A Beginner’s Guide to Deep Work: How to Develop The Skill That Will Sky-Rocket Your Productivity
All-day, we’re going from meeting to meeting, e-mail to e-mail & phone call to phone call.
How many hours in a day do you work without distractions, fully focussed on your work?
Probably not as much as you would like right?
This article will help you in achieving more of this distraction-free and full focus work, and will also explain why it’s absolutely essential to master the skill of doing Deep Work.
Deep Work is: “Professional activity 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.”
It was first coined by computer science professor Cal Newport on his blog, after which he wrote an entire book on it called: Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.
The goal of this article is to let you start a deep work habit as soon as tomorrow, without having to read the entire book.
First, this article will explain why Deep Work is so important. After that, practical tips will be given on how you can start a Deep Work habit as soon as possible.
Why Deep Work Is So Important
If you want to remain valuable in our economy, you have to master the art of quickly learning complicated things. Doing this requires Deep Work.
Deep Work is not something that’s new. It’s been practiced by many great people throughout the ages.
Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, bought a piece of land and built a small castle on it called The Bollingen Tower.
Several months per year, he would be there alone to solely focus on his research and thinking.
Another example is Bill Gates, who famously had “Think Weeks” once or twice per year, where he would rent a small cabin for himself for a week. In that week, he would only read, think, and write deeply.
These 2 examples may be a drastic form of Deep Work. And there are other forms we will discuss later. But they do show us that in order to work deeply and create something meaningful, we have to go deep.
And Deep Work is not only essential to create good things in your life. It will also make your life better. To quote Cal Newport: “The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limit in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile”
Human beings are at their best when immersed deeply into something challenging.
Objection: Deep Work Is Nice, But My Work Doesn’t Allow It
One of the biggest challenges people always give is that they can’t be unavailable to their boss for hours on end. Knowledge workers have to be available most of the time as that is the nature of their work.
However, I want to argue that even as knowledge workers, it’s absolutely essential to master this skill.
First, think about how you get better at something. That is through systematic improvement. Becoming a bit better every day.
If we look at chess players, they study the game hours and hours. If we look at a guitar player, they practice hours and hours.
However, most of us nowadays spend most of our days answering e-mails. There’s not really a way to get better at that, and thus increase the value we give to our companies and society.
This type of work is called shallow work — the opposite of deep work. These are tasks that almost anyone can do (like sending out e-mails).
It’s easy work, which makes it attractive, but it doesn’t advance our career further or significantly impact the value we give to this world.
Deep Work can benefit you as in three particular ways:
- You will continually improve the value of your work output
- There will be an increase in the total quantity of valuable output you produce
- You will be more deeply satisfied with your work.
How to do Deep Work
Now that I’ve hopefully convinced you that working deeply is an absolutely essential skill in modern days’ society, let’s delve deeper into how you can actually do Deep Work.
First of all, there are different philosophies of Deep Work. The example of Carl Jung is an example of the bimodal philosophy of Deep Work. This means in practice that someone will be fully focused on Deep Work for periods in time (weeks, months). And after or in-between these periods doing a combination of shallow and deep work.
In Carl Jung’s case, he worked deeply in his Bollingen Tower and worked more shallowly in his private practice of psychiatry.
For this article, I don’t want to bore you with all the different philosophies, as most of us will try to follow the rhythmic philosophy of deep work.
This philosophy of deep work argues that the easiest way to consistently do Deep Work is to transform Deep Work into a simple regular habit. This means doing Deep Work at a set time every day, for example, an hour after waking up. This philosophy is most common amongst workers in standard office jobs.
And, it works really well if there’s no deadline for your work. Let’s say, like me, you want to start your own business and also have a normal day job. There’s is no immediate pressure on you to work on your business.
By waking up earlier and working deeply for 1 to 2 hours before your work every day, you instill the habit of deep work and you will make strides towards working on your side-businesses!
How To Make An Effective Deep Work Ritual
For making an effective Deep Work ritual, you need to do 3 things:
- Determine where you will work and for how long
First, determine where you will work: at your desk at home, in a coffee shop. Doesn’t matter where it is, as long as it’s distraction-free and it will be the same place most of the time.
Secondly, determine how long you will work deeply. If you’re starting out don’t try to stretch it. Starting with 30 or 45 minutes of deep work is already enough, you can always expand later. It’s more about creating the habit at the start.
2. Determine how you’ll work once you start to work
Determine the structure of your deep work session: what is allowed and what is not? To give you an example, I’ve instilled these rules for myself:
- Phone off
- Internet on (no shallow work-related things: social media, e-mail, etc.)
- Water, food, etc. should be in the room at the start of the session
- Set a goal at the start of the session
3. Determine how you’ll support your work.
This is something you have to figure out on the go. Some might find it nice to listen to piano music while working deeply, others to have a full glass of tea when they’re working.
A good tip is to use a scoreboard to track how many hours you’ve spent working deeply.
You can use a whiteboard on which you write down # hours of Deep Work, and then you can track it after you’ve done another hour of Deep Work! This makes the habit of Deep Work more satisfying.
Embrace Boredom
If you want to make working deeply a habit, you should embrace boredom. What this means is that you can’t expect to do Deep Work in your deep work hours, if in the other hours you’re running from distraction to distraction all the time. This quote sums it up nicely:
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 has likely been rewired to a point where, like the “mental wrecks” in Nass’s research, it’s not ready for deep work — even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration
Tips to embrace boredom:
- Don’t look at your phone in the first hour after waking up — once you’re wired for distraction you will crave it the entire day
- Quit social media — this rule might be too extreme for you, however, I would urge you to critically look at the different social media platforms you are using. If they are not adding significant value to your life, it’s better to quit them. What you could also do is a 30 day no social media challenge — eliminate social media from your life for 30 days and then see which platforms you really missed and which you did not at all.
In this article, we’ve discussed why Deep Work is so important in our modern-day society, and how you can instill a habit of Deep Work. Working deeply is of vital importance if you want to achieve something meaningful.
That’s why I urge you now to schedule your first deep work session right now. Your first few sessions won’t be perfect but after a while, you will see the benefit of this practice. Then you’ll never want to return to shallow work again.
Main Take-Aways:
- Deep Work is an essential skill to develop in the 21st century
- Deep work will A) Continually improve your work B) Increase the total quantity of valuable output you produce and C) will make you more satisfied with your work
- Make an effective deep work ritual by A) Determining where you will work and for how long B) Determine how you’ll work once you start, and C) How you’ll support your work
- Embrace boredom by A) Don’t look at your phone first hour in the morning B) Quit social media, or at least do a 30 day no social media challenge
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