05_newport_deep_work.md

Deep Work by Cal Newport

• Deep work = working without distraction on imp. things

Why is Deep Work Important?

• Not as important if you are a CEO etc. e.g. Jack Dorsey etc.

• Economy demands a) being good at learning complicated things quickly, and b) producing like a superstar. Both need focus.

• Evidence for why focus is needed for learning:

  • Evidence from "performance psychology":
    • k anders ericsson: to become an expert, you need to do 'deliberate practice.' deliberate practice has 2 aspects:
      • focus on what you are trying to improve
      • get feedback so focusing where attention most productive
    • more you practice, more myelin around certain neurons (skill cemented) -> the talent code by daniel coyle

• Average is over (Tyler Cowen), Superstar effect (1981, Sherwin Rosen).

  • http://home.uchicago.edu/~vlima/courses/econ201/Superstars.pdf
  • quality is observed perfectly

• Quality adjusted production of work = (hours * intensity of focus)

• To do real good [physics] work, you need absolute solid lengths of time (Feynman)

• If you are focused, minor annoyances in life become less imp.

• Best moments when people in 'flow'

  • Using Experience Sampling by Csikszentmihalyi and Reed Larson
  • Most people assume relaxation causes happiness. Work has more of that built in.

• Deep work is "meaningful"

  • craftsmen know this
  • focused life is the best there is (Gallagher)
  • World used to be sacred. In post-enlightenment world, we have to find meaning.
    • All Things Shining by Dreyfus and Gallagher (2011)
    • craftsmanship opens a window to sacredness
      • appreciation of subtle virtues is a source of meaning outside the individual.
    • Beautiful code ~ poem. Santiago Gonzalez
    • We who cut stones must always envision cathedrals --- pragmatic programmer quotes medieval quarry workers' creed
      • our engineering may seem archaic but our craftsmanship will still be honored.

Why is Shallow Work Still so Popular?

• Hard to measure ind. contrib. to firm's output --- Piketty. So replaced by simulacrum of progress --- meetings, etc. 'Knowledge workers leaning toward visible busyness because they lack a better way to demonstrate value.'

  • Turn to industrial age indicator of prod.: Doing lots of stuff in a visible manner

• Planning your day is hard so people choose easier alternatives like running it off their inbox.

• Technopoly --- belief that all new tech. is good.

• See also book: Evgeny Morozov. 2013. To Save Everything, Click Here.

Strategies for Focused Work

• Relevant fact Upper limit per day of focused work = 4 hrs. Novices = 1 hr. (Ericsson -- the delib. practice guy)

• Understand the following:

  • You don't need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to yr. work.

• Cultivating craftsmanship essential for deep work

• To the extent possible, eliminate all other work

  • Donald Knuth tries to be almost monastic.
  • Neal Stephenson is just hard to get in touch w/.
  • Radhika Nagpal only gives 5 talks per year
  • Say no. It should take a lot to convince you to do something.
  • Be hard to reach

• People fight desires all day long ---eating, sleeping, and sex most common but also in top 5 = taking a break from work to check email, do social networking, do Internet surfing, listen to music, watch TV

  • Using experience sampling. Hofmann, Baumeister. See Baumeister & Tierney's Willpower also.
  • Answer = rituals and routines.
    • Routines and rituals designed to minimize depletion of willpower.
    • Darwin had a set schedule
    • Great creative minds think like artists but work like accountants (David Brooks)

• Build a Ritual (answer following 4 qs.)

  • Where will you work and for how long?
  • If possible, identify a location associated only with depth. a conf. room or library etc.
  • How will you work when you start working?
    • no internet, etc.
    • set prod. metrics
  • How will you support yr. work * get a good coffee, walk ...etc.

• Execute like a company (from 4 disciplines of execution)

  • (Based on the premise: execution harder than strategizing)
  • Focus on the wildy imp. (pt. about what, not how)
  • Look at Lead Measures
    • lag measures = papers produced. lead = focused time devoted. fix lead measures if they are 'lagging.'
  • Keep a compelling scorecard of lead measures
  • Create a cadence of accountability
    • weekly review

• Take time off, be lazy

  • downtime aids insights
    • some decisions better left to unconscious (Ap Dijksterhuis)
      • apparently better car purchase decisions after solving easy puzzles and no time to deliberate.
  • helps 'recharge'
    • People who took a walk in arboretum rather than city did better on a attention demanding task. From a 2008 Pysch. science article.
    • Attention restoration therapy by spending time in nature (kaplan and kaplan)
  • work during downtime generally not imp.
  • working less may allow you to 'drain the shallows'

• Don't touch the computer after you get home.

• Incomplete tasks dominate attention so have a plan or finish

  • Work by Bluma Zeigarnik
  • You don't need to complete a task to get if off your mind
    • Asked people to make a plan and that reduced effect of not doing X on the next task. 'Consider it done' by Baumeister and Masicampo

• Have a shutdown ritual - skim every open task. review every incomplete task and make a) plan for completion or b) capture in a place where it will revisited when time is right. - look at what's planned for next day. make a rough plan for next day. - post completion, say a phrase like 'shutdown complete'

• Schedule every minute of your day

  • small flexible chunks. rescheduling is ok. makes you think about yr. time throughout the day.
  • without structure easy to slip

• Need to train to be able to concentrate intensely

  • Don't feed addiction off hours. Discipline in Internet use off hours useful. William Powers popularized 'Internet Shabbath' in Hamlet's Blackberry.
  • Schedule when you will use Internet both at work and at home. Keep notepad near a computer. Mark when you get to go to Internet next. Don't check Internet if not in the time box. If you need to look at Internet for work, schedule Internet time to begin after 5 minutes or more. So not giving in to addiction.

• Increase short term memory by trying to memorize a deck of cards

  • helps improve 'attentional control'
  • memory technique = begin by cementing image of walking through 5 rooms in your home. how will you go through the door, hallways etc. in each room, imagine clearly what you will see. fix in your mind a collection of ten items in each room. items should be large. next, fix order in which you look at the items. associate memorable person/thing with each card and then practice these associations. next as you walk through, put memorable card/person/ w/ memorable item in the room.

• Productive meditation

  • thinking while walking, commuting. focus on complex things, not trivial.

• Put yourself under some time pressure to finish X

• Work everyday

  • Seinfeld. Cross day on calendar when you write jokes, and then after a few days job = don't break the chain; the chain method. Called chain method.

• Wake up early

  • work distraction free till breakfast

• Collaboration

  • white board effect: working w/ someone can deepen yr. insights, allow you to come w/ new things.
  • Split alone time w/ collab. time

• Batch important intellectual work into long uninterrupted stretches.

  • Adam Grant uses it. Teaches only in fall. Alternates between where door is open and where he will put an out-of-office responder to email. 3 tasks for a paper: analyze the data, write the first draft, edit to publishable (3--4 days each)
  • Carl Jung also
  • Author calls it 'bimodal philosophy'

• Grand gestures help focus

  • Rowling booked a 5 star hotel room
  • increase perceived imp. of task
  • bill gates think weeks
  • alan lightman summer retreat
  • shockley went to conf. (didn't attend) to finish work on transistor
  • peter shankman bought round trip biz. class to JP

• Don't do Social media

  • Tweet:
    • George Packer: 'Twitter is the crack of media addicts'
  • Because you only want to use tools that add sig. value to you. Cost/benefit tradeoff.
  • If finding it hard to do:
    • write out yr. key professional + personal goal(s) and see whether s. media fits in.
    • quit for 30 days and see how things are diff. and then go back if that makes sense.

• Don't Multi-task, quickly check email or twitter etc.

  • Attention residue. When transitioning from Task A to B, part of your attention stuck with Task A. Large residue if Task A is low intensity and unbounded. Experiment = half interrupted, half allowed to finish. after interruption/finishing --- a lexical decision task to measure residue. eval. on Task B.
    • by Sophie Leroy. Why is it hard to do my work?

• Don't sit in open offices, have alerts

  • If phone goes off in the background, you are distracted. According to some neuroscientist. See previous also.

• Feynman invented a myth about himself to avoid admin. work--- "I am irresponsible. I can't do anything."

• Ask your boss for a shallow work budget

  • you can then point to it as hey, i am doing x, y, and z.

• Become hard to reach

• How to reduce time on email

  • Ask people who send emails to do more work.
  • Write emails so that they don't generally 5 other emails. Be organized, specific. Clarify next steps for people.
  • Create alternate email IDs for specific things. If you have interesting stuff to share, write to X.
  • Don't respond --- behavior of profs. --- prove to me why I shld respond
  • Provide information about how you are hard to reach and why
  • Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen

Misc. Points

• Trend toward open office misunderstands this serendipity thing

  • Mervin Kelly, Bell Labs, corridors + private offices. Corridors for mingling. Office for work.
  • For Stata center, profs. wanted extra soundproofing.

• men of genius great only when they brought their focus on one thing

  • dalmace sertillanges, a friar who wrote 'intellectual life'

• 'Skillful management of Attention' and happiness correlated according to Winifred Gallagher (author of rapt)

  • we focus more on circumstances than needed.
  • brains construct worldview based on what we attend to.
  • you choose what to attend to.
  • After a bad event in life, what you choose to attend to matters a bunch. ---Barbara Frederickson
  • Older people suppress response to -ve imagery. Younger don't. (Laura Carstensen)

• Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. Mine is to be on the bottom of things (Don Knuth).

• 16 hrs off work ~ time where you are basically a person w/ a private income. Use it to do rigorous self-improvement.

  • How to live on 24hrs a day. Arnold Bennett

Misc. Facts

• Efficiency movement. Founded by Frederic Taylor. He would stand w/ a stopwatch and try to find ways to increase prod.

• Elites attend workshops like how to produce at an optimal rate.

  • e.g. Adam grant

• Eudaimonia: greek for state when you are achieving your full human potential (well not quite; but useful concept)

• Examples of people w/ private houses/offices to work + tech. free

  • Carl Jung created a stone house called 'the tower' to work on stuff
  • Carl Jung was inspired by visit to India where houses had meditation rooms added a "retiring room."
  • de Montaigne created a private library
  • mark twain wrote tom sawyer in shed (far from house)
  • woody allen used typewriter
  • rowling moved to fancy 5 star to write her 6th book
  • bill gates 2 weeks/yr w/o email for 'think weeks'
  • neal stephenson v. hard to reach electronically - why i am a bad correspondent

• Neal Stephenson wrote Anathem which explores world where intellectual elite live in monastic orders, isolated from distracted masses