Deep Work Flashcards
Deep Work vs Shallow Work
Deep work. Distraction-free concentration. Stretches your cognitive capabilities to their limit. Creates new value. Improves your skill. And the products of this type of work are hard to replicate. Let’s compare it to its opposite:
Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tends to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.
How much time are you spending as a human network router—constantly sending emails and otherwise distracting yourself with every new little push notification and text message and attention-paper-cutting distraction imaginable?
Philosophers Notes - Deep Work
Myelin & Deep Work
To understand the role of myelin in improvement, keep in mind that skills, be they intellectual or physical, eventually reduce down to brain circuits. This new science of performance argues that you get better at a skill as you develop more myelin around the relevant neurons, allowing the corresponding circuit to fire more effortlessly and effectively. To be great at something is to be well myelinated.
This understanding is important because it provides a neurological foundation for why deliberate practice works. By focusing intensely on a specific skill, you’re forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire, again and again, in isolation. This repetitive use of a specific circuit triggers cells called oligodendrocytes to begin wrapping layers of myelin around the neurons in the circuits—effectively cementing the skill. The reason, therefore, why it’s important to focus intensely on the task at hand while avoiding distraction is because this is the only way to isolate the relevant neural circuit enough to trigger useful myelination.
Philosophers Notes - Deep Work
4 Rules of Deep Work
Rule #1: Work Deeply
Rule #2: Embrace Boredom
Rule #3: Quit Social Media
Rule #4: Drain the Shallows
Rule #1: Work Deeply. It’s not enough to have the intention to work more deeply. We need to systematically install new routines and rituals to create the new habits that will lead to more and more deep work. This is a hallmark of great humans.
Rule #2: Embrace Boredom. For some reason these days, the MOMENT we have a lull in our lives—whether that’s a few minutes before a friend arrives for lunch or in line at the grocery store or whatever—most of us immediately grab our smart phone and compulsively check out whatever we think we need to see right.this.second. We have about a hundredth of a second of tolerance for boredom.
If we want to create the capacity for more deep work, then feeding that beast is NOT a good idea. Cal tells us that rather than immediately flail around in the shallow end of the distraction pool, we need to EMBRACE BOREDOM. Use those moments to think or breathe deeply. Anything other than our habitual, addictive, impulsive, attention paper-cutting behaviors.
Rule #3: Quit Social Media. If there’s a poster child for shallow living, it’s social media. Cal walks us through a logical analysis of the fact that just because there’s a little benefit to things like social media (e.g., staying connected to old friends, etc.), doesn’t mean it’s actually worth the time we give it.
If we REALLY want to live deeply—working and loving—we can do better than fritter away our time on social media. The bold among us shall quit it! I’ve never really engaged on the personal side of Facebook and, via the exercises in the book, got even more clarity that, if I’m committed to my deep work, it’s time for my social media time to be nearly eliminated. FUN! (You?!)
Rule #4: Drain the Shallows. The Shallows is the name of a book written capturing the essence of superficial living. (Written by a guy in retreat doing deep work, btw.) As we cultivate deep work, we need to systematically drain the shallow from our lives.
One of Cal’s big tips here? SCHEDULE EVERY MINUTE OF EVERY DAY. Not to drive yourself crazy, but to bring more mindfulness to your day.
Philosophers Notes - Deep Work
How to ritualize deep work?
Create routines to ritualize deep work
Monastic Philosophy: Think of a monk in a monastery—removed from the little distractions of normal life. You’re essentially unplugged from the matrix and focused. It’s (obviously) not for everybody but an extraordinarily productive approach if you can pull it off. (This is basically me in my hermit-mode.)
Bimodal Philosophy: In this mode, you alternate between a monastic approach and a normally engaged mode. Cal shares the story of Carl Jung who alternated between a very engaged therapy practice/social life in Zurich and a totally removed monk-mode in his retreat house for writing.
Rhythmic Philosophy: Basic idea here is captured in Jerry Seinfeld’s “chain method” habit
of writing a joke every day. In this mode, we’re less attached to a particular schedule and committed to having a “rhythm” of consistently creating—where, like, Seinfeld, we don’t want to break the chain of successful showing up and completing our daily deep work.
Journalistic Philosophy: In this mode, like a journalist who’s ready to write on deadline whenever the situation arises, you fit deep work into your schedule whenever you can. This is Cal’s main approach.
Check out the book for more
Philosophers Notes - Deep Work
Cal Newport on Work Habits
An often-overlooked observation about those who use their minds to create valuable things is that they’re rarely haphazard in their work habits - Cal Newport
Philosophers Notes - Deep Work
“The more you try to do…”
“As the authors of The 4 Disciplines of Execution explain, ‘The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.’ They elaborate that execution should be aimed at a small number of ‘wildly important goals.’ This simplicity will help focus an organization’s energy to a sufficient intensity to ignite real results.
For an individual focused on deep work, the implication is that you should identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours. The general exhortation to ‘spend more time working deeply’ doesn’t spark a lot of enthusiasm.
In a 2014 column titled, ‘The Art of Focus,’ David Brooks endorsed this approach of letting ambitious goals drive focused behavior, explaining: ‘If you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to say ‘no’ to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasborg; try to say ‘yes’ to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else.’”
Remember: It’s a HECK of a lot easier to say “No!” to shallow distractions when you have a REALLY BIG YES!
So, what WILDLY (!!!) important thing fires you up?
Seriously. Let’s slow down and capture this.
What’s the #1 (challenging but feasible!) thing you’d most like to achieve over the next 6-12 months that would have a wildly awesome positive impact on your life?
My #1 WILDLY IMPORTANT goal = ______________________________________.
Fantastic. Here’s to going deep and prioritizing our lives around that #1—crowding out the distractions in the process.
Philosophers Notes - Deep Work
“SHUT-DOWN COMPLETE!”
“At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning —no after-dinner e-mail check, no mental replays of conversations, and no scheming about how you’ll handle an upcoming challenge; shut down work thinking completely. If you need more time, then extend your workday, but once you shut down, your mind must be left free. …
Decades of work from multiple different subfields within psychology all point toward the conclusion that regularly resting your brain improves the quality of your deep work. When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done. Your average e-mail response time might suffer some, but you’ll more than make up for this with the sheer volume of truly important work produced during the day by your refreshed ability to dive deeper than your exhausted peers.”
Dan Coyle echoed this as well. He laughed as he told a story about how he once wrote a piece on the world’s fastest men. He said when these guys weren’t racing they barely moved—they were professional nappers! (Hah.)
One GREAT way to do that is to have a hard stop at the end of every day. Cal makes a strong case for why this is so important and walks us through his personal end of the day ritual in which he basically does one final check of email to make sure he’s handled anything that’s urgent, looks over what was left undone and plans some time the next day to complete it then, as he turns off his computer for the night, he says to himself, “Shut-down complete!”
LOVE that. I do something similar. With my digital sunset, I turn off the computer and return it to its not-gonna-see-you-till-tomorow home, appreciate all that’s been done, look ahead to the next day, clean up my desk so it’s in a ready-state for tomorrow morning and #done. Time to recover. I may need to add: “Houston. We’re shutting down. 3. 2. 1. Shut-down, complete.” :)
Philosophers Notes - Deep Work
Cal Newport on Darwin & Caro
Great minds like Caro and Darwin didn’t deploy rituals to be weird; they did so because success in their work depended on their ability to go deep, again and again—there’s no way to win a Pulitzer Prize or conceive a grand theory without pushing your brain to the limit.
- Cal Newport
Philosophers Notes - Deep Work
