When's the last time you went deep? Really deep?
Working late selfie. Thanks smart phone.
“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.”
On a recent work call, a colleague and I discovered we were both struggling with days that seemed to get away from us, hijacked by overflowing inboxes, non-stop meetings and last minute fire drills.
We’d end a day exhausted, yet feeling we’d accomplished very little of what we set out to do. And our to-do lists kept growing. But was all that work actually valuable?
“Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of any 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.”
I’ve worked in offices that adhere to a productivity proxy – the ones where you get side-eye for daring to leave your desk for lunch and your workday doesn’t end until your boss has left, regardless of your workload. But I’ve also worked in offices where years of layoffs, restructuring or attrition have resulted in people being tasked with jobs once shared by two or even three people. Of course they’re busy! But again. Is all the busy work actually valuable?
“…knowledge workers increasingly replace deep work with the shallow alternative –constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction.”
The tighter my relationships with my clients, the more likely that their culture will influence my own. And yet – clients do not hire outside partners for shallow work. My value comes from my ability to go deep – to spend time with the hard problems, to produce at an elite level. That is what they pay me for.
My work, and to be honest, my satisfaction with my work were dependent on my ability to wrest back my time. To take advantage of being uniquely positioned to close the door – literally or digitally – and work. Deeply.
Following are a few tactics taken from and inspired by Cal Newport’s Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World that I’ve found helpful.
Schedule every minute of your day.
I’m used to tracking my time, but it has always been a reactive task – I do the work, I write it down. Turn that on its head – number a page with the hours in your working day. Fill in the meetings. Fill in time to eat and take breaks. And then in half hour increments, fill in what you’re working on for the rest of the hours. If your day changes (as it invariably will), don’t get frustrated. Revise your schedule and stick to it.
Schedule meetings in blocks
When my meetings are spread throughout the day, I find it very hard to use the in-between times for deep work – instead I find myself catching up on the shallow – like preparing for the next meeting. If I can block them all in the morning or afternoon, the rest of the day is there for deep work.
Measure the depth of your activities
Ask yourself how long it would take a smart college graduate with no specialized training in your field to complete the task. Editing a research paper, for example? That could take 50-75 months. Bias your time toward the deep tasks – the ones that would take someone else a really long time to learn to do well.
Think carefully about your Internet habits
Rule #3 in Newport’s book was actually “Quit Social Media.” As the manager of a Fortune 100 company’s social media program, that’s not in the cards for me. But this is – Newport advises 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.” So while I need to keep presences on certain tools to be sure I’m up-to-date with the most relevant trends for my client, I don’t need to maintain two distinct presences on multiple channels as I have in the past.
Take breaks from focus, not breaks from distraction
For me and for many, the Internet = distraction. So schedule the times you’ll access it, and avoid it otherwise. You may have to schedule an Internet session every 15 minutes, and that’s fine. The point is breaking the habit between “I’m bored” and instantly hopping on the Internet – even a five-minute delay helps you hone your ability to concentrate even when you don’t want to. This means you may have to wait in line without checking your phone. And I recommend this policy after working hours too – I’m really good at falling into rabbit holes otherwise.
When you’re done working, be done working
Newport suggests a shut-down ritual at the end of your workday which includes going over your to-do list, adding items that come to mind, checking your calendar for the next couple of days and making a rough plan for the day to come. He also recommends a catchphrase that ritualizes the end of the day and allows your brain to go off duty as far as work is concerned.
My job means I cannot totally disconnect from work – that’s where #5 comes in – I schedule times to check my email/alerts in the evening, so the rest of my time can be spent recharging.
Two years ago I began writing a novel - while the story was the impetus, the nagging fear that I had lost the ability to go deep as a writer spurred me on too. (Spending a career in advertising and digital (hello headlines and punchy ad copy) will do that.) I’m convinced that this side project was what kept my paid work from suffering. My book is an exercise in going deep.
Even so, by the end of 2019, frenetic shallow work, evenings spent surfing and allowing my inbox to rule my day left me feeling completely burned out. My husband’s pleas to “put the computer down” didn’t convince me, but the evidence that digital habits physically change your brain did. (For more on that, check out The Shallows by Nicholas Carr.)
If some of these frustrations resonate with you, consider taking a look at how you work. Your time should be valuable to you too - not just your employers and clients. Take the steps to fill it with work that inspires and makes you proud.
“…there’s increasing evidence that this shift toward the shallow is not a choice that can be easily reversed. Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.”
While you still can.
