Takeaways from the book — “Deep Work” — Part 1
By: Rama Satya Diwakar Grandhi
Tags: Review, Productivity, Self Improvement, Books, Self Help

I picked up this book in a chance encounter. When I visited a book fair, this book caught my attention even among the sea of other books. The title and tag line seemed very persuasive since I already had some interest in the domain of productivity.

The author describes deep work as the ability to focus, without distraction, on a cognitively demanding task. These efforts create new value and improve our skills. The term was introduced by the author (Cal Newport) himself and it mirrors what Carl Jung, the famous psychiatrist, had followed. Carl Jung was the founder of analytical psychology and his style of work involved isolating himself by retreating to a place that he built far away from his city of work. He did that frequently to cut himself off of all possible distractions and produced some of his best work during those times.

Starting from Mark Twain to Bill Gates, lots of other people have also prioritized spending time on distraction free thinking. Bill Gates used to have his thinking weeks where he spent time mostly on reading and thinking big.

Today, a typical workday for someone in the tech industry consists of being connected with e-mail and messaging all day and then doing spurts of work in between these distractions. This can also be termed as shallow work and once we get accustomed to it, it becomes more and more difficult to produce deep work. Shallow work is something that can easily be done by anyone and is not irreplaceable. Also, the quality of something done in a shallow manner will differ hugely when compared to something done in a deep manner. Some people might have the necessity to work just based on email and talk predominantly like business executives & CEOs and else however it is an exception and not the norm.

The industrial economy and the informational economy have a hugely different average day at work. In the industrial economy, there wasn’t much of a difference in the day-to-day work whereas in the informational economy things change rapidly. To tackle this, people need to know how to learn things quickly and for that, the best way to go about is by being focused.

This part, the first part about this topic, covers the why aspect. Why should we do deep work?

Deep work is valuable

Only 3 groups of people can succeed in this Intelligent machine age,

High skilled workers — those people whose work cannot be replaced by a machine but instead will be provided more value with a machine’s help Stars — the ones who can provide the frameworks and else — like David Hansson who wrote Ruby on rails Owners — the ones who can invest capital (VC)

There is a “Great Restructuring” which is going on right now and is being driven by the intelligent machine. The restructuring is dividing the workforce into two, one which can be easily replaced by a machine and another which can thrive and improve the results when they work along with the machine.

To fall in the first two groups i.e. high skilled workers and stars, a person would need,

Ability to quickly master hard things Ability to produce at an elite level

The biological reasoning behind why focused work is good — by focusing on the same thing repetitively, we are making the neurons work on the same thing repetitively and this triggers more myelination of a neuron which cements the skill.

Attention residue is a term that was introduced by Sophie Leroy in her paper “Why is it so hard to do my work?”. When we switch from task A to task B, if task A was not done in a deep fashion and if we are abruptly moving to task B, a part of our attention never recovers and makes our focus on task B less than what it could have been. It will be heavily felt when we are alternating between things, for example checking email and writing code.

Jack Dorsey is an example of people who can thrive without depth and focus. The lifestyle of such executives is unavoidably distracted. The deep work effect is suitable based on the role an individual is playing and for someone like Dorsey, distractions are unavoidable.

We should be careful while marking out jobs as distraction-necessary. For example, even management consultants who never thought that they could go for a few hours without email realized that they can and it helped their work.

Deep work is rare

Open office, a new trend in the software companies, goes against our ability to go deep. To help them along in the same endeavor, we have the ever-present e-mails and IMs. Metric black hole — something which cannot be objectively measured. For example, how many dollars are being brought in by employees answering emails daily? The principle of least resistance — When companies don’t know the impact of various behaviors on the bottom line, they go with implementing the behaviors that are easiest at the moment. The same has happened with companies going ahead with open offices and IMs. How do they make it easier? If we can get an answer for something in minutes, I don’t have to plan my day meticulously. If I am replying to a message, we will equate that to doing work and get some satisfaction out of it but ultimately that is not creating anything. Busyness as a proxy for productivity — does being busy every minute by answering emails and IMs make someone very productive. It might be the case for some but not for most. For someone who wants to create, this is not going to help since our attention is fractured over here. What led us to think in this way though? A lack of measuring our productivity drove us to this. For professors an h-index is available. The h-index measures how much their research has been cited and by how prestigious papers. Cult of the internet — I feel that rather than the internet it is social media that is very addictive, the cause for FOMO (fear of missing out), and the cause for distractions. From all the above points the author intends to show how deep work is becoming rare day by day due to the advent of the different practices we are adopting regularly.

Deep work is meaningful

Craft economy vs information economy — craft economy is basically what we can understand as the work of a craftsman. Let’s take a blacksmith (Ric Furrer’s example is taken in the book) for an example. For them, the defining part i.e. what to do is simple whereas the execution part i.e. how to do is tough. This leads to a lot of clarity since the task has a clear intention and a clear measurable goal at the end of all of it. However, in the information economy, we have the opposite, since there is no clear differentiation and there is a lot of overlap in the work we do. Responding to an email is a part of our job and almost everyone’s job. This is the un-clear part. And how do we measure the impact of this? We don’t have a way today. A neurological argument for depth — Winifred Gallagher was diagnosed with cancer. She had 2 options to live her life during her treatment. One was to focus on the negatives about this happening to her and the pain associated with it or two, to focus on the other pleasurable things in life. As she focused on life, even though the circumstance was the same, she was able to get through the situation in a better way than she would have in the other case. The focus on life gave her the positivity needed to stay strong and reduced the extra stress which would have come up had she concentrated on the cancer treatment. This proved that we can focus on anything under any circumstances and we aren’t always constricted by the circumstances. The author says similarly if we focus on the work at hand rather than the shallow activities like e-mail which almost always all the time lead to petty disturbances or reminds us about the upcoming things repeatedly and makes it more stressful, we can live it in a better way. When we react to something by giving it attention, our amygdala (center of emotion) fires up. We can train it to react only to the positives by choosing to focus on what is positive. By doing it repeatedly, we will be in a small way not a prisoner of our circumstances. A psychological argument for depth — in an experiment conducted by Mihaly, it was found that depth induces a flow to a person, something we experience while stretching our minds to our limit to solve a problem. More the flow, more the happiness has been observed. And more the depth, more the flow. A philosophical argument for depth — it’s based on a book written by Harvard professors of philosophy, Dreyfus and Kelly. They argue that we stopped paying attention to things as being shiny/sacred. In the medieval age, a blacksmith was not a rare job but his output and his craftsmanship were often looked at in awe and the output was treated shiny. The workers of the information era also need to start seeing their craftsmanship and work in the same way and their work will be better with depth.

I will be back with the second part which deals with takeaways about how to perform deep work.