On the Importance of Deep Work

Constantly learn new things

To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deepwork. If you don’t cultivate this ability, you’re likely to fall behind as technology advances.

Lifelong learning

The ability to perform is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becomingincreasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few whocultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life,will thrive

Attention residue

The problem this research identifies with this work strategy is that when you switch from some Task A to another Task B,your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task. This residue gets especially thick if your work on Task A was unbounded and of lowintensity before you switched, but even if you finish Task A beforemoving on, your attention remains divided for a while.

• Why is it so hard to do my work

Part 1

Chapter 1: Deep Work is Valuable

• Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy

  • 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 Intelectual Life

“Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converging rays of attention; let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea.”

Law of productivity

• High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)

Chapter 2: Deep Work is rare

The 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 in 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

Chapter 3: Deep Work is Meaningful

Rapt

As Gallagher recalls in her 2009 book Rapt, as she walked away from the hospital after the diagnosis she formed a sudden and strongintuition: “This disease wanted to monopolize my attention, but as much as possible, I would focus on my life instead.”

Her curiosity piqued, Gallagher set out to better understand the role that attention—that is, what we choose to focus on and what wechoose to ignore—plays in defining the quality of our life. After fiveyears of science reporting, she came away convinced that she was witness to a “grand unified theory” of the mind:

• Attention management

  Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioral economics tofamily counseling, similarly suggest that the skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience

Flow

“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.” Csikszentmihalyi calls this mental state flow (a term he popularized with a 1990 book of the same title).

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

• The connection between deep work and flow should be clear
  • deep work generates a flow state
    • stretches your mind to its limits
    • helps you to concentrate and loose yourself in an activity

Part 2

Taking action.

The Rules

Rule #1: Work deeply

• By Roy Baumeister

  You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.
Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of yourcharacter that you can deploy without limit; it’s instead like a muscle that tires

  The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration

• Different philosophies

  • Monastic

    Knuth deploys what I call the monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling. This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations. Practitioners of the monastic philosophy tend to have a well-defined and highly valued professional goal that they’re pursuing, and the bulk of their professional success comes from doing this one thing exceptionally well

  • Bimodal

    Jung’s approach is what I call the bimodal philosophy of deep work. This philosophy asks that you divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else. During the deep time, the bimodal worker will act monastically—seeking intense and uninterrupted concentration. During the shallow time, such focus is not prioritized. This division of time between deep and open can happen on multiple scales. For example, on the scale of a week, you might dedicate a four-day weekend to depth and the rest to open time. Similarly, on the scale of a year, you might dedicate one season to contain most of your deep stretches (as many academics do over the summer or while on sabbatical).

  • Rhythmic

    This chain method (as some now call it) soon became a hit among writers and fitness enthusiasts—communities that thrive on the ability to do hard things consistently. For our purposes, it provides a specific example of a general approach to integrating depth into your life: the rhythmic philosophy. This philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit. The goal, in other words, is to generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you’re going to go deep. The chain method is a good example of the rhythmic philosophy of deep work scheduling because it combines a simple scheduling heuristic (do the work every day), with an easy way to remind yourself to do the work: the big red Xs on the calendar.

  • Journalistic

    I call this approach, in which you fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule, the journalist philosophy. This name is a nod to the fact that journalists, like Walter Isaacson, are trained to shift into a writing mode on a moment’s notice, as is required by the deadline-driven nature of their profession

• 4DX Framework

  • The 4 Discipline of Execution

    • #1 Focus on the wildly importante

      • Aim to for a small number of wildly importantly goals
      • Let ambitious goals drove focus driven behaviour

        • The Art of Focus (David Brooks)

          “If you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to say ’no’ to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say ‘yes’ to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else.”

    • #2 Act on the lead measures

      • 2 types of metrics to measure the your goal

      • Lag measures

        • Lag measures describe the thing you’re ultimately trying to improve
        • the problem with lag measures is that they come too late to change your behavior: “When you receive them, the performance that drove them is already in the past.”

      • Lead measures

        • Lead measures, on the other hand, “measure the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures.
        • For an individual focused on deep work, it’s easy to identify the relevant lead measure: time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal
          • Don’t track how many books, articles you’ve read
          • Measure instead how many hours of deep work you’ve mastered

    • #3 Keep the a compelling scoreboard

      “People play differently when they’re keeping score,” the 4DX authors explain. They then elaborate that when attempting to drive your team’s engagement toward your organization’s wildly important goal, it’s important that they have a public place to record and track their lead measures. This scoreboard creates a sense of competition that drives them to focus on these measures, even when other demands vie for their attention. It also provides a reinforcing source of motivation. Once the team notices their success with a lead measure, they become invested in perpetuating this performance.

    • #4 Create a Cadence of Accountability

      • The 4DX authors elaborate that the final step to help maintain a focus on lead measures is to put in place “a rhythm of regular and

      frequent meetings of any team that owns a wildly important goal.”

      • multiple places throughout this book I discuss and recommend the habit of a weekly review in which you make a plan for the workweek ahead (see Rule #4). During my experiments with 4DX, I used a weekly review to look over my scoreboard to celebrate good weeks, help understand what led to bad weeks, and most important, figure out how to ensure a good score for the days ahead. This led me to adjust my schedule to meet the needs of my lead measure—enabling significantly more than if I had avoided such reviews altogether.

Rule #2: Embrace boredom

• Much in the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, you’ll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom

Don’t Take Breaks from Distraction. Instead Take Breaks from Focus

• Productively Meditation

  The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally—walking, jogging, driving, showering—and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem. Depending on your profession, this problem might be outlining an article, writing a talk, making progress on a proof, or attempting to sharpen a business strategy. As in mindfulness meditation, you must continue to bring your attention back to the problem at hand when it wanders or stalls

  • Tipps
    • Be Wary of Distractions and Looping
    • Structure Your Deep Thinking

• Attention control

  • Memorize deck of cards

    • Daniel Kilov

    “We found that one of the biggest differences between memory athletes and the rest of us is in a cognitive ability that’s not a direct measure of memory at all but of attention,” explained Roediger in a New York Times blog post (emphasis mine). The ability in question is called “attentional control,” and it measures the subjects’ ability to maintain their focus on essential information.

    The technique for card memorization I’ll teach you comes from someone who knows quite a bit about this particular challenge: Ron White, a former USA Memory Champion and world record holder in card memorization.* The first thing White emphasizes is that professional memory athletes never attempt rote memorization, that is, where you simply look at information again and again, repeating it in your head. This approach to retention, though popular among burned-out students, misunderstands how our brains work. We’re not wired to quickly internalize abstract information. We are, however, really good at remembering scenes

Rule #3: Quit social media

• Chose your tools
  • 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
• Social media as source of distraction
  • They’re just products, developed by private companies, fundedlavishly, marketed carefully, and designed ultimately to capture thensell your personal information and attention to advertisers. They can befun, but in the scheme of your life and what you want to accomplish,they’re a lightweight whimsy, one unimportant distraction among many threatening to derail you from something deeper

Rule #4: Drain the Shallows

• 37signals/Basecamp 4-day week

  Very few people work even 8 hours a day. You’re lucky if you geta few good hours in between all the meetings, interruptions, websurfing, office politics, and personal business that permeate thetypical workday.
Fewer official working hours helps squeeze the fat outof the typical workweek. Once everyone has less time to get their stuffdone, they respect that time even more. People become stingy with theirtime and that’s a good thing. They don’t waste it on things that just don’t matter. When you have fewer hours you usually spend them more wisely.

  37signals’ experiments highlight an important reality: The shallow work that increasingly dominates the time and attention ofknowledge workers is less vital than it often seems in the moment. Formost businesses, if you eliminated significant amounts of thisshallowness, their bottom line would likely remain unaffected. And asJason Fried discovered, if you not only eliminate shallow work, but also replace this recovered time with more of the deep alternative, not only will the business continue to function; it can become more successful

• Cognitive capacity and deep work

  Then there’s the issue of cognitive capacity. is exhausting because it pushes you toward the limit of your abilities.Performance psychologists have extensively studied how much such effortscan be sustained by an individual in a given day.* In their seminalpaper on deliberate practice, Anders Ericsson and his collaboratorssurvey these studies. They note that for someone new to such practice(citing, in particular, a child in the early stages of developing anexpert-level skill), an hour a day is a reasonable limit. For those familiar with the rigors of such activities, the limit expands to something like four hours, but rarely more

Conclusion

• A commitment to is not a moral stance and it’s not aphilosophical statement
  • it is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done

From Top Performer

Why deep work is important for new skills

Cal explains why Deep Work is essential for acquiring new skills and mentions 2 aspects:

• Neuronal Activity

  When focusing intensely on a task without distraction, the related neuronal circuit in the brain is repeatedly activated in a clean, focused manner, with minimal noise or distractions. This repeated firing of the same neural circuit in isolation prompts certain cells to build myelin sheaths around the neurons, acting as insulators. This process allows neurons to fire more easily and quickly, enhancing the brain’s efficiency. This mechanism is crucial for cementing new skills, whether cognitive or physical, into our neural processes

• Attention Residue

  Newport describes the phenomenon of “attention residue,” where shifting focus from one target to another leaves a residue of the first target in the mind, lasting up to 30 minutes. This residue reduces cognitive performance, as measured by a drop in IQ points when people frequently check distractions like emails or social media. This constant state of attention residue results in working at reduced capacity. Deep work counters this by leveraging the principles of cognitive science and neuroscience to maximize brain efficiency during focused work session

SCOTT: You and I have done a lot of deep work, but I think you have done all the research behind it, so I’m interested, what is the reason why doing this kind of concentrated work is just so much more effective, particularly for these deliberate practice projects that the people who are watching this are going to be caring about?

CAL: It’s a good question. If you dive into the research, there are really two reasons why we know that deep work produces a lot of work and helps you learn complicated things in a short amount of time.

The first reason has to do with the neurons in your head. When you’re focusing intensely on a task without distraction, what’s happening in your head is that the neuronal circuit related to that activity is firing again and again very cleanly. There is not a lot of noise that is getting your attention. The way that the neural system works, is that if you fire the same circuit again and again in isolation, some cells come along and begin to build sheaths of a substance called myelin around the cell bodies. This acts like an insulator. Now the neurons can fire easier, and they can fire quicker than they could before.

Doing deep work when you’re trying to learn a hard new task, be it cognitive or even physical, is exactly what is required for the neural process of cementing a new skill in the neurons. The second reason why we know deep work is so effective is exactly how you experienced. There’s an effect called “attention residue” that causes real issues, and I think it’s being overlooked. Essentially the effect is as follows: If you have your attention on one target and then you shift your attention to another target, that original target leaves a residue in your head that can last 10, 20, up to 30 minutes. As long as that residue is there, you’re at a reduced cognitive performance. They can measure the number of IQ points you drop if you have just checked Facebook or if you just checked your email, and it’s a lot. If, like a lot of people, the way you work is you’re mainly focusing on one thing but every 10 or 15 minutes, you check your email or check a browser tab, you’re keeping yourself in a constant state of attention residue, which means you’re keeping yourself working at a reduced capacity.

Deep work really leverages both of those truths from cognitive science and neuroscience to make sure you’re getting the most out of your brain for the time you have to spend on the task at hand.