Deep Work By CAL NEWPORT

Cal defines ‘deep work’ as “professional activities performed in a state of distraction free concentration that pushes your cognitive abilities to their limit.” These efforts create new value improve your skill and are hard to replicate.

J.K. Rowling used deep work to complete the final book of her Harry Potter series: the deadly hollows in 2007. She needed to escape the distraction of screaming kids and barking dogs so she checked into a suite in a five-star hotel in downtown Edinburgh Scotland. She says, “I didn’t intend to stay there but the first days writing went well so I kept coming back and I ended up finishing the last of the Harry Potter books here.”

Bill Gates used deep work in 1974 to program the first version of basic in just eight weeks. Cal says that Gates worked with such intensity for such lengths during the two-month stretch that he would often collapse into sleep on his keyboard in the middle of writing a line of code. He would then sleep for an hour then wake up and pick up right where he left off. The basic software that Gates wrote in eight weeks while in a state of deep work became the foundation of a billion dollar company.

Author Cal Newport, an MIT graduate and Georgetown professor claims that deep work allowed him to double his output of research papers while raising a family, writing this book and teaching full-time at a prestigious university.

The first two cases; Gates and JK Rowling, might be extreme as most people don’t have the ability to go off the grid and do deep work for weeks at a time. However, Cal shows that we can maintain a busy schedule and still find ways to do deep work and produce significant results in our lives that others find hard to replicate.

Exactly how does deep work lead to these best-selling books, innovative products and elite levels of productivity? Well, neuroscientists have found that intense periods of focus in isolated fields of work causes myelin to develop in relevant areas of the brain. Myelin is a white tissue that develops around neurons and allows brain cells to fire faster and cleaner.

So in a sense when we practice deep work we upgrade our brains and allow specific brain circuits to fire more effortlessly and effectively. The brain upgrade we get from deep work allows you to rapidly connect ideas and uncover creative solutions in today’s economy.

The ability to do deep work is increasingly valuable and increasingly rare. It’s valuable because when you produce something great in our hyper-connected world, it has the ability to spread to billions of people. Producing something great is necessary to stand out amongst the noise and avoid being forgotten by the flood of information that we deal with on a day-to-day basis. Think of your last tweet. How long did it last? How quickly was it forgotten?

Deep work is becoming increasingly rare because it requires undivided attention and our world is being filled with more and more tempting distractions. So the ability to do deep work is becoming increasingly difficult. Co-workers expect you to immediately respond to an email or an instant message. Employers want you to function in an open office concept of constant distraction. Your friends and followers online expect you to maintain a social media presence.

It’s not enough to try to ignore these distractions. We are hard-wired to be distracted and pay attention to novelty. In 2012, a study led by psychologists Wilhelm Hofmann and Roy Baumeister, involving 205 adults, found that we are only able to resist temptations to take a break from work, to check email, surf the web or watch TV just 50 % of the time. But there is hope you can build a scale of deep work and escape the trap of constant distraction thus separating you from the pack and making you indispensable in today’s economy.

Here are three deep work strategies that you can incorporate into your schedule to heighten your ability to focus and produce results that are hard to replicate.

First, schedule your distraction periods. At home and at work, most of us allow ourselves to go online at any moment and check our phone whenever it buzzes or dings but doing so is training your brain to avoid deep work. A day full of unscheduled distraction is training your brain to give in to any and all distractions. To build your tolerance to avoid distraction, you need to place boundaries on your distractions.

Have a notepad nearby and put down the next distraction break. You’ll have hold your focus until that time. At first, it’s going to be painful but remember that doing this is effectively doing the reps that build your ability to concentrate.

Second, develop a rhythmic deep work ritual. Cal says the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit. The goal in other words is to generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you’re going to go deep.

Cal uses several examples in the book to show that scheduling chunks of deep focus in an ad-hoc manner doesn’t yield much productivity at all for people who are not seasoned at doing deep work. It’s best for them to have a reoccurring time each day or each week to go into deep work. Early morning is typically the best time to do this because at that time you typically don’t have to deal with incoming requests.

The research shows that people new to deep work can typically only do it for about one hour and masters of deep work can typically only hold their attention up to four hours in intervals between 60 and 90 minutes throughout the day. So the ultimate goal of each day is to plant deep work rituals throughout the day with the ultimate goal of building up the some of your deep work practices to four hours a day.

The third strategy to cultivate deep work in your life is to have a daily shutdown – complete ritual. Sleep is the price we need to pay in order to do deep work. It’s the interest we pay on the loans of intense focus required to do deep work.

To ensure that we get adequate sleep and restore our attention reserves for the following day, Cal recommends that we incorporate an evening shutdown into our daily routine. An evening shutdown ritual involves making a plan to complete any unfinished tasks goals or projects the following day. Getting a series of steps lined out for the following day is enough to get items off your mind so you can disconnect for the rest of the day. When you get things off your mind you restore the ability to sleep well and do deep work the following day.

After Cal completes his plan for the following day he will say to himself, “shutdown complete!” It’s pretty cheesy but he says it’s a great cue to unplug. In the end, deep work is incredibly valuable because it changes your brain and allows you to produce innovative work that is hard to replicate.

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