Introduction
- 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.
- 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.
- Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.
PART 1: The Idea
Chapter 1: Deep Work Is Valuable
- In this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital.
- Two can be attained: those who can work creatively with intelligent machines and those who are stars in their field.
- 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.
- If you want to become a superstar, mastering the relevant skills is necessary, but not sufficient. If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive — no matter how skilled or talented you are.
- The two core abilities depend on your ability to perform deep work.
- Deliberate practice actually requires.
- 1. your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you’re trying to improve or an idea you’re trying to master;
- 2. you receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it’s most productive.
- To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction.
- High – Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)
- Something I noticed in these interviews is that the very best students often studied less than the group of students right below them on the GPA rankings.
- “People experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor performance on that next task,” and the more intense the residue, the worse the performance.
- To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction (deep work).
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.
- Why? You can get an answer to a question or a specific piece of information immediately and run your day out of your inbox (feels productive, but not advancing goals).
- 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 (answering emails).
Chapter 3: Deep Work Is Meaningful
- Elderly subjects were not happier because their life circumstances were better than those of the young subjects; they were instead happier because they had rewired their brains to ignore the negative and savor the positive.
- 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.
PART 2: The Rules
Rule #1: Work Deeply
- You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.
- 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.
- The rhythmic philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit.
- 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 – don’t break the chain.
- Another common way to implement the rhythmic philosophy is to have a set starting time that you use every day for deep work.
- Eliminate even the simplest scheduling decisions, such as when during the day to do the work
- The journalist philosophy – fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule.
- This approach is not for the deep work novice. The ability to rapidly switch your mind from shallow to deep mode doesn’t come naturally. Without practice, such switches can seriously deplete your finite willpower reserves.
- To make the most out of your deep work sessions, build rituals on: Where you’ll work and how long (e.g.office with the door shut and desk cleaned off)? How you’ll work once you start to work (e.g. ban on any Internet use, or maintain a metric such as words produced per twenty–minutes
- ).
- How you’ll support your work (e.g. start with coffee or access to food to maintain energy, or walking to help keep the mind clear).
- The grand gesture – By leveraging a radical change to your normal environment, coupled perhaps with a significant investment of effort or money, all dedicated toward supporting a deep work task, you increase the perceived importance of the task (writing a book on airplanes). This boost in importance reduces your mind’s instinct to procrastinate and delivers an injection of motivation and energy.
- 4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX) helps companies successfully implement high-level strategies.
- Discipline # 1: Focus on the Wildly Important – “The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.”Discipline # 2: Act on the Lead Measures – Once you’ve identified a wildly important goal, you need to measure your success. In 4DX, there are two types of metrics for this purpose: lag measures and lead measures.
- Lag measures describe the thing you’re ultimately trying to improve.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.
- Discipline # 1: Focus on the Wildly Important – “The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.”Discipline # 2: Act on the Lead Measures – Once you’ve identified a wildly important goal, you need to measure your success. In 4DX, there are two types of metrics for this purpose: lag measures and lead measures.
- Discipline # 3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard – “People play differently when they’re keeping score”. Shown publicly to record and track their lead measures. This scoreboard creates a sense of competition and motivation that drives them to focus on these measures, even when other demands vie for their attention.
- Individual’s scoreboard should be a physical artifact in the workspace that displays the individual’s current deep work hour count.
- Circle the hour when an important milestone is reached. Helps calibrate how many hours of deep work were needed per result.
- Discipline # 4: Create a Cadence of Accountability – put in place “a rhythm of regular and frequent meetings of any team that owns a wildly important goal.” During these meetings, the team members must confront their scoreboard, commit to specific actions to help improve the score before the next meeting and describe what happened with the commitments they made at the last meeting.
- Review weekly to look over the 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.
- Some decisions are better left to your unconscious.
- For decisions that involve large amounts of information and multiple vague, and perhaps even conflicting, constraints, use your unconscious.
- At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning.
- You can restore your ability to direct your attention if you give this activity a rest.
- If you keep interrupting your evening to check e-mail, you’re robbing your directed attention centers of the uninterrupted rest they need for restoration
- Trying to squeeze a little more work out of your evenings might reduce your effectiveness the next day enough that you end up getting less done than if you had instead respected a shutdown.
- Deep work is about an hour a day of intense concentration for novices, and as much as four hours for experts.
- A strict shutdown ritual that you use at the end of the workday to maximize the probability that you succeed.
- Ensure that every incomplete task, goal, or project has been reviewed and that for each you have confirmed that either (1) you have a plan you trust for its completion, or (2) it’s captured in a place where it will be revisited when the time is right.
- When you’re done, have a set phrase you say that indicates completion ( “Shutdown complete”).
- First: look at your e-mail inbox to ensure that there’s nothing requiring an urgent response before the day ends.
- Second: transfer any new tasks into my official task lists.
- Third: quickly skim every task in every list, and then look at the next few days on my calendar. Ensure there’s nothing urgent or any important deadlines or appointments.
- Last: say, “Shutdown complete,” and my work thoughts are done for the day.
Rule #2: Embrace Boredom
- The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained.
- You’ll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom.
- If every moment of potential boredom is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where it’s not ready for deep work – even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.
- Instead of scheduling the occasional break from distraction so you can focus, you should instead schedule the occasional break from focus to give in to distraction.
- Schedule in advance when you’ll use the Internet, and then avoid it altogether outside these times.
- The key here isn’t to avoid or even to reduce the total amount of time you spend engaging in distracting behavior but instead to give yourself plenty of opportunities throughout your evening to resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom.
- Identify a deep task that’s high on your priority list. Estimate how long you’d normally put aside for an obligation of this type, then give yourself a hard deadline that drastically reduces this time.
- 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.
- Suggestion # 1: Be Wary of Distractions and Looping
- When you notice your attention slipping away from the problem at hand, gently remind yourself that you can return to that thought later, then redirect your attention back.
- When faced with a hard problem, your mind, as it was evolved to do, will attempt to avoid excess expenditure of energy when possible. One way it might attempt to sidestep this expenditure is by avoiding diving deeper into the problem by instead looping over and over again on what you already know about it.
- Suggestion # 2: Structure Your Deep Thinking
- Careful review of the relevant variables for solving the problem and then storing these values in your working memory.Once the relevant variables are identified, define the specific next-step question you need to answer using these variables.
- Example “How am I going to effectively open this chapter?” you now have a specific target for your attention. The final step is to consolidate your gains by reviewing clearly the answer you identified.
- Memory training can improve your general ability to concentrate. This ability can then be fruitfully applied to any task demanding deep work.
- Begin by cementing in your mind the mental image of walking through five rooms in your home.
- The second step in preparing to memorize a deck of cards is to associate a memorable person or thing with every 52 cards.
Rule #3: Quit social media
- To master the art of deep work, therefore, you must take back control of your time and attention from the many diversions that attempt to steal them.
- 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.
- Identify the main high-level goals in both your professional and your personal life.
- List for each the two or three most important activities that help you satisfy the goal.
- Keep using this tool only if it has substantial positive impacts and outweighs the negative impacts.
Rule #4: Drain the Shallows
- Fewer official working hours help squeeze the fat out of the typical workweek. When you have fewer hours, you usually spend them more wisely.
- Decide in advance what you’re going to do with every minute of your workday.
- Schedule every minute of your day into blocks of time.
- Two things can (and likely will) go wrong with your schedule once the day progresses.
- First, you’re going to underestimate at first how much time you require for most things.
- Second, tasks will take longer. Use of overflow conditional blocks. Overlap blocks if you’re unsure how long a given activity might take
- I maintain a rule that if I stumble onto an important insight, then this is a perfectly valid reason to ignore the rest of my schedule for the day (with the exception, of course, of things that cannot be skipped).
- Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.
- How long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task? The answers it provides will help you objectively quantify the shallowness or depth of various activities.Once you know where your activities fall on the deep-to-shallow scale, bias your time toward depth.
- Here’s an important question that’s rarely asked: What percentage of my time should be spent on shallow work?
- Try to stick to this percentage (30-50%)
- Fixed-schedule productivity – firm goal of not working past a certain time. Work backward to find productivity strategies that allow me to satisfy this declaration.
- How to say no to shallow work: be clear in my refusal but ambiguous in my explanation for the refusal. Avoid providing enough specificity about the excuse that the requester has the opportunity to defuse it (e.g. busy on Tuesday, response: what about next Tuesday?).
- What is the most efficient (in terms of messages generated) process for bringing this project to a successful conclusion?
- Replace a quick response with one that takes the time to describe the process you identified, points out the current step, and emphasizes the step that comes next.
- The extra two to three minutes you spend will save you many more minutes reading and responding to unnecessary extra messages later.
- Emails: Deep thinker’s default behavior when receiving an e-mail is to not respond.
- Do not reply to e-mail rules:
- It’s ambiguous or otherwise makes it hard for you to generate a reasonable response.It’s not a question or proposal that interests you.
- Nothing really good would happen if you did respond and nothing really bad would happen if you didn’t.