5 Quick Lessons — Deep Work by Cal Newport
Summary:
Today, technology 💻has given us incredibly powerful tools 🛠— more powerful than any previous generation has had access to. However, alongside those powerful tools have come the most powerful DISTRACTIONS 📳 as well. Learn to use the tools without sucumbing to distractions. Work smarter, not harder, and produce higher-quality work.
1. Deep Concentration is a Competitive Advantage.
Committment to Deep Work is a common theme among influential figures:
Carl Jung — “The Tower” 🏘
For several months out of each year, famed psychologist Carl Jung would retreat to The Tower, an isolated cottage location with private offices, no electricity or running water, and no visitors, for months at a time. It was this crucial practice that allowed him to challenge Freud and change the world of psychology.
Bill Gates — “Think Week” 💡
Twice per year, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates would retreat to a two-story, waterfront cottage to partake in a think week. These weeks would consist mostly of reading 📚 and deep thinking 💭, with no distractions whatsoever. It was during these weeks he conceived the idea for the tablet PC, and composed his “Internet Tidal Wave” memo 📝 (which ultimately lead Microsoft to enter, and then dominate, the Internet).
In today’s world, “shallow work” (which includes emails, meetings, and social media posts) requires very little concentration, and as a result, produces extremely common results. High-quality work, which requires deep concentration and specialized skillsets, is extremely rare 💎.
Highly-powerful distractions such as email notifications, social media, texting, and YouTube videos have become such a powerful draw, with such powerful dopamine-addiction capibilities, that deep work/specialization has become rare — a competitive advantage.
2. Start your Day on the Hardest Thing.
Your attention is finite. Your attention is at its highest capacity 🔋 in the morning. As the day goes on, various tasks and distractions start to erode that capacity.
For example: Let’s say you read a news article 📰. Even when you finish that news article and close your browser, a tiny piece of that news article has taken ahold of your attention capacity…and will stay there for the rest of the day.
Most people start their day off by reading the news, checking e-mails, and engaging in social media. By 10 AM, your attention capacity has been completely trashed 🗑️…and your day is just beginning.
Instead, wake up early ⏰ (before people expect you to respond to emails) and spend an hour or two focusing exclusively on one single thing: the hardest task of your day. By the time you get to your emails, you have already used your best attention hours on the most important task 🥇!
3. Multitasking is BAD. Chunking is GOOD.
It is amazing how much of an emphasis we still place on multitasking — just look at any job posting!
As we mentioned: shallow work, which is the only kind of work multitasking will allow, produces low-quality work.
It takes your brain several minutes to get into a concentrated state…so constantly switching 📳📧🛒💻tasks never lets you access the state where you produce your best work!
Instead of multitasking, try “chunking” your work instead. Organize your tasks into “batches” 🗂️ where you can do similar-typed work all at once. This way, you are allowing your brain to focus and maximize efficiency. For example, check all your emails at once (maybe 2 times a day).
If you can’t neatly batch everything into categories, at LEAST batch your “shallow” tasks away from your deep-concentration tasks. (“From 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM, I will stay away from my special project and only work on shallow tasks….answer emails, return phone calls, etc.”)
Most people are capable of one to three 90-minute “chunks” of deep concentration per day.
4. Schedule your Chunks
Hand-in-hand with #3 is to set aside specific TIMES ⏰ and LOCATIONS 🏢where your deep work will take place.
Motivating yourself to focus on deep work is much harder than for shallow tasks…so your brain will naturally want to prevent you from working deeply. In other words, deciding when/what to work on is actually stressful in itself…let’s call it “decision stress”.
While you can’t easily remove the stress that comes with trying to concentrate, you CAN easily remove the decision stress by scheduling and planning your deep work.
Additionally, the more you “practice” 💪 sticking to the schedule, the quicker your brain will be able to enter deep concentration. The schedule becomes ingrained.
As a bonus, other people ️👩👨👴👩🦱 will also “learn” your schedule…and will be less likely to try to reach you during certain times of the day.
5. Be Comfortable being Bored.
Humans in this day and age almost NEVER experience true boredom. This is a shame, because being bored is actually a wonderful time for creative ✨thinking .
Learn to “embrace boredom”! Put your phone in another room, turn off your computer/TV, and write down a specific time that you will be allowed to access these devices again. Do activities that allow your thoughts to wander…such as listening to music, meditating, or going for a walk 🚶♀️.
By now, we all KNOW that smart-phone/Internet distractions are bad, but few people actually COMMIT to turning them off because they fear boredom. Learn to embrace boredom.
Start Doing These Now:
Commit to concentration. Not reading it or watching videos about it….commit to DOING it.
- Pick a project/skill you want to focus on.
- Choose a TIME and LOCATION for working deeply on this. Start with one 90-minute chunk of time per day.
- Turn off all distractions, set an alarm for 90-minutes.
- When you get done, take a moment to reflect on how you feel and how much progress you made.
