What Deep Work Is All About

In this blog, there are notes from “Deep Work Rules For Focused Success In A Distracted World” book by Cal Newport. The first part is about deep work and why we need it. The second part is deep work rules and practices.

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.

First Part

Deep work helps quickly master hard things. We use a lot of technologies such as software language libraries, IDEs, services, etc. They change quickly and are hard to master. To adopt the changes we need the ability to quickly master hard things. This is necessary for working well with intelligent machines and a key role in the attempt to become a superstar in just about any field.

High-Quality Work = Time x Focus

When you switch from some Work A to another Work B, attention doesn’t follow you immediately. Your brain is stuck thinking about your previous task. Taking a quick check at your mail every ten minutes might look harmless. Taking a quick check redirects your attention to a new target. Typical worst case is seeing a message that you cannot resolve at the moment, you’ll be forced to turn back to the preparatory work with a secondary work left unfinished. Attention distraction from such unresolved switches dampens your performance. For producing at your maximum level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task without distraction. In other words, deep work is which type of work that optimizes your performance. Also, the scrum project management methodology creates more free time for thinking deeply about the problems and often improves the general value of results.

There are certain corners where depth is not valued. For sure deep work is not only a skill valuable. Until you have strong thought that distraction is important to your work, consider deep work.

Ironically, jobs are actually 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.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Second Part

To develop a deep work habit, you need to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to working life. You need to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration. For example, you need to switch your attention to an intense task from the middle of the mobile video watching. You’ll draw heavily from your finite willpower to wrest your attention away from online video-watching shininess. Those attempts generally fail. Therefore if you develop good routines and rituals you’d require much less willpower to start and keep going. For example, dedicate on free time and a quiet location in your day which is far away from external distractions for deep work.

Much psychological work shows resting your brain improves the quality of your deep work. That means work hard when you are working but when you’re done, be done. Your average message response time might increase a little bit. But you can produce more value because you refresh your ability to dive deeper.

Don’t take breaks from distraction. Instead, take breaks from focus. Maybe you can think you can switch a state of distraction to one of concentration as needed, but this assumption is optimistic.

Deep work requires levels of concentration well beyond where most knowledge workers are comfortable. For that, you can try the exercise experiment: This exercise is about injecting the occasional intensity into your workday. First chose a task that requires deep work and that’s high on your priority list. Note normal task time and then give time which is a hard deadline and reduces this time. Make a commitment to the person waiting or observing the task. Then you’ll see only one possible way to get the deep task done in time: working with great intensity. That means no phone breaks, no daydreaming, and no repeated trips to the kitchen. You’ll likely work on the task with every free neuron with deep concentration. But do these exercises no more than once a week because that increase your stress levels and your brain needs to rest. These exercises help you train for attention centers of the brain. Also, commitment has no escape (like creating a new deadline) therefore you resist boring sessions, etc… More resisting such urges, the easier such resistance becomes.

Willpower is limited. So the more enticing tools (ex: social media) you have pulling at your attention, the harder it’ll be to maintain focus on your important work. You should take back control of your time and attention from many distractions that attempt to steal them to master the art of deep work.

You need to treat shallow work with suspicion because its damage is often vastly underestimated and its importance vastly overestimated.This type of work is inevitable but you must keep it confined to a point where it doesn’t impede your ability to take full advantage of the deeper efforts that ultimately determine your impact. The strategies that follow will help you act on this reality.

Approach to shallow work with suspicion because its damage is often underestimated and its importance vastly overestimated. Shallow work is unavoidable, but you must reduce it until where it doesn’t impact your ability to take full advantage.

Habits for deep work required treating your time with respect. One of the good habits is to decide in advance what you’re going to do with every minute of your workday. You’ll naturally resist this idea but you must overcome this if you want to approach your true potential as someone who creates things that matter.

Closing

Deep work-life requires hard work and important changes to your habits. Therefore that is not for everybody. However, if you are willing to move past these comforts and fears, and use your brain’s full potential to generate things that matter, then you’ll discover that depth leads to a productive, fulfilling life.