Are you enjoying riding the waves? It surely is more fun than resisting the waves, right? Now it is time to enter deep waters with this skill.
Author Cal Newport defines Deep Work as, “Professional activity performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”
Note that this is contrary to Shallow Work, which is “Non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create new value in the world and are easy to replicate.” To connect the dots, when you focus on your essential tasks, you are doing deep work, while all the non-essential tasks count as shallow work.
Deep work is tiring by design, and an average person can do only 3-4 hours of deep work per day. This is the reason why people avoid it, especially when there is an option to do shallow work, like organizing their room instead of studying for an exam. But even in case one wants to do deep work, technology stands as a bigger hurdle. The result is that deep work has become a rare phenomenon in the modern world (while we saw how Franklin could pack two windows of deep work every day).
Newport suggests four steps to improve your deep work capability:
Location: Choose a distraction-free space that is conducive to deep work. If such a space is unavailable, use noise-canceling headphones. Try to be consistent with this location for your deep work, so your brain will get used to shifting to focus mode as soon as you sit there.
Duration: Before starting a deep work session, plan for how long you want to commit. It can help to start small with just 15 minutes and set a timer. From there, slowly work your way up to longer sessions. After each session, take small breaks of 5-10 minutes to relax and then jump to the next session if there is any.
Structure: Set your dos and don’ts to define the structure of the deep work session. How will you measure the success of a session (i.e., pages read, words written, etc.), or rules like whether you are allowed to go to the kitchen or check your phone?
Requirements: Use your first few sessions to learn about what things you need to support your deep work. For example, it could be a specific focus inducing music, a favorite beverage, or a preferred notebook. Once you know your requirements, make sure you have them before you jump into deep work and don’t need to get up intermittently.
In the end, it is about building your focus muscle to do important tasks for longer. Play with Newport’s suggestions to find your groove, even if it takes 10-20 sessions. And once you know your mix, stick with it.
In it to win it! 😊