I recently read Deep Work by Cal Newport. He wrote that a few hours of deep work a day is enough to be very productive. Deep work, tough on the brain, is focused and completely undistracted; a few hours is 1.5 to 4 hours. Newport, an academic, wrote to intellectuals. Skill workers who might have read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and his theory that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert will appreciate Newport’s practical ideas.
Many will find it hard to find undistracted time, what with social media, work and family. But I think that what makes finding such time hard is the belief that one needs to set aside large blocks of it. The idea of kaizen (see my previous blog) is that only a small effort every day is all that’s needed. I remember this book Baby Steps by the fictional psychiatrist Leo Marvin (Richard Dreyfuss) in the 1991 movie What About Bob. Baby Steps is also the idea behind the painting I made based on a photo by a friend, @scenebymelinda (left-most image above), which is now my cellphone’s wallpaper. Whoever has climbed a mountain knows what we’re talking about.
A typical intellectual schedule, for example, may consist of 2 hours of writing and/or data analysis and another 1 to 2 hours of reading scholarly journals. Other work such as meetings, editing manuscripts, writing letters, networking, and gathering data don’t usually involve the creativity and hard thinking that goes into deep work.
Many feel that their job makes it impossible to achieve much with little; they feel they need 16 hours of work a day to get results. Newport has this advice: block out time as “scheduled productivity” during the day, then protect them, respect them. Scheduled productivity allows him to leave work at 5:30 pm to devote himself to his family. This schedule did not stop him from publishing up to 9 papers in one year, and that was his tenure year.
Newport is a computer scientist; other professions might require a different kind of schedule. I do not imagine an entrepreneur, for example, as having a mathematician’s schedule. Yet, even entrepreneurs will benefit from 1 to 2 hours of undistracted strategic thinking.
One can eliminate distraction in many ways. My favorite is to switch off the Wifi. Others find a secret place or instruct their secretaries not to schedule any meetings between such and such hour. Some people have focused times every day, others have one focused day per week. I have a friend who escaped into a countryside retreat for a few weeks to write up his dissertation.
Concentration is tiring, but it can be relaxing. A book read with leisure, or practicing jazz improvisation are cognitively demanding but in a way different from doing math. I think that activities on one side of the brain are rest with respect to those on the other side. A painter can rest by solving math problems. Rest activities are also relaxing because they are not the “main thing”: they do take perhaps half an hour at most. Yet even kaizen will apply to them.
All other activities outside of deep work are rest, distraction, or what Franklin Covey in The Four Disciplines of Execution calls the “whirlwind”: meetings, phonecalls, firefighting, all the necessary and urgent matters that we have to address. Because the whirlwind is part of our job, Covey suggests to get the most concentrated work done early.
Some people wake up every day at 5:00 a.m. and get something important done by 9:00 a.m. before the whirlwind begins. What you might achieve in those early hours is often all the deep work you will need.
jaylazzo 