out that taking one day off from emails on a consultation firm made the employees enjoy the work more, better communicate among themselves and most importantly, a better product delivered to the customer.

Deep Work is Meaningful

The world is the outcome of what you pay attention to. When you dedicate a significant time to deep endeavors, there is a sense of meaning and importance. Also, this concentration hijacks your attention apparatus preventing you from noticing many unpleasant things. There is also psychological evidence 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. This mental state is called the "flow".

Ironically, jobs are easier to enjoy than free time because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.

The next part of the book proposes a set of rules that helps to cultivate deep work. However, I feel like those are outside the scope of this post. I strongly recommend you to read the book.

References

• C. Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Hachette UK, 2016.