Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. Such efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate. To remain valuable in our economy, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. To succeed, you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of producing– a task that requires depth. The real rewards are reserved for those who are comfortable building the innovative distributed systems that run the service (a decidedly deep task, hard to replicate). Deep work, “the superpower of the 12st century” The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform 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, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, can produce a lot of valuable output. The ability of fully disconnecting → allows us to be present. The lack of distraction in the life tones down that background hum of nervous mental energy seems to increasingly pervade people’s daily lives. “It’s comfortable being bored.” A deep life is a good life. Chapter One – Deep work is valuable Those with the oracular ability to work with and tease valuable results out of increasingly complex machines will thrive. “The key question is: are you good at working with intelligent machines or not?” Once the talent market is made universally accessible, those at the peak of the market thrive while the rest suffer. Current economic thinking argues that the unprecedented growth and impact of technology are creating a massive restructuring of our economy. 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 core abilities for thriving in the new economy: The ability to quickly master hard things. 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. You must then transform that talent potential into tangible results that people value. If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive– no matter how skilled or talented you are. Deep work helps you quickly learn hard things. To advance your understanding of your field you must tackle the relevant topics systematically, allowing your “converging rays of attention” to recover the truth latent in each. → TO LEARN requires intense CONCENTRATION. “Men of genius themselves were great only by bringing all their power to beer on the point on which they had decided to show their full measure.” Core components of deliberate practice: Your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you’re trying to improve or an idea you’re trying to master. You receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it’s most productive. Deliberate practice cannot exist alongside distraction, and that it instead requires uninterrupted concentration. To be great at something is to be well myelinated. By focusing intensely on a specific task, you’re forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire, again and again, in isolation. → effectively cementing the skill. This is the only way to isolate the relevant neural circuit enough to trigger useful myelination. By contrast, if you’re trying to learn a complex new skill in a state of low concentration, you’re firing too many circuits simultaneously and haphazardly to isolate the group of neurons you actually want to strengthen. To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction. Batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches. Writing of a scholarly paper: analyzing the data, writing a full draft, editing the full draft into something publishable. (3-4 days) It’s important to enforce strict isolation until completing the task at hand. High-quality work produced = (time spent) * (intensity of focus) When you switch from Task A to Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow — a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task. → People experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor performance on the next task. The type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work. Chapter Two: Deep work is rare The principle of least resistance: In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviours to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviours that are easiest in the moment. Why? → It’s easier: We like responsiveness. It creates an environment where it becomes acceptable to run your day out of your inbox– responding to the latest missive with alacrity while others pile up behind it. All the while feeling satisfyingly productive. Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not. The ultimate goal of this book: to systematically develop your personal ability to go deep– and by doing so, reap great rewards. Chapter Three: Deep work is meaningful A deep life is not just economically lucrative, but also a life well lived. Our brains construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to. “Who you are, you think, feel, and do, what you love– is the sum of what you focus on”. – Winifred Gallagher “Concentration so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or worry about problems.” The world represented by your inbox, isn’t a pleasant world to inhibit. ‘The idle’s mind is the devil’s workshop.’ A workday driven by the shallow, is likely to be a draining and upsetting day, even if most of the shallow things that capture your attention seem harmless or fun. “I’ll choose my targets with care… then give them my rapt attention. In short, I’ll live the focused life, because it’s the best kind there is. – Gallagher The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. “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.” – Csikscentanihalyi Human beings are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging. To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction. “We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals.” PART TWO 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. Develop rituals to sharpen your concentration before starting each session. Bimodal philosophy of deep work: dividing time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else. “The chain method”– the ability to do hard things consistently. (The rhythmic philosophy) “After a few days you’ll have a chain, just keep at it and the chain will grow longer everyday. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.” “Who’s to say that I can’t be that prolific?” “Why not me?” Rhythmic vs. Bimodal Philosophy: The rhythmic philosophy perhaps fails to achieve the most intense levels of deep thinking sought in the day- long concentration sessions favored by the bi-modalist. The trade-off, however, is that this approach works better with the reality of human nature. By supporting deep work with rock-solid routines that make sure a little bit gets done on a regular basis, the rhythmic scheduler will often log a larger total number of deep hours per year. The journalistic philosophy of deep work philosophy: the approach in which you fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule. → this approach is not for the deep work novice. “[Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.” – David Brooks Strict rituals minimize the friction in the transition to depth, allowing to go deep more easily and stay in the state longer. There’s no one correct deep work ritual– the right fit depends on both the person and the type of the project pursued. But there are some general rules and questions that any affective ritual must address: Where you’ll work and for how long; Specify a location for your deep work efforts. If it’s possible to identify a location used only for depth — for instance, a conference room or quiet library– the positive effect can be even greater. Also give yourself a specific time frame to keep the session a discrete challenge and not an open-ended slog. How you’ll work when you start to work. Your ritual needs rules and processes to keep your efforts structured. Ex. Institute a ban on any internet use. Or, maintain a metric such as words produced per twenty-minute interval to keep your concentration honed. How you’ll support your work. Your ritual needs to ensure your brain gets the support it needs to keep operating at a high level of depth. Ex. Starting with a cup of good coffee, integrating light exercise such as walking “It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.” – Nietzsche You might require experimentation to find the best ritual. Once you’ve evolved something that feels right, the impact can be significant. Make Grand Gestures: 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. This boost in performance reduces your mind’s instinct to procrastinate and delivers an injection of motivation and energy. The dominant force is the psychology of committing so seriously to the task at hand. → These gestures push your deep goal to a level of mental priority that helps unlock the needed mental resources. Don’t work alone The whiteboard effect: The presence of the other party waiting for you next insight- be it someone physically in the same room or collaborating with you virtually– can short-circuit the natural instinct to avoid depth. → For some types of problems, working with someone else at the problems, working with someone else at the proverbial shared whiteboard can push you deeper than if you were working alone. Isolation is not required for productive deep work. For many types of work– especially when pursuing innovation– collaborative deep work can yield better results. Two guidelines: First, distraction remains a destroyer of depth. Therefore, the hub-and-spoke model provides a crucial template. Optimize each effort separately. Second, even when you retreat to a spoke to think deeply, when it’s reasonable to leverage the whiteboard effect, do so. The 4 Disciplines of Execution (book): extensive consulting case studies to describe form “disciplines” (4DX) for helping companies successfully implement high-level strategies. They can be used to achieve deep work: Discipline #1: Focus on the Wildly Important “The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.” The execution should be aimed at a small number of “wildly important goals”. → Deep work: you should identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours. To have a specific goal that would return tangible and substantial professional benefits will generate a steady stream of enthusiasm. Discipline #2: Act on the Lead Measures Once you’ve identified a wildly important goal, you need to measure your success. 4DX: two types of metrics for this purpose: lag measures and lead measures. Lag measures describe the thing you’re ultimately trying to improve. The problem with lag measures is that they come too late to change your behaviour. Lead measures “measure the new behaviours that will drive success on the lag measures. They turn your attention to improving the behaviours you directly control in the near future that will then have a positive impact on your long-term goals. For an individual focused on deep work, it’s easy to identify the relevant lead measures: time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal. Discipline #3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard “People play differently when they’re keeping score.” The individual’s scoreboard should be a physical artifact in the workspace that displays the individual’s current deep work hour count. Record and track hours of deep work in front of you (somewhere it couldn’t be ignored) Discipline #4: Create a Cadence of Accountability “ a rhythm of regular and frequent meetings of any team that owns wildly important goals.” → 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. This can be only a few minutes, but it must be regular for its effort to be felt. This is the discipline where “execution really happens.” For the individual’s deep work execution, the habit of weekly review is advised. Study and adjust your scoreboard to celebrate good results and optimize planning for the upcoming days. “Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as tickets… it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.” – Tim Kreider → Inject regular and substantial freedom from professional concerns into your day. At the end of each workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next day. If you need more time, extend your workday, but once you shut down, your mind must be left free. Why a shutdown will be profitable to your ability to produce valuable output: Reason #1: Downtime Aids Insights Some decisions are better left to your unconscious mind to untangle. Providing your conscious brain time to rest enables your unconscious mind to take a shift sorting through your most complex professional challenges. Reason #2: Downtime Helps Recharge the Energy Needed to Work Deeply Attention restoration theory (ART), claims that spending time in nature can improve your ability to concentrate. Only the confidence that you’re done with work until the next day can convince your brain to downshift to the level where it can begin to recharge for the next day to follow. Reason #3: The Work that Evening Downtime Replaces Is Usually Not that Important Your capacity for deep work in a given day is limited. By deferring evening work you’re not missing out on much of importance. ⇒ The three reasons support the general strategy of maintaining a strict endpoint to your workday. Have a ritual for your shutting down after each workday. Have a set phrase you say that indicates completion. Ex. “Shutdown complete”. When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done. Rule #2 Embrace Boredom The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained. Meditate Productively 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. Productive meditation builds on both of the key ideas introduced at the beginning of this rule (embrace boredom). By focusing you to resist distraction and return your attention repeatedly to a well-defined problem, it helps strengthen your distraction-resisting muscles, and by forcing you to push your focus deeper and deeper on a single problem, it sharpens concentration. 2 Suggestions to succeed productive meditation: Suggestion #1: Be wary of distractions and looping When you notice your attention slipping away from the problem at hand, rewind yourself that you can return to that thought later, then redirect your attention back. Avoid looping. Suggestion #2: Structure you deep thinking Star with a 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. With the relevant variables stored and the next step question identified, you now have a specific target for your attention. The final step of this structured approach is to consolidate your gains by reviewing clearly the answer you identified. At this point, you can push yourself to the next level of depth by starting the process over. Rule #3: Quit Social Media Willpower is limited, and therefore the more enticing tools you have pulling at your attention, the harder it’ll be to maintain focus on something important. 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. Any-benefit– You’re justified by only looking at the benefits of something while ignoring the negatives attached to it. 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. =/ any-benefit approach. The first step of this strategy is to identify the main high level goals in both your professional and your personal life. The key is to keep the list limited to what’s most important and to keep the descriptions suitably high-level. Once you’ve identified these goals, list for each the two or three most important activities that help you satisfy the goal. These activities should be specific enough to allow you to clearly picture doing them. On the other hand, they should be general enough that they’re not tied to a one-time outcome. Ex. “do better research” → too general. “Finish paper on … for the .. conference” → too specific. “Regularly read and understand the cutting-edge research in my field” → good The next step in this strategy is to consider the network tools you currently use. For each tool, go through the key activities you identified and ask whether the use of the tools has a substantially positive impact, a substantially negative impact, or little impact on your regular and successful participation in the activity. → Keep using this tool only if you conclude that it has substantial positive impacts and that these outweigh the negative impacts. The Law of the Vital Few (the 80/20 rule / Pareto’s Principle): In many settings, 80 percent of a given effect is due to just 20 percent of the possible causes. Assuming that you could probably list somewhere between ten and fifteen distinct and potentially beneficial activities for each of your life goals. The 80/20 law says that it’s the top or three such activities that make most of the difference in whether or not you succeed with the goal. All activities, regardless of their importance, consume your same limited store of time and attention. If you service low-impact activities, therefore, you’re taking away time uou could be spending on higher-impact activities. Because your time returns substantially more rewards when invested in high-impact activities, the more of it you shift to the latter, the lower your overall benefit. Don’t use the Internet to entertain yourself. Put more thought into your leisure time. It’s crucial that you figure out in advance what you’re going to do with your evenings and weekends before they begin. If you give your mind something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you’ll end the day more fulfilled. Eliminate the addictive pull of social media and websites by giving your brain a quality alternative. Experience what it means to live, and not just exist. Rule #4: Drain the Shallows When you have fewer hours you usually spend them more wisely. Schedule every minute of your day. Your goal is not to stick to a given schedule at all costs; it’s instead to maintain, at all times, a thoughtful say in what you’re doing with your time going forward. Fixed-schedule productivity: fixing a certain amount of time for work, then working backward to find productivity strategies that allow us to satisfy this declaration. → By ruthlessly reducing the shallow while preserving the deep. People are quick to adjust their expectations to the specifics of your communication habits. Conclusion The ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done. Deep work is way more powerful than most people understand. Depth generates a life rich with productivity and meaning. “I’ll live the focused life, because it’s the best kind there is.”