Deep Work

Initial Notes

**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.

**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.

"What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation." \- Nicholas Carr

The reason knowledge workers are losing their familiarity with Deep Work is well established: network tools. This is a broad category that captures communication services like e-mail and SMS, social media networks like Twitter and Facebook, and the shiny tangle of infotainment sites like Buzzfeed and Reddit. In aggregate, the rise of these tools, combined with ubiquitous access to them through smartphones and networked office computers, has fragmented most knowledge workers' attention into slivers.

A 2012 McKinsey study found that the average knowledge worker now spends more than 60% of the workweek engaged in electronic communication and internet searching, with close to 30% of a worker's time dedicated to reading and answering email alone.

To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction.

Readwise Highlights

• It turns out to be really difficult to answer a simple question such as: What’s the impact of our current e-mail habits on the bottom line? Cochran had to conduct a company-wide survey and gather statistics from the IT infrastructure. He also had to pull together salary data and information on typing and reading speed, and run the whole thing through a statistical model to spit out his final result. And even then, the outcome is fungible, as it’s not able to separate out, for example, how much value was produced by this frequent, expensive e-mail use to offset some of its cost. ([Location 610](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=610))
• Deep work should be a priority in today’s business climate. But it’s not. I’ve just summarized various explanations for this paradox. Among them are the realities that deep work is hard and shallow work is easier, that in the absence of clear goals for your job, the visible busyness that surrounds shallow work becomes self-preserving, and that our culture has developed a belief that if a behavior relates to “the Internet,” then it’s good—regardless of its impact on our ability to produce valuable things. All of these trends are enabled by the difficulty of directly measuring the value of depth or the cost of ignoring it. ([Location 786](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=786))
• “The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy,” explains Matthew Crawford. ([Location 824](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=824))
• No one would fault Ric Furrer for not using Facebook, but if a knowledge worker makes this same decision, then he’s labeled an eccentric ([Location 834](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=834))
• Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging. ([Location 939](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=939))
• As the authors of The 4 Disciplines of Execution explain, “The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.” They elaborate that execution should be aimed at a small number of “wildly important goals.” This simplicity will help focus an organization’s energy to a sufficient intensity to ignite real results. ([Location 1506](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1506))
• 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. Returning to my example, this insight had an important impact on how I directed my academic research. I used to focus on lag measures, such as papers published per year. These measures, however, lacked influence on my day-to-day behavior because there was nothing I could do in the short term that could immediately generate a noticeable change to this long-term metric. When I shifted to tracking deep work hours, suddenly these measures became relevant to my day-to-day: Every hour extra of deep work was immediately reflected in my tally. ([Location 1526](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1526))
• “People play differently when they’re keeping score,” the 4DX authors explain. They then elaborate that when attempting to drive your team’s engagement toward your organization’s wildly important goal, it’s important that they have a public place to record and track their lead measures. This scoreboard creates a sense of competition that drives them to focus on these measures, even when other demands vie for their attention. It also provides a reinforcing source of motivation. Once the team notices their success with a lead measure, they become invested in perpetuating this performance. ([Location 1532](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1532))
• For an individual focused on his or her own deep work habit, there’s likely no team to meet with, but this doesn’t exempt you from the need for regular accountability. In multiple places throughout this book I discuss and recommend the habit of a weekly review in which you make a plan for the workweek ahead (see Rule #4). During my experiments with 4DX, I used a weekly review to look over my 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. ([Location 1551](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1551))
• The 4DX framework is based on the fundamental premise that execution is more difficult than strategizing. ([Location 1557](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=1557))
• The Law of the Vital Few*: In many settings, 80 percent of a given effect is due to just 20 percent of the possible causes. ([Location 2225](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2225))
• For example, it might be the case that 80 percent of a business’s profits come from just 20 percent of its clients, 80 percent of a nation’s wealth is held by its richest 20 percent of citizens, or 80 percent of computer software crashes come from just 20 percent of the identified bugs. There’s a formal mathematical underpinning to this phenomenon (an 80/20 split is roughly what you would expect when describing a power law distribution over impact—a type of distribution that shows up often when measuring quantities in the real world), but it’s probably most useful when applied heuristically as a reminder that, in many cases, contributions to an outcome are not evenly distributed. ([Location 2226](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2226))
• The business world understands this math. This is why it’s not uncommon to see a company fire unproductive clients. If 80 percent of their profits come from 20 percent of their clients, then they make more money by redirecting the energy from low-revenue clients to better service the small number of lucrative contracts—each hour spent on the latter returns more revenue than each hour spent on the former. The same holds true for your professional and personal goals. ([Location 2243](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2243))
• part of what makes social media insidious is that the companies that profit from your attention have succeeded with a masterful marketing coup: convincing our culture that if you don’t use their products you might miss out. ([Location 2282](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2282))
• By dropping off these services without notice you can test the reality of your status as a content producer. For most people and most services, the news might be sobering—no one outside your closest friends and family will likely even notice you’ve signed off. ([Location 2309](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2309))
• The “great and profound mistake which my typical man makes in regard to his day,” he elaborates, is that even though he doesn’t particularly enjoy his work (seeing it as something to “get through”), “he persists in looking upon those hours from ten to six as ‘the day,’ to which the ten hours preceding them and the six hours following them are nothing but a prologue and epilogue.” This is an attitude that Bennett condemns as “utterly illogical and unhealthy.” What’s the alternative to this state of affairs? Bennett suggests that his typical man see his sixteen free hours as a “day within a day,” explaining, “during those sixteen hours he is free; he is not a wage-earner; he is not preoccupied with monetary cares; he is just as good as a man with a private income.” Accordingly, the typical man should instead use this time as an aristocrat would: to perform rigorous self-improvement—a task that, according to Bennett, involves, primarily, reading great literature and poetry. ([Location 2330](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2330))
• If anything, with the rise of the Internet and the low-brow attention economy it supports, the average forty-hour-a-week employee—especially those in my tech-savvy Millennial generation—has seen the quality of his or her leisure time remain degraded, consisting primarily of a blur of distracted clicks on least-common-denominator digital entertainment. If Bennett were brought back to life today, he’d likely fall into despair at the lack of progress in this area of human development. ([Location 2338](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2338))
• they provide a cognitive crutch to ensure you eliminate any chance of boredom. As I argued in Rule #2, however, such behavior is dangerous, as it weakens your mind’s general ability to resist distraction, making deep work difficult later when you really want to concentrate. ([Location 2355](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2355))
• Fortunately, Arnold Bennett identified the solution to this problem a hundred years earlier: Put more thought into your leisure time. In other words, this strategy suggests that when it comes to your relaxation, don’t default to whatever catches your attention at the moment, but instead dedicate some advance thinking to the question of how you want to spend your “day within a day.” ([Location 2359](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2359))
• At this point you might worry that adding such structure to your relaxation will defeat the purpose of relaxing, which many believe requires complete freedom from plans or obligations. Won’t a structured evening leave you exhausted—not refreshed—the next day at work? Bennett, to his credit, anticipated this complaint. As he argues, such worries misunderstand what energizes the human spirit: What? You say that full energy given to those sixteen hours will lessen the value of the business eight? Not so. On the contrary, it will assuredly increase the value of the business eight. One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a ([Location 2371](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2371))
• continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change—not rest, except in sleep. In my experience, this analysis is spot-on. If you give your mind something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you’ll end the day more fulfilled, and begin the next one more relaxed, than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in semiconscious and unstructured Web surfing. ([Location 2376](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2376))
• To summarize, if you want to eliminate the addictive pull of entertainment sites on your time and attention, give your brain a quality alternative. Not only will this preserve your ability to resist distraction and concentrate, but you might even fulfill Arnold Bennett’s ambitious goal of experiencing, perhaps for the first time, what it means to live, and not just exist. ([Location 2379](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2379))
• Very few people work even 8 hours a day. You’re lucky if you get a few good hours in between all the meetings, interruptions, web surfing, office politics, and personal business that permeate the typical workday. Fewer official working hours helps squeeze the fat out of the typical workweek. Once everyone has less time to get their stuff done, they respect that time even more. People become stingy with their time and that’s a good thing. They don’t waste it on things that just don’t matter. When you have fewer hours you usually spend them more wisely. ([Location 2399](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2399))
• a job that doesn’t support deep work is not a job that can help you succeed in our current information economy. ([Location 2617](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2617))
• To give another example, consider Antonio Centeno, who runs the popular Real Man Style blog. Centeno’s sender filter lays out a two-step process. If you have a question, he diverts you to a public location to post it. Centeno thinks it’s wasteful to answer the same questions again and again in private one-on-one conversations. If you make it past this step, he then makes you commit to, by clicking check boxes, the following three promises: I am not asking Antonio a style question I could find searching Google for 10 minutes. I am not SPAMMING Antonio with a cut-and-pasting generic request to promote my unrelated business. I will do a good deed for some random stranger if Antonio responds within 23 hours. The message box in which you can type your message doesn’t appear on the contact page until after you’ve clicked the box by all three promises. ([Location 2745](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2745))
• Process-Centric Response to E-mail #1: “I’d love to grab coffee. Let’s meet at the Starbucks on campus. Below I listed two days next week when I’m free. For each day, I listed three times. If any of those day and time combinations work for ([Location 2779](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2779))
• you, let me know. I’ll consider your reply confirmation for the meeting. If none of those date and time combinations work, give me a call at the number below and we’ll hash out a time that works. Looking forward to it.” Process-Centric Response to E-mail #2: “I agree that we should return to this problem. Here’s what I suggest… “Sometime in the next week e-mail me everything you remember about our discussion on the problem. Once I receive that message, I’ll start a shared directory for the project and add to it a document that summarizes what you sent me, combined with my own memory of our past discussion. In the document, I’ll highlight the two or three most promising next steps. “We can then take a crack at those next steps for a few weeks and check back in. I suggest we schedule a phone call for a month from now for this purpose. Below I listed some dates and times when I’m available for a call. When you respond with your notes, indicate the date and time combination that works best for you and we’ll consider that reply confirmation for the call. I look forward to digging into this problem.” Process-Centric Response to E-mail #3: “Thanks for getting back to me. I’m going to read this draft of the article and send you back an edited version annotated with comments on Friday (the 10th). In this version I send back, I’ll edit what I can do myself, and add comments to draw your attention to places where I think you’re better suited to make the improvement. At that point, you should have what you need to polish and submit the final draft, so I’ll leave you to do that—no need to reply to this message or to follow up with me after I return the edits—unless, of course, there’s an issue.” ([Location 2780](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2780))
• Second, to steal terminology from David Allen, a good process-centric message immediately “closes the loop” with respect to the project at hand. When a project is initiated by an e-mail that you send or receive, it squats in your mental landscape—becoming something that’s “on your plate” in the sense that it has been brought to your attention and eventually needs to be addressed. This method closes this open loop as soon as it forms. ([Location 2802](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2802))
• Process-centric e-mails might not seem natural at first. For one thing, they require that you spend more time thinking about your messages before you compose them. In the moment, this might seem like you’re spending more time on e-mail. But the important point to remember is that the extra two to three minutes you spend at this point will save you many more minutes reading and responding to unnecessary extra messages later. ([Location 2807](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2807))
• The other issue is that process-centric messages can seem stilted and overly technical. The current social conventions surrounding e-mail promote a conversational tone that clashes with the more systematic schedules or decision trees commonly used in process-centric communication. If this concerns you, I suggest that you add a longer conversational preamble to your messages. You can even separate the process-centric portion of the message from the conversational opening with a divider line, or label it “Proposed Next Steps,” so that its technical tone seems more appropriate in context. In the end, these minor hassles are worth it. By putting more thought up front into what’s really being proposed by the e-mail messages that flit in and out of your inbox, you’ll greatly reduce the negative impact of this technology on your ability to do work that actually matters. ([Location 2810](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2810))
• As a graduate student at MIT, I had the opportunity to interact with famous academics. In doing so, I noticed that many shared a fascinating and somewhat rare approach to e-mail: Their default behavior when receiving an e-mail message is to not respond. Over time, I learned the philosophy driving this behavior: When it comes to e-mail, they believed, it’s the sender’s responsibility to convince the receiver that a reply is worthwhile. If you didn’t make a convincing case and sufficiently minimize the effort required by the professor to respond, you didn’t get a response. ([Location 2817](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2817))
• Once you get past the discomfort of this approach, you’ll begin to experience its rewards. There are two common tropes bandied around when people discuss solutions to e-mail overload. One says that sending e-mails generates more e-mails, while the other says that wrestling with ambiguous or irrelevant e-mails is a major source of inbox-related stress. The approach suggested here responds aggressively to both issues—you send fewer e-mails and ignore those that aren’t easy to process—and by doing so will significantly weaken the grip your inbox maintains over your time and attention. ([Location 2844](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00X47ZVXM&location=2844))