The power of ‘deep work’: An excerpt from Reframe the Day

DEEP WORK

This book is about reframing your days to make your life more fulfilling. Many of us spend a significant portion of our days working on different things in different capacities—jobs, careers, passion projects, studies, fitness, family, social life, causes, commitments. So, it follows that we should try to make these kinds of “work” more fulfilling. (One semantic point before we continue: To me, “work” represents any activity in which I invest my time, energy, attention, and care. It’s not restricted to “things I get paid for” or “things I have to do.” But if “work” has negative connotations for you, feel free to mentally replace it with something else, such as “activities” or “how I spend my time.”)

When it comes to work, no single book has had a greater impact on the way I understand the quest to make the time I spend on it more fulfilling than Cal Newport’s Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. I urge everyone to read Deep Work in its entirety, but its premise is simple: The type of work necessary to create meaningful output often requires deep, sustained, uninterrupted concentration. What constitutes meaningful output could be anything, from writing a book to reading history to learning a language to carving a piece of wood. It could simply be undertaking administrative tasks you’ve been assigned, but with more focus and fewer distractions. Regardless of the activity, the type of mental engagement required is characterized by long periods of presence and intense focus on a single task.

A key premise of Newport’s “Deep Work Hypothesis” is that, today, human beings are perpetually distracted. Many of us spend so much time in “frenetic shallowness,” Newport argues, that we “permanently reduce [our] capacity to perform deep work.” This reality owes something, at least in part, to a concept he cites called “attention residue,” or the notion that “when you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task.” As Newport writes, “the constant switching from low-stimuli/high-value activities to high-stimuli/low-value activities, at the slightest hint of boredom or cognitive challenge… teaches your mind to never tolerate an absence of novelty.” By attempting to multitask, you deplete your ability to focus on what’s in front of you and train your brain to crave constant stimulation.

This observation will ring true for anyone who’s found themselves without access to their cell phone for even a few minutes. How frequently do you feel a hint of boredom and instinctively reach for a dose of distraction? How often do you begin to work on something that you’ve been putting off and, upon running into the first challenge, automatically open Instagram to escape the challenge rather than work through it? We’re not always conscious of it. Technology-enhanced life has cultivated a finely tuned, deeply embedded inability to concentrate.

The antidote, according to Newport, is deep work. He defines deep work as “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit.” Put another way, deep work is “the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches.” From these definitions, Newport’s intended audience seems clear: professional employees, usually white-collar office workers, whose responsibilities require both a great deal of mental energy (writing, coding, researching, analyzing) and a lot of distracting tasks (emails, calls, meetings, emails, social media, emails, more emails). It’s a call to action for knowledge workers who spend much of their time in front of computer screens and who want to make sure they’re not automated out of the job market in ten years. That covers a lot of people, including me and many people I know, but it’s still a relatively narrow audience.

That narrowness is a shame, because I think the principles behind deep work are about more than job security for knowledge workers. The type of effort and focus deep work demands is about more than being a valuable commodity on LinkedIn. Working deeply can make any type of work more fulfilling. Newport argues that human beings derive immense satisfaction from applying sustained focus to single activities. “The act of going deep,” Newport writes, citing compelling psychology research as well as his own experience, “orders the consciousness in a way that makes life worthwhile.”

No matter how you define “work,” you can choose to reframe today’s tasks, responsibilities, and obligations—whatever you have to do, for whatever reason—as activities that you’ll undertake with all of your attention and focus. Instead of seeing a given task as one of a never-ending series of begrudging obligations, you can see each item as something to take pride in and focus intently on. In other words, by working deeply you can begin to see your work as a craft.

SHALLOW WORK

The opposite of deep work is what Newport calls “shallow work.” For many of us, our days are consumed by shallow work. In part, that’s because deep work is hard. When you’re staring at a blank screen that you’re responsible for transforming into a detailed report, for instance, it’s much easier to decide to respond to a WhatsApp message from a friend that’s been lurking unanswered for a couple days. Or check Instagram. Or submit a timesheet. Or follow up with that person you never got back to about that thing. Or clean out the fridge. Or get some coffee. Or sort of do all these things at once in different tabs on different devices while listening to a podcast in the background.

But it’s not only easily accessible distractions or a lack of willpower that leave your days inundated with shallow work. It’s also an issue of incentives. Much of modern society equates shallow work with productivity and worth, while undervaluing what can be produced through long-term, sustained concentration. Because that’s what the world around us does, that’s what we internalize and, in turn, that’s how we operate. We train ourselves to automatically denote a busy day of semi-distracted multitasking as a “productive” day, no matter whether we’ve actually “produced” anything.

I was no exception to this pattern until I stumbled into a role that forced me to prioritize deep work: writing speeches in the U.S. Senate. It was only as a speechwriter that I realized that the type of work I was avoiding, in part because it didn’t fit with my traditional productivity metrics, was actually the type of work I found most fulfilling. My deep work awakening (i.e., discovering that there was a more fulfilling way to work than frenzied juggling while being perpetually distracted) was helped by the fact that I first read Deep Work while in that job. As life-altering books often do, Newport’s book put into words and made me aware of what I had slowly been coming to realize as a speechwriter: The activities and vocations that matter most to us are often simultaneously right in front of us and impossible for us to see. How we’re working is often just as important as what we’re working on.

[…] No matter your personal or professional circumstances, life on its default settings can easily thrust you into a constant state of shallowness, leaving you exhausted, overwhelmed, and unfulfilled. You have to take proactive steps to work deep because, as Newport suggests simply, “a deep life is a good life.” A day characterized by lengthy, intentional bouts of sustained concentration can be deeply fulfilling. Again, that can be true regardless of what you’re working on. “Work” doesn’t have to be inherently meaningful or creative to benefit from focus and depth. Almost any activity of any kind, even just responding to emails, can be done with deliberation, care, and single-tasked focus. In other words, as a craft.

SINGLETASKING

Many psychologists and journalists have studied and opined on “decision fatigue,” the possibly real and possibly manufactured idea that we have a finite amount of willpower and decision-making strength on any given day. As with several other well-known psychology studies, the research supporting this concept (which is also known as “ego depletion”) is facing increasing scrutiny for its inability to be replicated. But the notion of decision fatigue still resonates. Even President Obama made it part of his mental framework. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” the “decider-in-chief” famously said in 2012. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make. … You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.”

Regardless of the concept’s scientific validity (which is not my usual standard, for the record), the lifestyle validity of decision fatigue is not in question. Few things drain my reserves of focus and creativity more quickly than making decisions and repeatedly switching between tasks. I picture my brain as a computer that’s been charging (i.e., sleeping) all night. In the morning, once my computer-brain has been booted up with coffee, it runs like new. All the work and knowledge from the day before is there, saved (and backed up endlessly), but no other processes are running in the background, needlessly draining the battery. I’m not yet thinking about the news, the errands I need to run, or the work meeting I have scheduled for later in the day. I’m not sending, reading, or responding to messages. I’m not yet watching the clock, mentally counting down the time until I have to turn my attention elsewhere. In my computer-brain, there aren’t yet any updates downloading. No alerts or to-do list reminders or calendar notifications are popping up on the screen. There are no lingering browser windows with countless tabs, each reminding me of a passing thought or search query that remains unfinished. The first file I open (perhaps a Word document of the latest iteration of this book) loads quickly and crisply. Although I know my computer-brain’s performance will wax and wane over the course of the day, for now it is uncluttered, recharged, and focused.

That’s how I think about the working mind. As far as I know, there’s no scientific basis for this analogy. But, like “decision fatigue,” whether this idea of a computer-brain is scientifically supported or just anecdotally appropriate, its consequences ring true for me. The type of deep, focused, fulfilling work I enjoy most is incompatible with multitasking. Switching tasks, starting new ones, and managing multiple attention targets will always leave something running in the background. (This is Cal Newport’s concept of “attention residue.”) If you spend a lot of time and energy moving through small, inconsequential decisions throughout the day, you’re not going to have the mental strength for the big decisions. If you waste attention and energy on shallow tasks, you’ll have little attention or energy left for the big stuff that you really care about. And if you don’t make time to focus on the big stuff—the stuff that matters most to you—you’re less likely to create fulfilling days.

Cutting back on the nonstop decision-making and pseudo-multitasking that dominates our lives doesn’t only benefit knowledge workers or people working on creative projects. Focusing and being present can make even the most mundane activity more enjoyable and fulfilling. If your job is to respond to customer service inquiries, you can focus on that, not that and Instagram and the news. If your job is taking care of your children, you can focus on that (or them), not on child care and scrolling through Facebook and making a phone call. If your job in this moment is to pay your bills, try to focus on that, not that and your overflowing email inbox and the webinar playing in a corner of the screen and a Skype message from a colleague flashing on the toolbar.

Focus on the task in front of you. When you finish that task for the day, you truly finish for the day. In your computer-brain, you save the work and close the program before opening the next one. Maybe you even restart the computer by going for a walk after installing some updates that you’ve been postponing for a couple of days. No multitasking, no switching back-and-forth, no unnecessary decisions, no lingering guilt about having picked the easy task yet again. The formula for making your work a little more fulfilling is pretty simple. As the blog Lifehacker put it in 2010: “One thing at a time. Most important thing first. Start now.”

To read more from Reframe the Day, head here and grab your copy, or just search for “Reframe the Day” wherever books are sold online. All profits from book sales support the Covid-19 response efforts of Direct Relief.