This post features a review of the book Deep Work by Cal Newport, and some of the best ideas.
If you struggle to focus on your work, then Deep Work is the book for you. It is extremely helpful for knowledge workers, since the author presents techniques and ideas that we can follow to get a lightning-sharp focus in the work.
Concentration
“Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capacities to their limits. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are difficult to replicate.
Cal Newport
Shallow Work: Non-cognitively demanding, logistically similar tasks, often performed under distraction. These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world, and are easy to replicate.”
As Cal says, the difference between Deep and Shallow work is big. It is that difference that determines whether we will become part of those who make a great and useful difference with focused and intensive work that few others are able to perform, or whether we will simply falter along the way with distractions, which most are extremely capable of single.
So what do YOU choose? Shallow… or Deep work?
Concentration leads to more relaxed and productive work. It’s a bit like leading four horses in the same direction instead of opposite directions, a story Tom Sterner tells us in The Practicing Mind.
Basic Skills
“Two Core Skills to Thrive in the New Economy:
1. The ability to quickly master difficult things.
2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.
(1) To learn difficult things quickly, you need to focus intensely without distraction…
(2) When you switch from one Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a rest of your attention stays stuck thinking about the original thesis (A). ..
Even worse, seeing messages you can’t deal with at the moment (which is almost always the case), forces you to return to the main task with another task left unfinished. Attentional residue left behind by such unresolved shifts dampens your performance…
To produce at your peak level, you must work for extended periods of time with full concentration on a single task, free from distraction. Stated another way, the kind of work that optimizes your performance is deep work.”
Here we have a good and general explanation of what Deep Work helps us to do. It helps our ability to quickly master difficult things, which further explains that all our abilities consist of brain circuits. This is one of the most important general skills we can learn when it comes to work and productivity.
When we rehearse an ability with full focus, a substance called myelin wraps the specific neural circuits that are fired by repetition, making it easier for the circuits to fire more quickly. And as Cal says: “To be good at something is to be well myelinated.”
Deep Work also helps us to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and quantity. Since multitasking messes up the rest of our Attention, we have to beat common distractions like Facebook, email and messages when we work with an intense focus on the task at hand.
If you can’t handle going Deep for long periods of time every day, it will be impossible for you to produce a lot and of good quality, while also taking care of other everyday tasks.
How to make a daily schedule?
“It’s an idea that may seem extreme at first, but will prove indispensable in your quest to fully benefit from the value of deep work: Plan every minute of your day…
Your goal is not to stick to a given schedule at any cost; instead, it’s about maintaining, at all times, a thoughtful influence on what you do with your time going forward—even as those decisions are revisited again and again as the day unfolds.”
It can quickly happen that we complete a task/to-do, only to not know what the next action is. This wastes a lot of time, which is why Cal asks us to plan every minute of the workday.
Cal shares some steps you can follow if you’re interested in trying this idea out:
- Create a Google Calendar user.
- Inside the calendar, you divide your working day into blocks to which you add activities. (Everything does not have to be for work; it can be rest, meal breaks, etc.)
- Collect several small tasks that can be completed quickly (email, order something on the Internet, write a message…) in the same block. These are shallow tasks, which require less focus and time.
- When unexpected things occur (as they always will) you move the blocks further forward, and move the blocks that go outside working hours to the next day instead. (Some days a lot can happen unexpectedly, and then you may have to do this several times—which is fine.)
- The next day, you complete the ones you moved forward. (Be sure to do deep activities first, as your focus is limited.)
By having a clear daily schedule, you avoid procrastinating as much as you would if you didn’t know what to do. With a plan, it becomes easier to stay focused on what is happening at all times, since you then trust that the other things will also be done eventually.
About the Author: Cal Newport
Cal Newport is an assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown University. He has a PhD from MIT, started the blog Study Hacks, and has written several best-selling books, including How to Become a Straight-A Student and So Good They Can’t Ignore You.
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