Cal Newport - Deep work

 

-          Transform the rest of your time – be more present

-          Work that happens when we refuse to avert our eyes

-          Resist the corporate groupthink of constant connectivity

-          Practice of addin meditation rooms to homes – In my retiring room I am by myself.

-          Two hours of undistracted writing time

-          Average knowledge worker now spends more than 60 percent of the workweek engaged in electronic communication. 30 % to reading and answering mails

o   I have now blocked 1h per workday. This is 13%

o   Like human network routers (pinging messages back and forth and around) vs. forming a new business strategy or writing an important grant application

-          Shallow work

-          Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you PERMANENTLY reduce your capacity to perform deep work!!!!!!

o   Chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation

-          Learning something complex like computer programming requires intense uninterrupted concentration on cognittivley demanding concepts

-          Most knowledge workers have lost their ability to perform deep work

o   Always getting on the internet and checking my emails

o   Compulsion

o   Periods free from electronic distraction

-          On good days, I can get in four hours of focus before the first meeting. Then maybe another three to four hours in the afternoon.

o   No email, no hacker news, just programming

-          To remain valuable in our economy therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things.

-          You’re likely to fall behind as technology advances

-          If you can create something useful, its reachable audience is essentially limitless

-          To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of producing – a task that requires depth.

-          Deep work is becoming a key currency

-          The superpower of the 21^st century

-          Increasing scarcity of deep work and the other about its increasing value

-          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 economcy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then makeit the core of their working life, will thrive.

-          Training your brain and transforming your work habits to place deep work at the core of your professional life.

-          While rarely working past five pm

-          I’ve invested significant effort to minimize the shallow in my life. I build my days around a core of carefully chosen deep work, with the shallow activities I absolutely cannot avoid batched into smaller burstst at the peripheries of my schedule.

o   Three to four hous a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output

-          I don’t touch a computer between the time when I get home from work and the next morning.

-          Read a surprising number of books

-          The lack of distraction in my life tones down that background hum of nervous mental energy that seems to increasingly pervade peoples daily lives. I am comfortable being bored.

-          A deep life is a good life

-          Two core abilities for thriving in the new economy

o   The ability to quickly master hard things

o   The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed

-          We’ve been spoiled by the intuitive and drop-dead-simple user experience

o   They are consumer products, not serious tools

-          Requires that you hone your ability to master hard things

o   This process of mastering hard things never ends: You must be able to do it quickly, again and again

o   If you cant learn, you can thrive

-          Now consider the second core ability: producing at an elite level

o   You must transform latent potential into tangible results that people value.

o   If you don’t product, you wont thrive – no matter how skilled or talented you are

-          High-Quality work produced = (Time Spent) * (Intensity of Focus)

o  

-          Very best students often studied less than the group of students right below them

o   Maximize their concentration

-          Multitasking is bad – a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task

o   Even worse – by seeing messages that you cannot deal with at the moment, you’ll be forced to turn back to the primary task with a secondary task left unfinished

-          To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction

-          The scrum project management replaces a lot of this ad hoc messaging with regular, highly structured, and ruthlessly efficient status meetings. This approach frees up more managerial time for thinking deeply about the problems their teams are tackling

-          Deep work is rare

o   Big trends in business today actively decrease peoples ability to perform deep work

§  Open offices

§  Instant messenger systems are meant to be always active

§  Culture of connectivity – one is expected to read and respond to e-mails (and related communication) quickly

§  The common practice of setting up regularly occurring meetings for projects

-          We tend towards behaviour that are easiest in the moment (now I am in plane – watching a movie is tempting – no one is watching me. I don’t have to do / to deliver anything,…)

o   It has become acceptable to run your day out of your inbox, all the while feeling satisfyingly productive.

o   If email were to move to the periphery of your workday, youd be required to deploy a more thoughtful approach to figuring out what you should be working on and for how long (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

-          Emails: why are avoidable and time-sucking emails so common? From the senders perspective, they’re easy!!!

-          Busyness as proxy for productivity

-          Feynman was adamant in avoiding administrative duties

-          Knowledge worker want to prove that theyre productive members of the team and are earning their keep, but theyre not entirely clear what this goal constitutes. They have no rising h-index or rack of repaired motorcycles to point to as evidence of their worth

o   Knowledge workers are tending toward increasingly visible busyness because they lack a better way to demonstrate their value

-          Busyness as Proxy for Productivitiy: 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

o   If you send and answer emails at all hours, if you schedule and attend meetings constantly, if you weigh in on instant message systems, roam your open office bouncing ideas off all whom you encounter – all of these behaviors make you seem busy in a public manner.

-          We no longer see Internet tools as products released by for-profit companies, funded by investors hoping to make a return

-          To support deep work often requires the rejection of much of what is new and high-tech. (And here I am typing this on my laptop)

-          We should not be surprised that deep work struggles to compete against the shiny thrum of tweets, likes, tagged photos, walls, posts, and all the other behaviors that were now taught are necessary for no other reason than that they exist

-          The realities that deep work is hard and shallow work is easier. In the absence of clear goals for your job, the visible busyness that surrounds shallow work becomes self-preserving

-          Systematically develop your personal ability to go deep – and by doing so, reap great rewards

-          Attention

o   The disease wanted to monopolize my attention, but as much as possible, I would focus on my life instead.

o   The skillfull management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience

o   Our brains construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to

o   Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love – is the sum of what you focus on

o   Rewire your brain to ignore the negative and savor the positive. By skillfully managing your attention, you improve your world without changing anything concrete about it.

o   The habit of frequently checking inboxes ensures that these issues remain at the forefront of your attention. It ensures that your mind will construct an understanding of your working life that’s dominated by stress, irritation, frustration, and triviality. The world represented by your inbox, in other words, isn’t a pleasant world to inhabit.

o   A workday driven by the shallow, from a neurological perspective, is likely to be a draining and upsetting day, even if most of the shallow things seem harmless or fun

o   Multitasking

§  Cant filter out irrelevancy

§  Constantly distracted

§  Mental wrecks

§  They’ve developed habits of mind that make it impossible for them to be laser-focused. They just cant keep on task

§  Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction, its hard to shake the constant addiction

§  If every moment of potential boredom in your life is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where its not ready for deep work – even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.

§  Once you are wired for distraction, you crave it

-          Concentration

o   The advantage of cultivating concentration so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems.

o   Regularly resting your brain improves the quality of your deep work. When you work, work hard. When youre done, be done.

o   Give yourself plenty of opportunities throughout your evening to resist switching to these distractions

§  Gird yourself for the temporary boredom, fight through it with only the company of your thoughts. To simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, its incredibly valuable

o   Reddy Roosevelt – his concentration was so intense, and his reading so rapid

o   Bill Gates when coding Microsoft coded nonstop – fell asleep on keyboard

o   Working with great intensity

§  No email breaks, no daydreaming, no browsing, no repeated trips to coffee machine.

§  Attack the task with every free neuron until it gives way under your unwavering barrage of concentration

§  Giving your brain practice with intensity

§  The more you practice resisting such urges, the easier such resistance becomes

o   Productive meditation

§  Walking, jogging, driving, showering – and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem.

§  You must continue to bring your attention back to the problem at hand when it wanders or stalls

§  Rapidly improve your ability to think deeply

§  It requires practice to do well

§  Your minds first act of rebellion will be to offer unrelated but seemingly more interesting thoughts.

§  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

·         (Thoughts are like trains that constantly invite the attention to join and come with them – say thanks. let them pass)

§  Your mind will attempt to avoid excess expenditure of energy when possible

§  Avoiding diving deeper into the problem by instead looping over and over again on what you already know about it

-          Flow

o   The best moments usually occur when a persons body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile

o   Most people assume that relaxation makes them happy. We want to work less and spend more time in the hammock

§  BUT jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time. Goals, feedback rules and challenges. Free time is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed

§  When measure empirically, people were happier at work and less happy relaxing than they suspected.

§  Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.

-          Work

o   Your work is craft. If you hone your ability and apply it with respect and care, you can generate meaning in the daily efforts of your professional life.

o   Transform knowledge work from a distracted, draining obligation into something satisfying – a portal to a world full of shining, wondrous things (!!!)

-          Behaviours

o   People fight desires all day long!

o   Desire turns out to be the norm, not the exception

o   Desires

§  Eating, sleeping and sex

§  Taking a break

§  Checking email

§  Checking social media

§  Surfing the web

§  Listening to music

§  Watching television

o   You can expect to be bombarded with the desire to do anything but work deeply throughout your day

-          Willpower

o   You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it

o   It’s a muscle that tires

o   Unless youre smart about your habits

o   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 mainatain a state of unbroken concentration.

o   A set time and quiet location used for your deep tasks each afternoon

§  Lock himself every morning into a minimally appointed room to write without interruption

§  Divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else

·         Can be one week blocked out of office

·         Can be a part of a day

·         Once or twice a month, take a period of two to four days to become completely monastic. Shut the door. Put out-of-office response

-          Habit

o   The way to create better jokes was to write every day

o   Calendar on the wall – every day he crosses out the date on the calendar with a big red X

o   You’ll like seeing that chain

o   A rhythm that removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when youre going to go deep

o   Eg deep work needed to happen in ninety-minute chunks

o   Eg wake up and start working by 5:30 every morning

o   I map out when I’ll be working deeply during each week at the beginning of the week

o   I trained myself to be organized – even what I wear to the office

o   Build rituals of the same level of strictness and idiosyncrasy

o   You need to support your efforts to go deep

§  Specific timeframe

§  Door shut

§  Desk cleaned

§  Coffee / drink / snack prepared

§  Craft your deep work ritual

-          I know WHAT I need to do, but not HOW to do it

-          The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish

o   Stop starting, start finishing!

o   A small number of wildly important goals

o   You should identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours – a specific goal

o   don’t try to say “no” to trivial distractions, try to say “yes” to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing

-          Track deep work hours – visibly – eg whiteboard

-          Attention restoration – work vs free time

o   Spending time in nature improves your ability to concentrate

o   Reaching the levels of deeper relaxation in which attention restoration can occur. Only the conficence that you’re done with work until the next day can convince your brain to sownshift to the level where it can begin to recharfe for the next day to follow.

o   Maintain a strict endpoint to your workday

§  Even a brief intrusion of work can generat a self-reinforcing stream of distraction that impedes the shut-down advantages

§  A strict shutdown ritual that you use at the end of the workday

§  Algorithmic

§  A series of steps you always conduct

§  Have a set phrase you say that indicates completion (to end my own ritual, I say “Shutdown complete”)

§  A simple cue to your mind that its safe to release work-related thoughts for the rest of the day

§  Incomplete tasks dominate our attention

·         They keep battling for your attention

·         There are ALWAYS tasks left incomplete. The idea that you can ever reach a point where all your obligations are handled is a fantasy.

·         Fortunately, we don’t need to complete a task to get if off our minds. Make a plan for how you later compete the task

o   Committing to a specific plan frees cognitive resources for other pursuits

·         Your mind is released from its duty to keep track of these obligations at every moment

·         Your mind needs to trust your ritual enough to actually begin to release work-related thoughts in the evening

§  Give yourself plenty of opportunities throughout your evening to resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom

§  Gird yourself for the temporary boredom. Fight through it with only the company of your thoughts. To simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but form the perspective of concentration training, its incredibly valuable

o   Put more thought into your leisure time

§  Dedicate some advanced thinking to the question of how you want to spend your “day within a day” (the 16 hours you are not working).

·         Addictive webpages thrive in a vacuum: If you haven’t given yourself something to do in a given moment, they’ll always beckon as an appealing option

§  Structured hobbies

§  A set program of reading

§  Exercise

§  Good (in-person) company

o   We spend much of our day on autopilot – not fibbing much thought to what were doing with our time – this is a problem.

§  Difficult to prevent the trivial from creeping into every corner of your schedule

§  Ask yourself: What makes the most sense right now

o   Goal of not working past a certain time

§  Then work backwards to find productivity strategies that allow to satisfy this declaration

-          Working productively

o   Schedule every minute of your day!

§  Give every minute of your time a job

o   You can batch similar things into more generic “task blocks”

§  On a page you list out the full set of small tasks you plan to accomplish in that block

o   This type of scheduling is about thoughtfulness

§   A simple habit that forces you to continually take a moment throughout your day and ask: “What makes sense for me to do with the time that remains?”

§  Without structure, its esy to allow your time to devolve into the shallow – email, social media, web surfing

o   Deep work habit requires you to treat YOUR time with RESPECT

§  Maximize your ROT – Return on time

§  What percentage of my time should be spent on shallow work?

·         Ask your boss

§  Budget this

·         This budget might lead you to drop the need for a weekly status meeting (“let me know when you have made significant progress, then we’ll talk”)

§  Start spending more mornings in communication isolation

§  These changes are all positive for your quest to make deep work central to your working life

o   I am incredibly cautious about my use of the most dangerous word in ones productivity vocabulatory: “yes”. It takes a lot to convince me to agree to something that yields shallow work.

o   Make people who send you email do more work

§  Emails often take the sender long to craft but they would require a lot of explanation and writing on my part to respond

§  The default social convention surrounding e-mail is that if someone sends you something, you owe him or her a response

§  Most people easily accept the idea that you have a right to control YOUR OWN incoming communication

§  The notion that all messages, regardless of purpose or sender deserves a timely response is absurdly unproductive

§  Process centric response to email

·         I start by identifying the project implied in the message

o   Take a minute to think through a process that gets us from the current state to a desired outcome with a minimum of messages required.

o   Write a reply that clearly describes this process and where we stand

o   Close the loop – otherwise squats in your mental landscape, something that’s “on your plate”

o   More mental resources available for deep thinking

o   Don’t respond

§  Famous academics: their default behaviour when receiving an email is to not respond

§  When it comes to email they believe it’s the senders responsibility to convince the receiver that a reply is worthwhile

o   Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen (eg because of ignoring many mails and meetings). If you don’t, youll never find time for the life-changing big things

o   People are quick to adjust their expectations to the specifics of your communication habits

o   Sending emails generates more emails

o   You send less emails and ignore more mails it will all become much more easy

-          I started to take extended lunch breaks in the middle of the day to go for a run and then eat lunch back at my apartment

-          Carefully block out deep work hours and preserve them against incursion

-          Developed an ability to carefully work through thoughts during the many hours I spent on foot each week

-          Finding disconnected locations conductive to focus. – library

-          Push this habit to the extreme. Ruthless in turning down time-consuming commitments. Work more in isolated locations outside the office

-          Habit of working on problems in my head whenever a good time presented itself – walking the dog or commuting

-          Deep work is WAY MORE powerful than most people understand

o   A transformative experience

o   The deep life

o   Requires hard work and drastic changes to your habits.

o   If youre willing to struggle to deploy your mind to its fullest capacity to create things that matter – depth generates a life rich with productivity and meaning.