-
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 21st 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.
