B-Newport-DeepWork

Last updated Feb 9, 2023

Newport suggests that the intense work practice of several people in history across multiple disciplines is responsible for their prolific contributions to their field. He attributes their success to what he defines as Deep Work, which is defined 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.”

Here are some examples of people who have had a tendency to go into deep focus modes when doing their work:

1. Carl Jung, built a house for himself where he could isolate himself for work
2. Mark Twain wrote in a shed away from the family, who had to blow a horn to alert him for meals
3. Peter Higgs, physicist, was so isolated that people could not find him to tell him he had won the nobel prize
4. Bill Gates stayed in his lakeside cottage for two “Think Weeks” in a year, from where he wrote the famous “Internet Tidal Wave” memo

But we live in a time where distraction is celebrated by being instantly responsive on communication platforms, and in contrast most knowledge workers perform Shallow Work, defined as,

“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.”

It appears that the modern world is permanently erasing our ability to perform Deep Work. Instead of nostalgically looking at our distraction-free past, deep work today has more meaning than ever before for two reasons:

1. It is valuable to quickly learn complicated things
2. In the digital age, creating valuable work has incredible reach- more than ever before In the internet age, more and more people are becoming knowledge workers, and those who have the ability to do deep work, will stand out above the others. This is called the Deep Work Hypothesis.

“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.”

It is notable that deep work does not mean long hours. It is a period of intense focus every for 3-4 hours a day, that is capable of producing valuable output. A deep life is a good life, as Newport says.

In this section, three “successful” people are provided as examples, and the reason for their success is considered. Our future economy looks increasingly divided where easy to replicate jobs will be automated away, and hard to replicate jobs will become more valuable. Let’s see who these people are and what makes them valuable.

1. Nate Silver- a statistician who took his love of baseball to election predictions
   1. A highly skilled worker, who is capable of taking data and manipulating it with machines to successfully predict new outcomes
2. David Hansson- a programmer who created Ruby on Rails, used a lot to build the internet
   1. A superstar whose skillset is clearly at a premium, and it often makes more economic sense to hire a superstar to get the job done instead of hiring a team of mediocre programmers not capable of that kind of output
   2. Everybody’s skill today is traded on a “universal bazaar” where the best will clearly dictate a premium over all others
3. John Doerr- a venture capitalist who fueled many major and successful tech companies
   1. A wealthy individual with lots of investable capital, can fund a company like Instagram which sold for a billion dollars with only 13 people

Not everyone has capital to invest, but the first two are definitely worth looking at. Our interest essentially lies in how we develop the ability to:

1. quickly master hard things
2. produce at an elite level (quality and speed)

The contrary is also important to consider and Newport states:

“If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.”

Both of these skills essentially depends on our ability to do deep work.

To develop the ability to master hard things, we need to have

1. Intense concentration where all our attention is solely focused on overcoming the challenge ahead of us, without distraction
2. Deliberate practice to fail multiple times, use the feedback from the experience and correct your methods till you achieve success
3. Neurological scaffolding called Myelin, which is a fatty tissue that develops around neurons when they are being used to do challenging tasks. Repeated work triggers oligodendrocytes to wrap myelin around neurons

Newport uses the example of Adam Grant, the youngest tenured prof at Wharton, who produced an absurdly high number of papers and a best selling book Give and Take. He takes the fall semester to do all his teaching and then all this research is batched into spring and summer. He also uses smaller batches to time to work deep, by putting out-of-office notices when he is working on a paper.

The reason you need long stretches of time to do deep work is due to attention residue. When you switch from one task to another, there is a residue left over from the previous task. This is entirely antithetical to the idea of multi-tasking where the semi-distracted state never lets you ultimately focus.

What about Jack Dorsey? The twitter ex-CEO famously spends time in meetings and conversations with people doing what we define here as shallow work. He is still an effective leader and has proven he can disrupt the industry. Why? Deep work is not always applicable to all kinds of people in all roles. But in most circumstances deep work is usually valuable. There are always exceptions to the rule.

Today’s work culture is chock full of terms that are meant to keep people and ideas “connected” together; open workpaces, instant messaging, social media. Many organizations require their employees to respond instantly to emails and messages, and even to develop a social media presence, while not prioritizing deep work as a fundamental component of achieving productivity in a workplace.

The reason the companies do not see that the always-connected trend is detrimental to their business is due to the metric black hole, which is another way of saying that it is difficult to put a monetary value on the impact on the business causes by these office distractions which keep people away from deep work.

What are some of the mental models that cause people to embrace distractions instead of deep work?

• Principle of least resistance
  • Getting an answer to your question immediately makes your work easier, at least for the time being
  • People appear to be working when sending/receiving emails even if they have nothing else to show for work. Companies seem to permit working out of an email inbox.
  • Setting weekly meetings on the pretext of following up on projects is a proxy for staying on track with your own work, even if others have nothing to contribute in your meeting.
• Busyness as a proxy for productivity
  • Knowledge work lacks real metrics to show that you have been productive
  • Being visibly busy is a viable option to prove to management that you are productive (even if you have nothing to show for it)
• The cult of the internet
  • We have come to accept the “internet” as being good for us, often without considering the ramifications entirely.
  • This technopoly assumes that everyone should and will adopt the latest in technology because it is “good” for them (why won’t you have a cell phone? do you know how convienient it is?)

With distractions from social media and the culture of connectivity in workplaces, deep work is becoming increasing rare, which is really bad for businesses. However, if everyone is always in a distracted state, those who are capable of deep work will suddenly find themselves in a fortunate position when they can produce at an elite level.

Everything is not always about being successful and wealthy. Deep work is capable making a life meaningful and well worth living. The following arguments will prove that it is so, in a neurological, psychological and philosophical sense.

Neurological: Science writer, Winifred Gallagher, in her book Rapt, says that our quality of life depends on what we pay attention to and what we ignore. Most often, we look at it backwards, ie, what happens to us should dictate how we feel. (There are some fMRI experiement arguments trying to support the neurological origin for this argument that does not make much sense.)

Deep work allows your attention to focus on what is important, and ignore the minute stresses that are present in shallow work such as emails and instant messages. As such this results in an improved quality of life, because the small stuff does not stress us out throughout the day. A meaningful connection with your work can be very fulfilling.

Psychological: When humans are deeply immersed in a challeging activity, they engage the limits of the mental powers while achieving what Csikszentmihalyi calls a flow state during which time takes on a different meaning, and a deep sense of satisfaction and happiness emerges.

Philosophical: Sacredness has always been connected to meaning in the course of human culture, but since the evolution of Descartes’ skepticism which put an individual over the importance of an all-knowing god, has led us to a life devoid of meaning. However, by dedicating ourselves to our craft, we can once again spark that connection to the sacredness and meaning. Cultivating craftsmanship is a deep task that requires a commitment to deep work. It can be argued that our daily job is much too mundane to be sacred. This is because we have been led to believe that rarified jobs (nonprofits, startups, unique roles) are the only ones with meaning. Newport refutes this with

You don’t need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work

David Dewane envisions what he calls The Eudaimonia Machine which is an architectural concept for a workspace whose sole purpose is to enable deep work. The structure is a one-storey narrow rectangle with five rooms placed in a line, but there are no shared hallways. You need to pass through each room to get to the next one. The five rooms are

1. The Gallery: contains examples of deep work produced in the building, to create a healthy mix of stress and peer pressure
2. The Salon: a place to create intense curiousity and arguments that you will later develop deeper in the machine
3. The Library: has records of all work produced in the machine, and has copies and scanners that you can use to collect material for your own deep work
4. The Office: place to complete all the shallow work needed for your projects, email notes, webpage clippings, note collections.
5. The Chamber: room with sound proof wall for total focus. The intention is to spend 90 minutes at a time and take a 90 minute break, and repeat this a few times a day will the brain has reached it’s capacity for deep work.

We need to somehow emulate this process in our daily lives so that we can slip into deep work modes. We always have the urge to turn to something superficial, and this is the biggest obstacle to deep work. Roy Baumeister established that willpower is a finite resource that gets depleted as you use it. The key is to not rely on willpower to do deep work but instead develop a work habit that adds routines and rituals to put you in a state of intense concentration.

Decide on your depth philosophy

You must decide on a depth philosophy that best suites your lifestyle and commitments. Here are some options:

• Monastic
  • This is most suitable for people who have a well-defined and highly valued professional goal that only comes from doing this one thing exceptionally well
  • Applies to people like Donald Knuth where he spends his time on computer programming or Neal Stephanson, writing science fiction novels. These people usually have a single point of focus in their lives (novels for Neal Stephanson; to produce accessible forms of computer science knowledge to people, for Donald Knuth)
  • This may not apply to people who have meetings to attend to at work, and other shallow commitments that are a requirement to fulfill
• Bimodal
  • Define a clearly defined stretch of time in a week to deep work and leave the rest open to everything else. However, the amount of time has to be substantially long (at least a full day) for one to reach maximum cognitive load.
  • This method of deep work is best suited to those who have committments that involve shallow tasks, whether they like it or not (most people).
  • Carl Jung used split his time between his retreat and treating patients in his clinic. Adam Grant, the Wharton professor, split his time between teaching in fall, and research in summer and spring. They used bimodal depth philosophies.
  • The key to making this work is to make yourself unavailable during deep work periods, and totally accessible during open work times. The hope is people working with you will come to accept this work modality.
• Rhythmic
  • In this philosophy, you commit yourself to habits where you work deeply at a prescribed time. You could also create for yourself a calendar where you mark your deep work, and as you build up a work streak, you will be hesitant to break it.
  • The mode of work is most suitable to office workers
  • This seems to be a very short time-scale implementation of the bimodal approach. The difference between this method and the bimodal method is elucidated clearly by Newport.
    • Rhythmic approach will not produce the level of depth that bimodal would, but this form of work is much more suitable to reality.
    • Rhythmic approach is capable of logging more deep work hours in a given year compared to bimodal, by its sheer repetitive nature.
• Journalistic
  • Here, you fit in deep work at any time you get a chance to. You should have the ability to quickly sink into deep concentration and work deeply.
  • This is something that is only acquired by practice and is not often suitable for a beginner. A beginner will likely quickly deplete willpower reserves. Also, one must have the conviction that the work at hand is important, which usually only happens to already accomplished people.
  • The journalist Walter Isaacson apparently worked on his book any chance he got. Newport also admits to using this technique to write this book. Although not as spontaneous, he mapped out in advance any free time he had to write this book.

Ritualize

Completely ignore the need for inspiration to do deep work, and create idiosyncratic rituals to minimize all friction in getting to work. A ritual can be designed around the following considerations:

1. Specify a location for your deep work, and decide how long you will work.
2. Define rules and metrics, such as no internet, external communication, or words typed in a fixed time interval
3. Minimize all friction required to do work. Use good stationary, appropriate computer peripherals, computer files ready to go, coffee if you need it.

These principles cement into your mind that your deep work is the highest priority and needs this kind of committment.

Make Grand Gestures

Increase the perceived importance of a task by making a grand gesture that often involves significant effort or energy. Here are some fun examples:

• J.K. Rowling checked into the 5-star Balmoral Hotel to finish the last Harry Potter book. Physicist
• Physicist and novelist, Alan Lightman retires to a remote island in Maine with no phone access.
• William Shockley invented the junction transistor by locking himself in a Chicago hotel.
• Entrepreneur Peter Shankman found that he wrote best when on a plane. So to meet a deadline, he booked a round trip flight to Japan and wrote for the next 30 hours.

Don’t Work Alone

So far in the book, it seems that going solo is the only way to work deeply at all. However, collaboration and interaction with others is an important aspect in creative work. The whiteboard effect, a term coined by Newport to describe the phenomenon where your collaborator pushes you into deeper work, than when you were working alone. This is the basis of the “open-workspace” concept applied in offices today, and it seems to have it’s origins in Building 20, in MIT, where this lab produced an enormous amount of work ranging from the first solar cell, to fiber optics. This hastily constructed lab in MIT housed people of multiple unrelated disciplies working together, and this is the often cited reasons for why open workspaces work.

However, Newport argues that even Building 20 has a “hub-and-spoke” architecture, where people congregated in hubs to discuss ideas and then retreated to their spoke to work deeply. I recommend reading this chapter for more reasoning of why this is so, and how it works. In contrast, our open workspace offices provide nothing but constant distraction. The key to successful collaboration is treat interaction and deep work as two separate entities, and therefore need to be optimized separately. Do collaborate when necessary, but be cautious to not overdo it, at the cost of your own ability to do deep work.

Execute like a business

In this section, Newport explains how he adapted a book titled “The 4 Disciplines of Execution” - a book about corporate strategy - to how to spend more time working deeply. The four “adapted” disciplines as related to deep work are:

1. Focus on the wildly important: Identify and work on a small number of ambitious outcomes
2. Act on Lead Measures: Lag measures are metrics evaluated after a relevant span of time, but lead measures are metrics that can be evaluated immediately towards a goal. Instead of defining a lag measure like, “I will write X papers this year”, adopt a lead measure like, “I will spend 4 hours in deep work everyday.”
3. Keep a compelling scoreboard: Setup a real scoreboard that measures the amount of time spent in deep work. A simple way is to write down deep work hours in a calendar, and mark off important milestones achieved to indicate how many deep work hours were required to achieve that goal.
4. Create a cadence of accountability: Setup a weekly review with yourself to go over your deep work count, identify wins and losses, and make course corrections for the next week.

Be Lazy

Giving yourself time to recover from deep work, so that you can attack the next day with the same intensity is vitally important. To ensure this happens, Newport suggests that one invents a shutdown routine you go through to tell your mind that the work for the day is done, and from that point on, you do not apply your mind to any work activity. Here are some reasons why shutting down is important:

1. Downtime aids insights: A well rested mind is capable of making much better connections between ideas, and improves creativity and problem solving.
2. Downtime helps recharge: Directed attention, like willpower, is finite, and is easily exhausted. To replenish our reserves, we need downtime where our mind is put at ease by engaging in relaxing activities.
3. Working during downtimes results in poor quality: Our capacity for deep work in a day is limited to about 4 hours, which you should fit into your workday. Any work done outside of that is usually of poor quality.

The need for a shutdown ritual is important when considering the Zeigernik effect- which points out that incomplete tasks will dominate our attention. Note that the task need not actually be completed, but we need to devise a way to trick the brain into thinking that it’s completed, at least for now. This is where a strict shutdown ritual helps, and it can be something like this:

1. Review all incomplete tasks, goals and projects
2. Make sure you have a plan for it’s completion
3. Capture all the details in a place you will revisit when the time is right
4. Verbally declare the day complete (“Shutdown complete” or “That’s enough for the day”)

Now, your obligations has been released from your brain, and your recovery period begins.

When you work, work hard. When you’re done, you’re done.

Like most skills, the ability to work deeply and concentrate intensely cannot be gained overnight. Much like anything else, it requires repeated and deliberate practice. However, it is not sufficient to simply practice concentrating on a task. We must actively work on minimizing our distractions.

With the ubiquity of smart phones, we have the ability to distract ourselves at a moments notice, when we are standing in line at the grocery store, or when we are waiting for a friend to arrive, by getting on social media or checking news and email. Unless we work on staving off the need to distract ourselves, there is no way our ability to concentrate will improve. We must embrace boredom. This chapter outlines some strategeies to minimize distraction and practise focus.

Take breaks from focus, instead of breaks from distraction

A popular strategy to break away from distracton addiction is to take an Internet Sabbath, a day devoid of any digital devices, once every week. Newport suggests an alternative, where instead of taking a break from distraction so you can focus, you instead take a break from focus for distraction.

For example, schedule in advance when you will use the internet by writing down on a notepad the exact time you will allowed to browse the internet. This will force ourselves not to reach for distraction at the slightest hint of boredom.

• This strategy works even if your job requires lots of internet use / emails
  • You will just need to schedule more internet blocks to get the job done
• Time outside of internet blocks should be absolutely free from internet use
  • If you find the need to get a piece of information online to do your job offline, you must resist the temptation to go online immediately, but instead wait for your next online block to roll by. Even take a break to relax if you have to.
  • If you happen to go online during an offline block, you will risk running in distractions in the form of urgent emails or messages from people.
• Schedule internet use at home as well
  • This will help unplug from social media and news when at home.
  • Only exceptions are time sensitive internet use, like co-ordinating with a friend for dinner.

To reiterate, the key strategy is to avoid going online at the slightest hint of boredom. This is something to be practiced mindfully, and one must take every opportunity to do so - for exapmle, when waiting in line at the grocery store.

Work like Teddy Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt had an amazing array of interests ranging from body building to naturalism, but he still did well in his classes at Harvard. He was not at the top of his class but he did quite well. His interests left him very little time to actually focus on academics and therefore he worked on school work for only short periods of time but with blistering intensity.

Here is how we can adopt this strategy: identify a deep work, high priority task and give yourself a hard deadline that drastically reduces the time usually taken to do such a task. Make it even harder by publicly proclaiming that deadline, and set a countdown timer and set to work on it. Newport calls such work periods Roosevelt Dashes.

Always make sure you keep Roosevelt dashes on the edge of feasibility, where the successful completion of the task will require levels of concentration higher than usual. It provides interval training for the brain.

Meditate Productively

Productive meditation is when you focus your attention on a mental task such as outlining an article, or solving a hard problem, while walking, jogging or showering. And whenever you mind starts to wander from the topic you intended to meditate on, you forcibly bring your attention back to the topic at hand.

Newport suggests that two or three such sessions in a week is sufficient, and finding such time blocks is usually easy because it is usually easy to occupy between chores and other tasks on which time would otherwise be spent without thinking anyway.

Here are some potential pitfalls to watch out for:

• Be wary of distractions and looping
  • If you attention is slipping away, gently remind yourself that you’re supposed to be thinking about something else, and you can address the distraction later.
  • Avoid looping the same thought over and over, which is what happens when addressing a hard problem. Push the mind to go beyond the usual thought process.
• Structure your deep thinking
  • Clearly define what question you are looking to answer
  • Gather all the relevant variables and commit them to working memory
  • At the end of the session, consolidate your thoughts by reviewing the answer you have come up with

Memorize a deck of cards

In this section, Newport goes fairly into depth about strategies for memorizing a deck of cards, and the details are best read from the book itself and are not worth repeating here unless you intend to memorize a deck of cards (which I don’t).

The key takeaway here is that training your memory often leads to an increase in concentration, and any kind of mental training you can undertake to improve memory will result in concentration gains.

In this chapter, Newport argues that Social Media has its place in society and the level of adoption in your personal life should be considered with care. The binary nature of the title of this chapter is not what he actually suggests, knowing that many people could either not stick to completely quitting social media, or that some walks of life actually do benefit from social media. So he offers a more nuaced approach.

Social media is a tool. Like any craftsman, the tool should be adopted only if it’s positive impacts substantially outweights its negative impacts. Before adopting every social media platform, ask yourself what the impact is, and then evaluate carefully.

• Identify high level goals in your professional and personal life.
• List a few activities that help you achieve these goals.
• Consider the “network-tools” like social media, chat, etc, that you use
• Ask if the tool has a positive, negative, or minimal impact on the listed activities
• Keep the tool only if positive impact substantially outwights the negative impacts

Even if these tools do positively contribute, but only to a small extent, consider not adopting the tool at all. High impact activities that contribute heavily to the overall outcome should be prioritized instead.

Actually do try quitting social media for a month and see how it goes. Do you miss people? Do people miss you? What impact does it have on your life? Based on the outcome, you can always get back into it. But if your life has improved as a result of quitting, consider keeping it that way.

Arnold Bennett, an English writer, suggests in his self-help classic - How to live on 24 hours a day - that there is plenty of time outside of the 8 hour work period where one can focus on self-improvement of various kinds. What this means today is - you can and should make deliberate use of your time outside work. Avoid using the internet as a source of entertainment at all time. By no means should you avoid watching a movie or show on TV, but do so with intention. Put more thought into your leisure time. For this, structured hobbies such as reading, music or woodworking are an excellent way to spend free time with intention.

The argument that working eight hours in the day will tire your mental faculties so much that you will not be able to spend leisure time with intention is a myth. Arnold Bennett writes-

“What? You say that full energy given to those sixteen hours will lessen the value of the business eight? Not so. On the contrary, it will assuredly increase the value of the business eight. One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change—not rest, except in sleep.”

In summary, give your brain a quality alternative to relaxation other than social media and online entertainment. Learn to live, not just exist.

Find ways to tame shallow work in your day to day life because it is usually not as important as it seems. It has a habit of dangerously eating into your deep work time. Sadly, most knowledge work has some amount of shallow work. It is prudent to schedule shallow work after we have exhausted our capacity for deep work.

Newport suggests three main strategies to minimize shallow work.

Schedule Every Minute

• Newport suggests that one must schedule every minute, and chart out a plan on paper with “task-blocks,” which are free to expand and contract as the work needs. If disrupted, one simply rearranges the task-blocks and continues. If an important insight shows up, then it is okay to abandon all task-blocks for the rest of the day.
• I’ve actually tried this before I read the book, and it gets exhausting after some time. I’m not sure it works for me.
• The key takeaway is to be intentional with your time, and make sure you do not slip into autopilot mode.

Quantify the depth of every activity

• To quantify the depth of a task, ask how long (in months) it would take to train a recent smart college grad with no specialized training to do the task? If the answer is many months, then the task clearly has some depth. After sorting tasks by quantifying them, prioritize deep work over shallow.

Ask your boss for a shallow work budget

• Anywhere between 30-50% is a reasonable ask for purely shallow work. Anything more than 50%, and you will be viewed as a hermit with deep thoughts. Anything less than 30%, and there is a fear you won’t respond to email.
• You maintain the ratio of these work types, you will have to say no to shallow tasks like weekly sync meetings, and instead ask for a more results driven interaction, where you meet when there are results to report.
• If your boss insists that you are still required to respond immediately to responses, even if they do interrupt, then it is time to look for a new position that values depth in work.

Finish your work by 5:30pm

• Fixed schedule productivity - where you need to finish your work by a given time of day, requires you to ruthlessly say no to anything that will not allow you to do deep work. At this point, you will be forced to adopt a scarcity mindset and find all ways to minimize shallow work.

Become hard to reach

• Make people who send you email do more work, by setting conditions that the emailer has to satisfy, so that they can expect a response from you. Newport calls this a sender filter. For example, you can blatantly state that you will respond only if interests match. There is nothing offensive in doing this.
• Do more work when you send emails. Newport suggests that you use process centric emails to respond to people, instead of responding in an open ended fashion. Attempt to provide enough details or outline enough steps that the email sender has a clear picture of what needs to be done next. This will minimize the number of emails you receive, and also close the loop on the issue at hand.
• Don’t respond. Adopt a mentality that the default reaction is not to respond at all. This might not work in all situations.