Deep Work by Cal Newport: Key Points and Summary

deep work rules for focused success in a distracted World written by Cal Newport introduction in the Swiss Canton of Saint Gallen near the northern Banks of Lake Zurich is a village named bollingan in 1922 the psychiatrist Carl Jung chose this spot to begin building a retreat he began with a basic two-story Stone House he called the tower after returning from a trip to India where he observed the practice of adding meditation rooms to homes he expanded the complex to include a private office in my retiring room I am by myself Jung said of the space I keep the key with me all the time no one else is allowed in there except with my permission in his book daily rituals journalist Mason Curry sorted through various sources on Jung to recreate the psychiatrist&#39;s work habits at the tower you would rise at 7am Curry reports and after a big breakfast he would spend two hours of undistracted riding time in his private office his afternoons would often consist of meditation or long walks in the surrounding Countryside there was no electricity at the tower so as day gave way to night light came from oil lamps and heat from the fireplace Jung would retire to bed by 10 pm the feeling of repose and renewal that I had in this Tower was intense from the start he said though it&#39;s tempting to think of bollingan tower as a vacation home if we put it into the context of Jung&#39;s career at this point it&#39;s clear that the Lakeside retreat was not built as an escape from work in 1922 when Jung bought the property he could not afford to take a vacation only one year earlier in 1921 he had published psychological types a seminal book that solidified many differences that had been long developing between Jung&#39;s thinking and the ideas of his one-time friend and Mentor Sigmund Freud to disagree with Freud in the 1920s was a bold move to back up his book Yoon needed to stay sharp and produce a stream of smart articles and books further supporting and establishing analytical psychology the eventual name for his new school of thought Jung&#39;s lectures and Counseling Practice kept him busy in Zurich this is clear but he wasn&#39;t satisfied with busyness alone he wanted to change the way we understood the unconscious and this goal required deeper more careful thought than he could manage amid his hectic City lifestyle Jung retreated to bollingan not to escape his professional life but instead to advance it Carl Jung went on to become one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century there are of course many reasons for his eventual success in this book however I&#39;m interested in his commitment to the following skill which almost certainly played a key role in his accomplishments deep work professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit these efforts create new value improve your skill and are hard to replicate deep work is necessary to ring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity we now know from Decades of research in both Psychology and Neuroscience that the state of mental strain that accompanies deep work is also necessary to improve your abilities deep work in other words was exactly the type of effort needed to stand out in a cognitively demanding field like academic psychiatry in the early 20th century the term deep work is my own and is not something Carl Jung would have used but his actions during this period were those of someone who understood the underlying concept Jung built a tower out of stone in the woods to promote deep work in his professional life a task that required time energy and money it also took him away from more immediate Pursuits as Mason Curry writes Jung&#39;s regular Journeys to balinggan reduced the time he spent on his clinical work noting although he had many patients who relied on him Jung was not shy about taking time off deep work though a burden to prioritize was crucial for his goal of changing the world indeed if you study the lives of other influential figures from both distant and recent history you&#39;ll find that a commitment to deep work is a common theme the 16th century essayist Michelle de montane for example pre-figured Jung by working in a private Library he built in the southern Tower guarding the stone walls of his French Chateau while Mark Twain wrote much of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in a shed on the property of the Quarry Farm in New York where he was spending the summer Twain&#39;s study was so isolated from the main house that his family took to blowing a horn to attract his attention for meals moving forward in history consider the screenwriter and director Woody Allen in the 44-year period between 1969 and 2013. Woody Allen wrote and directed 44 films that received 23 Academy Award nominations an absurd rate of artistic productivity throughout this period Allen never owned a computer instead completing all his writing free from electronic distraction on a German Olympia sm-3 manual typewriter Allen is joined in his rejection of computers by Peter Higgs a theoretical physicist who performs his work in such disconnected isolation that journalists couldn&#39;t find him after it was announced he had won the Nobel Prize JK Rowling on the other hand does use a computer but was famously absent from social media during the writing of her Harry Potter novels even though this period coincided with the rise of the technology and its popularity among media figures rolling staff finally started a Twitter account in her name in the fall of 2009 as she was working on the Casual Vacancy and for the first year and a half her only tweet read this is the real me but you won&#39;t be hearing from me often I&#39;m afraid as pen and paper is my priority at the moment deep work of course is not limited to the historical or technophobic Microsoft CEO Bill Gates famously conducted think weeks twice a year during which he would isolate himself often in a Lakeside Cottage to do nothing but read and think big thoughts it was during a 1995 think week that Gates wrote his famous internet tidal wave memo that turned Microsoft&#39;s attention to an upstart company called Netscape Communications and in an ironic twist Neil Stevenson the acclaimed cyberpunk author who helped form our popular conception of the internet age is near impossible to reach electronically his website offers no email address and features an essay about why he is purposefully bad at using social media here&#39;s how he once explained the Omission if I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long consecutive uninterrupted time chunks I can write novels if I instead get interrupted a lot what replaces it instead of a novel that will be around for a long time there is a bunch of email messages that I have sent out to individual persons the ubiquity of deep work among influential individuals is important to emphasize because it stands in sharp contrast to the behavior of most modern knowledge workers a group that&#39;s rapidly forgetting the value of going deep the reason knowledge workers are losing their familiarity with deep work is well established Network Tools this is a broad category that captures communication services like email and SMS social media networks like Twitter and Facebook and the shiny tangle of infotainment sites like BuzzFeed and Reddit in aggregate the rise of these tools combined with ubiquitous access to them through smartphones and networked office computers has fragmented most knowledge workers attention into slivers a 2012 McKinsey study found that the average knowledge worker now spends more than 60 percent of the work week engaged in electronic communication and internet searching with close to 30 percent of a worker&#39;s time dedicated to reading and answering email alone this state of fragmented attention cannot accommodate deep work which requires long periods of uninterrupted thinking at the same time however modern knowledge workers are not loafing in fact they report that they are as busy as ever what explains the discrepancy a lot can be explained by another type of effort which provides a counterpart to the idea of deep work shallow work non-cognitively demanding logistical style tasks often performed while distracted these efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate in an age of Network Tools in other words knowledge workers increasingly replace deep work with the shallow alternative constantly sending and receiving email messages like human Network routers with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction larger efforts that would be well served by deep thinking such as forming a new business strategy or writing an important Grant application get fragmented into distracted dashes that produce muted quality to make matters worse for depth there&#39;s increasing evidence that this shift toward the shallow is not a choice that can be easily reversed spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce Your Capacity to perform deep work what the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation admitted journalist Nicholas Carr in an oft-cited 2008 Atlantic article and I&#39;m not the only one Carr expanded this argument into a book the shallows which became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize to write the shallows appropriately enough Carr had to move to a cabin and forcibly disconnect the idea that Network Tools are pushing our work from the deep toward the shallow is not new the shallows was just the first in a series of recent books to examine the internet&#39;s effect on our brains and work habits these subsequent titles include William Powers Hamlet&#39;s Blackberry John Freeman&#39;s the tyranny of email and Alex sujang kin pang&#39;s the distraction addiction all of which agree more or less that Network Tools are distracting us from work that requires unbroken concentration while simultaneously degrading our capacity to remain focused given this existing body of evidence I will not spend more time in this book trying to establish this point we can I hope stipulate that Network Tools negatively impact deep work I&#39;ll also sidestep any Grand arguments about the long-term societal consequence of this shift as such arguments tend to open in passable Rifts on one side of the debate are techno Skeptics like Geron Lanier and John Freeman who suspect that many of these tools at least in their current state damage Society while on the other side techno-optimists like Clive Thompson argue that their changing Society for sure but in ways that&#39;ll make us better off Google for example might reduce our memory but we no longer need good memories as in the moment we can now search for anything we need to know I have no stance on this philosophical debate my interest in this matter instead veers toward a thesis of much more pragmatic and individualized interest our work culture shift toward the shallow whether you think it&#39;s philosophically good or bad is exposing a massive economic and personal opportunity for the few who recognize the potential of resisting this trend and prioritizing depth an opportunity that not too long ago was leveraged by a board young consultant from Virginia named Jason Ben there are many ways to discover that you&#39;re not valuable in our economy for Jason Ben the lesson was made clear when he realized not long after taking a job as a Financial Consultant that the vast majority of his work responsibilities could be automated by a clutch together Excel script The Firm that hired Ben produced reports for banks involved in complex deals it was about as interesting as it sounds Ben joked in one of our interviews the report creation process required hours of manual manipulation of data in a series of Excel spreadsheets when he first arrived it took Ben up to six hours per report to finish this stage the most efficient veterans at the firm could complete this task in around half the time this didn&#39;t sit well with Ben the way it was taught to me the process seemed clunky and manually intensive Ben recalls he knew that Excel has a feature called macros that allows users to automate common tasks Ben read articles on the topic and soon put together a new worksheet wired up with a series of these macros that could take the six hour process of manual data manipulation and replace it essentially with a button click a report writing process that originally took him a full work day could now be reduced to less than an hour Ben is a smart guy he graduated from an elite College the University of Virginia with a degree in economics and like many in his situation he had Ambitions for his career it didn&#39;t take him long to realize that these Ambitions would be thwarted so long as his main professional skills could be captured in an Excel macro he decided therefore he needed to increase his value to the world after a period of research Ben reached a conclusion he would he declared to his family quit his job as a human spreadsheet and become a computer programmer as is often the case with such Grand plans however there was a hitch Jason Ben had no idea how to write code as a computer scientist I can confirm an obvious point programming computers is hard most new developers dedicate a four-year college education to learning the ropes before their first job and even then competition for the best spots is fierce Jason Ben didn&#39;t have this time after his Excel Epiphany he quit his job at the financial firm and moved home to prepare for his next step his parents were happy he had a plan but they weren&#39;t happy about the idea that this return home might be long term Ben needed to learn a hard skill and needed to do so fast it&#39;s here that Ben ran into the same problem that holds back many knowledge workers from navigating into more explosive career trajectories learning something complex like computer programming requires intense uninterrupted concentration on cognitively demanding Concepts the type of concentration that drove Carl Jung to the woods surrounding Lake Zurich this task in other words is an act of deep work most knowledge workers however as I argued earlier in this introduction have lost their ability to perform deep work Ben was no exception to this trend I was always getting on the Internet and checking my email I couldn&#39;t stop myself it was a compulsion Ben said describing himself during the period leading up to his quitting his Finance job to emphasize his difficulty with depth Ben told me about a project that a supervisor at the finance firm once brought to him they wanted me to write a business plan he explained Ben didn&#39;t know how to write a business plan so he decided he would find and read five different existing plans comparing and contrasting them to understand what was needed this was a good idea but Ben had a problem I couldn&#39;t stay focused there were days during this period he now admits when he spent almost every minute 98 of my time surfing the web the business plan project a chance to distinguish himself early in his career fell to the Wayside by the time he quit Ben was well aware of his difficulties with deep work so when he dedicated himself to learning how to code he knew he had to simultaneously teach his mind how to go deep his method was drastic but effective I locked myself in a room with no computer just textbooks note cards and a highlighter he would highlight the computer programming textbooks transfer the ideas to note cards and then practice them out loud these periods free from electronic distraction were hard at first but Ben gave himself no other option he had to learn this material and he made sure there was nothing in that room to distract him Over time however he got better at concentrating eventually getting to a point where he was regularly clocking five or more disconnected hours per day in the room focused without distraction on learning this hard new skill I probably read something like 18 books on the topic by the time I was done he recalls after two months locked away studying Ben attended the notoriously difficult Dev boot camp a hundred hour a week crash course in web application programming while researching the program Ben found a student with a PhD from Princeton who had described Dev as the hardest thing I&#39;ve ever done in my life given both his preparation and his newly honed ability for deep work Ben excelled some people show up not prepared he said they can&#39;t focus they can&#39;t learn quickly only half the students who started the program with Ben ended up graduating on time Ben not only graduated but was also the top student in his class the Deep work paid off Ben quickly landed a job as a developer at a San Francisco Tech startup with 25 million dollars in Venture funding and its pick of employees when Ben quit his job as a Financial Consultant only half a year earlier he was making forty thousand dollars a year his new job as a computer developer paid a hundred thousand dollars an amount that can continue to grow essentially without limit in the Silicon Valley Market along with his skill level when I last spoke with Ben he was thriving in his new position a newfound devotee of deep work he rented an apartment across the street from his office allowing him to show up early in the morning before anyone else arrived and work without distraction on good days I can get in four hours of focus before the first meeting he told me then maybe another three to four hours in the afternoon and I do mean Focus no email no Hacker News a website popular among Tech types just programming for someone who admitted to sometimes spending up to 98 of his day in his old job surfing the web Jason Ben&#39;s transformation is nothing short of astonishing Jason Ben&#39;s story highlights a crucial lesson deep work is not some nostalgic affectation of writers in early 20th century philosophers it&#39;s instead a skill that has great value today there are two reasons for this value the first has to do with learning we have an information economy that&#39;s dependent on complex systems that change rapidly some of the computer languages Ben learned for example didn&#39;t exist 10 years ago and will likely be outdated 10 years from now similarly someone coming up in the field of marketing in the 1990s probably had no idea that today they&#39;d need to master digital Analytics to remain valuable in our economy therefore you must Master the art of quickly learning complicated things this task requires deep work if you don&#39;t cultivate this ability you&#39;re likely to fall behind this technology advances the second reason that deep work is valuable is because the impacts of the digital Network Revolution cut both ways if you can create something useful its reachable audience EG employers or customers is essentially Limitless which greatly magnifies your reward on the other hand if what you&#39;re producing is mediocre then you&#39;re in trouble as it&#39;s too easy for your audience to find a better alternative online whether you&#39;re a computer programmer writer marketer consultant or entrepreneur your situation has become similar to Jung trying to outwit Freud or Jason Ben trying to hold his own in a hot startup to succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you&#39;re capable of producing a task that requires depth the growing necessity of deep work is new in an industrial economy there was a small skilled labor and professional class for which deep work was crucial but most workers could do just fine without ever cultivating an ability to concentrate without distraction they were paid to crank widgets and not much about their job would change in the decades they kept it but as we shift to an information economy more and more of our population are knowledge workers and deep work is becoming a key currency even if most haven&#39;t yet recognized this reality deep work is not in other words an old-fashioned skill falling into irrelevance it&#39;s instead a crucial ability for anyone looking to move ahead in a globally competitive information economy that tends to chew up and spit out those who aren&#39;t earning their keep the real rewards are reserved not for those who are comfortable using Facebook a shallow task easily replicated but instead for those who are comfortable building the Innovative distributed systems that run the service a decidedly deep task hard to replicate deep work is so important that we might consider it to use the phrasing of business writer Eric Barker the superpower of the 21st Century we have now seen two strands of thought one about the increasing scarcity of deep work and the other about its increasing value which we can combine into the idea that provides the foundation for everything that follows in this book the Deep work hypothesis the ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy as a consequence the few who cultivate this skill and then make it the core of their working life will thrive this book has two goals pursued in two parts the first tackled in part one is to convince you that the Deep work hypothesis is true the second tackled in part two is to teach you how to take advantage of this Reality by training your brain and transforming your work habits to place deep work at the core of your professional life before diving into these details however I&#39;ll take a moment to explain how I became such a devotee of depth I&#39;ve spent the past decade cultivating my own ability to concentrate on hard things to understand the origins of this interest it helps to know that I&#39;m a theoretical computer scientist who performed my doctoral training in mit&#39;s famed theory of computation group a professional setting where the ability to focus is considered a crucial occupational skill during these years I shared a graduate student office down the hall from a MacArthur genius grant winner a professor who was hired at MIT before he was old enough to legally drink it wasn&#39;t uncommon to find this theoretician sitting in the common space staring at markings on a whiteboard with a group of visiting Scholars arrayed around him also sitting quietly and staring this could go on for hours I&#39;d go to lunch I&#39;d come back still staring this particular Professor is hard to reach he&#39;s not on Twitter and if he doesn&#39;t know you he&#39;s unlikely to respond to your email last year he published 16 papers this type of fierce concentration permeated the atmosphere during my student years not surprisingly I soon developed a similar commitment to death to the Chagrin of both my friends and the various publicists I&#39;ve worked with on my books I&#39;ve never had a Facebook or Twitter account or any other social media presence outside of a Blog I don&#39;t web Surf and get most of my news from my home delivered Washington Post and NPR I&#39;m also generally hard to reach my author website doesn&#39;t provide a personal email address and I didn&#39;t own my first smartphone until 2012 when my pregnant wife gave me an ultimatum you have to have a phone that works before our son is born on the other hand my commitment to depth has rewarded me in the 10-year period following my college graduation I published four books earned a PhD wrote peer-reviewed academic papers at a high rate and was hired as a tenure track professor at Georgetown University I maintain this voluminous production while rarely working past 5 or 6 PM during the work week this compressed schedule is possible because I&#39;ve invested significant effort to minimize the shallow in my life while making sure I get the most out of the time this frees up I build my days around a core of carefully chosen deep work with the shallow activities I absolutely cannot avoid batched into smaller bursts at the peripheries of my schedule three to four hours a day five days a week of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration it turns out can produce a lot of valuable output my commitment to depth has also returned non-professional benefits for the most part I don&#39;t touch a computer between the time when I get home from work and the next morning when the new work day begins the main exception being blog posts which I like to write after my kids go to bed this ability to fully disconnect as opposed to the more standard practice of sneaking in a few quick work email checks or giving into frequent surveys of social media sites allows me to be present with my wife and two sons in the evenings and read a surprising number of books for a busy father of two more generally the lack of distraction in my life tones down that background hum of nervous mental energy that seems to increasingly pervade people&#39;s daily lives I&#39;m comfortable being bored and this can be a surprisingly rewarding skill especially on a lazy DC summer night listening to a Nationals game slowly unfold on the radio this book is best described as an attempt to formalize and explain my attraction to depth over shallowness and to detail the types of strategies that have helped me act on this attraction I&#39;ve committed this thinking to words in part to help you follow my lead in rebuilding your life around deep work but this isn&#39;t the whole story my other interest in distilling and clarifying these thoughts is to further develop my own practice my recognition of the deep work hypothesis has helped me Thrive but I&#39;m convinced that I haven&#39;t yet reached my full value producing potential as you struggle and ultimately Triumph with the ideas and rules and the chapters ahead you can be assured that I&#39;m following suit ruthlessly calling the shallow and painstakingly cultivating the intensity of my depth you&#39;ll learn how I fare in this book&#39;s conclusion when Carl Jung wanted to revolutionize the field of Psychiatry he built a retreat in the woods Jung&#39;s bollingan Tower became a place where he could maintain his ability to think deeply and then apply the skill to produce work of such stunning originality that it changed the world in the chapters ahead I&#39;ll try to convince you to join me in the effort to build our own personal balingan Towers to cultivate an ability to produce real value in an increasingly distracted world and to recognize a truth embraced by the most productive and important personalities of generations past a deep life is a good life part one the idea chapter one deep work is valuable as election day loomed in 2012 traffic at the New York Times website spiked as is normal during moments of national importance but this time something was different a wildly disproportionate fraction of this traffic more than 70 percent by some reports was visiting a single location in the sprawling domain it wasn&#39;t a front page breaking news story and it wasn&#39;t commentary from one of the paper&#39;s Pulitzer prize-winning columnists it was instead a Blog run by a baseball stats geek turned election forecaster named Nate silver less than a year later ESPN and ABC News lured silver away from the times which tried to retain him by promising a staff of up to a dozen riders in a major deal that would give Silver&#39;s operation a role in everything from Sports to weather to network news segments to improbably enough Academy Awards telecasts though there is debate about the methodological rigor of Silver&#39;s hand-tuned models there are few who deny that in 2012 this 35 year old data whiz was a winner in our economy another winner is David heinermeier Hansen a computer programming star who created the Ruby on Rails website development framework which currently provides the foundation for some of the web&#39;s most popular destinations including Twitter and Hulu Hanson is a partner in the influential development firm base camp called 37 signals until 2014. Hanson doesn&#39;t talk publicly about the magnitude of his profit share from base camp or his other Revenue sources but we can assume they&#39;re lucrative given that Hanson splits his time between Chicago Malibu and Marbella Spain where he dabbles in high performance race car driving our third and final example of a clear winner in our economy is John door a general partner in the famed Silicon Valley venture capital fund Kleiner Perkins Caufield and buyers door helped fund many of the key companies fueling the current technological Revolution including Twitter Google Amazon Netscape and Sun Microsystems the return on these Investments has been astronomical doors net worth as of this writing is more than three billion dollars why have silver Hanson endure done so well there are two types of answers to this question the first are micro in scope and focus on the personality traits and tactics that help drive this Trio&#39;s rise the second type of answers are more macro in that they focus Less on the individuals and more on the type of work they represent though both approaches to this core question are important the macro answers will prove most relevant to our discussion as they better illuminate what our current economy Rewards to explore this macro perspective we turn to a pair of MIT economists Eric benjolsson and Andrew McAfee who in their influential 2011 book Race Against the Machine provide a compelling case that among various forces at Play It&#39;s the rise of digital technology in particular that&#39;s Transforming Our labor markets in unexpected ways we are in the early throes of a great restructuring Bryn yolfson and McAfee explain early in their book our Technologies are racing ahead but many of our skills and organizations are lagging behind for many workers this lag predicts bad news as intelligent machines improve and the gap between machine and human abilities shrinks employers are becoming increasingly likely to hire new machines instead of new people and when only a human will do improvements in Communications and collaboration technology are making remote work easier than ever before motivating companies to Outsource key roles to Stars leaving the local talent pool underemployed this reality is not however universally grim as brinjalsen and McAfee emphasize this great restructuring is not driving down all jobs but is instead dividing them though an increasing number of people will lose in this new economy as their skills become automatable or easily outsourced there are others who will not only survive but Thrive becoming more valued and therefore more rewarded than before brinjal Center McAfee aren&#39;t alone in proposing this bimodal trajectory for the economy in 2013 for example the George Mason Economist Tyler Cowan published average is over a book that Echoes this thesis of a digital division but what makes brinjalsson and McAfee&#39;s analysis particularly useful is that they proceed to identify three specific groups that will fall on the lucrative side of this divide and reap a disproportionate amount of the benefits of the intelligent Machine age not surprisingly it&#39;s to these three groups that silver Hansen and door happen to belong let&#39;s touch on each of these groups in turn to better understand why they&#39;re suddenly so valuable the high-skilled workers renovsen and McAfee call the group personified by Nate silver the high skilled workers advances such as Robotics and voice recognition are automating many low-skilled positions but as these economists emphasize other Technologies like data visualization analytics high-speed Communications and rapid prototyping have augmented the contributions of more abstract and data-driven reasoning increasing the values of these jobs in other words those with the oracular ability to work with and tease valuable results out of increasingly complex machines will thrive Tyler Cowan summarizes this reality more bluntly the key question will be are you good at working with intelligent machines or not Nate silver of course with his comfort in feeding data into large databases then siphoning it out into his mysterious Monte Carlo simulations is the epitome of the high-skilled worker intelligent machines are not an obstacle to Silver&#39;s success but instead provide its precondition the superstars the ace programmer David heinermeier Hansen provides an example of the second group that brinjin and McAfee predict will thrive in our new economy Superstars high-speed data networks and collaboration tools like email and virtual meeting software have destroyed regionalism in many sectors of knowledge work it no longer makes sense for example to hire a full-time programmer put aside office space and pay benefits when you can instead pay one of the world&#39;s best programmers like Hanson for just enough time to complete the project at hand in this scenario you&#39;ll probably get a better result for less money while Hanson can service many more clients per year and will therefore also end up better off the fact that Hanson might be working remotely from Marbella Spain while your office is in Des Moines Iowa doesn&#39;t matter to your company as advances in communication and collaboration technology make the process near seamless this reality does matter however to the less skilled local programmers living in Des Moines and in need of a steady paycheck this same Trend holds for the growing number of fields where technology makes productive remote work possible Consulting marketing writing design and so on CE the talent Market is made universally accessible those at the peak of the market Thrive while the rest suffer in a seminal 1981 paper The Economist Sherwin Rosen worked out the mathematics Behind These winner take all markets one of his key insights was to explicitly Model Talent labeled innocuously with the variable Q in his formulas as a factor with imperfect substitution which Rosen explains as follows hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance in other words Talent is not a commodity you can buy in bulk and combine to reach the needed levels there&#39;s a premium to being the best therefore if you&#39;re in a marketplace where the consumer has access to all performers and everyone&#39;s Q value is clear the consumer will choose the very best even if the talent advantage of the best is small compared to the next rung down on the skill ladder the superstars still win the bulk of the market in the 1980s when Rosen studied this effect he focused on examples like movie stars and musicians where there existed Clear markets such as music stores and movie theaters where an audience has access to different performers and can accurately approximate their talent before making a purchasing decision the rapid rise of communication and collaboration Technologies has transformed many other formerly local markets into a similarly Universal Bazaar the small company looking for a computer programmer or public relations consultant now has access to an international marketplace of talent in the same way that the Advent of the record store allowed the Small Town music fan to bypass local musicians to buy albums from the world&#39;s best bands the Superstar effect in other words has a broader application today than Rosen could have predicted 30 years ago an increasing number of individuals in our economy are now competing with the rock stars of their sectors the owners the final group that will thrive in our new economy the group epitomized by John door consists of those with capital to invest in the new technologies that are driving the great restructuring as we&#39;ve understood since Marx access to Capital provides massive advantages it&#39;s also true however that some periods offer more advantages than others as brynoffson and McAfee point out post-war Europe was an example of a bad time to be sitting on a pile of cash as the combination of Rapid inflation and aggressive taxation wiped out old fortunes with surprising speed what we might call the Downton Abbey effect the great restructuring unlike the post-war period is a particularly good time to have access to Capital to understand why first recall that bargaining Theory a key component in standard economic thinking argues that when money is made through the combination of capital investment and labor the rewards are returned roughly speaking proportional to the input as digital technology reduces the need for labor in many Industries the proportion of the rewards returned to those who own the intelligent machines is growing a venture capitalist in today&#39;s economy can fund a company like Instagram which was eventually sold for a billion dollars while employing only 13 people when else in history could such a small amount of Labor be involved in such a large amount of value with so little input from labor the proportion of this wealth that flows back to the machine owners in this case the Venture investors is without precedent it&#39;s no wonder that a venture capitalist I interviewed for my last book admitted to me with some concern everyone wants my job let&#39;s pull together the threads spun so far current economic thinking as I&#39;ve surveyed argues that the unprecedented growth and impact of technology are creating a massive restructuring of our economy in this new economy three groups will have a particular Advantage those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines those who are the best at what they do and those with access to Capital to be clear this great restructuring identified by economists like brynjolsen McAfee and Cowan is not the only economic trend of importance at the moment and the three groups mentioned previously are not the only groups who will do well but what&#39;s important for this book&#39;s argument is that these Trends even if not alone are important and these groups even if they are not the only such groups will thrive if you can join any of these groups therefore you&#39;ll do well if you cannot you might still do well but your position is more precarious the question we must now face is the obvious one how does one join these winners at the risk of quelling a rising enthusiasm I should first confess that I have no secret for quickly amassing capital and becoming the next John door if I had such Secrets it&#39;s unlikely I&#39;d share them in a book the other two winning groups however are accessible how to access them is the goal we tackle next how to become a winner in the new economy I just identified two groups that are poised to thrive and that I claim are accessible those who can work creatively with intelligent machines and those who are stars in their field what&#39;s the secret to Landing in these lucrative sectors of the widening digital divide I argue that the following two core abilities are crucial two core abilities for thriving in the new economy one the ability to quickly Master hard things 2. the ability to produce at an elite level in terms of both quality and speed let&#39;s begin with the first ability to start we must remember that we&#39;ve been spoiled by the intuitive and drop dead simple user experience of many consumer-facing Technologies like Twitter and the iPhone these examples however are consumer products not serious tools most of the intelligent machines driving the great restructuring are significantly more complex to understand and master consider Nate silver our earlier example of someone who thrives by working well with complicated technology if we dive deeper into his methodology we discover that generating data-driven election forecasts is not as easy as typing who will win more votes into a search box he instead maintains a large database of poll results thousands of polls from more than 250 posters that he feeds into stata a popular statistical analysis system produced by a company called staticorp these are not easy tools to master here for example is the type of command you need to understand to work with a modern database like silver uses create view cities as select name population altitude from capitals Union select name population altitude from non-underscore capitals databases of this type are interrogated in a language called SQL you send them commands like the one I just read to interact with their stored information understanding how to manipulate these databases is subtle the example command for example creates a view a virtual database table that pulls together data from multiple existing tables and that can then be addressed by the SQL commands like a standard table when to create views and how to do so well is a tricky question one of many that you must understand and master to tease reasonable results out of real-world databases working with our Nate silver case study consider the other technology he relies on stata this is a powerful tool and definitely not something you can learn intuitively after some modest tinkering here for example is a description of the features added to the most recent version of this software stated 13 adds many new features such as treatment effects multi-level glm power and sample size generalized sem forecasting effect sizes project manager long strings and blobs and much more silver uses this complex software with its generalized sem and blobs to build intricate models with interlocking Parts multiple regressions conducted on custom parameters which are then referenced as custom weights used in probabilistic expressions and so on the point of providing these details is to emphasize that intelligent machines are complicated and hard to master to join the group of those who can work well with these machines therefore requires that you hone your ability to master hard things and because these Technologies change rapidly this process of mastering hard things never ends you must be able to do it quickly again and again this ability to learn hard things quickly of course isn&#39;t just necessary for working well with intelligent machines it also plays a key role in the attempt to become a superstar in just about any field even those that have little to do with technology to become a world-class yoga instructor for example requires that you master an increasingly complex set of physical skills to excel in a particular area of medicine to give another example requires that you be able to quickly Master the latest research on relevant procedures to summarize these observations more succinctly if you can&#39;t learn you can&#39;t thrive now consider the second core ability from the list described earlier producing at an elite level if you want to become a superstar mastering the relevant skills is necessary but not sufficient you must then transform that latent potential into tangible results that people value many Developers for example can program computers well but David Hansen are examples Superstar from earlier leveraged this ability to produce Ruby on Rails the project that made his reputation Ruby on Rails required Hanson to push his current skills to their limit and produce unambiguously valuable and concrete results this ability to produce also applies to those looking to master intelligent machines it wasn&#39;t enough for Nate silver to learn how to manipulate large data sets and run statistical analyzes he needed to then show that he could use this skill to tease information from these machines the large audience cared about silver worked with many stats Geeks during his days at baseball prospectus but it was silver alone who put in the effort to adapt these skills to the new and more lucrative territory of election forecasting this provides another General observation for joining the ranks of winners in our economy if you don&#39;t produce you won&#39;t Thrive no matter how skilled or talented you are having established two abilities that are fundamental to getting ahead in our new technology disrupted world we can now ask the obvious follow-up question how does one cultivate these core abilities it&#39;s here that we arrive at a central thesis of this book the two core abilities just described depend on your ability to perform deep work if you haven&#39;t mastered this foundational skill you&#39;ll struggle to learn hard things or produce at an elite level the dependence of these abilities on deep work isn&#39;t immediately obvious it requires a closer look at the science of learning concentration and productivity the sections ahead provide this closer look and by doing so will help this connection between deep work and economic success shift for you from unexpected to unimpeachable deep work helps you quickly learn hard things let your mind become a lens thanks to the converging rays of attention let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant wholly absorbing idea this advice comes from antonan certiage a Dominican Friar and professor of moral philosophy who during the early part of the 20th century penned a slim but influential volume titled the intellectual life wrote the book as a guide to the development and deepening of the mind for those called to make a living in the world of ideas throughout the intellectual life certiage recognizes the necessity of mastering complicated material and helps prepare the reader for this challenge for this reason his book proves useful in our quest to better understand how people quickly Master hard cognitive skills to understand satyaja&#39;s advice let&#39;s return to the quote from earlier in these words which are echoed in many forms in the intellectual life certiage argues that to advance your understanding of your field you must tackle the relevant topics systematically allowing your converging rays of attention to uncover the truth latent in each in other words he teaches to learn requires intense concentration this idea turns out to be ahead of its time in reflecting on the life of the Mind in the 1920s certiage uncovered a fact about mastering cognitively demanding tasks that would take the academy another seven decades to formalize this task of formalization began in Earnest in the 1970s when a branch of psychology sometimes called performance psychology began to systematically explore what separates experts in many different fields from everyone else in the early 1990s K Anders Erickson a professor at Florida State University pulled together these strands into a single coherent answer consistent with the growing research literature that he gave a Punchy name deliberate practice Erickson opens his seminal paper on the topic with a powerful claim we deny that these differences between expert performers and normal adults are immutable instead we argue that the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a lifelong period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain American culture in particular loves the storyline of the Prodigy do you know how easy this is for me Matt Damon&#39;s character famously cries in the movie Good Will Hunting as he makes quick work of proofs that stymie the world&#39;s top mathematicians the line of research promoted by Erickson and now widely accepted with caveats destabilizes these myths to master a cognitively demanding task requires this specific form of practice there are a few exceptions made for natural Talent on this point too certiage seems to have been ahead of his time arguing in the intellectual life Men of Genius themselves were great only by bringing all their power to bear on the point on which they had decided to show their full measure Erickson couldn&#39;t have said it better this brings us to the question of what deliberate practice actually requires its core components are usually identified as follows one your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you&#39;re trying to improve or an idea you&#39;re trying to master two you receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it&#39;s most productive the first component is of particular importance to our discussion as it emphasizes that deliberate practice cannot exist alongside distraction and that it instead requires uninterrupted concentration as Ericsson emphasizes diffused attention is almost antithetical to the focused attention required by deliberate practice as psychologists Ericsson and the other researchers in his field are not interested in why deliberate practice Works they&#39;re just identifying it as an effective Behavior in the intervening decades since Ericsson&#39;s first major papers on the topic however neuroscientists have been exploring the physical mechanisms that drive people&#39;s improvements on hard tasks as the journalist Daniel Coyle surveys in his 2009 book The Talent Code these scientists increasingly believe the answer includes myelin a layer of fatty tissue that grows around neurons acting like an insulator that allows the cells to fire faster and cleaner 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&#39;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&#39;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 by contrast if you&#39;re trying to learn a complex new skill say SQL database Management in a state of low concentration perhaps you also have your Facebook feed open you&#39;re firing too many circuits simultaneously and haphazardly to isolate the group of neurons you actually want to strengthen in the century that has passed since Anton first wrote about using the mind like a lens to focus rays of attention we have advanced from this elevated metaphor to a decidedly less poetic explanation expressed in terms of oligodendrocyte cells but this sequence of thinking about thinking points to an inescapable conclusion to learn hard things quickly you must Focus intensely without distraction to learn in other words is an act of deep work if you&#39;re comfortable going deep you&#39;ll be comfortable mastering the increasingly complex systems and skills needed to thrive in our economy if you instead remain one of the many for whom depth is uncomfortable and distraction ubiquitous you shouldn&#39;t expect these systems and skills to come easily to you deep work helps you produce at an elite level Adam Grant produces at an elite level when I met Grant in 2013 he was the youngest Professor to be awarded tenure in the history of the Wharton School of Business at Penn a year later when I started writing this chapter and was just beginning to think about my own tenure process the claim was updated he&#39;s now the youngest full professor at Wharton the reason Grant Advanced so quickly in his corner of Academia is simple he produces in 2012 Grant published seven articles all of them in major journals this is an absurdly high rate for his field in which professors tend to work alone or in small professional collaborations and do not have large teams of students and post-docs to support their research in 2013 this count fell to five this is still absurdly high but below his recent standards he can be excused for this dip however because the same year he published a book titled give and take which popularized some of his research on relationships in business to say that this book was successful is an understatement it ended up featured on the cover of the New York Times magazine and went on to become a massive best seller when Grant was awarded full professorship in 2014 he&#39;d already written more than 60 peer-reviewed Publications in addition to his best-selling book soon after meeting Grant my own academic career on my mind I couldn&#39;t help but ask him about his productivity fortunately for me he was happy to share his thoughts on the subject it turns out that Grant thinks a lot about the mechanics of producing at an elite level he sent me for example a collection of PowerPoint slides from a workshop he attended with several other professors in his field the event was focused on data-driven observations about how to produce academic work at an Optimum rate these slides included detailed pie charts of time allocation per season a flow chart capturing relationship development with co-authors and a suggested reading list with more than 20 titles these business professors do not live the cliche of the absent-minded academic lost in books and occasionally stumbling on a big idea they see productivity as a scientific problem to systematically solve a goal Adam Grant seems to have achieved though Grant&#39;s productivity depends on many factors there&#39;s one idea in particular that seems Central to his method the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long uninterrupted stretches Grant performs this batching at multiple levels within the year he Stacks his teaching into the fall semester during which he can turn all of his attention to teaching well and being available to his students this method seems to work as Grant is currently the highest rated teacher at Wharton and the winner of multiple teaching Awards by batching his teaching in the fall Grant can then turn his attention fully to research in the spring and summer and Tackle this work with less distraction Grant also batches his attention on a smaller time scale within a semester dedicated to research he alternates between periods where his door is open to students and colleagues and periods where he isolates himself to focus completely and without distraction on a single research task he typically divides the writing of a scholarly paper into three discrete tasks analyzing the data writing a full draft and editing the draft into something publishable during these periods which can last up to three or four days he&#39;ll often put an out of office Auto responder on his email so correspondence will know not to expect a response it sometimes confuses my colleagues he told me they say you&#39;re not out of office I see you in your office right now but to Grant it&#39;s important to enforce strict isolation until he completes the task at hand my guess is that Adam Grant doesn&#39;t work substantially more hours than the average professor at an elite research institution generally speaking this is a group prone to workaholism but he still manages to produce more than just about anyone else in his field I argue that his approach to batching helps explain this Paradox in particular by consolidating his work into intense and uninterrupted pulses he&#39;s leveraging the following law of productivity high quality work produced equals time spent times intensity of focus if you believe this formula then grants habits make sense by maximizing his intensity when he works he maximizes the results he produces per unit of time spent working this is not the first time I&#39;ve encountered this formulaic conception of productivity it first came to my attention when I was researching my second book How to Become a Straight A Student many years earlier during that research process I interviewed around 50 ultra high scoring college undergraduates from some of the country&#39;s most competitive schools something I noticed in these interviews is that the very best students often studied less than the group of students right below them on the GPA rankings one of the explanations for this phenomenon turned out to be the formula detailed earlier the best students understood the role intensity plays in productivity and therefore went out of their way to maximize their concentration radically reducing the time required to prepare for tests or write papers without diminishing the quality of their results the example of Adam Grant implies that this intensity formula applies Beyond just undergraduate GPA it is also relevant to other cognitively demanding tasks but why would this be an interesting explanation comes from Sophie Leroy a business professor at the University of Minnesota in a 2009 paper titled intriguingly why is it so hard to do my work Leroy introduced an effect she called attention residue in the introduction to this paper she noted that other researchers have studied the effect of multitasking trying to accomplish multiple tasks simultaneously on performance but that in the modern knowledge work office once you got to a high enough level it was more common to find people working on multiple projects sequentially going from one meeting to the next starting to work on one project and soon after having to transition to another is just part of life in organizations Leroy explains the problem this research identifies with this work strategy is that when you switch from some task a to another task B your attention doesn&#39;t immediately follow a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task this residue gets especially thick if your work on task a was unbounded and of low intensity before you switched but even if you finish task a before moving on your attention remains divided for a while Leroy studied the effect of this attention residue on performance by forcing task switches in the laboratory in one such experiment for example she started her subjects working on a set of word puzzles in one of the trials she would interrupt them and tell them that they needed to move on to a new and challenging task in this case reading resumes and making hypothetical hiring decisions in other trials she let the subjects finish the puzzles before giving them the next task in between puzzling and hiring she would deploy a quick lexical decision game to quantify the amount of residue left from the first task the results from this and her similar experiments were clear people experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor performance on that next task and the more intense the residue the worse the performance the concept of attention residue helps explain why the intensity formula is true and therefore helps explain Grant&#39;s productivity by working on a single hard task for a long time without switching Grant minimizes the negative impact of attention residue from his other obligations allowing him to maximize performance on this one task when Grant is working for days in isolation on a paper in other words he&#39;s doing so at a higher level of Effectiveness than the standard Professor following a more distracted strategy in which the work is repeatedly interrupted by residue slathering interruptions even if you&#39;re unable to fully replicate Grant&#39;s extreme isolation we&#39;ll tackle different strategies for scheduling depth in part two the attention residue concept is still telling because it implies that the common habit of working in a state of semi-distraction is potentially devastating to your performance it might seem harmless to take a quick glance at your inbox every 10 minutes or so indeed many justify this Behavior as better than the old practice of leaving an inbox open on the screen at all times a straw man habit that few follow anymore but Lee Roy teaches us that this is not in fact much of an improvement that quick check introduces a new Target for your attention even worse by seeing messages that you cannot deal with at the moment which is almost always the case you&#39;ll be forced to turn back to the primary task with a secondary task left unfinished the attention residue left by such unresolved switches dampens your performance when we step back from these individual observations we see a clear argument form to produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction put another way the type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work if you&#39;re not comfortable going deep for extended periods of time it&#39;ll be difficult to get your performance to the peak levels of quality and quantity increasingly necessary to thrive professionally unless your talent and skills absolutely dwarf those of your competition the Deep workers among them will out produce you what about Jack Dorsey I&#39;ve now made my argument for why deep work supports abilities that are becoming increasingly important in our economy before we accept this conclusion however we must face a type of question that often arises when I discuss this topic what about Jack Dorsey Jack Dorsey helped found Twitter after stepping down as CEO he then launched the Payment Processing Company Square to quote a Forbes profile he is a disrupter on a massive scale and a repeat offender he is also someone who does not spend a lot of time in a state of deep work Dorsey doesn&#39;t have the luxury of long periods of uninterrupted thinking because at the time when the Forbes profile was written he maintained management duties at both Twitter where he remained chairman and square leading to a tightly calibrated schedule that ensures that the companies have a predictable weekly Cadence and that also ensures that dorsey&#39;s time and attention are severely fractured Dorsey reports for example that he ends the average day with 30 to 40 sets of meeting notes that he reviews and filters at night in the small spaces between all these meetings he believes in serendipitous availability I do a lot of my work at stand-up tables which anyone can come up to Dorsey said I get to hear all these conversations around the company this style of work is not deep to use a term from our previous section dorsey&#39;s attention residue is likely slathered on thick as he darts from one meeting to another letting people interrupt him freely in the brief interludes in between and yet we cannot say that dorsey&#39;s work is shallow because shallow work as defined in the introduction is low value and easily replicable while what Jack Dorsey does is incredibly valuable and highly rewarded in our economy as of this writing he was among the top one thousand richest people in the world with a net worth over 1.1 billion Jack Dorsey is important to our discussion because he&#39;s an Exemplar of a group we cannot ignore individuals who Thrive without depth when I titled the motivating question of this section what about Jack Dorsey I was providing a specific example of a more General query if deep work is so important why are there distracted people who do well to conclude this chapter I want to address this question so it doesn&#39;t nag at your attention as we dive deeper into the topic of depth in the sections ahead to start we must first note that Jack Dorsey is a high-level executive of a large company two companies in fact individuals with such positions play a major role in the category of those who Thrive without depth because the lifestyle of such Executives is famously and unavoidably distracted here&#39;s Carrie Trainor CEO of Vimeo trying to answer the question of how long he can go without email I can go a good solid Saturday without without well most of the day time without it I mean I&#39;ll check it but I won&#39;t necessarily respond at the same time of course these executives are better compensated and more important in the American economy today than in any other time in history Jack dorsey&#39;s success without depth is common at this Elite level of management once we&#39;ve stipulated this reality we must then step back to remind ourselves that it doesn&#39;t undermine the general value of depth why because the necessity of distraction in these Executives work lives is highly specific to their particular jobs a good chief executive is essentially a hard to automate decision engine not unlike IBM&#39;s jeopardy playing Watson system they have built up a hard-won repository of experience and have honed and proved an instinct for their Market they&#39;re then presented inputs throughout the day in the form of emails meetings site visits and the like that they must process and act on to ask a CEO to spend four hours thinking deeply about a single problem is a waste of what makes him or her valuable it&#39;s better to hire three smart subordinates to think deeply about the problem and then bring their solutions to the executive for a final decision this specificity is important because it tells us that if you&#39;re a high level executive at a major company you probably don&#39;t need the advice in the sections that follow on the other hand it also tells us that you cannot extrapolate the approach of these Executives to other jobs the fact that Dorsey encourages interruption or Kerry Trainor checks his email constantly doesn&#39;t mean that you&#39;ll share their success if you follow suit their behaviors are characteristic of their specific roles as corporate officers this rule of specificity should be applied to similar counter examples that come to mind while listening to the rest of this book there are we must continually remember certain corners of our economy where depth is not valued in addition to Executives we can also include for example certain types of salesmen and lobbyists for whom constant connection is their most valued currency there are even those who manage to grind out distracted success in fields where depth would help but at the same time don&#39;t be too hasty to label your job as necessarily non-deep just because your current habits make deep work difficult doesn&#39;t mean that this lack of depth is fundamental to doing your job well in the next chapter for example I tell the story of a group of high-powered management Consultants who were convinced that constant email connectivity was necessary for them to service their clients when a Harvard Professor forced them to disconnect more regularly as part of a research study they found to their surprise that this connectivity didn&#39;t matter nearly as much as they had assumed the clients didn&#39;t really need to reach them at all times and their performance as consultants improved once their attention became less fractured similarly several managers I know tried to convince me that they&#39;re most valuable when they&#39;re able to respond quickly to their team&#39;s problems preventing project log jams they see their role as enabling others productivity not necessarily protecting their own follow-up discussions however soon uncovered that this goal didn&#39;t really require attention fracturing connectivity indeed many software companies now deploy the scrum project management methodology which replaces a lot of this ad hoc messaging with regular highly structured and ruthlessly efficient status meetings often held standing up to minimize the urge to bloviate this approach frees up more managerial time for thinking deeply about the problems their teams are tackling often improving the overall value of what they produce put another way deep work is not the only skill valuable in our economy and it&#39;s possible to do well without fostering this ability but the niches where this is advisable are increasingly rare unless you have strong evidence that distraction is important for your specific profession you&#39;re best served for the reasons argued earlier in this chapter by giving serious consideration to depth chapter 2. deep work is rare in 2012 Facebook unveiled the plans for a new headquarters designed by Frank Gary at the center of this new building is what CEO Mark Zuckerberg called the largest open floor plan in the world more than 3 000 employees will work on movable Furniture spread over a 10-acre expanse Facebook of course is not the only Silicon Valley heavyweight to embrace the open Office concept when Jack Dorsey whom we met at the end of the last chapter bought the old San Francisco Chronicle building to House Square he configured the space so that his developers work in common spaces on Long shared desks we encourage people to stay out in the open because we believe in Serendipity and people walking by each other teaching new things Dorsey explained another big business Trend in recent years is the rise of instant messaging a Times article notes that this technology is no longer the province of Chatty teenagers it is now helping companies benefit from new productivity gains and improvements in customer response time a senior project manager at IBM boasts we send 2.5 million IMS within IBM each day one of the more successful recent entrants into the business I am space is Hall a Silicon Valley startup that helps employees move Beyond just chat and engage in real-time collaboration a San francisco-based developer I know described to me what it was like to work in a company that uses Hall the most efficient employees he explained set up their Text Editor to flash an alert on their screen when a new question or comment is posted to the company&#39;s Hall account they can then with a sequence of practiced keystrokes jump over to Hall type in their thoughts and then jump back to their coding with barely a pause my friends seemed impressed when describing their speed a third trend is the push for Content producers of all types to maintain a social media presence the New York Times a Bastion of Old World Media values now encourages its employees to tweet a hint taken by the more than 800 writers editors and photographers for the paper who now maintain a Twitter account does not outlier Behavior it&#39;s Instead The New Normal when the novelist Jonathan Franzen wrote a piece for the guardian calling Twitter a coercive development in the literary world he was widely ridiculed as out of touch the online magazine slate called Francis complaints a lonely war on the internet and fellow novelist Jennifer weiner wrote a response in the new Republic in which she argued franzen&#39;s a category of one a lonely voice issuing ex Cathedral edicts that can only apply to himself the sarcastic hashtag Jonathan Franzen hates soon became a fad I mentioned these three business Trends because they highlight a paradox in the last chapter I argued that deep work is more valuable than ever before in our shifting economy if this is true however you would expect to see this skill promoted not just by ambitious individuals but also by organizations hoping to get the most out of their employees as the examples provided emphasize this is not happening many other ideas are being prioritized is more important than deep work in the business world including as we just encountered serendipitous collaboration rapid communication and inactive presence on social media it&#39;s bad enough that so many Trends are prioritized ahead of deep work but to add insult to injury many of these Trends actively decrease one&#39;s ability to go deep open offices for example might create more opportunities for collaboration but they do so at the cost of massive distraction to quote the results of experiments conducted for a British TV special titled The Secret Life Of Office Buildings if you were just getting into some work and a phone goes off in the background it ruins what you were concentrating on said the neuroscientist who ran the experiments for the show even though you were not aware at the time the brain responds to distractions similar issues apply to the rise of real-time messaging email inboxes in theory can distract you only when you choose to open them whereas instant messenger systems are meant to be always active magnifying the impact of interruption Gloria Mark a professor of informatics at the University of California Irvine is an expert on the science of attention fragmentation in a well-cited study Mark and her co-authors observed knowledge workers in real offices and found that an interruption even if short delays the total time required to complete a task by a significant fraction this was reported by subjects as being very detrimental she&#39;s summarized with typical academic understatement forcing content producers onto social media also has negative effects on the ability to go deep serious journalists for example need to focus on doing serious journalism diving into complicated sources pulling out connective threads crafting persuasive prose so to ask them to interrupt this deep thinking throughout the day to participate in the frothy back and forth of online tittering seems irrelevant and somewhat demeaning at best and devastatingly distracting at worst the respected New Yorker staff writer George Packer captured this fear well in an essay about why he does not tweet Twitter is crack for media addicts it scares me not because I&#39;m morally Superior to it but because I don&#39;t think I could handle it I&#39;m afraid I&#39;d end up letting my son go hungry tellingly when he wrote that essay Packer was busy writing his book The unwinding which came out soon after and promptly won the national book award despite or perhaps aided by his lack of social media use to summarize big trends in business today actively decrease people&#39;s ability to perform deep work even though the benefits promised by these Trends EG increased Serendipity faster responses to requests and more exposure are arguably dwarfed by the benefits that flow from a commitment to deep work EG the ability to learn hard things fast and produce at an elite level the goal of this chapter is to explain this paradox the rareness of deep work I&#39;ll argue is not due to some fundamental weakness of the habit when we look closer at why we Embrace distraction in the workplace we&#39;ll find the reasons are more arbitrary than we might expect based on flawed thinking combined with the ambiguity and confusion that often Define knowledge work my objective is to convince you that Although our current Embrace of distraction is a real phenomenon it&#39;s built on an unstable foundation and can be easily dismissed once you decide to cultivate a deep work ethic the metric black hole in the fall of 2012 Tom Cochran the chief technology officer of Atlantic media became alarmed at how much time he seemed to spend on email so like any good techie he decided to quantify this unease observing his own behavior he measured that in a single week he received 511 email messages and sent 284. this averaged to around 160 emails per day over a five-day work week calculating further Cochrane noted that even if he managed to spend only 30 seconds per message on average this still added up to almost an hour and a half per day dedicated to moving information around like a human Network router this seemed like a lot of time spent on something that wasn&#39;t a primary piece of his job description as Cochrane recalls in a blog post he wrote about his experiment for the Harvard Business review these simple statistics got him thinking about the rest of his company just how much time were employees of Atlantic media spending moving around information instead of focusing on the specialized tasks they were hired to perform determined to answer this question Cochrane gathered company-wide statistics on emails sent per day and the average number of words per email he then combined these numbers with the employee&#39;s average typing speed reading speed and salary the result he discovered that Atlantic media was spending well over a million dollars a year to pay people to process emails with every message sent or received tapping the company for around 95 cents of labor costs a free and frictionless method of communication Cochrane summarized had soft costs equivalent to procuring a small company Learjet Tom cochrane&#39;s experiment yielded an interesting result about the literal cost of a seemingly harmless Behavior but the real importance of this story is the experiment itself and in particular its complexity it turns out to be really difficult to answer a simple question such as what&#39;s the impact of our current email habits on the bottom line Cochrane had to conduct a company-wide survey and gather statistics from the it infrastructure he also had to pull together salary data and information on typing and reading speed and run the whole thing through a statistical model to spit out his final result and even then the outcome is fungible as it&#39;s not able to separate out for example how much value was produced by this frequent expensive email use to offset some of its cost this example generalizes to most behaviors that potentially impede or improve deep work even though we abstractly accept that distraction has costs and depth has value these impacts is Tom Cochrane discovered are difficult to measure this isn&#39;t a trait unique to habits related to distraction and depth generally speaking as knowledge work makes more complex demands of the labor force it becomes harder to measure the value of an individual&#39;s efforts the French Economist Thomas picketty made this point explicit in his study of the extreme growth of executive salaries the enabling assumption driving his argument is that it is objectively difficult to measure individual contributions to a firm&#39;s output in the absence of such measures irrational outcomes such as executive salaries way out of proportion to the executive&#39;s marginal productivity can occur even though some details of piketty&#39;s theory are controversial the underlying assumption that it&#39;s increasingly difficult to measure individuals contributions is generally considered to quote one of his critics undoubtedly true we should not therefore expect the bottom line impact of depth destroying behaviors to be easily detected as Tom Cochrane discovered such metrics fall into an opaque region resistant to easy measurement a region I call the metric black hole of course just because it&#39;s hard to measure metrics related to deep work doesn&#39;t automatically lead to the conclusion that businesses will dismiss it we have many examples of behaviors for which it&#39;s hard to measure their bottom line impact but that nevertheless flourish in our business culture think for example of the three trends that opened this chapter or the outsize executive salaries that puzzled Thomas picketty but without clear metrics to support it any business behavior is vulnerable to unstable whim and shifting forces and in this volatile scrum deep work has fared particularly poorly the reality of this metric black hole is the backdrop for the arguments that follow in this chapter in these upcoming sections I&#39;ll describe various mindsets and biases that have pushed business away from Deep work and toward more distracting alternatives none of these behaviors would survive long if it was clear that they were hurting the bottom line but the metric black hole prevents this Clarity and allows the shift toward distraction we increasingly encounter in the professional world the principle of least resistance when it comes to distracting behaviors embraced in the workplace we must give a position of dominance to the now ubiquitous culture of connectivity where one is expected to read and respond to emails and related communication quickly in researching this topic Harvard Business School Professor Leslie perlow found that the professional she surveyed spent around 20 to 25 hours a week outside the office monitoring email believing it important to answer any email internal or external within an hour of its arrival you might argue as many do that this behavior is necessary in many fast-paced businesses but here&#39;s where things get interesting Perlo tested this claim in more detail she convinced Executives at the Boston Consulting Group a high pressure management consulting firm with an ingrained culture of connectivity to let her fiddle with the work habits of one of their teams she wanted to test a simple question does it really help your work to be constantly connected to do so she did something extreme she forced each member of the team to take one day out of the work week completely off no connectivity to anyone inside or outside the company at first the team resisted the experiment she recalled about one of the trials the partner in charge who had been very supportive of the basic idea was suddenly nervous about having to tell her client that each member of her team would be off one day a week the Consultants were equally nervous and worried that they were putting their careers in Jeopardy but the teen didn&#39;t lose their clients and its members did not lose their jobs instead the Consultants found more enjoyment in their work better communication among themselves more learning as we might have predicted given the connection between depth and skill development highlighted in the last chapter and perhaps most important a better product delivered to the client this motivates an interesting question why do so many follow the lead of the Boston Consulting Group and Foster a culture of connectivity even though it&#39;s likely as Perlo found in her study that it hurts employees well-being and productivity and probably doesn&#39;t help the bottom line I think the answer can be found in the following reality of workplace Behavior the principle of least resistance in a business setting without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors to the bottom line we will tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment to return to our question about why cultures of connectivity persist the answer according to our principle is because it&#39;s easier there are at least two big reasons why this is true the first concerns responsiveness to your needs if you work in an environment where you can get an answer to a question or a specific piece of information immediately when the need arises this makes your life easier at least in the moment if you couldn&#39;t count on this quick response time you&#39;d instead have to do more advanced planning for your work be more organized and be prepared to put things aside for a while and turn your attention elsewhere while waiting for what you requested all of this would make the day-to-day of your working life harder even if it produced more satisfaction and a better outcome in the long term the rise of professional instant messaging mentioned earlier in this chapter can be seen as this mindset pushed toward an extreme if receiving an email reply within an hour makes your day easier then getting an answer via instant message in under a minute would improve this game by an order of magnitude the second reason that a culture of connectivity makes life easier is that it creates an environment where it becomes acceptable to run your day out of your inbox responding to the latest missive with alacrity While others pile up behind it all the while feeling satisfyingly productive more on this soon if email were to move to the periphery of your workday you&#39;d be required to deploy a more thoughtful approach to figuring out what you should be working on and for how long this type of planning is hard consider for example David Allen&#39;s getting things done task management methodology which is a well-respected system for intelligently managing competing workplace obligations this system proposes a 15 element flow chart for making a decision on what to do next it&#39;s significantly easier to Simply chime in on the latest cc&#39;d email thread I&#39;m picking on constant connectivity as a case study in this discussion but it&#39;s just one of many examples of business behaviors that are antithetical to depth and likely reducing the bottom line value produced by the company that nonetheless thrives because in the absence of metrics most people fall back on what&#39;s easiest to name another example consider the common practice of setting up regularly occurring meetings for projects these meetings tend to pile up and Fracture schedules to the point where sustained Focus during the day becomes impossible why do they persist they&#39;re easier for many these standing meetings become a simple but blunt form of personal organization instead of trying to manage their time and obligations themselves they let the impending meeting each week force them to take some action on a given project and more generally provide a highly visible simulacrum of progress also consider the frustratingly common practice of forwarding an email to one or more colleagues labeled with a short open-ended interrogative such as thoughts these emails take the sender only a handful of seconds to write but can command many minutes if not hours in some cases of time and attention from their recipients to work toward a coherent response a little more care in crafting the message by the sender could reduce the overall time spent by all Parties by a significant fraction so why are these easily avoidable and time-sucking emails so common from the sender&#39;s perspective they&#39;re easier it&#39;s a way to clear something out of their inbox at least temporarily with a minimum amount of energy invested the principle of least resistance protected from scrutiny by the metric black hole supports work cultures that save us from the short-term discomfort of concentration and planning at the expense of long-term satisfaction and the production of real value by doing so this principle drives us toward shallow work in an economy that increasingly rewards depth it&#39;s not however the only Trend that leverages the metric black hole to reduce depth we must also consider the always present and always vexing demand toward productivity the topic will turn our attention to next busyness as a proxy for productivity there are a lot of things difficult about being a professor at a research-oriented university but one benefit that this profession enjoys is clarity how well or how poorly you&#39;re doing as an academic researcher can be boiled down to a simple question are you publishing important papers the answer to this question can even be Quantified as a single number such as the H index of a formula named for its inventor George Hirsch that processes your publication and citation counts into a single value that approximates your impact on your field in computer science for example an H index score above 40 is difficult to achieve and once reached is considered the mark of a strong long-term career on the other hand if your H index is in single digits when your case goes up for 10-year review you&#39;re probably in trouble Google Scholar a tool popular among academics for finding research papers even calculates your H index automatically so you can be reminded multiple times per week precisely where you stand in case you&#39;re wondering as of the morning when I&#39;m writing this chapter I&#39;m a 21. this Clarity simplifies decisions about what work habits a professor adopts or abandons here for example is the late Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman explaining in an interview one of his less Orthodox productivity strategies to do real good physics work you need absolute solid lengths of time it needs a lot of concentration if you have a job administrating anything you don&#39;t have the time so I have invented another myth for myself that I&#39;m irresponsible I&#39;m actively irresponsible I tell everyone I don&#39;t do anything if anyone asks me to be on a committee for admissions no I tell them I&#39;m irresponsible was adamant in avoiding administrative duties because he knew they would only decrease his ability to do the one thing that mattered most in his professional life to do real good physics work Feynman we can assume was probably bad at responding to emails and would likely switch universities if you would try to move him into an open office or demand that he tweet clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not I mentioned the example of professors because they&#39;re somewhat exceptional among knowledge workers most of whom don&#39;t share this transparency regarding how well they&#39;re doing their job here&#39;s the social critic Matthew Crawford&#39;s description of this uncertainty managers themselves inhabit a bewildering psychic landscape and are made anxious by the vague imperatives that they must answer to though Crawford was speaking specifically to the plight of the knowledge work middle manager the bewildering psychic landscape he references applies to many positions in this sector as Crawford describes in his 2009 Ode to the trades shop class as soulcraft he quit his job as a Washington DC Think Tank director to open a motorcycle repair shop exactly to escape this bewilderment the feeling of taking a broken machine struggling with it then eventually enjoying a tangible indication that he had succeeded the bike driving out of the shop under its own power provides a concrete sense of accomplishment he struggled to replicate when his day revolved vaguely around reports and communication strategies a similar reality creates problems for many knowledge workers they want to prove that they&#39;re productive members of the team and are earning their keep but they&#39;re not entirely clear what this goal constitutes they have no Rising H index or rack of repaired motorcycles to point to as evidence of their worth to overcome this Gap many seem to be turning back to the last time when productivity was more universally observable the Industrial Age to understand this claim recall that with the rise of assembly lines came the rise of the efficiency movement identified with its founder Frederick Taylor who would famously stand with a stopwatch monitoring the efficiency of worker movements looking for ways to increase the speed at which they accomplish their tasks in Taylor&#39;s era productivity was unambiguous widgets created per unit of time it seems that in today&#39;s business landscape many knowledge workers bereft of other ideas are turning toward this old definition of productivity and trying to solidify their value in the otherwise bewildering landscape of their professional lives David Allen for example even uses the specific phrase cranking widgets to describe a productive workflow knowledge workers I&#39;m arguing are tending toward increasingly visible busyness because they lack a better way to demonstrate their value let&#39;s give this tendency a name busyness as proxy for productivity in the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity doing lots of stuff in a visible manner this mindset provides another explanation for the popularity of many depth destroying behaviors if you send and answer emails at all hours if you schedule and attend meetings constantly if you weigh in on instant message systems like hall within seconds when someone poses a new question or if you roam your open Office bouncing ideas off all whom you encounter all of these behaviors make you seem busy in a public manner if you&#39;re using busyness as a proxy for productivity then these behaviors can seem crucial for convincing yourself and others that you&#39;re doing your job well this mindset is not necessarily irrational for some their jobs really do depend on such Behavior in 2013 for example Yahoo&#39;s new CEO Marissa Mayer banned employees from working at home she made this decision after checking the server logs for the virtual private Network that Yahoo employees use to remotely log into company servers mayor was upset because the employees working from home didn&#39;t sign in enough throughout the day she was in some sense punishing her employees for not spending more time checking email one of the primary reasons to log into the servers if you&#39;re not visibly busy she signaled I&#39;ll assume you&#39;re not productive viewed objectively however this concept is anachronistic knowledge work is not an assembly line and extracting value from information is an activity that&#39;s often at odds with busyness not supported by it remember for example Adam Grant the academic from our last chapter who became the youngest full professor at Wharton by repeatedly shutting himself off from the outside world to concentrate on writing such behavior is the opposite of being publicly busy if Grant worked for Yahoo Marissa Mayer might have fired him but this deep strategy turned out to produce a massive amount of value we could of course eliminate this anachronistic commitment to busyness if we could easily demonstrate its negative impact on the bottom line but the metric black hole enters the scene at this point and prevents such clarity this potent mixture of job ambiguity and lack of metrics to measure the effectiveness of different strategies allows behavior that can seem ridiculous when viewed objectively to thrive in the increasingly bewildering psychic landscape of our daily work as we&#39;ll see next however even those who have a clear understanding of what it means to succeed in their knowledge work job can still be lured away from depth all it takes is an ideology seductive enough to convince you to discard common sense The Cult of the internet consider Alyssa Rubin she&#39;s the New York Times bureau chief in Paris before that she was the bureau chief in Kabul Afghanistan where she reported from the front lines on the post-war reconstruction around the time I was writing this chapter she was publishing a series of hard-hitting articles that looked at the French government&#39;s complicity and the Rwandan genocide Reuben in other words is a serious journalist who is good at her craft she also at what I can only assume is the persistent urging of her employer tweets Reuben&#39;s Twitter profile reveals a steady and somewhat desultory string of missives one every two to four days as if Reuben receives a regular notice from the time social media desk a real thing reminding her to appease her followers with few exceptions the tweets simply mention an article she recently read and liked Reuben is a reporter not a media personality her value to her paper is her ability to cultivate important sources pull together facts and write articles that make us splash it&#39;s the Alyssa Rubens of the world who provide the times with its reputation and it&#39;s this reputation that provides the foundation for the paper&#39;s commercial success in an age of ubiquitous and addictive click bait so why is Alyssa Rubin urged to regularly interrupt this necessarily deep work to provide for free shallow content to a service run by an unrelated Media company based out of Silicon Valley and perhaps even more important why does this Behavior seem so normal to most people if we can answer these questions we&#39;ll better understand the final Trend I want to discuss relevant to the question of why deep work has become so paradoxically rare a foundation for our answer can be found in a warning provided by the late communication theorist and New York University Professor Neil Postman writing in the early 1990s as the personal computer revolution first accelerated Postman argue that our society was sliding into a troubling relationship with technology we were he noted no longer discussing the trade-offs surrounding new technologies balancing the new efficiencies against the new problems introduced if it&#39;s high tech we began to instead assume then it&#39;s good case closed he called such a culture a technopoly and he didn&#39;t mince words in warning against it technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World he argued in his 1993 book on the topic it does not make them illegal it does not make them immoral it does not even make them unpopular it makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant Postman died in 2003 but if he were alive today he would likely Express amazement about how quickly his fears from the 1990s came to fruition a slide driven by the unforeseen and sudden rise of the internet fortunately postman has an intellectual heir to continue this argument in the internet age the hyper citational social critic evgenie Moore is off in his 2013 book to save everything click here morsov attempts to pull back the curtains on our technopolic obsession with the internet a term he purposefully places in scare quotes to emphasize its role as an ideology saying it&#39;s this propensity to view the internet as a source of wisdom and policy advice that transforms it from a fairly uninteresting set of cables and network routers into a seductive and exciting ideology perhaps today&#39;s Uber ideology in murazav&#39;s critique we&#39;ve made the internet synonymous with the Revolutionary future of business and government to make your company more like the internet is to be with the times and to ignore these Trends is to be the proverbial buggy wit maker in an automotive age we no longer see internet tools as products released by for-profit companies funded by investors hoping to make a return and run by 20-somethings who are often making things up as they go along we&#39;re instead quick to idolize these digital doodads as a signifier of progress and a harbinger of a dare I say Brave New World this internet centrism to steal another morizoff term is what technopoly looks like today it&#39;s important that we recognize this reality because it explains the question that opened this section the New York Times maintains a social media desk and pressures its writers like Alyssa Rubin toward distracting Behavior because in an internet-centric technopoly such behavior is not up for discussion the alternative to not embrace all things internet is as Postman would say invisible and therefore irrelevant this invisibility explains the Uproar mentioned earlier that arose when Jonathan Franzen dared suggests that novelists shouldn&#39;t tweet it riled people not because they&#39;re well versed in book marketing and disagreed with franzen&#39;s conclusion but because it surprised them that anyone serious would suggest the irrelevance of social media in an internet-centric technopoly such a statement is the equivalent of a flag burning desecration not debate perhaps the near Universal reach of this mindset is best captured in an experience I had recently on my commute to the Georgetown campus where I work waiting for the light to change so I could cross Connecticut Avenue I idled behind a truck from a refrigerated supply chain logistics company refrigerated shipping is a complex competitive business that requires equal skill managing trade unions and Route scheduling it&#39;s the ultimate old school industry and in many ways is the opposite of the lean consumer-facing Tech startups that currently receive so much attention what struck me is I waited in traffic behind this truck however was not the complexity or scale of this company but instead a graphic that had been commissioned and then it fixed probably at significant expense on the back of this entire fleet of trucks a graphic that read like us on Facebook deep work is at a severe disadvantage in a technopoly because it builds on values like quality craftsmanship and Mastery that are decidedly old-fashioned and non-technological even worse to support deep work often requires the rejection of much of what is new and high tech deep work is exiled in favor of more distracting high-tech behaviors like the professional use of social media not because the former is empirically inferior to the latter indeed if we had hard metrics relating the impact of these behaviors on the bottom line our current technopoly would likely crumble but the metric black hole prevents such Clarity and allows us instead to elevate all things internet into morazov&#39;s feared Uber ideology in such a culture we should not be surprised that deep work struggles to compete against the shiny thromb of tweets likes tagged photos walls posts and all the other behaviors that were now taught are necessary for no other reason than that they exist bad for business good for you deep work should be a priority in today&#39;s business climate but it&#39;s not I&#39;ve just summarized various explanations for this paradox among them are the realities that deep work is hard and shallow work is easier that in the absence of clear goals for your job the visible busyness that surrounds shallow work becomes self-preserving and that our culture has developed a belief that if a behavior relates to the internet then it&#39;s good regardless of its impact on our ability to produce valuable things all of these Trends are enabled by the difficulty of directly measuring the value of depth or the cost of ignoring it if you believe in the value of depth this reality spells bad news for businesses in general as it&#39;s leading them to miss out on potentially massive increases in their value production but for you as an individual good news lurks the myopia of your peers and employers uncovers a great personal advantage assuming the trends outlined here continue depth will become increasingly rare and therefore increasingly valuable having just established that there&#39;s nothing fundamentally flawed about deep work and nothing fundamentally necessary about the distracting behaviors that displace it you can therefore continue with confidence with the ultimate goal of this book to systematically develop your personal ability to go deep and by doing so reap great rewards chapter 3. deep work is Meaningful Rick fur is a blacksmith he specializes in ancient and medieval metal working practices which he painstakingly recreates in his shop Door County Forge works I do all my work by hand and use tools that multiply my Force without limiting my creativity or interaction with the material he explains in his artist statement what may take me a hundred Blows By Hand can be accomplished in one by a large swaging machine this is the antithesis of my goal and to that end all my work shows evidence of the two hands that made it a 2012 PBS documentary provides a glimpse into Furr&#39;s world we learned that he works in a converted Barn in Wisconsin farm country not far inland from the scenic Sturgeon Bay of Lake Michigan fur often leaves the barn doors open to vent the heat of the forges one suspects his efforts framed by Farm Fields stretching to the horizon the setting is idyllic but the work can seem at first encounter brutish in the documentary fur is trying to recreate a viking era sword he begins by using a 1500 year old technique to smelt Crucible steel an unusually pure for the period form of the metal the result is an Ingot not much bigger than three or four stacked smartphones this dense Ingot must then be shaped and Polished into a long and elegant sword blade this part the initial breakdown is terrible fur says to the camera as he methodically heats the Ingot hits it with a hammer turns it hits it then puts it back in the Flames to start over the narrator reveals that it will take eight hours of this hammering to complete the shaping as you watch for a work however the sense of the labor shifts it becomes clear that he&#39;s not drearily whacking at the metal like a miner with a pickaxe every hit though forceful is carefully controlled he peers intently at the metal through thin framed intellectual glasses which seem out of place perched above his heavy beard and broad shoulders turning it just so for each impact you have to be very gentle with it or you will crack it he explains after a few more Hammer strikes he adds you have to nudge it slowly it breaks down then you start to enjoy it at one point about halfway through the smithing after fur has finished hammering out the desired shape he begins rotating the metal carefully in a narrow trough of burning charcoal as he stares at the blade something clicks it&#39;s ready he lifts the sword red with heat holding it away from his body as he strides swiftly toward a pipe filled with oil and plunges in the blade to cool it after a moment of relief that the blade did not crack into pieces a common Occurrence at this step fur pulls it from the oil the residual heat of the metal lights the fuel engulfing the sword&#39;s full length in yellow flames fur holds the burning sword up above his head with a single powerful arm and stares at it a moment before blowing out the fire during this brief pause the flame illuminates his face and his admiration is palpable to do it right it is the most complicated thing I know how to make fur explains and it&#39;s that challenge that drives me I don&#39;t need a sword but I have to make them Rick Furr is a master Craftsman whose work requires him to spend most of his day in a state of depth even a small slip in concentration can ruin dozens of hours of effort he&#39;s also someone who clearly finds great meaning in his profession this connection between deep work and a good life is familiar and widely accepted when considering the world of Craftsmen the satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy explains Matthew Crawford and we believe him but when we shift our attention to knowledge work this connection is muddied part of the issue is clarity Craftsmen like fur tackle professional challenges that are simple to Define but difficult to execute a useful imbalance when seeking purpose knowledge work exchanges this Clarity for ambiguity it can be hard to Define exactly what a given knowledge worker does and how it differs from another on our worst days it can seem that all knowledge work boils down to the same exhausting Royal of emails in PowerPoint with only the charts used in the slides differentiating one career from another fur himself identifies this blandness when he writes the world of information super highways and cyberspace has left me rather cold and disenchanted another issue muddying the connection between depth and meaning and knowledge work is the cacophony of voices attempting to convince knowledge workers to spend more time engaged in Shallow activities as elaborated in the last chapter we live in an era where anything internet related is understood by default to be Innovative and necessary depth destroying behaviors such as immediate email responses and an active social media presence are lauded while avoidance of these Trends generate suspicion no one would fault Rick fur for not using Facebook but if a knowledge worker makes this same decision then he&#39;s labeled an eccentric as I&#39;ve learned from personal experience just because this connection between depth and meaning is less clear in knowledge work however doesn&#39;t mean that it&#39;s non-existent the goal of this chapter is to convince you that deep work can generate as much satisfaction in an information economy as it so clearly does in a craft economy in the sections ahead I&#39;ll make three arguments to support this claim these arguments roughly follow a trajectory from the conceptually narrow to Broad starting with a neurological perspective moving to the psychological and ending with the philosophical I&#39;ll show that regardless of the angle from which you attack the issue of depth and knowledge work it&#39;s clear that by embracing depth over shallowness you can tap the same veins of meaning that drive Craftsmen like Rick fur the thesis of this final chapter in part one therefore is that a deep life is not just economically lucrative but also a life well lived a neurological argument for depth the science writer Winfred Gallagher stumbled onto a connection between attention and happiness after an unexpected and terrifying event a cancer diagnosis not just cancer she clarifies but a particularly nasty fairly Advanced kind as Gallagher recalls in her 2009 book wrapped as she walked away from the hospital after the diagnosis she formed a sudden and strong intuition this disease wanted to monopolize my attention but as much as possible I would focus on my life instead the cancer treatment that followed was exhausting and terrible but Gallagher couldn&#39;t help noticing in that corner of her brain honed by a career in non-fiction writing that her commitment to focus on what was good in her life movies walks and a 630 Martini worked surprisingly well her life during this period should have been mired in fear and pity but it was instead she noted often quite Pleasant her curiosity peaked Gallagher set out to better understand the role that attention that is what we choose to focus on and what we choose to ignore plays in defining the quality of our life after five years of science reporting she came away convinced that she was witness to a grand unified theory of the Mind like fingers pointing to the Moon other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education behavioral economics to family counseling similarly suggest that the skillful management of attention is the Cena quanon of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience this concept upends the way most people think about their subjective experience of life we tend to place a lot of emphasis on our circumstances assuming that what happens to us or fails to happen determines how we feel from this perspective the small scale details of how you spend your day aren&#39;t that important because what matters are the large-scale outcomes such as whether or not you get a promotion or move to that nicer apartment according to Gallagher Decades of research contradict this understanding our brains instead construct our world view based on what we pay attention to if you focus on a cancer diagnosis you and your life become unhappy and dark but if you focus instead on an evening Martini you in your life become more pleasant even though the circumstances in both scenarios are the same as Gallagher summarizes who you are what you think feel and do what you love is the sum of what you focus on in wrapped Gallagher surveys the research supporting this understanding of the Mind she cites for example the University of North Carolina psychologist Barbara Frederickson a researcher who specializes in the cognitive appraisal of emotions after a bad or disrupting occurrence in your life frederickson&#39;s research shows what you choose to focus on exerts significant leverage on your attitude going forward these simple choices can provide a reset button to your emotions she provides the example of a couple fighting over inequitable splitting of household chores rather than continuing to focus on your partner&#39;s selfishness and sloth she suggests you might focus on the fact that at least a festering conflict has been aired which is the first step toward a solution to the problem and to your improved mood this seems like a simple exhortation to look on the bright side but Fredrickson found that skillful use of these emotional leverage points can generate a significantly more positive outcome after negative events scientists can watch this effect in action all the way down to the neurological level Stanford psychologist Laura karstensen to name one such example used in fmri scanner to study the brain behavior of subjects presented with both positive and negative imagery she found that for young people their amygdala a center of emotion fired with activity at both types of imagery when she instead scanned the elderly the amygdala fired only for the positive images karstensen hypothesizes that the elderly subjects had trained the prefrontal cortex to inhibit the amygdala in the presence of negative stimuli these elderly subjects were not happier because their life circumstances were better than those of the young subjects they were instead happier because they had rewired their brains to ignore the negative and Savor the positive by skillfully managing their attention they improved their world without changing anything concrete about it we can now step back and use Gallagher&#39;s Grand Theory to better understand the role of deep work in cultivating a good life this Theory tells us that your world is the outcome of what you pay attention to so consider for a moment the type of mental World constructed when you dedicate significant time to deep endeavors there&#39;s a gravity and sense of importance inherent in deep work whether you&#39;re Rick fur smitting a sword or a computer programmer optimizing an algorithm Gallagher&#39;s Theory therefore predicts that if you spend enough time in this state your mind will understand your world as rich in meaning and importance there is however a hidden but equally important benefit to cultivating wrapped attention in your workday such concentration hijacks your attention apparatus preventing you from noticing the many smaller and Less Pleasant things that unavoidably and persistently populate Our Lives the psychologist nahali chick sent mahali whom we&#39;ll learn more about in the next section explicitly identifies this Advantage when he emphasizes the advantage of cultivating concentration so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant or to worry about problems danger is especially pronounced in knowledge work which due to its dependence on ubiquitous connectivity generates a devastatingly appealing Buffet of distraction most of which will if given enough attention leech meaning and importance from the world constructed by your mind to help make this claim more concrete I&#39;ll use myself as a test case consider for example the last five emails I sent before I began writing the first draft of this chapter following are the subject lines of these messages along with summaries of their contents re-urgent Cal Newport brand registration confirmation this message was in response to a standard scam in which a company tries to trick website owners into registering their domain in China I was annoyed that they kept spamming me so I lost my cool and responded feudally of course by telling them their scam would be more convincing if they spelled website correctly in their emails re Sr this message was a conversation with a family member about an article he saw in the Wall Street Journal re important advice this email was part of a conversation about optimal retirement investment strategies re-forward study hacks this email was part of a conversation in which I was attempting to find a time to meet with someone I know who was visiting my city a task Complicated by his fractured schedule during his visit re just curious this message was part of a conversation in which a colleague and I were reacting to some thorny office politics issues of the type that are frequent and cliched in academic departments these emails provide a nice case study of the type of shallow concerns that Vie for your attention in a knowledge work setting some of the issues presented in these sample messages are benign such as discussing an interesting article some are vaguely stressful such as the conversation on retirement saving strategies a type of conversation which almost always concludes with you not doing the right things some are frustrating such as trying to arrange a meeting around busy schedules and some are explicitly negative such as angry responses to scammers or worried discussions about office politics many knowledge workers spend most of their working day interacting with these types of shallow concerns even when they&#39;re required to complete something more involved the habit of frequently checking inboxes ensures that these issues remain at the Forefront of their attention Gallagher teaches us that this is a foolhardy way to go about your day as it ensures that your mind will construct an understanding of your working life that&#39;s dominated by stress irritation frustration and triviality the world represented by your inbox in other words isn&#39;t a pleasant world to inhabit even if your colleagues are all genial and your interactions are always upbeat and positive by allowing your attention to drift over the seductive landscape of the shallow you run the risk of falling into another neurological trap identified by Gallagher five years of reporting on attention have confirmed some home truths Gallagher reports among them is the notion that the idle mind is the devil&#39;s workshop when you lose focus your mind tends to fix on what could be wrong with your life instead of what&#39;s right a work day driven by the shallow from a neurological perspective is likely to be a draining and upsetting day even if most of the shallow things that capture your attention seem harmless or fun the implication of these findings is clear in work and especially knowledge work to increase the time you spend in a state of depth is to Leverage The Complex Machinery of the human brain in a way that for several different neurological reasons maximizes the meaning and satisfaction you&#39;ll associate with your working life after running my tough experiment with cancer I have a plan for living the rest of my life Gallagher concludes in her book I&#39;ll choose my targets with care then give them my wrapped attention in short I&#39;ll live the focused life because it&#39;s the best kind there is we&#39;d be wise to follow her lead a psychological argument for depth our second argument for why depth generates meaning comes from the work of one of the world&#39;s best known and most misspelled psychologists mahali cheekset mahali in the early 1980s cheek sent mahali working with Reed Larson a young colleague at the University of Chicago invented a new technique for understanding the psychological impact of everyday behaviors at the time it was difficult to accurately measure the psychological impact of different activities if you brought someone into a laboratory and asked her to remember how she felt at a specific point many hours ago she was unlikely to recall if you instead gave her a diary and asked her to record how she felt throughout the day she wouldn&#39;t be likely to keep up the entries with diligence it&#39;s simply too much work cheek sent mahali and Larson&#39;s breakthrough was to leverage new technology for the time to bring the question to the subject right when it mattered in more detail they outfitted experimental subjects with pagers these pagers would beep at randomly selected intervals in modern incarnations of this method smartphone apps play the same role when the Beeper went off the subjects would record what they were doing at the exact moment and how they felt in some cases they would be provided with a journal in which to record this information while in others they would be given a phone number to call to answer questions posed by a field worker because the beeps were only occasional but hard to ignore the subjects were likely to follow through with the experimental procedure and because the subjects were recording responses about an activity at the very moment they were engaged in it the responses were more accurate cheek sent mahali and Larson called the approach the experience sampling method esm and it provided unprecedented insight into how we actually feel about the Beats of our daily lives among many breakthroughs cheek sent mahali&#39;s work with esm helped validate a theory he had been developing over the preceding decade the best moments usually occur when a person&#39;s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile Sheik sent mahali calls this mental state flow a term he popularized with a 1990 book of the same title at the time this finding pushed back against conventional wisdom most people assumed and still do that relaxation makes them happy we want to work less and spend more time in the hammock but the results from cheek sent mahali&#39;s esm studies revealed that most people have this wrong ironically he writes jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time because like flow activities they have built-in goals feedback rules and challenges all of which encourage one to become involved in one&#39;s work to concentrate and lose oneself in it free time on the other hand is unstructured and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed when measured empirically people were happier at work and less happy relaxing than they suspected and is the esm studies confirmed the more such flow experiences that occur in a given week the higher the subject&#39;s life satisfaction human beings it seems are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging there is of course overlap between the theory of flow and the ideas of Winifred Gallagher highlighted in the last section both Point toward the importance of depth over shallowness but they focus on two different explanations for this importance Gallagher&#39;s writing emphasizes that the content of what we focus on matters if we give wrapped attention to important things and therefore also ignore shallow negative things we&#39;ll experience our working life as more important and positive cheek sent mahali&#39;s theory of Flow by contrast is mostly agnostic to the content of our attention though he would likely agree with the research cited by Gallagher his theory notes that the feeling of going deep is in itself very rewarding our minds like this challenge regardless of the subject the connection between deep work and flow should be clear deep work is an activity well suited to generate a flow State the phrases used by cheek sent mahali to describe what generates flow include Notions of stretching your mind to its limits concentrating and losing yourself in an activity all of which also describe deep work and as we just learned flow generates happiness combining these two ideas we get a powerful argument from psychology in favor of depth Decades of research stemming from cheek scent mahali&#39;s original esm experiments validate that the act of going deep orders the Consciousness in a way that makes life worthwhile cheek sent mahali even goes so far as to argue that modern companies should embrace this reality suggesting that jobs should be redesigned so that they resemble as closely as possible flow activities noting however that such a redesign would be difficult and disruptive see for example my arguments from the previous chapter cheek sent mahali then explains that it&#39;s even more important that the individual learn how to seek out opportunities for flow this ultimately is the lesson to come away with from our brief foray into the world of experimental psychology to build your working life around the experience of flow produced by Deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction a philosophical argument for depth our final argument for the connection between depth and meaning requires us to step back from the more concrete worlds of neuroscience and psychology and instead adopt a philosophical perspective I&#39;ll turn for help in this discussion to a pair of Scholars who know this topic well Herbert Dreyfus who taught philosophy at Berkeley for more than four decades and Sean doran&#39;s Kelly who at the time of this writing is the chair of Harvard&#39;s philosophy Department in 2011 Dreyfus and Kelly published a book all things shining which explores how Notions of sacredness and meaning have evolved throughout the history of human culture they set out to reconstruct this history because they&#39;re worried about its endpoint in our current ERA the world used to be in its various forms a world of sacred shining things Dreyfus and Kelly explained early in the book The Shining things now seem far away what happened between then and now the short answer the authors argue is Descartes from Descartes skepticism came the radical belief that the individuals seeking certainty trumped a God or King bestowing truth the resulting Enlightenment of course led to the concept of Human Rights and freed many from oppression but as Dreyfus and Kelly emphasize for all its good in the political arena in the domain of the metaphysical this thinking stripped the world of the order and sacredness essential to creating meaning in a post-enlightenment world we have tasked ourselves to identify what&#39;s meaningful and what&#39;s not an exercise that can seem arbitrary and induce a creeping nihilism the enlightenment&#39;s metaphysical Embrace of the autonomous individual leads not just to a boring life Dreyfus and Kelly worry it leads almost inevitably to a nearly unlivable one this problem might at first seem far removed from our quest to understand the satisfaction of depth but when we proceed to Dreyfus and Kelly&#39;s solution we will discover Rich new insights into the sources of meaning in professional Pursuits this connection should seem less surprising when it&#39;s revealed that Dreyfus and Kelly&#39;s response to Modern nihilism Builds on the very subject that opened this chapter the Craftsman craftsmanship Dreyfus and Kelly argue in their book&#39;s conclusion provides a key to reopening a sense of sacredness in a responsible manner to illustrate this claim they use an organizing example an account of a master wheel right the now lost profession of shaping wooden wagon wheels because each piece of wood is distinct it has its own personality they write after a passage describing the details of the wheel rights craft the woodworker has an intimate relationship with the wood he works its subtle virtues call out to be cultivated and cared for in this appreciation for the subtle virtues of his medium they note the Craftsman has stumbled onto something crucial in a post-enlightenment world a source of meaning cited outside the individual the wheel right doesn&#39;t decide arbitrarily which Virtues Of The Wood he works are valuable and which are not this value is inherent in the wood and the task it&#39;s meant to perform as Dreyfus and Kelly explain such sacredness is common to craftsmanship the task of a Craftsman they conclude is not to generate meaning but rather to cultivate in himself the skill of Discerning the meanings that are already there this frees the Craftsmen of the nihilism of autonomous individualism providing an ordered world of meaning at the same time this meaning seems safer than the sources cited in previous eras the wheel right the authors imply cannot easily use the inherent quality of a piece of pine to justify a despotic monarchy returning to the question of professional satisfaction Dreyfus and Kelly&#39;s interpretation of craftsmanship as a path to meaning provides a nuanced understanding of why the work of those like Rick fur resonates with so many of us the look of satisfaction on Furr&#39;s face as he works to extract Artistry from crude Metals these philosophers would argue is a look expressing appreciation for something Elusive and valuable in modernity a glimpse of the sacred once understood we can connect the sacredness inherent in traditional craftsmanship to the world of knowledge work to do so there are two key observations we must first make the first might be obvious but requires emphasis there&#39;s nothing intrinsic about the manual trades when it comes to generating this particular source of meaning any Pursuit be it physical or cognitive that supports high levels of skill can also generate a sense of sacredness to elaborate this point let&#39;s jump from the old-fashioned examples of carving wood or smithing metal to the modern example of computer programming consider this quote from the coding Prodigy Santiago Gonzalez describing his work to an interviewer beautiful code is short and concise so if you were to give that code to another programmer they would say oh that&#39;s well written code it&#39;s much like as if you were writing a poem Gonzalez discusses computer programming similarly to the way Woodworkers discuss their craft in the passages quoted by Dreyfus and Kelly the pragmatic programmer a well-regarded book in the computer programming field makes this connection between code and old style craftsmanship more directly by quoting the medieval Quarry workers Creed in its preface we who cut mere Stones must always be envisioning cathedrals the book then elaborates that computer programmers must see their work in the same way within the overall structure of a project there is always room for individuality and craftsmanship 100 years from now our engineering may seem as archaic as the techniques used by medieval Cathedral Builders seem to today&#39;s civil engineers while our craftsmanship will still be honored you don&#39;t in other words need to be toiling in an open-air Barn for your efforts to be considered the type of craftsmanship that can generate Dreyfus and Kelly&#39;s meaning a similar potential for craftsmanship can be found in most skilled jobs in the information economy whether you&#39;re a writer marketer consultant or lawyer your work is craft and if you hone your ability and apply it with respect and care then like the skilled wheel right you can generate meaning in the daily efforts of your professional life it&#39;s here that some might respond that their knowledge work job cannot possibly become such a source of meaning because their job subject is much too mundane but this is flawed thinking that our consideration of traditional craftsmanship can help correct in our current culture we place a lot of emphasis on job description our obsession with the advice to follow your passion the subject of my last book for example is motivated by the flawed idea that what matters most for your career satisfaction is the specifics of the job you choose in this way of thinking there are some rarified jobs that can be a source of satisfaction perhaps working in a non-profit or starting a software company while all others are soulless and Bland the philosophy of Dreyfus and Kelly frees us from such traps the Craftsman they cite don&#39;t have rarified jobs throughout most of human history to be a blacksmith or a wheel right wasn&#39;t glamorous but this doesn&#39;t matter as the specifics of the work are irrelevant the meaning uncovered by such efforts is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in craftsmanship not the outcomes of their work put another way a wooden wheel is not Noble but its shaping can be the same applies to knowledge work you don&#39;t need a rarified job you need instead a rarified approach to your work the second key observation about this line of argument is that cultivating craftsmanship is necessarily a deep task and therefore requires a commitment to deep work recall that I argued in chapter 1 the Deep work is necessary to hone skills and to then apply them at an elite level the core activities in craft deep work therefore is key to extracting meaning from your profession in the manner described by Dreyfus and Kelly it follows that to embrace deep work in your own career and to direct it toward cultivating your skill is an effort that can transform a knowledge work job from a distracted draining obligation into something satisfying a portal to a world full of shining wondrous things Homo sapiens deep pensus the first two chapters of part one were pragmatic they argued that deep work is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy at the same time that it also is becoming increasingly rare for somewhat arbitrary reasons this represents a classic Market mismatch if you cultivate this skill you&#39;ll Thrive professionally this Final Chapter by contrast has little to add to this practical discussion of workplace advancement and yet it&#39;s absolutely necessary for these earlier ideas to gain traction the sections ahead describe a rigorous program for transforming your professional life into one centered on depth this is a difficult transition and as with many such efforts well-reasoned pragmatic arguments can motivate you only to a certain point eventually the goal you pursue needs to resonate at a more human level this chapter argues that when it comes to the Embrace of depth such resonance is inevitable whether you approach the activity of going deep from the perspective of Neuroscience psychology or lofty philosophy these paths all seem to lead back to a connection between depth and meaning it&#39;s as if our species has evolved into one that flourishes in depth and wallows in shallowness becoming what we might call homo sapiens deepenses I earlier quoted Winifred Gallagher the converted disciple of depth saying I&#39;ll live the focused life because it&#39;s the best kind there is this is perhaps the best way to sum up the argument of this chapter and of part one more broadly a deep life is a good life any way you look at it part two the rules rule number one work deeply soon after I met David Dewayne for a drink at a Dupont Circle bar he brought up the eudaimonia machine Duane is an architecture professor and therefore likes to explore the intersection between the conceptual and the concrete the eudaimonia machine is a good example of this intersection the machine which takes its name from the ancient Greek concept of eudaimonia a state in which you&#39;re achieving your full human potential turns out to be a building the goal of the machine David explained is to create a setting where the users can get into a state of deep human flourishing creating work that&#39;s at the absolute extent of their personal abilities it is in other words a space designed for the sole purpose of enabling the deepest possible deep work I was as you might expect intrigued as Dwayne explained the machine to me he grabbed a pen to sketch its proposed layout the structure is a one-story narrow rectangle made up of five rooms placed in a line one after the other there&#39;s no shared hallway you have to pass through one room to get to the next as Dewayne explains the lack of circulation is critical because it doesn&#39;t allow you to bypass any of the spaces as you get deeper into the machine the first room you enter when coming off the street is called the gallery in Duane&#39;s plan this room would contain examples of deep work produced in the building it&#39;s meant to inspire the users of the machine creating a culture of healthy stress and peer pressure as you leave the gallery you next enter the salon in here Dwayne imagines access to high quality coffee and perhaps even a full bar there are also couches and Wi-Fi the salon is designed to create a mood that hovers between intense curiosity and argumentation this is a place to debate brood and in general work through the ideas that you&#39;ll develop deeper in the machine beyond the salon you enter the library this room stores a permanent record of all work produced in the machine as well as the books and other resources used in this previous work there will be copiers and scanners for Gathering and collecting the information you need for your project Dwayne describes the library as the hard drive of the machine the next room is the office space it contains a standard conference room with a white board and some cubicles with desks the office Dwayne explains is for low intensity activity to use our terminology this is the space to complete the shallow efforts required by your project Duane imagines an administrator with a desk in the office who could help its users improve their work habits to optimize their efficiency this brings us to the final room of the machine a collection of what Dwayne calls deep work Chambers he adopted the term deep work from my articles on the topic each chamber is conceived to be six by ten feet and protected by thick sound proof walls Duane&#39;s plans call for 18 inches of insulation the purpose of the deep work chamber is to allow for total focus and uninterrupted workflow Duane explains he imagines a process in which you spend 90 minutes inside take a 90-minute break and repeat two or three times at which point your brain will have achieved its limit of concentration for the day for now the eudaimonium machine exists only as a collection of architectural drawings but even as a plan its potential to support impactful work excites Duane this design remains in my mind the most interesting piece of architecture I&#39;ve ever produced he told me in an ideal world one in which the true value of deep work is accepted and celebrated we&#39;d all have access to something like the eudaimonia machine perhaps not David Dewayne&#39;s exact design but more generally speaking a work environment and culture designed to help us extract as much value as possible from our brains unfortunately this vision is far from our current reality we instead find ourselves in distracting open offices where inboxes cannot be neglected and meetings are incessant a setting where colleagues would rather you respond quickly to their latest email than produce the best possible results as a listener of this book in other words you&#39;re a disciple of depth in a shallow world this rule the first of four such rules in part two of this book is designed to reduce this conflict you might not have access to your own eudaimonia machine but the strategies that follow will help you simulate its effects in your otherwise distracted professional life they&#39;ll show you how to transform deep work from an aspiration into a regular and significant part of your daily schedule rules number two through number four will then help you get the most out of this deep work habit by presenting among other things strategies for training your concentration ability and fighting back encroaching distractions before proceeding to these strategies however I want to First address a question that might be nagging you why do we need such involved interventions put another way once you accept that deep work is valuable isn&#39;t it enough to just start doing more of it do we really need something as complicated as the eudaimonia machine or its equivalent for something as simple as remembering to concentrate more often unfortunately when it comes to replacing distraction with Focus matters are not so simple to understand why this is true let&#39;s take a closer look at one of the main obstacles to going deep the urge to turn your attention towards something more superficial most people recognize that this urge can complicate efforts to concentrate on hard things but most underestimate its regularity and strength consider a 2012 study led by psychologists Wilhelm Hoffman and Roy Baumeister that outfitted 205 adults with beepers that activated it randomly selected times this is the experience sampling method discussed in part one when the Beeper sounded the subject was asked to pause for a moment to reflect on desires that he or she was currently feeling or had felt in the last 30 minutes and then answer a set of questions about these desires after a week the researchers had gathered more than 7 500 samples here&#39;s the short version of what they found people fight desires all day long as Baumeister summarized in his subsequent book willpower co-authored with the science writer John Tierney desire turned out to be the norm not the exception the five most common desires these subjects fought include not surprisingly eating sleeping and sex but the top five list also included desires for taking a break from hard work checking email and social networking sites surfing the web listening to music or watching television The Lure of the internet and television proved especially strong the subjects succeeded in resisting these particularly addictive distractions only around half the time these results are bad news for this Rule&#39;s goal of helping you cultivate a deep work habit they tell us that you can expect to be bombarded with the desire to do anything but work deeply throughout the day and if you&#39;re like the German subjects from the Hoffman and Baumeister study these competing desires will often win out you might respond at this point that you will succeed where these subjects failed because you understand the importance of depth and will therefore be more rigorous in your will to remain concentrated Noble sentiment but the Decades of research that preceded this study underscore its futility a now voluminous line of inquiry initiated in a series of pioneering papers also written by Roy Baumeister has established the following important and at the time unexpected truth about willpower you have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it your will in other words is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit it&#39;s instead like a muscle that tires this is why the subjects in the Hoffman and Baumeister study had such a hard time fighting desires over time these distractions drained their finite pool of willpower until they could no longer resist the same will happen to you regardless of your intentions unless that is you&#39;re smart about your habits this brings me to the motivating idea behind the strategies that follow the key to developing a deep work habit is to move Beyond Good Intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration if you suddenly decide for example in the middle of a distracted afternoon spent web browsing to switch your attention to a cognitively demanding task you&#39;ll draw heavily from your finite willpower to rest your attention away from the online shininess such attempts will therefore frequently fail on the other hand if you deployed smart routines and rituals perhaps a set time and quiet location used for your deep tasks each afternoon you&#39;d require much less willpower to start and keep going in the long run you therefore succeed with these deep efforts far more often with this in mind the six strategies that follow can be understood as an arsenal of routines and rituals designed with the science of limited willpower in mind to maximize the amount of deep work you consistently accomplish in your schedule among other things they&#39;ll ask you to commit to a particular pattern for scheduling this work and develop rituals to sharpen your concentration before starting each session some of these strategies will deploy simple heuristics to hijack your brain&#39;s motivation Center While others are designed to recharge your willpower Reserves at the fastest possible rate you could just try to make deep work a priority but supporting this decision with the strategies that follow or strategies of your own devising that are motivated by the same principles will significantly increase the probability that you succeed in making deep work a crucial part of your professional life decide on your depth philosophy the famed computer scientist Donald knuth cares about deep work as he explains on his website what I do takes long hours of studying an uninterruptible concentration a doctoral candidate named Brian Chappelle who is a father with a full-time job also values deep work as it&#39;s the only way he can make progress on his dissertation given his limited time Chappelle told me that his first encounter with the idea of deep work was an emotional moment I mentioned these examples because although knuth and Chappelle agree on the importance of depth they disagree on their philosophies for integrating this depth into their work lives as I&#39;ll detail in the next section knuth deploys a form of monasticism that prioritizes deep work by trying to eliminate or minimize all other types of work Chappelle by contrast deploys a rhythmic strategy in which he works for the same hours 5 to 7 30 a.m every weekday morning without exception before beginning a workday punctuated by standard distractions both approaches work but not universally knuth&#39;s approach might make sense for someone whose primary professional obligation is to think big thoughts but if Chappelle adopted a similar rejection of all things shallow he&#39;d likely lose his job you need your own Philosophy for integrating deep work into your professional life as argued in this Rule&#39;s introduction attempting to schedule deep work in an ad hoc fashion is not an effective way to manage your limited willpower but this example highlights a general warning about this selection you must be careful to choose a philosophy that fits your specific circumstances as a mismatch here can derail your deep work habit before it has a chance to solidify this strategy will help you avoid this Fate by presenting four different depth philosophies that I&#39;ve seen work exceptionally well in practice the goal is to convince you that there are many different ways to integrate deep work into your schedule and it&#39;s therefore worth taking the time to find an approach that makes sense for you the monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling let&#39;s return to Donald knuth he&#39;s famous for many Innovations in computer science including notably the development of a rigorous approach to analyzing algorithm performance among his peers however knuth also maintains an aura of infamy for his approach to electronic communication if you visit knuth&#39;s website at Stanford with the intention of finding his email address you&#39;ll instead discover the following note I have been a happy man ever since January 1st 1990 when I no longer had an email address I&#39;d used email since about 1975 and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things but not for me my role is to be on the bottom of things what I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration knuth goes on to acknowledge that he doesn&#39;t intend to cut himself off completely from the world he notes that writing his books requires communication with thousands of people and that he wants to be responsive to questions and comments his solution he provides an address a postal mailing address he says that his Administrative Assistant will sort through any letters arriving at that address and put aside those that she thinks are relevant anything that&#39;s truly urgent she&#39;ll bring to knuth promptly and everything else he&#39;ll handle in a big batch once every three months or so knuth deploys what I call the monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling this philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations practitioners of the monastic philosophy tend to have a well-defined and highly valued professional goal that they&#39;re pursuing and the bulk of their professional success comes from doing this one thing exceptionally well it&#39;s this Clarity that helps them eliminate the thicket of shallow concerns that tend to trip up those whose value proposition in the Working World is more varied knuth for example explains his professional goal as follows I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don&#39;t have time for such study trying to pitch knuth on the intangible returns of building an audience on Twitter or the unexpected opportunities that might come through a more liberal use of email will fail as these behaviors don&#39;t directly Aid his goal to exhaustively understand specific corners of computer science and then write about them in an accessible manner another person committed to monastic deep work is the acclaimed science fiction writer Neil Stevenson if you visit Stevenson&#39;s author website you&#39;ll notice a lack of email or mailing address we can gain insight into this Omission from a pair of essays that Stevenson posted on his early website hosted on the well back in the early 2000s and which have been preserved by the internet archive in one such essay archived in 2003 Stevenson summarizes his communication policy as follows persons who wish to interfere with my concentration are politely requested not to do so and warned that I don&#39;t answer email lest my communication policies key message get lost in the verbiage I will put it here succinctly all of my time and attention are spoken for several times over please do not ask for them to further justify this policy Stevenson wrote an essay titled why I am a bad correspondent at the core of his explanation for his inaccessibility is the following decision the productivity equation he writes is a non-linear one in other words this accounts for why I am a bad correspondent and why I very rarely accept speaking engagements if I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long consecutive uninterrupted time chunks I can write novels but as those chunks get separated and fragmented my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly Stevenson sees two mutually exclusive options he can write good novels at a regular rate or he can answer a lot of individual emails into 10 conferences and as a result produce lower quality novels at a slower rate he chose the former option and this Choice requires him to avoid as much as possible any source of shallow work in his professional life this issue is so important to Stevenson that he went on to explore its implications positive and negative in his 2008 science fiction epic anatham which considers a world where an intellectual Elite live in monastic orders isolated from the distracted masses and Technology thinking Deep Thoughts in my experience the monastic philosophy makes many knowledge workers defensive the clarity with which its adherents identify their value to the world I suspect touches a raw nerve for those whose contribution to the information economy is more complex notice of course that more complex does not mean lesser a high-level manager for example might play a vital role in the functioning of a billion dollar company even if she cannot point to something discreet like a completed novel and say this is what I produce this year therefore the pool of individuals to whom the monastic philosophy applies is limited and that&#39;s okay if you&#39;re outside this pool it&#39;s radical Simplicity shouldn&#39;t evince too much Envy on the other hand if you&#39;re inside this pool someone whose contribution to the world is discreet clear and individualized then you should give this philosophy serious consideration as it might be the deciding factor between an average career and one that will be remembered the bimodal philosophy of deep work scheduling this book opened with a story about the Revolutionary psychologist and thinker Carl Jung in the 1920s at the same time that Jung was attempting to break away from the strictures of his mentor Sigmund Freud he began regular retreats to a rustic Stone House he built in the woods outside the small town of bollingan when there Jung would lock himself every morning into a minimally appointed room to write without interruption he would then meditate and walk in the woods to clarify his thinking in preparation for the next day&#39;s writing these efforts I argued were aimed at increasing the intensity of Jung&#39;s deep work to a level that would allow him to succeed in intellectual combat with Freud and his many supporters in recalling this story I want to emphasize something important Jung did not deploy a monastic approach to deep work Donald knuth and Neil Stevenson are examples from earlier attempted to completely eliminate distraction and shallowness from their professional lives Jung by contrast sought this elimination only during the periods he spent at his retreat the rest of Jung&#39;s time was spent in Zurich where his life was anything but monastic he ran a busy clinical practice that often had him seeing patients until late at night he was an active participant in the Zurich coffeehouse culture and he gave and attended many lectures in the city&#39;s respected universities Einstein received his Doctorate from one University in Zurich and later taught at another he also interestingly enough knew Young and the two shared several dinners to discuss the key ideas of Einstein&#39;s special relativity Jung&#39;s life in Zurich in other words is similar in many ways to the modern archetype of the hyper-connected digital age knowledge worker replace Zurich with San Francisco and letter with tweet and we could be discussing some hot shot Tech CEO Jung&#39;s approach is what I call the bimodal philosophy of deep work this philosophy asks that you divide your time dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep Pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else during the Deep time the bimodal worker will act monastically seeking intense and uninterrupted concentration during the shallow time such focus is not prioritized this division of time between deep and open can happen on multiple scales for example on the scale of a week you might dedicate a four day weekend to depth and the rest to open time similarly on the scale of a year you might dedicate one season to contain most of your deep stretches as many academics do over the summer or while on sabbatical the bimodal philosophy believes the Deep work can produce extreme productivity but only if the subject dedicates enough time to such Endeavors to reach maximum cognitive intensity the state in which real breakthroughs occur this is why the minimum unit of time for deep work in this philosophy tends to be at least one full day to put aside a few hours in the morning for example is too short to count as a deep work stretch for an adherent of this approach at the same time the bimodal philosophy is typically deployed by people who cannot succeed in the absence of substantial commitments to non-deep Pursuits um for example needed his clinical practice to pay the bills and the Zurich coffeehouse scene to stimulate his thinking the approach of Shifting between two modes provides a way to serve both needs well to provide a more modern example of the bimodal philosophy in action we can once again consider Adam Grant the Wharton business school Professor whose thoughtfulness about work habits was first introduced in part one as you might recall Grant&#39;s scheduled during his rapid rise through the professorship ranks at Wharton provides a nice bimodality case study on the scale of the academic year he stacked his courses into one semester so that he could focus the other two on deep work during these deep semesters he then applied the bimodal approach on the weekly scale he would perhaps once or twice a month take a period of two to four days to become completely monastic he would shut his door put an out of office Auto responder on his email and work on his research without interruption outside of these deep sessions Grant remained famously open and accessible in some sense he had to be his 2013 best seller give and take promotes the practice of giving of your time and attention without expectation of something in return as a key strategy in professional advancement those who deploy the bimodal philosophy of deep work admire the productivity of the monastics but also respect the value they receive from the shallow behaviors in their working lives perhaps the biggest obstacle to implementing this philosophy is that even short periods of deep work require a flexibility that many fear they lack in their current positions if even an hour away from your inbox makes you uncomfortable then certainly the idea of Disappearing for a day or more at a time will seem impossible but I suspect bimodal working is compatible with more types of jobs than you might guess earlier for example I described a study by Harvard Business School Professor Leslie perlow in this study a group of management Consultants were asked to disconnect for a full day each work week the Consultants were afraid the client would Rebel it turned out that the client didn&#39;t care as Yoon Grant and perlow&#39;s subjects discovered people will usually respect your right to become inaccessible if these periods are well-defined and well advertised and outside these stretches you&#39;re once again easy to find the rhythmic philosophy of deep work scheduling in the early days of the Seinfeld show Jerry Seinfeld remained a working comic with a busy tour schedule it was during this period that a writer and comic named Brad Isaac who was working Open Mic nights at the time ran into Seinfeld at a club waiting to go on stage as Isaac later explained in a now classic Lifehacker article I saw my chance I had to ask Seinfeld if he had any tips for a young comic what he told me was something that would benefit me for a lifetime Seinfeld began his advice to Isaac with some common sense noting the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes and then explaining that the way to create better jokes was to write every day Seinfeld continued by describing a specific technique he used to help maintain this discipline he keeps a calendar on his wall every day that he writes jokes he crosses out the date on the calendar with a big red X after a few days you&#39;ll have a chain Seinfeld said just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day you&#39;ll like seeing that chain especially when you get a few weeks under your belt your only job next is to not break the chain this chain method as some now call it soon became a hit among writers and fitness enthusiasts communities that thrive on the ability to do hard things consistently for our purposes it provides a specific example of a general approach to integrating depth into your life the rhythmic philosophy this philosophy argues that 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&#39;re going to go deep the chain method is a good example of the rhythmic philosophy of deep work scheduling because it combines a simple scheduling heuristic do the work every day with an easy way to remind yourself to do the work the big red x&#39;s on the calendar another common way to implement the rhythmic philosophy is to replace the visual aid of the chain method with a set starting time that you use every day for deep work in much the same way that maintaining visual indicators of your work progress can reduce the barrier to entry for going deep eliminating even the simplest scheduling decisions such as when during the day to do the work also reduces this barrier consider the example of Brian Chappelle the busy doctoral candidate I introduced in the opening to this strategy Chappelle adopted the rhythmic philosophy of deep work scheduling out of necessity around the time that he was ramping up his dissertation writing he was offered a full-time job at a center on the campus where he was a student professionally this was a good opportunity and Chappelle was happy to accept it but academically a full-time job especially when coupled with the recent arrival of Chappelle&#39;s first child made it difficult to find the depth needed to write thesis chapters Chappelle began by attempting a vague commitment to deep work he made a rule that deep work needed to happen in 90-minute chunks recognizing correctly that it takes time to ease into a state of concentration and he decided he would try to schedule these chunks in an ad hoc manner whenever appropriate openings in his schedule arose not surprisingly this strategy didn&#39;t yield much productivity in a dissertation boot camp Chappelle had attended the year before he&#39;d managed to produce a full thesis chapter in a single week of rigorous deep work after he accepted his full-time job he managed to produce only a single additional chapter in the entire first year he was working it was the glacial writing progress during this year the drove Chappelle to embrace the rhythmic method he made a rule that he would wake up and start working by 5 30 every morning he would then work until 7 30 make breakfast and go to work already done with his dissertation obligations for the day please buy early progress he soon pushed his wake-up time to 4 45 to squeeze out even more morning depth when I interviewed Chappelle for this book he described his rhythmic approach to deep work scheduling as both astronomically productive and guilt-free his routine was producing four to five pages of academic prose per day and was capable of generating drafts of thesis Chapters at a rate of one chapter every two or three weeks a phenomenal output for someone who also worked a nine-to-five job who&#39;s to say that I can&#39;t be that prolific he concluded why not me the rhythmic philosophy provides an interesting contrast to the bimodal philosophy it perhaps fails to achieve the most intense levels of deep thinking sought in the day-long concentration sessions favored by the bimodalist the trade-off however is that this approach works better with the reality of human nature by supporting deep work with Rock Solid routines that make sure a little bit gets done on a regular basis the rhythmic scheduler will often log a larger total number of deep hours per year the decision between rhythmic and bimodal can come down to your self-control in such scheduling matters if you&#39;re Carl Jung and are engaged in an intellectual dog fight with Sigmund Freud supporters you&#39;ll likely have no trouble recognizing the importance of finding time to focus on your ideas on the other hand if you&#39;re writing a dissertation with no one pressuring you to get it done the habitual nature of the rhythmic philosophy might be necessary to maintain progress for many however it&#39;s not just self-control issues that bias them toward the rhythmic philosophy but also the reality that some jobs don&#39;t allow you to disappear for days at a time when the need to go deep arises for a lot of bosses the standard is that you&#39;re free to focus as hard as you want so long as the boss&#39;s emails are still answered promptly this is likely the biggest reason why the rhythmic philosophy is one of the most common among deep workers in standard office jobs the journalistic philosophy of deep work scheduling in the 1980s the journalist Walter Isaacson was in his 30s and well along in his rapid Ascent through the ranks of Time Magazine by this point he was undoubtedly on the radar of the thinking class Christopher Hitchens for example writing in the London Review of Books during this period called him one of the best magazine journalists in America the time was right for Isaacson to write a big important book a necessary step on the latter of journalistic achievement so Isaacson chose a complicated topic an intertwined narrative biography of six figures who played an important role in early Cold War policy and teamed up with a fellow young time editor Evan Thompson to produce an appropriately weighty book an 864-page epic titled the wise men six friends and the world they made this book which was published in 1986 was well received by the right people the New York Times called it a richly textured account while the San Francisco Chronicle exalted that the two Young Writers had fashioned a cold war Plutarch less than a decade later Isaacson reached the Apex of his journalism career when he was appointed editor of time which she Then followed with a second act as the CEO of a think tank and an incredibly popular biographer of figures including Benjamin Franklin Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs what interests me about Isaacson however is not what he accomplished with his first book but how he wrote it in uncovering this story I must draw from a fortunate personal connection as it turns out in the Years leading up to the publication of the wise men my uncle John Paul Newport who was also a journalist in New York at the time shared his summer Beach rental with Isaacson to this day my uncle remembers isaacson&#39;s impressive work habits it was always amazing he said he could Retreat up to the bedroom for a while when the rest of us were chilling on the patio or whatever to work on his book he&#39;d go up for 20 minutes or an hour we&#39;d hear the typewriter pounding then he&#39;d come down as relaxed as the rest of us the work never seemed to faze him he just happily went up to work when he had the spare time Isaacson was methodic anytime he could find some free time he would switch into a deep work mode and hammer away at his book this is how it turns out one can write a 900 page book on the side while spending the bulk of Wednesday becoming one of the country&#39;s best magazine writers I call this approach in which you fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule the journalist philosophy this name is a nod to the fact that journalists Like Walter Isaacson are trained to shift into a writing mode on a moment&#39;s notice as is required by the deadline driven nature of their profession this approach is not for the Deep work novice as I established in the opening to this rule the ability to rapidly switch your mind from shallow to deep mode doesn&#39;t come naturally without practice such switches can seriously deplete your finite willpower Reserves this habit also requires a sense of confidence in your abilities a conviction that what you&#39;re doing is important and will succeed this type of conviction is typically built on a foundation of existing professional accomplishment Isaacson for example likely had an easier time switching to writing mode than say a first-time novelist because Isaacson had worked himself up to become a respected writer by this point he knew he had the capacity to write an epic biography and understood it to be a key task in his professional advancement this confidence goes a long way in motivating hard efforts I&#39;m partial to the journalistic philosophy of deep work because it&#39;s my main approach to integrating these efforts into my schedule in other words I&#39;m not monastic in my deep work though I do find myself occasionally jealous of my fellow computer scientist Donald knuth&#39;s Unapologetic disconnection I don&#39;t deploy multi-day depth binges like the bimodalists and though I am intrigued by the rhythmic philosophy my schedule has a way of thwarting attempts to enforce a daily habit instead in an Ode to Isaacson I face each week as it arrives and do my best to squeeze out as much depth as possible to write this book for example I had to take advantage of free stretches of time wherever they popped up if my kids were taking a good nap I&#39;d grab my laptop and lock myself in the home office if my wife wanted to visit her parents in nearby Annapolis on a weekend day I take advantage of the extra child care to disappear to a quiet corner of their house to write if a meeting at work was canceled or an afternoon left open I might Retreat to one of my favorite libraries on campus to squeeze out a few hundred more words and so on I should admit that I&#39;m not pure in my application of the journalist&#39;s philosophy I don&#39;t for example make all my deep work decisions on a moment-to-moment basis i instead tend to map out when I&#39;ll work deeply during each week at the beginning of the week and then refine these decisions as needed at the beginning of each day see rule number three for more details on my scheduling routines by reducing the need to make decisions about deep work Moment by moment I can preserve more mental energy for the deep thinking itself in the final accounting the journalistic philosophy of deep work scheduling remains difficult to pull off but if you&#39;re confident in the value of what you&#39;re trying to produce and practiced in the skill of going deep a skill we will continue to develop in the strategies that follow it can be a surprisingly robust way to squeeze out large amounts of depth from an otherwise demanding schedule ritualize and often overlooked observation about those who use their minds to create valuable things is that their rarely haphazard in their work habits consider the Pulitzer prize-winning biographer Robert Carro as revealed in a 2009 magazine profile every inch of cairo&#39;s New York office is governed by rules where he places his books how he Stacks his notebooks what he puts on his wall even what he wears to the office everything is specified by a routine that has very little over cairo&#39;s long career I trained myself to be organized he explained Charles Darwin had a similarly strict structure for his working life during the period when he was perfecting On the Origin of Species as his son Francis later remembered he would rise promptly at seven to take a short walk he would then eat breakfast alone and retire to his study from 8 to 9 30. the next hour was dedicated to reading his letters from the day before after which he would return to his study from 10 30 until noon after this session he would mull over challenging ideas while walking on a prescribed route that started at his greenhouse and then circled a path on his property he would walk until satisfied with his thinking then declare his work day done the journalist Mason Curry who spent half a decade cataloging the habits of famous thinkers and writers and from whom I learned the previous two examples summarized this tendency towards systemization as follows there is a popular notion that artists work from inspiration that there is some strike or bolt or bubbling up of creative Mojo from who knows where but I hope my work makes clear that waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible terrible plan in fact perhaps the single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration in a New York Times column on the topic David Brooks summarizes this reality more bluntly great creative minds think like artists but work like accountants this strategy suggests the following to make the most out of your deep work sessions build rituals of the same level of strictness and idiosyncrasy as the important thinkers mentioned previously there&#39;s a good reason for this mimicry great minds like Cairo and Darwin didn&#39;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&#39;s no way to win a Pulitzer Prize or conceive a grand Theory without pushing your brain to its limit their rituals minimize the friction in this transition to depth allowing them to go deep more easily and stay in the state longer if they had instead waited for inspiration to strike before settling into serious work their accomplishments would likely have been greatly reduced there&#39;s no one correct deep work ritual the right fit depends on both the person and the type of project pursued but there are some general questions that any effective ritual must address where you&#39;ll work and for how long your ritual needs to specify a location for your deep work efforts this location can be as simple as your normal office with the door shut and desk cleaned off a colleague of mine likes to put a hotel style do not disturb sign on his office door when he&#39;s tackling something difficult if it&#39;s possible to identify a location used only for depth for instance a conference room or quiet library the positive effect can be even greater if you work in an open Office plan this need to find a deep work Retreat becomes particularly important regardless of where you work be sure to also give yourself a specific time frame to keep the session a discrete Challenge and not an open-ended slog how you&#39;ll work once you start to work your ritual needs rules and processes to keep your efforts structured for example you might Institute a ban on any internet use or maintain a metric such as words produced per 20-minute interval to keep your concentration honed without this structure you&#39;ll have to mentally litigate again and again what you should and should not be doing during these sessions and keep trying to assess whether you&#39;re working sufficiently hard these are unnecessary drains on your willpower Reserves how you&#39;ll support your work your ritual needs to ensure your brain gets the support it needs to keep operating at a high level of depth for example the ritual might specify that you start with a good cup of coffee or make sure you have access to enough food of the right type to maintain energy or integrate light exercise such as walking to help keep the Mind clear as Nietzsche said it is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth this support might also include environmental factors such as organizing the raw materials of your work to minimize energy dissipating friction as we saw with cairo&#39;s example to maximize your success you need to support your efforts to go deep at the same time this support needs to be systematized so that you don&#39;t waste mental energy figuring out what you need in the moment these questions will help you get started in crafting your deep work ritual but keep in mind that finding a ritual that sticks might require experimentation so be willing to work at it I assure you that the effort&#39;s worth it once you&#39;ve evolved something that feels right the impact can be significant to work deeply is a big deal and should not be an activity undertaken lightly surrounding such efforts with a complicated and perhaps to the outside world quite strange ritual accepts this reality providing your mind with the structure and commitment it needs to slip into the state of focus where you can begin to create things that matter make grand gestures in the early winter of 2007 JK Rowling was struggling to complete the Deathly Hallows the final book in her Harry Potter series the pressure was intense as this book bore the responsibility of tying together the six that preceded it in a way that would satisfy the series hundreds of millions of fans Rowling needed to work deeply to satisfy these demands but she was Finding unbroken concentration increasingly difficult to achieve at her home office in Edinburgh Scotland as I was finishing Deathly Hallows there came a day where the window cleaner came the kids were at home the dogs were barking rolling recalled in an interview it was too much so JK Rowling decided to do something extreme to shift her mindset where it needed to be she checked into a suite in the five-star Balmoral hotel located in the heart of downtown Edinburgh so I came to this hotel because it&#39;s a beautiful hotel but I didn&#39;t intend to stay here she explained but the first day&#39;s writing went well so I kept coming back and I ended up finishing the last of the Harry Potter books here in retrospect it&#39;s not surprising that Rowling ended up staying the setting was perfect for her project the Balmoral known as one of Scotland&#39;s most luxurious hotels is a classic Victorian building complete with ornate stonework and a tall Clock Tower it&#39;s also located only a couple of blocks away from Edinburgh Castle one of Rowling&#39;s Inspirations in dreaming up Hogwarts Rowling&#39;s decision to check into a luxurious hotel suite near Edinburgh Castle is an example of a curious but effective strategy in the world of deep work the grand gesture the concept is simple by leveraging a radical change to your normal environment coupled perhaps with a significant investment of effort or money all dedicated towards supporting a deep work task you increase the perceived importance of the task this boost in importance reduces your mind&#39;s instinct to procrastinate and delivers an injection of motivation and energy writing a chapter of a Harry Potter novel for example is hard work and will require a lot of mental energy regardless of where you do it but when paying more than a thousand dollars a day to write the chapter in a suite of an old hotel down the street from a hogwarts-style castle mustering the energy to begin and sustain this work is easier than if you were instead in a distracting home office when you study the habits of other well-known deep workers the grand gesture strategy comes up often Bill Gates for example was famous during his time as Microsoft CEO for taking think weeks during which he would leave behind his normal work and family obligations to retreat to a cabin with a stack of papers and books his goal was to think deeply without distraction about the big issues relevant to his company it was during one of these weeks for example that he famously came to the conclusion that the internet was going to be a major force in the industry there was nothing physically stopping gates from thinking deeply in his office in Microsoft&#39;s Seattle headquarters but the novelty of his week-long Retreat helped him achieve the desired levels of concentration the MIT physicist and award-winning novelist Alan Lightman also leverages grand gestures in his case he Retreats each summer to a tiny Island in Maine to think deeply and recharge at least as of 2000 when he described this gesture in an interview the island not only lacked internet but didn&#39;t even have phone service as he then Justified it&#39;s really about two and a half months that I&#39;ll feel like I can recover some silence in my life which is so hard to find not everyone has the freedom to spend two months in Maine but many writers including Dan pink and Michael Pollan simulate The Experience year-round by building often at significant expense and effort riding cabins on their properties pollen for his part even wrote a book about his experience building his cabin in the woods behind his former Connecticut home these outbuildings aren&#39;t strictly necessary for these Riders who need only a laptop and a flat surface to put it on to apply their trade but it&#39;s not the amenities of the cabins that generate their value it&#39;s instead the grand gesture represented in the design and building of the cabin for the sole purpose of enabling better writing not every Grand gesture need be so permanent after the pathologically competitive Bell Labs physicist William Shockley was scooped in the invention of the transistor as I detail in the next strategy two members of his team made the Breakthrough at a time when Shockley was away working on another project he locked himself in a hotel room in Chicago where he had traveled ostensibly to attend a conference he didn&#39;t emerge from the room until he had ironed out the details for a better design that had been rattling around in his mind when he finally did leave the room he air mailed his notes back to Murray Hill New Jersey so that a colleague could paste them into his lab notebook and sign them to time stamp the innovation The Junction form of the transistor that Shockley worked out in this burst of depth ended up earning him a share of the Nobel Prize subsequently awarded for the invention an even more extreme example of a one-time Grand gesture yielding results is a story involving Peter shankman an entrepreneur and social media pioneer as a popular speaker Shanklin spends much of his time flying he eventually realized that thirty thousand feet was an ideal environment for him to focus as he explained in a blog post locked in a seat with nothing in front of me nothing to distract me nothing to set off my ooh shiny DNA I have nothing to do but be it one with my thoughts it was sometime after this realization that shankman signed a book contract that gave him only two weeks to finish the entire manuscript meeting this deadline would require incredible concentration to achieve this state shankman did something unconventional he booked a round-trip business class ticket to Tokyo he wrote during the whole flight to Japan drank an espresso in the business class Lounge once he arrived in Japan then turned around and flew back once again writing the whole way arriving back in the States only 30 hours after he first left with a completed manuscript now in hand the trip cost four thousand dollars and was worth every penny he explained in all of these examples it&#39;s not just the change of environment or seeking of quiet that enables more depth the dominant force is the psychology of committing so seriously to the task at hand to put yourself in an exotic location to focus on a writing project or to take a week off from work just to think or to lock yourself in a hotel room until you complete an important invention these gestures push your deep goal to a level of mental priority that helps unlock the needed mental resources sometimes to go deep you must first go big don&#39;t work alone the relationship between deep work and collaboration is tricky it&#39;s worth taking the time to untangle however because properly leveraging collaboration can increase the quality of deep work in your professional life it&#39;s helpful to start our discussion of this topic by taking a step back to consider what it first seems to be an unresolvable conflict in part one of this book I criticized Facebook for the design of its new headquarters in particular I noted that the company&#39;s goal to create the world&#39;s largest open Office Space a giant room that will reportedly hold 2 800 workers represents an absurd attack on concentration both intuition and a growing body of research underscore the reality that sharing a workspace with a large number of co-workers is incredibly distracting creating an environment that the warts attempts to think seriously in a 2013 article summarizing Recent research on this topic Business Week went so far as to call for an end to the tyranny of the open plan office and yet these open Office designs are not embraced haphazardly as Maria konikova reports in the New Yorker when this concept first emerged its goal was to facilitate communication and idea flow this claim resonated with American businesses looking to embrace an aura of startup unconventionality Josh tirangel the editor of Bloomberg businessweek for example explained the lack of offices in Bloomberg&#39;s headquarters as follows open plan is pretty spectacular it ensures that everyone is attuned to the broad Mission and it encourages curiosity between people who work in different disciplines Jack Dorsey Justified the open layout of the square headquarters by explaining we encourage people to stay out in the open because we believe in Serendipity and people walking by each other teaching new things for the sake of discussion let&#39;s call this principle that when you allow people to bump into each other smart collaborations and new ideas emerge the theory of serendipitous creativity when Mark Zuckerberg decided to build the world&#39;s largest office we can reasonably conjecture this Theory helped drive his decision just as it has driven many of the moves toward open workspaces elsewhere in Silicon Valley and Beyond other less exalted factors like saving money and increasing supervision also play a role but they&#39;re not as sexy and are therefore less emphasized this decision between promoting concentration and promoting Serendipity seems to indicate that deep work an individual Endeavor is incompatible with generating creative insights a collaborative endeavor this conclusion however is flawed it&#39;s based I argue on an incomplete understanding of the theory of serendipitous creativity to support this claim let&#39;s consider the origins of this particular understanding of what Spurs breakthroughs the theory in question has many sources but I happen to have a personal connection to one of the more well-known during my seven years at MIT I worked on the site of the institute&#39;s famed building 20. this structure located at the intersection of Maine and Vassar streets in East Cambridge and eventually demolished in 1998 was thrown together as a temporary shelter during World War II meant to house the Overflow from the school&#39;s bustling radiation Laboratory as noted by a 2012 New Yorker article the building was initially seen as a failure ventilation was poor and hallways were dim the walls were thin the roof leaked and the building was broiling in the summer and freezing in the winter when the war ended however the influx of scientists to Cambridge continued MIT needed space so instead of immediately demolishing building 20 as they had promised local officials in exchange for lacks permitting they continued using it as an overflow space the result was that a mismatch of different departments from nuclear science to Linguistics to electronics shared the low slung building alongside more esoteric tenants such as a machine shop and a piano repair facility because the building was cheaply constructed these groups felt free to rearrange space as needed walls and Floors could be shifted and Equipment bolted to the beams in recounting the story of Gerald zacharias&#39;s work on the first atomic clock the aforementioned New Yorker article points to the importance of his ability to remove two floors from his building 20 lab so he could install the three-story cylinder needed for his experimental apparatus in MIT lore it&#39;s generally believed that this haphazard combination of different disciplines thrown together in a large reconfigurable building led to chance encounters and a spirit of inventiveness that generated breakthroughs at a fast pace innovating topics as diverse as Chomsky grammars Lauren navigational Radars and video games all within the same productive post-war decades when the building was finally demolished to make way for the 300 million dollar Frank Gary design status Center where I spent my time its loss was mourned in tribute to the plywood Palace it replaced the interior design of the status Center includes Boards of Unfinished plywood and exposed concrete with construction markings left intact around the same time that building 20 was hastily constructed a more systematic pursuit of serendipitous creativity was underway 200 miles to the Southwest in Murray Hill New Jersey it was here that Bell Labs director Mervin Kelly guided the construction of a new home for the lab that would purposefully encourage interaction between its diverse mix of scientists and engineers Kelly dismissed the standard university style approach of housing different departments in different buildings and instead connected the spaces into one contiguous structure joined by long hallways some so long that when you stood at one end it would appear to converge to a vanishing point is Bell Labs chronicler John gertner notes about this design traveling the Hall&#39;s length without encountering a number of acquaintances problems diversions and ideas was almost impossible a physicist on his way to lunch in the cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings this strategy mixed with Kelly&#39;s aggressive recruitment of some of the world&#39;s best Minds yielded some of the most concentrated innovation in the history of modern civilization in the decades following the second world war the lab produced among other achievements the first solar cell laser communication satellite cellular communication system and fiber optic networking at the same time their theorists formulated both information Theory and coding Theory their astronomers won the Nobel Prize for empirically validating The Big Bang Theory and perhaps most important of all their physicists invented the transistor the theory of serendipitous creativity in other words seems well justified by the historical record the transistor we can argue with some confidence probably required Bell labs and its ability to put solid-state physicists Quantum theorists and world-class experimentalists in one building where they could serendipitously encounter one another and learn from their varied expertise this was an invention unlikely to come from a lone scientist thinking deeply in the academic equivalent of Carl Jung&#39;s Stone Tower but it&#39;s here that we must Embrace more Nuance in understanding what really generated innovation in sites such as building 20 and Bell labs to do so let&#39;s return once again to my own experience at MIT when I arrived as a new PhD student in the fall of 2004 I was a member of the first incoming class to be housed in the new status Center which as mentioned replaced building 20. because the center was new incoming students were given tours that touted its features Frank Gary we learned arrange the offices around common spaces and introduced open stairwells between adjacent floors all in an effort to support the type of serendipitous encounters that had defined its predecessor but what struck me at the time was a feature that hadn&#39;t occurred to Gary but had been recently added at the faculty&#39;s insistence special gaskets installed into the office door jambs to improve sound proofing the professors at MIT some of the most Innovative technologists in the world wanted nothing to do with an open Office style workspace they instead demanded the ability to close themselves off this combination of soundproofed offices connected to large common areas yields a hub and spoke architecture of innovation in which both serendipitous encounter and isolated deep thinking are supported it&#39;s a setup that straddles a spectrum where on one extreme we find the solo thinker isolated from inspiration but free from distraction and On The Other Extreme we find the fully collaborative thinker in an open Office flush with inspiration but struggling to support the deep thinking needed to build on it if we turn our attention back to building 20 and Bell Labs we see that this is the architecture they deployed as well neither building offered anything resembling a modern open Office plan they were instead constructed using the standard layout of private offices connected to Shared hallways their creative Mojo had more to do with the fact that these offices shared a small number of long connecting spaces forcing researchers to interact whenever they needed to travel from one location to another these Mega hallways in other words provided highly effective hubs we can therefore still dismiss the depth destroying open Office concept without dismissing the innovation-producing theory of serendipitous creativity the key is to maintain both in a hub and spoke style Arrangement expose yourself to ideas and hubs on a regular basis but maintain a spoke in which to work deeply on what you encounter this division of efforts however is not the full story as even when one returns to a Spoke solo work is still not necessarily the best strategy consider for example the previously mentioned invention of the point contact transistor at Bell labs this breakthrough was supported by a large group of researchers all with separate Specialties who came together to form the solid-state physics research group a team dedicated to inventing a smaller and more reliable alternative to the vacuum tube this group&#39;s collaborative conversations were necessary preconditions to the transistor a clear example of the usefulness of Hub Behavior once the research group laid the intellectual groundwork for the component The Innovation process shifted to a Spoke what makes this particular Innovation process an interesting case however is that even when it shifted to a spoke it remained collaborative it was two researchers in particular the experimentalist Walter Bratton and the quantum theorist John bardeen who over a period of one month in 1947 made the series of breakthroughs that led to the first working solid-state transistor Bratton and bardeen worked together during this period in a small lab often side by side pushing each other toward better and more effective designs these efforts consisted primarily of deep work but a type of deep work we haven&#39;t yet encountered Bratton would concentrate intensely to engineer an experimental design that could exploit bardeen&#39;s latest theoretical Insight then bardeen would concentrate intensely to make sense of what bratton&#39;s latest experiments revealed trying to expand his theoretical framework to match the observations this back and forth represents a collaborative form of deep work common in academic circles that leverages what I call the Whiteboard effect for some types of problems working with someone else at the proverbial shared whiteboard can push you deeper than if you were working alone the presence of the other party waiting for your next Insight be it someone physically in the same room or collaborating with you virtually can short-circuit the natural instinct to avoid depth we can now step back and draw some practical conclusions about the role of collaboration and deep work the success of building 20 and Bell Labs indicates that isolation is not required for productive deep work indeed their example indicates that for many types of work especially when pursuing Innovation collaborative deep work can yield better results this strategy therefore asks that you consider this option in contemplating how best to integrate depth into your professional life in doing so however keep the following two guidelines in mind first distraction remains a destroyer of depth therefore the Hub and spoke model provides a crucial template separate your pursuit of serendipitous encounters from your efforts to think deeply and build on these inspirations you should try to optimize each effort separately as opposed to mixing them together into a sludge that impedes both goals second even when you Retreat to a spoke to think deeply when it&#39;s reasonable to leverage the Whiteboard effect do so by working side by side with someone on a problem you can push each other toward deeper levels of depth and therefore toward the generation of more and more valuable output as compared to working alone when it comes to deep work in other words consider the use of collaboration when appropriate as it can push your results to a new level at the same time don&#39;t lionize this quest for interaction and positive Randomness to the point where it crowds Out The Unbroken concentration ultimately required to ring something useful out of the swirl of ideas all around us execute like a business the story has become lore in the world of business Consulting in the mid-1990s Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen received a call from Andy Grove the CEO and chairman of Intel Grove had encountered christensen&#39;s research on disruptive innovation and asked him to fly out to California to discuss the Theory&#39;s implications for Intel on arrival Christensen walked through the basics of disruption entrenched companies are often unexpectedly dethroned by startups that begin with cheap offerings at the low end of the market but then over time improve their cheap products just enough to begin to steal high-end market share Grove recognized that Intel faced this threat from low-end processors produced by upstart companies like AMD and cyrix fueled by his Newfound understanding of disruption Grove devised the strategy that led to the Celeron family of processors a lower performance offering that helped Intel successfully fight off the challenges from Below there is however a lesser-known piece to this story as Christensen recalls Grove asked him during a break in this meeting how do I do this Christensen responded with a discussion of business strategy explaining how Grove could set up a new business unit and so on Grove cut him off with a Gruff reply you are such a naive academic I asked you how to do it and you told me what I should do I know what I need to do I just don&#39;t know how to do it as Christensen later explained this division between what and how is crucial but is overlooked in the professional world it&#39;s often straightforward to identify a strategy needed to achieve a goal but what trips up companies is figuring out how to execute the strategy once identified I came across this story in a forward Christensen wrote for a book titled the four disciplines of execution which built on extensive Consulting case studies to describe four disciplines abbreviated for DX for helping companies successfully Implement high-level strategies what struck me as I read was that this gap between what and how was relevant to my personal quest to spend more time working deeply just as Andy Grove had identified the importance of competing in the low end processor Market I had identified the importance of prioritizing depth what I needed was help figuring out how to execute this strategy intrigued by these parallels I set out to adapt the 4dx framework to my personal work habits and ended up surprised by how helpful they proved in driving me toward effective action on my goal of working deeply these ideas may have been forged for the world of big business but the underlying Concepts seemed to apply anywhere that something important needs to get done against the backdrop of many competing obligations and distractions with this in mind I&#39;ve summarized in the following sections the four disciplines of the 4dx framework and for each I describe how I adapted it to the specific concerns of developing a deep work habit discipline number one focus on the wildly important as the authors of the four 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&#39;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&#39;t spark a lot of enthusiasm to instead have a specific goal that would return tangible and substantial professional benefits will generate a steadier stream 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&#39;t try to say no to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord try to say yes to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else for example when I first began experimenting with 4dx I set the specific important goal of publishing five high quality peer-reviewed papers in the upcoming Academic Year this goal was ambitious as it was more papers than I had been publishing and there were tangible rewards attached to it tenure review was looming combined these two properties helped the goal Stoke my motivation discipline number two act on the lead measures once you&#39;ve identified a wildly important goal you need to measure your success in 4dx there are two types of metrics for this purpose lag measures and Lead measures lag measures describe the thing you&#39;re ultimately trying to improve for example if your goal is to increase customer satisfaction in your bakery then the relevant lag measure is your customer satisfaction scores as the 4dx authors explain the problem with lag measures is that they come too late to change your behavior when you receive them the performance that drove them is already in the past lead measures on the other hand measure the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures in the bakery example a good lead measure might be the number of customers who receive free samples this is a number you can directly increase by giving out more samples as you increase this number your lag measures will likely eventually improve as well in other words lead measures turn your attention to improving the behaviors you directly control in the near future that will then have a positive impact on your long-term goals for an individual focused on deep work it&#39;s easy to identify the relevant lead measure time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal returning to my example this Insight had an important impact on how I directed my academic research I used to focus on lag measures such as papers published per year these measures however lacked influence on my day-to-day Behavior because there was nothing I could do in the short term that could immediately generate a noticeable change to this long-term metric when I shifted to tracking deep work hours suddenly these measures became relevant to my day-to-day every hour extra of deep work was immediately reflected in my Tally discipline number three keep a compelling scorecard people play differently when they&#39;re keeping score the 4dx authors explain they then elaborate that when attempting to drive your team&#39;s engagement toward your organization&#39;s wildly important goal it&#39;s important that they have a public place to record and track their lead measures this scoreboard creates a sense of competition that drives them to focus on these measures even when other demands Vie for their attention it also provides a reinforcing source of motivation once the team notices their success with a lead measure they become invested in perpetuating this performance in the preceding discipline I argued that for an individual focused on deep work hours spent working deeply should be the lead measure it follows therefore that the individual&#39;s scoreboard should be a physical artifact in the workspace that displays the individual&#39;s current deep work hour count in my early experiments with 4dx I settled on a simple but effective solution for implementing the scorecard I took a piece of cardstock and divided it into rows one for each week of the current semester I then labeled each row with the dates of the week and taped it to the wall next to my computer monitor where it couldn&#39;t be ignored as each week progressed I kept track of the hours spent in deep work that week with a simple tally of tick marks in that week&#39;s row to maximize the motivation generated by the scorecard whenever I reached an important milestone in an academic paper I.E solving a key proof I would Circle the tally mark corresponding to the hour where I finish the result this served two purposes first it allowed me to connect at a visceral level accumulated deep work hours and tangible results second it helped calibrate my expectations for how many hours of deep work were needed per result this reality which was larger than I first assumed helped spermi to squeeze more such hours into each week discipline number four create a Cadence of accountability the 4dx authors elaborate that the final step to help maintain a focus on lead measures is to put in place a rhythm of regular and frequent meetings of any team that owns a wildly important goal during these meetings the team members must confront their scoreboard commit to specific actions to help improve the score before the next meeting and describe what happened with the commitments they made at the last meeting they note that this review can be condensed to only a few minutes but it must be regular for its effect to be felt the authors argue that it&#39;s this discipline where execution really happens for an individual focused on his or her own deep work habit there&#39;s likely no team to meet with but this doesn&#39;t exempt you from the need for regular accountability in multiple places throughout this book I discuss and recommend the habit of a weekly review in which you make a plan for the work week ahead see Rule Number Four during my experiments with 4dx I used a weekly review to look over my scorecard to celebrate good weeks help understand what led to bad weeks and most important figure out how to ensure a good score for the days ahead this led me to adjust my schedule to meet the needs of my lead measure enabling significantly more deep work than if I had avoided such reviews altogether the 40x framework is based on the fundamental premise that execution is more difficult than strategizing after hundreds and hundreds of case studies its inventors managed to isolate a few basic disciplines that seem to work particularly well in conquering this difficulty it&#39;s no surprise therefore that these same disciplines can have a similar effect on your personal goal of cultivating a deep work habit to conclude let&#39;s return one last time to my own example as I noted earlier when I first embraced 4dx I adopted the goal of publishing five peer-reviewed papers in the 2013-2014 Academic Year this was an ambitious goal given that I had published only four papers the previous year a feat I was proud of throughout this 4dx experiment the clarity of this goal coupled with the simple but unavoidable feedback of my lead measure scorecard pushed me to a level of depth I hadn&#39;t before achieved in retrospect it was not so much the intensity of my deep work periods that increased but instead their regularity whereas I used to Cluster my deep thinking near paper submission deadlines The 4dx Habit kept my mind concentrated throughout the full year it ended up I must admit an exhausting year especially given that I was writing this book at the same time but it also turned out to produce a convincing endorsement for the 4dx framework by the summer of 2014 I had nine full papers accepted for publication more than doubling what I had managed to accomplish in any preceding year be lazy in a 2012 article written for a New York Times blog the SAS 10 cartoonist Tim Kreider provided a memorable self-description I am not busy I am the laziest ambitious person I know kreider&#39;s distaste for frenetic work however was put to the test in the months leading up to the writing of his post here&#39;s his description of the period I&#39;ve insidiously started because of professional obligations to become busy every morning my inbox was full of emails asking me to do things I did not want to do or presenting me with problems that I now had to solve his solution he fled to what he calls an undisclosed location a place with no TV and no internet going online requires a bike ride to the local library and where he could remain non-responsive to the pinprick onslaught of small obligations that seem harmless in isolation but aggregate to Serious injury to his deep work habit I&#39;ve remembered about buttercups stink bugs and the Stars Kreider says about his Retreat from activity I read and I&#39;m finally getting some real writing done for the first time in months it&#39;s important for our purposes to recognize that Kreider is no Thoreau he didn&#39;t Retreat from the world of busyness to underscore a complicated social critique his move to an undisclosed location was instead motivated by a surprising but practical Insight it made him better at his job here&#39;s crider&#39;s explanation idleness is not just a vacation an Indulgence or a vice it is as indispensable to the brain as Vitamin D is to the body and deprived of it we suffer a mental Affliction as disfiguring as rickets it is paradoxically necessary to getting any work done when Kreider talks of getting work done of course he&#39;s not referencing shallow tasks for the most part the more time you can spend immersed in Shallow work the more of it that gets accomplished as a writer and artist however Kreider is instead concerned with deep work the serious efforts that produce things the world values these efforts he&#39;s convinced need the support of a mind regularly released to leisure this strategy argues that you should follow kreider&#39;s lead by injecting regular and substantial freedom from professional concerns into your day providing you with the idleness paradoxically required to get deep work done there are many ways to accomplish this goal you could for example use kreider&#39;s approach of retreating from the world of shallow tasks altogether by hiding out in an undisclosed location but this isn&#39;t practical for most people instead I want to suggest a more applicable but still quite powerful heuristic at the end of the workday shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning no after dinner email check no mental replays of conversations and no scheming about how you&#39;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 to encounter kreider&#39;s Buttercup stink bugs and stars before describing some tactics that support this strategy I want to First explore why a shutdown will be profitable to your ability to produce valuable output we have of course Tim kreider&#39;s personal endorsement but it&#39;s worth taking the time to also understand the science behind the value of downtime a closer examination of this literature reveals the following three possible explanations for this value reason number one downtime AIDS insights consider the following excerpt from a 2006 paper that appeared in the journal science the scientific literature has emphasized the benefits of conscious deliberation in decision making for hundreds of years the question addressed here is whether this view is Justified we hypothesize that it is not lurking in this Bland statement is a bold claim the authors of this study led by the Dutch psychologist app Dexter house set out to prove that some decisions are better left to your unconscious mind to untangle in other words to actively try to work through these decisions will lead to a worse outcome than loading up the relevant information and then moving on to something else while letting the subconscious layers of your mind mull things over Dexter House&#39;s team isolated this effect by giving subjects the information needed for a complex decision regarding a car purchase half the subjects were told to Think Through the information and then make the best decision the other half were distracted by easy puzzles after they read the information and were then put on the spot to make a decision without having had time to consciously deliberate the distracted group ended up performing better observations from experiments such as this one LED Dexter house and his collaborators to introduce unconscious thought Theory utt an attempt to understand the different roles conscious and unconscious deliberation play in decision making at a high level this theory proposes that for decisions that require the application of strict rules the conscious mind must be involved for example if you need to do a math calculation only your conscious mind is able to follow the precise arithmetic rules needed for correctness on the other hand for decisions that involve large amounts of information and multiple vague and perhaps even conflicting constraints your unconscious mind is well suited to tackle the issue utt hypothesizes that this is due to the fact that these regions of your brain have more neuronal bandwidth available allowing them to move around more information and sift through more potential Solutions than your conscious centers of thinking your conscious mind according to this theory is like a home computer on which you can run carefully written programs that return correct answers to limited problems whereas your unconscious mind is like Google&#39;s vast data centers in which statistical algorithms sift through terabytes of unstructured information teasing out surprising useful solutions to difficult questions the implication of this line of research is that providing your conscious brain time to rest enables your unconscious mind to take a shift sorting through your most challenging professional challenges a shutdown habit therefore is not necessarily reducing the amount of time you&#39;re engaged in productive work but is instead diversifying the type of work you deploy reason number two downtime helps recharge the energy needed to work deeply a frequently cited 2008 paper appearing in the journal&#39;s psychological science describes a simple experiment subjects were split into two groups one group was asked to take a walk on a Wooded Path in an arboretum near the Ann Arbor Michigan campus where the study was conducted the other group was sent on a walk through the bustling center of the city both groups were then given a concentration sapping task called backward digit span the core finding of the study is that the nature group performed up to 20 percent better on the task the nature Advantage still held the next week when the researchers brought back the same subjects and switched the locations it wasn&#39;t the people who determined performance but whether or not they got a chance to prepare by walking through the woods this study it turns out is one of many that validate attention restoration Theory art which claims that spending time in nature can improve your ability to concentrate this Theory which was first proposed in the 1980s by the University of Michigan psychologists Rachel Kaplan and Stephen Kaplan the latter of which co-authored the 2008 study discussed here along with Mark Berman and John Unitas is based on the concept of attention fatigue to concentrate requires what art calls directed attention this resource is finite if you exhaust it you&#39;ll struggle to concentrate for our purposes we can think of this Resource as the same thing as baumeister&#39;s limited willpower reserves we discussed in the introduction to this rule the 2008 study argues that walking on busy city streets requires you to use directed attention as you must navigate complicated tasks like figuring out when to cross a street to not get run over or when to maneuver around the slow group of tourists blocking the sidewalk after just 50 minutes of this focused navigation the subject store of directed attention was low walking through Nature by contrast exposes you to what lead author Mark Berman calls inherently fascinating stimuli using sunsets as an example these stimuli invoke attention modestly allowing focused attention mechanisms a chance to replenish put another way when walking through nature you&#39;re freed from having to direct your attention is there a few challenges to navigate like crowded Street Crossings and experience enough interesting stimuli to keep your mind sufficiently occupied to avoid the need to actively aim your attention this state allows your directed attention resources time to replenish after 50 minutes of such replenishment the subjects enjoyed a boost in their concentration you might of course argue that perhaps being outside watching a sunset puts people in a good mood and being in a good mood is what really helps performance on these tasks but in a sadistic twist the researchers debunked that hypothesis by repeating the experiment in the harsh Ann Arbor winter walking outside in brutal cold conditions didn&#39;t put the subjects in a good mood but they still ended up doing better on concentration tasks what&#39;s important to our purpose is observing that the implications of art expand beyond the benefits of nature the core mechanism of this theory is the idea that you can restore your ability to direct your attention if you give this activity a rest walking in nature provides such a mental respite but so too can any number of relaxing activities so long as they provide similar inherently fascinating stimuli and freedom from directed concentration having a casual conversation with a friend listening to music while making dinner playing a game with your kids going for a run the types of activities that will fill your time in the evening if you enforce a work shutdown play the same attention restoring role as walking in nature but on the other hand if you keep interrupting your evening to check and respond to email or put aside a few hours after dinner to catch up on an approaching deadline you&#39;re robbing your directed attention centers of the uninterrupted rest they need for restoration even if these work dashes consume only a small amount of time they prevent you from reaching the levels of deeper relaxation in which attention restoration could occur only the confidence that you&#39;re done with work until the next day can convince your brain to downshift to the level where it can begin to recharge for the next day to follow put another way trying to squeeze a little more work out of your evenings might reduce your Effectiveness the next day enough that you end up getting less done than if you had instead respected a shutdown reason number three the work that evening downtime replaces is usually not that important the final argument for maintaining a clear endpoint to your work day requires us to return briefly to Anders Ericsson the inventor of deliberate practice theory as you might recall from part one deliberate practice is the systematic stretching of your ability for a given skill it is the activity required to get better at something deep work and deliberate practice as I&#39;ve argued overlap substantially for our purposes here we can use deliberate practice as a general purpose stand-in for cognitively demanding efforts in Erickson&#39;s seminal 1993 paper on the topic titled the role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance he dedicates a section to reviewing what the research literature reveals about an individual&#39;s capacity for cognitively demanding work Ericsson notes that for a novice somewhere around an hour a day of intense concentration seems to be a limit while for experts this number can expand to as many as four hours but rarely more one of the studies cited for example catalogs the practice habits of a group of elite violin players training at Berlin&#39;s University this study found the elite players average around three and a half hours per day in a state of deliberate practice usually separated into two distinct periods the less accomplished players spent less time in a state of depth the implication of these results is that your capacity for deep work in a given day is limited if you&#39;re careful about your schedule using for example the type of productivity strategies described in rule number four you should hit your daily deep work capacity during your work day it follows therefore that by evening you&#39;re beyond the point where you can continue to effectively work deeply any work you do fit into the night therefore won&#39;t be the type of high value activities that really Advance your career your efforts will instead likely be confined to low value shallow tasks executed at a slow low energy pace by deferring evening work in other words you&#39;re not missing out on much of importance the three reasons just described support the general strategy of maintaining a strict endpoint to your workday let&#39;s conclude by filling in some details concerning implementation to succeed with this strategy you must first accept the commitment that once your workday shuts down you cannot allow even the smallest incursion of professional concerns into your field of attention this includes crucially checking email as well as browsing work-related websites in both cases even a brief intrusion of work can generate a self-reinforcing stream of distraction that impedes the shutdown advantages described earlier for a long time to follow most people are familiar for example with the experience of glancing at an alarming email on a Saturday morning and then having its implications haunt your thoughts for the rest of the weekend another key commitment for succeeding with this strategy is to support your commitment by shutting down with a strict shutdown ritual that you use at the end of the workday to maximize the probability that you succeed in more detail this ritual should ensure that every incomplete task goal or project has been reviewed and that for each you have confirmed that either one you have a plan you trust for its completion or two it&#39;s captured in a place where it will be Revisited when the time is right the process should be an algorithm a series of steps you always conduct one after another when you&#39;re done have a set phrase you say that indicates completion to end my own ritual I say shut down complete this final step sounds cheesy but it provides a simple cue to your mind that it&#39;s safe to release work-related thoughts for the rest of the day to make this suggestion more concrete let me walk through the steps of my own shutdown ritual which I first developed around the time I was writing my doctoral dissertation and have deployed in one form or another ever since the first thing I do is take a final look at my email inbox to ensure that there&#39;s nothing requiring an Urgent Response before the day ends the next thing I do is transfer any new tasks that are on my mind or were scribbled down earlier in the day into my official task lists I use Google Docs for storing my task lists as I like the ability to access them from any computer but the technology here isn&#39;t really relevant once I have these task lists open I quickly skim every task in every list and then look at the next few days on my calendar these two actions ensure that there&#39;s nothing urgent I&#39;m forgetting or any important deadlines or appointments sneaking up on me I have at this point reviewed everything that&#39;s on my professional plate to end the ritual I use this information to make a rough plan for the next day once the plan is created I say shut down complete and my work thoughts are done for the day the concept of a shutdown ritual might at first seem extreme but there&#39;s a good reason for it the zigarnik effect this effect which is named for the experimental work of the early 20th century psychologist Bloom is a garnik describes the ability of incomplete tasks to dominate our attention it tells us that if you simply stop whatever you&#39;re doing at 5 pm and declare I&#39;m done with work until tomorrow you&#39;ll likely struggle to keep your mind clear of professional issues as the many obligations left unresolved in your mind will as in bloom is the garnix experiments keep battling for your attention throughout the evening a battle that they&#39;ll often win at first this challenge might seem unresolvable as any busy knowledge worker can attest there are always tasks left incomplete the idea that you can ever reach a point where all your obligations are handled is a fantasy fortunately we don&#39;t need to complete a task to get it off our minds writing to our rescue in this matter is our friend from earlier in the rule the psychologist Roy Baumeister who wrote a paper with EJ massacampo playfully titled consider it done in this study the two researchers began by replicating the zagarnik effect in their subjects in this case the researchers assigned a task and then cruelly engineered interruptions but then found that they could significantly reduce the effects impact by asking the subject soon after the interruption to make a plan for how they would later complete the incomplete task to quote the paper committing to a specific plan for a goal May therefore not only facilitate attainment of the goal but may also free cognitive resources for other Pursuits the shutdown ritual described earlier leverages this tactic to battle the zagarnik effect while it doesn&#39;t force you to explicitly identify a plan for every single task in your task list a burdensome requirement it does force you to capture every task in a common list and then review these tasks before making a plan for the next day this ritual ensures that no task will be forgotten each will be reviewed daily and tackled when the time is appropriate your mind in other words is released from its duty to keep track of these obligations at every moment your shutdown ritual has taken over that responsibility shutdown rituals can become annoying as they add an extra 10 to 15 minutes to the end of your workday and sometimes even more but they&#39;re necessary for reaping the rewards of systematic idleness summarized previously from my experience it should take a week or two before the shutdown habit sticks that is until your mind trusts your ritual enough to actually begin to release work-related thoughts in the evening but once it does stick the ritual will become a permanent fixture in your life to the point that skipping the routine will fill you with a sense of unease 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&#39;re done be done your average email response time might suffer some but you&#39;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 rule number two Embrace boredom to better understand how one Masters the art of deep work I suggest visiting the knesses Israel synagogue in Spring Valley New York at 6 a.m on a weekday morning if you do you&#39;ll likely find at least 20 cars in the parking lot inside you&#39;ll encounter a couple dozen members of the congregation working over texts some might be reading silently mouthing the words of an ancient language While others are paired together debating at one end of the room a rabbi will be leading a larger group in a discussion this early morning gathering in Spring Valley represents just a small fraction of the hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Jews who will wake up early that morning as they do every weekday morning to practice a central tenet of their faith to spend time every day studying the complex written traditions of rabbinic Judaism I was introduced to This World by Adam Marlin a member of the knesses Israel congregation and one of the regulars at its morning study group as Marlin explained to me his goal with this practice is to decipher one talmud page each day though he sometimes fails to make it even this far often working with a shivruda study partner to push his understanding closer to his cognitive limit what interests me about Marlin is not his knowledge of ancient texts but instead the type of effort required to gain this knowledge when I interviewed him he emphasized the mental intensity of his morning ritual it&#39;s an extreme and serious discipline consisting mostly of the deep work stuff you write about he explained I run a growing business but this is often the hardest brain strain I do this strain is not unique to Marlin but is instead ingrained in the practice as his Rabbi once explained to him you cannot consider yourself as fulfilling this daily obligation unless you have stretched to the reaches of your mental capacity unlike many Orthodox Jews Marlin came late to his faith not starting his rigorous talmud training until his twenties this bit of trivia proves useful to our purposes because it allows Marlin a clear before and after comparison concerning the impact of these mental calisthenics and the results surprised him though Marlin was exceptionally well educated when he began the practice he holds three different ivy league degrees he soon met fellow adherents who had only ever attended small religious schools but could still dance intellectual circles around him a number of these people are highly successful professionally he explained to me but it wasn&#39;t some fancy school that pushed their intellect higher it became clear it was instead their daily study that started as early as the fifth grade after a while Marlon began to notice positive changes in his own ability to think deeply I&#39;ve recently been making more highly creative insights in my business life he told me I&#39;m convinced it&#39;s related to this daily mental practice this consistent strain has built my mental muscle over years and years this was not the goal when I started but it is the effect Adam Marlin&#39;s experience underscores an important reality about deep work the ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained this idea might sound obvious once it&#39;s pointed out but it represents a departure from how most people understand such matters in my experience it&#39;s common to treat undistracted concentration as a habit like flossing something that you know how to do and know is good for you but that you&#39;ve been neglecting due to a lack of motivation this mindset is appealing because it implies you can transform your working life from distracted to focused overnight if you can simply muster enough motivation but this understanding ignores the difficulty of focus and the hours of practice necessary to strengthen your mental muscle the creative insights that Adam Marlin now experiences in his professional life in other words have little to do with a one-time decision to think deeper and much to do with the commitment to training this ability early every morning there is however an important corollary to this idea efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don&#39;t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction much in the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions you&#39;ll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom we can find evidence for this claim in the research of Clifford nass the late Stanford Communications Professor who is well known for his study of behavior in the digital age among other insights NASA&#39;s research revealed that constant attention switching online has a lasting negative effect on your brain here&#39;s Nas summarizing these findings in a 2010 interview with NPR&#39;s iraflato so we have scales that allow us to divide up people into people who multitask all the time and people who rarely do and the differences are remarkable people who multitask all the time can&#39;t filter out irrelevancy they can&#39;t manage a working memory they&#39;re chronically distracted they initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand they&#39;re pretty much mental wrecks at this point flato asks Nas whether the chronically distracted recognized this rewiring of their brain the people we talk with continually said Look What I really have to concentrate I turn off everything and I am laser focused and unfortunately they&#39;ve developed habits of mind that make it impossible for them to be laser focused they&#39;re suckers for irrelevancy they just can&#39;t keep on task once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction Mass discovered it&#39;s hard to shake the addiction even when you want to concentrate to put this more concretely if every moment of potential boredom in your life say having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where like the mental wrecks in NASA&#39;s research it&#39;s not ready for deep work even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration rule number one taught you how to integrate deep work into your schedule and support it with routines and rituals designed to help you consistently reach the current limit of your concentration ability rule number two will help you significantly improve this limit the strategies that follow are motivated by the key idea that getting the most out of your deep work habit requires training and is clarified previously this training must address two goals improving your ability to concentrate intensely and overcoming your desire for distraction these strategies cover a variety of approaches from quarantining distraction to mastering a special form of meditation that combine to provide a practical roadmap for your journey from a mind wrecked by constant distraction and unfamiliar with concentration to an instrument that truly does deliver laser-like Focus don&#39;t take breaks from distraction instead take breaks from Focus many assume that they can switch between a state of distraction and one of concentration as needed but as I just argued this assumption is optimistic once you&#39;re wired for distraction you crave it motivated by this reality this strategy is designed to help you rewire your brain to a configuration better suited to staying on task before diving into the details let&#39;s start by considering a popular suggestion for distraction addiction that doesn&#39;t quite solve our problem the internet Sabbath sometimes called a digital detox in its basic form this ritual asks you to put aside regular time typically one day a week where you refrain from Network Technology in the same way that the Sabbath in the Hebrew Bible induces a period of quiet and reflection well suited to appreciate God and His works the internet Sabbath is meant to remind you of what you miss when you are glued to a screen it&#39;s unclear who first introduced the internet Sabbath concept but credit for popularizing the idea often goes to the journalist William Powers who promoted the practice in his 2010 reflection on technology and human happiness Hamlet&#39;s BlackBerry his powers later summarizes in an interview do what the row did which is learn to have a little disconnectedness within the connected world don&#39;t run away a lot of advice for the problem of distraction follows this General template of finding occasional time to get away from the clatter some put aside one or two months a year to escape these tethers others follow Powers one day a week advice While others put aside an hour or two every day for the same purpose all forms of this advice provide some benefit but once we see the distraction problem in terms of brain wiring it becomes clear that an internet Sabbath cannot by itself cure a distracted brain if you eat healthy just one day a week you&#39;re unlikely to lose weight as the majority of your time is still spent gorging similarly if you spend just one day a week resisting distraction you&#39;re unlikely to diminish your brain&#39;s craving for these stimuli as most of your time is still spent giving into it I propose an alternative to the internet Sabbath instead of scheduling the occasional break from distractions so you can focus you should instead schedule the occasional break from Focus to give in to distraction to make this suggestion more concrete let&#39;s make the simplifying assumption that internet use is synonymous with seeking distracting stimuli you can of course use the internet in a way that&#39;s focused and deep but for a distraction addict this is a difficult task similarly let&#39;s consider working in the absence of the internet to be synonymous with more focused work you can of course find ways to be distracted without a network connection but these tend to be easier to resist with these rough categorizations established the strategy works as follows schedule in advance when you&#39;ll use the internet and then avoid it all together outside these times I suggest that you keep a notepad near your computer at work on this pad record the next time you&#39;re allowed to use the internet until you arrive at that time absolutely no network connectivity is allowed no matter how tempting the idea motivating this strategy is that the use of a distracting service does not by itself reduce your brain&#39;s ability to focus it&#39;s instead the constant switching from low stimuli high value activities to high stimuli low value activities at the slightest hint of boredom or cognitive challenge that teaches your mind to never tolerate an absence of novelty this constant switching can be understood analogously as weakening the mental muscles responsible for organizing the many sources vying for your attention by segregating internet use and therefore segregating distractions you&#39;re minimizing the number of times you give in to distraction and by doing so you let these attention-selecting muscles strengthen for example if you&#39;ve scheduled your next internet block 30 minutes from the current moment and you&#39;re beginning to feel bored and crave distraction the next 30 minutes of resistance become a session of concentration calisthenics a full day of scheduled distraction therefore becomes a full day of similar mental training while the basic idea behind this strategy is straightforward putting it into practice can be tricky to help you succeed here are three important points to consider Point number one this strategy works even if your job requires lots of internet use and or prompt email replies if you&#39;re required to spend hours every day online or answer emails quickly that&#39;s fine this simply means that your internet blocks will be more numerous than those of someone whose job requires less connectivity the total number or duration of your internet blocks doesn&#39;t matter nearly as much is making sure that the Integrity of your offline blocks remains intact imagine for example that over a two hour period between meetings you must schedule an email check every 15 minutes further imagine that these checks require on average five minutes it&#39;s sufficient therefore to schedule an internet block every 15 minutes through this two hour stretch with the rest of the time dedicated to offline blocks in this example you&#39;ll end up spending around 90 minutes out of this two hour period in a state where you&#39;re offline and actively resisting distraction this works out to be a large amount of concentration training that&#39;s achieved without requiring you to sacrifice too much connectivity Point number two regardless of how you schedule your internet blocks you must keep the time outside these blocks absolutely free from internet use this objective is easy to state in principle but quickly becomes tricky in the messy reality of the standard workday an inevitable issue you&#39;ll face when executing this strategy is realizing early on in an offline block that there&#39;s some crucial piece of information online that you need to retrieve to continue making progress on your current task if your next internet block doesn&#39;t start for a while you might end up stuck the Temptation in this situation is to quickly give in look up the information then return to your offline block you must resist this temptation the internet is seductive you may think you&#39;re just retrieving a single key email from your inbox but you&#39;ll find it hard not to glance at the other urgent messages that have recently arrived it doesn&#39;t take many of these exceptions before your mind begins to treat the barrier between internet and offline blocks as permeable diminishing the benefits of this strategy it&#39;s crucial in this situation therefore that you don&#39;t immediately abandon an offline block even when stuck if it&#39;s possible switch to another offline activity for the remainder of the current block or perhaps even fill in this time relaxing if this is infeasible perhaps you need to get the current offline activity done promptly then the correct response is to change your schedule so that your next internet block begins sooner the key in making this change however is to not schedule the next internet block to occur immediately instead enforce at least a five minute gap between the current moment and the next time you can go online this Gap is minor so it won&#39;t excessively impede your progress but from a behavioralist perspective it&#39;s substantial because it separates the sensation of wanting to go online from the reward of actually doing so Point number three scheduling internet use at home as well as at work can further improve your concentration training if you find yourself glued to a smartphone or laptop throughout your evenings and weekends then it&#39;s likely that your behavior outside of work is undoing many of your attempts during the work day to rewire your brain which makes little distinction between the two settings in this case I would suggest that you maintain the strategy of scheduling internet use even after the workday is over to simplify matters when scheduling internet use after work you can allow time-sensitive communication into your offline blocks I.E texting with a friend to agree on where you&#39;ll meet for dinner as well as time sensitive information retrieval I.E looking up the location of the restaurant on your phone outside of these pragmatic exceptions however when in an offline block put your phone away ignore texts and refrain from internet usage as in the workplace variation of the strategy if the internet plays a large and important role in your evening entertainment that&#39;s fine schedule lots of long internet blocks the key here isn&#39;t to avoid or even to reduce the total amount of time you spend engaging in distracting Behavior but is instead to give yourself plenty of opportunities throughout your evening to resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom one place where this strategy becomes particularly difficult outside work is when you&#39;re forced to wait for example standing in line at a store it&#39;s crucial in these situations that if you&#39;re in an offline block you simply gird yourself for the temporary boredom and fight through it with only the company of your thoughts to Simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in Modern Life but from the perspective of concentration training it&#39;s incredibly valuable to summarize to succeed with deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli this doesn&#39;t mean that you have to eliminate distracting behaviors it&#39;s sufficient that you instead eliminate the ability of such behaviors to hijack your attention the simple strategy proposed here of scheduling internet blocks goes a long way toward helping you regain this attention autonomy work like Teddy Roosevelt if you attended Harvard College during the 1876-1877 school year you would have likely noticed a wiry mutton-chopped Brash and impossibly energetic freshman named Theodore Roosevelt if you then proceeded to befriend this young man you would have soon noticed a paradox on the one hand his attention might appear to be hopelessly scattered spread over what one classmate called an amazing array of interests a list that biographer Edmund Morris catalogs to contain boxing wrestling bodybuilding dance lessons poetry readings and the continuation of a lifelong obsession with naturalism Roosevelt&#39;s landlord on Winthrop Street was not pleased with her young tenants tendency to dissect and stuff specimens in his rented room this latter interest developed to the point that Roosevelt published his first book The Summer birds of the Adirondacks in the summer after his freshman year it was well received in the bulletin of the nuttal ornithological club a publication needless to say which takes bird books quite seriously and was good enough to lead Morris to assess Roosevelt at this young age to be one of the most knowledgeable young naturalists in the United States to support this extracurricular exuberance Roosevelt had to severely restrict the time left available for what should have been his primary focus his studies at Harvard Morris used Roosevelt&#39;s diary and letters from this period to estimate that the future president was spending no more than a quarter of the typical day studying one might expect therefore that Roosevelt&#39;s grades would crater but they didn&#39;t he wasn&#39;t the top student in his class but he certainly didn&#39;t struggle either in his freshman year he earned honor grades in five out of his seven courses the explanation for this Roosevelt Paradox turns out to be his unique approach to tackling this schoolwork Roosevelt would begin his scheduling by considering the eight hours from 8 30 a.m to 4 30 pm he would then remove the time spent in recitation and classes his athletic training which was once a day and lunch the fragments that remained were then considered time dedicated exclusively to studying as noted these fragments didn&#39;t usually add up to a large number of total hours but he would get the most out of them by working only on schoolwork during these periods and doing so with a blistering intensity the amount of time he spent at his desk was comparatively small explained Morris but his concentration was so intense and his reading so rapid that he could afford more time off from school work than most this strategy asks you to inject the occasional dash of roosevelty and intensity into your own workday in particular identify a deep task that is something that requires deep work to complete that&#39;s high on your priority list estimate how long you&#39;d normally put aside for an obligation of this type then give yourself a hard deadline that drastically reduces this time if possible commit publicly to the deadline for example by telling the person expecting the finished project when they should expect it if this isn&#39;t possible or if it puts your job in Jeopardy then motivate yourself by setting a countdown timer on your phone and propping it up where you can&#39;t avoid seeing it as you work at this point there should be only one possible way to get the Deep task done in time working with great intensity no email breaks no daydreaming no Facebook browsing no repeated trips to the coffee machine like Roosevelt at Harvard attacked the task with every free neuron until it gives way under your unwavering barrage of concentration try this experiment no more than once a week at First giving your brain practice with intensity but also giving it and your stress levels time to rest in between once you feel confident in your ability to trade concentration for completion time increase the frequency of these Roosevelt dashes remember however to always keep yourself imposed deadlines right at the edge of feasibility you should be able to consistently beat the buzzer or at least be close but to do so should require teeth gritting concentration the main motivation for this strategy is straightforward deep work requires levels of concentration well beyond where most knowledge workers are comfortable Roosevelt Dash&#39;s leverage artificial deadlines to help you systematically increase the level you can regularly achieve providing in some sense interval training for the attention centers of your brain an additional benefit is that these dashes are incompatible with distraction there&#39;s no way you can give in to distraction and still make your deadlines therefore every completed Dash provides a session in which you&#39;re potentially bored and really want to seek more novel stimuli but you resist as argued in the previous strategy the more you practice resisting such urges the easier such resistance becomes after a few months of deploying this strategy your understanding of what it means to focus will likely be transformed as you reach levels of intensity stronger than anything you&#39;ve experienced before and if you&#39;re anything like a young Roosevelt you can then repurpose the extra free time it generates toward the finer Pleasures in life like trying to impress the always Discerning members of the nuttal ornithological club meditate productively during the two years I spent as a postdoctoral associate at MIT my wife and I lived in a small but Charming apartment on Pinckney Street in historic Beacon Hill though I lived in Boston and worked in Cambridge the two locations were close only a mile apart sitting on opposite banks of the Charles River intent on staying fit even during the long and dark New England winter I decided to take advantage of this proximity by traveling between home and work to the greatest extent possible on foot my routine had me walk to campus in the morning crossing the Longfellow bridge in all weather the city it turns out to my dismay is often slow to shovel The Pedestrian path after snowstorms around lunch I would change into running gear and run back home on a longer path that followed the banks of the Charles Crossing at the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge after a quick lunch and shower at home I would typically take the subway across the river on the way back to campus saving perhaps a third of a mile on the track and then walk home when the work day was done in other words I spent a lot of time on my feet during this period it was this reality that led me to develop the practice that I&#39;ll now suggest you adopt in your own deep work training productive meditation the goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you&#39;re occupied physically but not mentally walking jogging driving showering and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem depending on your profession this problem might be outlining an article writing a talk making progress on a proof or attempting to sharpen a business strategy as in mindfulness meditation you must continue to bring your attention back to the problem at hand when it wanders or stalls I used to practice productive meditation in at least one of my daily Cross River treks while living in Boston and as I improved so did my results I ended up for example working out the chapter outlines for a significant portion of my last book while on foot and made progress on many naughty technical problems in my academic research I suggest that you adopt a productive meditation practice in your own life you don&#39;t necessarily need a serious session every day but your goal should be to participate in at least two or three such sessions in a typical week fortunately finding time for this strategy is easy as it takes advantage of periods that would otherwise be wasted such as walking the dog or commuting to work and if Done Right can actually increase your professional productivity instead of taking time away from your work in fact you might even consider scheduling a walk during your work day specifically for the purpose of applying productive meditation to your most pressing problem at the moment I&#39;m not however suggesting this practice for its productivity benefits though they&#39;re nice I&#39;m instead interested in its ability to rapidly improve your ability to think deeply in my experience productive meditation Builds on both of the key ideas introduced at the beginning of this rule by forcing you to resist distraction and return your attention repeatedly to a well-defined problem it helps strengthen your distraction resisting muscles and by forcing you to push your focus deeper and deeper on a single problem it sharpens your concentration to succeed with productive meditation it&#39;s important to recognize that like any form of meditation it requires practice to do well when I first attempted this strategy back in the early weeks of my post-doc I found myself hopelessly distracted ending long stretches of thinking with little new to show for my efforts it took me a dozen or so sessions before I began to experience Real Results you should expect something similar so patience will be necessary to help accelerate this ramp up process however I have two specific suggestions to offer suggestion number one be wary of distractions and looping as a novice when you begin a productive meditation session your mind&#39;s First Act of rebellion will be to offer unrelated but seemingly more interesting thoughts my mind for example was often successful at derailing my attention by beginning to compose an email that I knew I needed to write objectively speaking this train of thoughts sounds exceedingly dull but in the moment it can become impossibly tantalizing when you notice your attention slipping away from the problem at hand gently remind yourself that you can return to that thought later then redirect your attention back distraction of this type in many ways is the obvious enemy to defeat in developing a productive meditation habit a subtler but equally effective adversary is looping when faced with a hard problem your mind as it was evolved to do will attempt to avoid excess expenditure of energy when possible one way it might attempt to sidestep this expenditure is by avoiding diving deeper into the problem by instead looping over and over again on what you already know about it for example when working on a proof my mind has a tendency to rehash simple preliminary results again and again to avoid the harder work of building on these results toward the needed solution you must be on your guard for looping as it can quickly subvert an entire productive meditation session when you notice it remark to yourself that you seem to be in a loop then redirect your attention toward the next step suggestion number two structure your deep thinking thinking deeply about a problem seems like a self-evident activity but in reality it&#39;s not when faced with a distraction-free mental landscape a hard problem and time to think the next steps can become surprisingly non-obvious in my experience it helps to have some structure for this deep thinking process I suggest starting with a careful review of the relevant variables for solving the problem and then storing these values in your working memory for example if you&#39;re working on the outline for a book chapter the relevant variables might be the main points you want to make in the chapter if you&#39;re instead trying to solve a mathematics proof these variables might be actual variables or assumptions or lemmas once the relevant variables are identified Define the specific Next Step question you need to answer using these variables in the book chapter example this next step question might be how am I going to effectively open this chapter and for a proof it might be what can go wrong if I don&#39;t assume this property holds with the relevant variables stored and the next step question identified you now have a specific Target for your attention assuming you&#39;re able to solve your next step question the final step of this structured approach to deep thinking is to consolidate your gains by reviewing clearly the answer you identified at this point you can push yourself to the next level of depth by starting the process over this cycle of reviewing and storing variables identifying and tackling The Next Step question then consolidating your gains is like an intense workout routine for your concentration ability it will help you get more out of your productive meditation sessions and accelerate the pace at which you improve your ability to go deep memorize a deck of cards given just five minutes Daniel kilov can memorize any of the following a shuffled deck of cards a string of 100 random digits or 115 abstract shapes this last feat establishing an Australian National Record it shouldn&#39;t be surprising therefore that kilov recently won back-to-back silver medals in the Australian memory championships what is perhaps surprising given kilov&#39;s history is that he ended up a mental athlete at all I wasn&#39;t born with an exceptional memory kilov told me indeed during high school he considered himself forgetful and disorganized he also struggled academically and was eventually diagnosed with attention deficit disorder it was after a chance encounter with tonsil Ali one of the country&#39;s most successful and visible memory Champions the kilov began to seriously train his memory by the time he earned his college degree he had won his first national competition medal this transformation into a world-class mental athlete was rapid but not unprecedented in 2006 the American Science writer Joshua IV won the USA memory Championship after only a year of intense training a journey he chronicled in his 2011 bestseller Moon walking with Einstein but what&#39;s important to us about key Love&#39;s story is what happened to his academic performance during this period of intensive memory development while training his brain he went from a struggling student with attention deficit disorder to graduating from a demanding Australian University with first-class honors he was soon accepted into the PHD program at one of the country&#39;s top universities where he currently studies under a renowned philosopher one explanation for this transformation comes from research led by Henry rodiger who runs the memory Lab at the University of Washington at St Louis in 2014 rodiger and his collaborators sent a team equipped with a battery of cognitive tests to the extreme memory tournament held in San Diego they wanted to understand what differentiated these Elite memorizers from the population at Large we found that one of the biggest differences between memory athletes and the rest of us is in a cognitive ability that&#39;s not a direct measure of memory at all but of attention explained rodiger in a New York Times blog post the ability in question is called attentional control and it measures the subject&#39;s ability to maintain their focus on essential information a side effect of memory training in other words is an improvement in your general ability to concentrate this ability can then be fruitfully applied to any task demanding deep work Daniel kilov we can therefore conjecture didn&#39;t become a star student because of his award-winning memory it was instead his quest to improve this memory that incidentally gave him the Deep work Edge needed to thrive academically the strategy described here asks you to replicate a key piece of kilov&#39;s training and therefore gain some of the same improvements to your concentration in particular it asks you to learn a standard but quite impressive skill in the repertoire of most mental athletes the ability to memorize a shuffled deck of cards the technique for card memorization I&#39;ll teach you comes from someone who knows quite a bit about this particular challenge Ron White a former USA memory Champion and World Record holder in card memorization the first thing white emphasizes is that professional memory athletes never attempt rote memorization that is where you simply look at information again and again repeating it in your head this approach to retention though popular among burned out students misunderstands how our brains work we&#39;re not wired to quickly internalize abstract information we are however really good at remembering scenes think back to a recent memorable event in your life perhaps attending the opening session of a conference or meeting a friend you haven&#39;t seen in a while for a drink try to picture the scene as clearly as possible most people in this scenario can conjure a surprisingly Vivid recollection of the event even though you made no special effort to remember it at the time if you systematically counted the unique details in this memory the total number of items would likely be surprisingly numerous your mind in other words can quickly retain lots of detailed information if it&#39;s stored in the right way Ron White&#39;s card memorization technique Builds on this insight to prepare for this high volume memorization task white recommends that you begin by cementing in your mind the mental image of walking through five rooms in your home perhaps you come in the door walk through your front hallway then turn into the downstairs bathroom walk out the door and enter the guest bedroom walk into the kitchen and then head down the stairs into your basement in each room conjure a clear image of what you see once you can easily recall this mental walkthrough of a well-known location fix in your mind a collection of 10 items in each of these rooms white recommends that these items be large and therefore more memorable like a desk not a pencil next establish an order in which you look at each of these items in each room for example in the front hallway you might look at the entry mat then shoes on the floor by the mat then the bench above the shoes and so on combined this is only 50 items so add two more items perhaps in your backyard to get to the full 52 items you&#39;ll later need when connecting these images to all the cards in a standard deck practice this mental exercise of walking through the rooms and looking at items in each room in a set order you should find that this type of memorization because it&#39;s based on visual images of familiar places and things will be much easier than the rote memorizing you might remember from your school days the second step in preparing to memorize a deck of cards is to associate a memorable person or thing with each of the 52 possible cards to make this process easier try to maintain some logical association between the card and the corresponding image white provides the example of associating Donald Trump with the King of Diamonds as diamonds signify wealth practice these associations until you can pull a card randomly from the deck and immediately recall the associated image as before the use of memorable visual images and associations will simplify the task of forming these connections the two steps mentioned previously are Advanced steps things you do just once and can then leverage again and again in memorizing specific decks once these steps are done you&#39;re ready for the main event memorizing as quickly as possible the order of 52 cards in a freshly shuffled deck the method here is straightforward begin your mental walkthrough of your house as you encounter each item look at the next card from the shuffled deck and imagine the corresponding memorable person or thing doing something memorable near that item for example if the first item in location is the mat in your front entry and the first card is the King of Diamonds you might picture Donald Trump wiping mud off of his expensive loafers on the entry mat in your front hallway proceed carefully through the rooms associating the proper mental images with objects in the proper order after you complete a room you might want to walk through it a few times in a row to lock in the imagery once you&#39;re done you&#39;re ready to hand the deck to a friend and Amaze him by rattling off the cards in order without peaking to do so of course simply requires that you perform the mental walkthrough one more time connecting each memorable person or thing to its corresponding card as you turn your attention to it if you practice this technique you&#39;ll discover like many mental athletes who came before you that you can eventually internalize a whole deck in just minutes more important than your ability to impress friends of course is the training such activities provide your mind proceeding through the steps described earlier requires that you focus your attention again and again on a clear Target like a muscle responding to weights this will strengthen your general ability to concentrate allowing you to go deeper with more ease it&#39;s worth emphasizing however the obvious point that there&#39;s nothing special about card memorization any structured thought process that requires unwavering attention can have a similar effect be it studying the talmud like Adam Marlin from rule number two&#39;s introduction or practicing productive meditation or trying to learn the guitar part of a song by ear a past favorite of mine if card memorization seems weird to you in other words then choose a replacement that makes similar cognitive requirements the key to this strategy is not the specifics but instead the motivating idea that your ability to concentrate is only as strong as your commitment to train it rule number three quit social media in 2013 author and digital media consultant baratunde Thurston launched an experiment he decided to disconnect from his online life for 25 days no Facebook no Twitter No Foursquare a service that awarded him mayor of the year in 2011. not even email he needed the break Thurston who is described by friends as the most connected man in the world had by his own count participated in more than 59 000 Gmail conversations and posted 1500 times on his Facebook wall in the year leading up to his experiment I was burnt out fried done toast he explained we know about thurston&#39;s experiment because he wrote about it in a cover article for Fast Company magazine ironically titled hashtag unplug as Thurston reveals in the article it didn&#39;t take long to adjust to a disconnected life by the end of that first week the quiet rhythm of my days seemed far less strange he said I was less stressed about not knowing new things I felt that I still existed despite not having shared documentary evidence of set existence on the internet Thurston struck up conversations with strangers he enjoyed food without Instagram in the experience he bought a bike turns out it&#39;s easier to ride the thing when you&#39;re not trying to simultaneously check your Twitter the end came too soon Thurston lamented but he had startups to run and books to Market so after the 25 days passed he reluctantly reactivated his online presence thurston&#39;s experiment neatly summarizes two important points about our culture&#39;s current relationship with social networks like Facebook Twitter and Instagram and infotainment sites like Business Insider and BuzzFeed two categories of online distraction that I will collectively call Network Tools in the sections ahead the first point is that we increasingly recognize that these tools fragment our time and reduce our ability to concentrate this reality no longer generates much debate we all feel it this is a real problem for many different people but the problem is especially dire if you&#39;re attempting to improve your ability to work deeply in the preceding rule for example I described several strategies to help you sharpen your focus these efforts will become significantly more difficult if you simultaneously behave like a pre-experiment baritunde Thurston allowing your life outside such training to remain a distracted blur of apps and browser tabs willpower is limited and therefore the more enticing tools you have pulling at your attention the harder it&#39;ll be to maintain focus on something important to master the art of deep work therefore you must take back control of your time and attention from the many diversions that attempt to steal them before we begin fighting back against these distractions however we must better understand the battlefield this brings me to the second important Point summarized by baritunde thurston&#39;s story The impotence with which knowledge workers currently discuss this problem of Network Tools and attention overwhelmed by these tools demands on his time Thurston felt that his only option was to temporarily quit the internet altogether this idea that a drastic internet sabbatical is the only alternative to the distraction generated by social media and infotainment has increasingly pervaded our cultural conversation the problem with this binary response to this issue is that these two choices are much too crude to be useful the notion that you would quit the internet is of course an overstuffed straw man infeasible for most unless you&#39;re a journalist writing a piece about distraction no one is meant to actually follow baritunde thurston&#39;s lead and this reality provides justification for remaining with the only offered alternative accepting our current distracted State as inevitable for all the insight and Clarity that Thurston gained during his internet sabbatical for example it didn&#39;t take him long once the experiment ended to slide back into the fragmented state where he began on the day when I first started writing this chapter which fell only six months after thurston&#39;s article originally appeared in Fast Company the reformed connector had already sent a dozen Tweets in the few hours since he woke up this rule attempts to break us out of this rut by proposing a third option accepting that these tools are not inherently evil and that some of them might be quite vital to your success and happiness but at the same time also accepting that the threshold for allowing a site regular access to your time and attention not to mention personal data should be much more stringent and that most people should therefore be using many fewer such tools I won&#39;t ask you in other words to quit the internet altogether like baratunde Thurston did for 25 days back in 2013 but I will ask you to reject the state of distracted hyper-connectedness that drove him to that drastic experiment in the first place there is a middle ground and if you are interested in developing a deep work habit you must fight to get there our first step toward finding this middle ground and network tool selection is to understand the current default decision process deployed by most internet users in the fall of 2013 I received insight into this process because of an article I wrote explaining why I never joined Facebook though the piece was meant to be explanatory and not accusatory it nonetheless put many readers on the defensive leading them to reply with justifications for their use of the service here are some examples of these justifications entertainment was my initial draw to Facebook I can see what my friends are up to and post funny photos make quick comments when I first joined I didn&#39;t know why by mere curiosity I joined a forum of short fiction stories once there I improved my writing and made very good friends I use Facebook because a lot of people I knew in high school are on there here&#39;s what strikes me about these responses which are representative of the large amount of feedback I received on this topic they&#39;re surprisingly minor I don&#39;t doubt for example that the first commenter from this list finds some entertainment in using Facebook but I would also assume that this person wasn&#39;t suffering some severe deficit of entertainment options before he or she signed up for the service I would further wager that this user would succeed in staving off boredom even if the service were suddenly shut down Facebook at best added one more arguably quite mediocre entertainment option to many that already existed another commenter cited making friends in a writing Forum I don&#39;t doubt the existence of these friends but we can assume that these friendships are lightweight given that they&#39;re based on sending short messages back and forth over a computer network there&#39;s nothing wrong with such lightweight friendships but they&#39;re unlikely to be at the center of this user&#39;s social life something similar can be said about the commenter who reconnected with high school friends this is a nice diversion but hardly something Central to his or her sense of social connection or happiness to be clear I&#39;m not trying to denigrate the benefits identified previously there&#39;s nothing illusory or misguided about them what I&#39;m emphasizing however is that these benefits are minor and somewhat random by contrast if you&#39;d instead ask someone to justify the use of say the World Wide Web more generally or email the arguments would become much more concrete and compelling to this observation you might reply that value is value if you can find some extra benefit in using a service like Facebook even if it&#39;s small then why not use it I call this way of thinking the any benefit mindset as it identifies any possible benefit as sufficient justification for using a network tool in more detail the any benefit approach to network tool selection you&#39;re justified in using a network tool if you can identify any possible benefit to its use or anything you might possibly miss out on if you don&#39;t use it the problem with this approach of course is that it ignores all the negatives that come along with the tools in question these services are engineered to be addictive robbing time and detention from activities that more directly support your professional and personal goals such as deep work eventually if you use these tools enough you&#39;ll arrive at the state of burned out hyper-distracted connectivity that plagued baritunde Thurston and millions of others like him it&#39;s here that we encounter the true Insidious nature of an any benefit mindset the use of Network Tools can be harmful if you don&#39;t attempt to weigh Pros against cons but instead use any glimpse of some potential benefit as justification for unrestrained use of a tool then you are unwittingly crippling your ability to succeed in the world of knowledge work this conclusion if considered objectively shouldn&#39;t be surprising in the context of Network Tools we&#39;ve become comfortable with the any benefit mindset but if we instead zoom out and consider this mindset in the broader context of skilled labor it suddenly seems a bizarre and a historical approach to choosing Tools in other words once you put aside the Revolutionary rhetoric surrounding all things internet the sense summarized in part one that you&#39;re either fully committed to the revolution or a Luddite curmudgeon you&#39;ll soon realize that Network Tools are not exceptional they&#39;re tools no different from a blacksmith&#39;s hammer or an artist&#39;s brush used by skilled laborers to do their jobs better and occasionally to enhance their leisure throughout history skilled laborers have applied sophistication and skepticism to their encounters with new tools and their decisions about whether to adopt them there&#39;s no reason why knowledge workers cannot do the same when it comes to the internet the fact that the skilled labor here now involves digital bits doesn&#39;t change this reality to help understand what this more careful tool curation might look like it makes sense to start by talking to someone who makes a living working with non-digital tools and relies on a complex relationship with these tools to succeed fortunately for our purposes I found just such an individual in a lanky English major turned successful sustainable farmer named almost two aptly Forest Pritchard Forrest Pritchard runs Smith Meadows a family farm located an hour west of DC one of many farms clustered in The Valleys of the Blue Ridge Mountains soon after taking control of the land from his parents as I learned Pritchard moved the operation away from traditional monoculture crops and toward the then novel concept of grass-finished meat the farm bypasses wholesaling you cannot find Smith Meadows steaks and Whole Foods to sell direct to Consumers at the bustling farmers markets in the Washington DC metro area by all accounts the farm is thriving in an industry that rarely rewards small operations I first encountered Pritchard at our local farmers market in Tacoma Park Maryland where the Smith Meadows stand does good business to see Pritchard usually standing a foot taller than most of his suburbanite customers wearing the obligatory faded flannel of the farmer is to see a Craftsman confident in his trade I introduced myself to him because farming is a skill dependent on the careful management of tools and I wanted to understand how a Craftsman in a non-digital field approaches this crucial task haymaking is a good example he told me not long into one of our conversations on the topic it&#39;s a subject where I can give you the basic idea without having to gloss over the underlying economics when Pritchard took over Smith Meadows he explained the farm made its own hay to use this animal feed during the winter months when grazing is impossible haymaking is done with a piece of equipment called a hay baler a device you pull behind a tractor that compresses and binds dried grass into bales if you raise animals on the East Coast there&#39;s an obvious reason to own and operate a hay baler your animals need hay why spend money to buy in feed when you have perfectly good grass growing for free right in your own soil if a farmer subscribed to the any benefit approach used by knowledge workers therefore he would definitely buy a hay baler but as Pritchard explained to me after preemptively apologizing for a moment of snark if a farmer actually adopted such a simplistic mindset I&#39;d be counting the days until the force sale goes up on the property Pritchard like most practitioners of his trade instead deploys a more sophisticated thought process when assessing tools and after applying this process to the hay baler Pritchard was quick to sell it Smith Meadows now purchases all the hay it uses here&#39;s why let&#39;s start by exploring the costs of making hay Pritchard said first there&#39;s the actual cost of fuel and repairs and the shed to keep the baler you also have to pay taxes on it these directly measurable costs however were the easy part of his decision it was instead the opportunity costs that required more attention as he elaborated if I make hay all summer I can&#39;t be doing something else for example I now use that time instead to raise boilers chickens meant for eating these generate positive cash flow because I can sell them but they also produce manure which I can then use to enhance my soil then there&#39;s the equally subtle issue of assessing the secondary value of a purchased bale of hay as Pritchard explained when I&#39;m buying in Hay I&#39;m trading cash for animal protein as well as manure once it passes through the animal system which means I&#39;m also getting more nutrients from my land in exchange for my money I&#39;m also avoiding compacting soils by driving heavy machinery over my ground All Summer Long when making his final decision on the Baler Pritchard moved past the direct monetary costs which were essentially Awash and instead shifted his attention to the more nuanced issue of the long-term health of his fields for the reasons described previously Pritchard concluded that buying in Hay results in healthier fields and is he summarized soil fertility is my Baseline by this calculation the Baler had to go notice the complexity of pritchard&#39;s tool decision this complexity underscores an important reality the notion that identifying some benefit is sufficient to invest money time and attention in a tool is near laughable to people in his trade of course a hay baler offers benefits every tool at the farm supply store has something useful to offer at the same time of course it offers negatives as well Pritchard expected this decision to be nuanced he began with a clear Baseline in his case that soil health is a fundamental importance to his professional success and then built off this Foundation toward a final call on whether to use a particular tool I propose that if you&#39;re a knowledge worker especially one interested in cultivating a deep work habit you should treat your tool selection with the same level of care as other skilled workers such as farmers following is my attempt to generalize this assessment strategy I call it the Craftsman approach to Tool selection a name that emphasizes that tools are ultimately aids to the larger goals of one&#39;s craft the Craftsman approach to Tool selection identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts notice that this Craftsman approach to Tool selection stands in opposition to the any benefit approach whereas the any benefit mindset identifies any potential positive impact as justification for using a tool the Craftsman variant requires that these positive impacts affect factors at the core of what&#39;s important to you and that they outweigh the negatives even though the Craftsman approach rejects the Simplicity of the any benefit approach it doesn&#39;t ignore the benefits that currently drive people to network tools or make any advanced proclamations about what&#39;s good or bad technology it simply asks that you give any particular Network tool the same type of measured nuanced accounting that Tools in other trades have been subjected to throughout the history of skilled labor the three strategies that follow in this rule are designed to grow your comfort with abandoning the any benefit mindset and instead applying the more thoughtful Craftsman philosophy in curating the tools that lay claim to your time and attention this guidance is important because the Craftsman approach is not cut and dry identifying what matters most in your life and then attempting to assess the impacts of various tools on these factors doesn&#39;t reduce to a simple formula this task requires practice and experimentation the strategies that follow provide some structure for this practice and experimentation by forcing you to reconsider your Network Tools from many different angles combined they should help you cultivate a more sophisticated relationship with your tools that will allow you to take back enough control over your time and attention to enable the rest of the ideas in part two to succeed apply the law of the vital few to your internet habits Malcolm Gladwell doesn&#39;t use Twitter in a 2013 interview he explained why who says my fans want to hear from me on Twitter he then joked I know a lot of people would like to see less of me Michael Lewis another Mega best-selling author also doesn&#39;t use the service explaining in The Wire I don&#39;t tweet I don&#39;t Twitter I couldn&#39;t even tell you how to read or where to find a Twitter message and is mentioned in part one the award-winning New Yorker scribe George Packer also avoids the service and indeed only recently even succumbed to the necessity of owning a smartphone these three writers don&#39;t think Twitter is useless they&#39;re quick to accept that other writers find it useful Packers admission of non-twitter use in fact was written as a response to an unabashedly pro-twitter article by the New York Times media critic David Carr a piece in which Carr effused and now nearly a year later has Twitter turned my brain to Mush no I&#39;m in narrative on more things in a given moment than I ever thought possible and instead of spending a half hour surfing in search of Illumination I get a sense of the day&#39;s news and how people are reacting to it in the time that it takes to wait for coffee at Starbucks at the same time however Gladwell Lewis and Packer don&#39;t feel like the service offers them nearly enough advantages to offset its negatives in their particular circumstances Lewis for example worries that adding more accessibility will sap his energy and reduce his ability to research and write great stories noting it&#39;s amazing how overly accessible people are there&#39;s a lot of communication in my life that&#39;s not enriching it&#39;s impoverishing while Packer for his part worries about distraction saying Twitter is crack for media addicts he goes so far as to describe Carr&#39;s Rave about the service as the most frightening picture of the future that I&#39;ve read thus far in the new decade we don&#39;t have to argue about whether these authors are right in their personal decisions to avoid Twitter and similar tools because their sales numbers and awards speak for themselves we can instead use these decisions as a courageous illustration of the Craftsman approach to Tool selection in action in a time when so many knowledge workers and especially those in Creative fields are still trapped in the any benefit mindset it&#39;s refreshing to see a more mature approach to sorting through such services but the very rareness of these examples reminds us that mature and confident assessments of this type aren&#39;t easy to make recall the complexity of the thought process highlighted earlier that Forest Pritchard had to slog through to make a decision on his hay baler for many knowledge workers and many of the tools in their lives these decisions will be equally complex the goal of this strategy therefore is to offer some structure to this thought process a way to reduce some of the complexity of deciding which tools really matter to you the first step of this strategy is to identify the main high-level goals in both your professional and your personal life if you have a family for example then your personal goals might involve parenting well and running an organized household in the professional sphere the details of these goals depend on what you do for a living in my own work as a professor for example I pursue two important goals one centered on being an Effective Teacher in the classroom and effective mentor to my graduate students and another centered on being an effective researcher while your goals will likely differ the key is to keep the list limited to what&#39;s most important and to keep the descriptions suitably high level if your goal includes a specific Target to reach a million dollars in sales or to publish a half dozen papers in a single year then it&#39;s too specific for our purposes here when you&#39;re done you should have a small number of goals for both the personal and professional areas of your life once you&#39;ve identified these goals list for each the two or three most important activities that help you satisfy the goal these activities should be specific enough to allow you to clearly picture doing them on the other hand they should be General enough that they&#39;re not tied to a one-time outcome for example do better research is too general what does it look like to be doing better research well finish paper on broadcast lower bounds in time for upcoming conference submission is too specific it&#39;s a one-time outcome a good activity in this context would be something like regularly read and understand The Cutting Edge results in my field the next step in this strategy is to consider the Network Tools you currently use for each such tool go through the Key activities you identified and ask whether the use of the tool has a substantially positive impact a substantially negative impact or little impact on your regular and successful participation in the activity now comes the important decision keep using this tool only if you concluded that it has substantial positive impacts and that these outweigh the negative impacts to help illustrate this strategy in action let&#39;s consider a case study for the purposes of this example assume that Michael Lewis if asked would have produced The Following goal and corresponding important activities for his writing career professional goal to craft well-written narrative driven stories that change the way people understand the world Key activities supporting this goal research patiently and deeply write carefully and with purpose now imagine that Lewis was using this goal to determine whether or not to use Twitter our strategy requires him to investigate Twitter&#39;s impact on the Key activities he listed that support his goal there&#39;s no convincing way to argue that Twitter would make Lewis substantially better at either of these activities deep research for Lewis I assume requires him to spend weeks and months getting to know a small number of sources he&#39;s a master of the long-form journalism skill of drawing out a source of story over many sessions and careful writing of course requires freedom from distraction in both cases Twitter at best has no real impact and at worst could be substantially negative depending on Lewis&#39;s susceptibility to the services addictive attributes the conclusion would therefore be that Lewis shouldn&#39;t use Twitter you might argue at this point that confining our example to this single goal is artificial as it ignores the areas where a service like Twitter has its best chance of contributing for writers in particular Twitter is often presented as a tool to establish connections with your audience that ultimately lead to more sales for a writer like Michael Lewis however marketing doesn&#39;t likely Merit its own goal when he assesses what&#39;s important in his professional life this follows because his reputation guarantees that he will receive massive coverage in massively influential media channels if the book is really good his Focus therefore is much more productively applied to the goal of writing the best possible book then instead trying to squeeze out a few extra sales through inefficient author driven means in other words the question is not whether Twitter has some conceivable benefit to Lewis it&#39;s instead whether Twitter used significantly and positively affects the most important activities in his professional life what about a less famous writer in this case book marketing might play a more primary role in his or her goals but when forced to identify the two or three most important activities supporting this goal it&#39;s unlikely that the type of lightweight one-on-one contact enabled by Twitter would make the list this is the result of simple math imagine that our hypothetical author diligently sends 10 individualized tweets a day five days a week Each of which connects one-on-one with a new potential reader now imagine that 50 of the people contacted in this manner become loyal fans who will definitely buy the author&#39;s next book over the two-year period it might take to write this book this yields 2 000 sales a modest boost at Best in a marketplace where best seller status requires two or three times more sales per week the question once again is not whether Twitter offers some benefits but instead whether it offers enough benefits to offset its drag on your time and attention two resources that are especially valuable to a writer having seen an example of this approach applied to a professional context let&#39;s next consider the potentially more disruptive setting of personal goals in particular let&#39;s apply this approach to one of our culture&#39;s most ubiquitous and fiercely defended tools Facebook when justifying the use of Facebook or similar social networks most people cite its importance to their social lives with this in mind let&#39;s apply our strategy to understand whether Facebook makes the cut due to its positive impact on this aspect of our personal goals to do so we&#39;ll once again work with a hypothetical goal and key supporting activities personal goal to maintain close and rewarding friendships with a group of people who are important to me Key activities supporting this goal one regularly take the time for meaningful connection with those who are most important to me eg a long talk a meal joint activity two give of myself to those who are most important to me EG making non-trivial sacrifices that improve their lives not everyone will share this exact goal or supporting activities but hopefully you&#39;ll stipulate that they apply to many people let&#39;s now step back and apply our strategies filtering logic to the example of Facebook in the context of this personal goal this service of course offers any number of benefits to your social life to name a few that are often mentioned it allows you to catch up with people you haven&#39;t seen in a while it allows you to maintain lightweight contact with people you know but don&#39;t run into regularly it allows you to more easily monitor important events in people&#39;s lives such as whether or not they&#39;re married or what their new baby looks like and it allows you to stumble onto online communities or groups that match your interests these are real benefits that Facebook undeniably offers but none of these benefits provide a significant positive impact to the two Key activities we listed both of which are offline and effort intensive our strategy therefore would return a perhaps surprising but clear conclusion of course Facebook offers benefits to your social life but none are important enough to what really matters to you in this area to justify giving it access to your time and attention to be clear I&#39;m not arguing that everyone should stop using Facebook I&#39;m instead showing that for this specific representative case study the strategy proposed here would suggest dropping this service I can&#39;t imagine however other plausible scenarios that would lead to the opposite conclusion consider for example a college freshman for someone in this situation it might be more important to establish new friendships than to support existing relationships the activities this student identifies for supporting his goal of a thriving social life therefore might include something like attend lots of events and socialize with lots of different people if this is a key activity and you&#39;re on a college campus then a tool like Facebook would have a substantially positive impact and should be used to give another example consider someone in the military who&#39;s deployed overseas for this hypothetical Soldier keeping infrequent lightweight touch with friends and family left back home is a plausible priority and one that might once again be best supported through social networks which should be clear from these examples is that this strategy if applied as described will lead many people who currently use tools like Facebook or Twitter to abandon them but not everyone you might at this point complain about the arbitrariness of allowing only a small number of activities to dominate your decisions about such tools as we established previously for example Facebook has many benefits to your social life why would one abandon it just because it doesn&#39;t happen to help the small number of activities that we judged most important what&#39;s key to understand here however is that this radical reduction of priorities is not arbitrary but is instead motivated by an idea that has arisen repeatedly in any number of different fields from client profitability to social equality to prevention of crashes in computer programs the law of the vital few in many settings eighty percent of a given effect is due to just 20 percent of the possible causes for example it might be the case that 80 percent of a business&#39;s profits come from just 20 percent of its clients eighty percent of a nation&#39;s wealth is held by its richest 20 percent of citizens or eighty percent of computer software crashes come from just 20 percent of the identified bugs there&#39;s a formal mathematical underpinning to this phenomenon an 80 20 split is roughly what you would expect when describing a power law distribution over impact a type of distribution that shows up often when measuring quantities in the real world but it&#39;s probably most useful when applied heuristically as a reminder that in many cases contributions to an outcome are not evenly distributed moving forward let&#39;s assume that this law holds for the important goals in your life as we noted many different activities can contribute to your achieving these goals the law of the vital few however reminds us that the most important 20 or so of these activities provide the bulk of the benefit assuming that you could probably list somewhere between 10 and 15 distinct and potentially beneficial activities for each of your life goals this law says that it&#39;s the top two or three such activities the number that this strategy asks you to focus on that make most of the difference in whether or not you succeed with the goal even if you accept this result however you still might argue that you shouldn&#39;t ignore the other eighty percent of possible beneficial activities it&#39;s true that these less important activities don&#39;t contribute nearly as much to your goal as your top one or two but they can provide some benefit so why not keep them in the mix as long as you don&#39;t ignore the more important activities it seems like it can&#39;t hurt to also support some of the less important alternatives this argument however misses the key point that all activities regardless of their importance consume your same Limited store of time and attention if you service low impact activities therefore you&#39;re taking away time you could be spending on higher impact activities it&#39;s a zero-sum game and because your time returns substantially more rewards when invested in high impact activities than when invested in low impact activities the more of it you shift to the latter the lower your overall benefit the business World understands this map this is why it&#39;s not uncommon to see a company fire unproductive clients if eighty percent of their profits come from 20 percent of their clients then they make more money by redirecting the energy from low Revenue clients to better service the small number of lucrative contracts each hour spent on the latter returns more Revenue than each hour spent on the former the same holds true for your professional and personal goals by taking the time consumed by low impact activities like finding old friends on Facebook and reinvesting it in high impact activities like taking a good friend out to lunch you end up more successful in your goal to abandon a network tool using this logic therefore is not to miss out on its potential small benefits but is instead to get more out of the activities you already know to yield large benefits to return to where we started for Malcolm Gladwell Michael Lewis and George Packer Twitter doesn&#39;t support the 20 of activities that generate the bulk of the success in their writing careers even though in isolation this service might return some minor benefits when their careers are viewed as a whole they&#39;re likely more successful not using Twitter and redirecting that time to more fruitful activities than if they added it into their schedule as one more thing to manage you should take the same care in deciding which tools you allow to claim your own limited time and attention quit social media when Ryan Nicodemus decided to simplify his life one of his first targets was his possessions at the time Ryan lived alone in a spacious three-bedroom condo for years driven by a consumerist impulse he had been trying his best to fill this ample space now it was time to reclaim his life from his stuff the strategy he deployed was simple to describe but radical in concept he spent an afternoon packing everything he owned into cardboard boxes as if he was about to move in order to transform what he described as a difficult undertaking into something less onerous he called it a packing party explaining everything&#39;s more exciting when it&#39;s a party right once the packing was done Nicodemus then spent the next week going through his normal routine if he needed something that was packed he would unpack it and put it back where it used to go at the end of the week he noticed that the vast majority of his stuff remained untouched in its boxes so he got rid of it stuff accumulates in people&#39;s lives in part because when faced with a specific Act of elimination it&#39;s easy to worry what if I need this one day and then use this worry as an excuse to keep the item in question sitting around nicodemus&#39;s packing party provided him with definitive evidence that most of his stuff was not something he needed and it therefore supported his quest to simplify the last strategy provided a systematic method to help you begin sorting through the Network Tools the currently lay claim to your time and attention this strategy offers you a different but complementary approach to these same issues and it&#39;s inspired by Ryan nicodemus&#39;s approach to getting rid of his useless stuff in more detail this strategy asks that you perform the equivalent of a packing party on the social media services that you currently use instead of packing however you&#39;ll instead ban yourself from using them for 30 days all of them Facebook Instagram Google Plus Twitter Snapchat Vine or whatever other services have risen to popularity since I first wrote these words don&#39;t formally deactivate these services and this is important don&#39;t mention online that you&#39;ll be signing off just stop using them cold turkey if someone reaches out to you by other means and asks why your activity on a particular service has fallen off you can explain but don&#39;t go out of your way to tell people after 30 days of this self-imposed network isolation ask yourself the following two questions about each of the services you temporarily quit one would the last 30 days have been notably better if I&#39;d been able to use this service two did people care that I wasn&#39;t using this service if your answer is no to both questions quit the service permanently if your answer was a clear yes then return to using the service if your answers are qualified or ambiguous it&#39;s up to you whether you return to the service though I would encourage you to lean toward quitting you can always rejoin later this strategy picks specifically on social media because among the different network tools that can claim your time and attention these Services if used without limit can be particularly devastating to your quest to work deeper they offer personalized information arriving on an unpredictable intermittent schedule making them massively addictive and therefore capable of severely damaging your attempts to schedule and succeed with any Act of concentration given these dangers you might expect that more knowledge workers would avoid these tools altogether especially those like computer programmers or writers whose livelihood explicitly depends on the outcome of deep work but part of what makes social media Insidious is that the companies that profit from your attention have succeeded with a masterful marketing coup convincing our culture that if you don&#39;t use their products you might miss out this fear that you might miss out has obvious parallels to nicodemus&#39;s fear that the voluminous stuff in his closets might one day prove useful which is why I&#39;m suggesting a corrective strategy that parallels his packing party by spending a month without these Services you can replace your fear that you might miss out on events on conversations on shared cultural experience with a dose of reality for most people this reality will confirm something that seems obvious only once you&#39;ve done the hard work of freeing yourself from the marketing messages surrounding these tools they&#39;re not really all that important in your life the reason why I ask you to not announce your 30-day experiment is because for some people another part of the delusion that binds them to social media is the idea that people want to hear what you have to say and that they might be disappointed if you suddenly leave them bereft of your commentary I&#39;m being somewhat facetious here in my wording but this underlying sentiment is nonetheless common and important to tackle as of this writing for example the average number of followers for a Twitter user is 208. when you know that more than 200 people volunteered to hear what you have to say it&#39;s easy to begin to believe that your activities on these services are important speaking from experience as someone who makes a living trying to sell my ideas to people this is a powerfully addictive feeling but here&#39;s the reality of audiences in a social media era before these Services existed building an audience of any size beyond your immediate friends and family required hard competitive work in the early 2000s for example anyone could start a blog but to gain even just a handful of unique visitors per month required that you actually put in the work to deliver information that&#39;s valuable enough to capture someone&#39;s attention I know this difficulty well my first blog was started in the fall of 2003. it was called cleverly enough inspiring moniker I used it to Muse on my life as a 21 year old college student there were I&#39;m embarrassed to admit long stretches where no one read it a term I&#39;m using literally as I learned in the decade that followed a period in which I patiently and painstakingly built an audience for my current blog study hacks from a handful of readers to hundreds of thousands per month is that earning people&#39;s attention online is hard hard work except now it&#39;s not part of what fueled social media&#39;s rapid Ascent I contend is its ability to short-circuit this connection between the hard work of producing real value and the positive reward of having people pay attention to you it is instead replaced this Timeless capitalist exchange with a shallow collectivist alternative I&#39;ll pay attention to what you say if you pay attention to what I say regardless of its value a blog or magazine or television program that contained the content that typically populates a Facebook wall or Twitter feed for example would attract on average no audience but when captured within the social conventions of these services that same content will attract attention in the form of likes and comments the implicit agreement motivating this behavior is that in return for receiving for the most part undeserved attention from your friends and followers you&#39;ll return the favor by lavishing similarly undeserved attention on them you like my status update and all like yours this agreement gives everyone a simulacrum of importance without requiring much effort in return by dropping off these services without notice you can test the reality of your status as a Content producer for most people and most Services the news might be sobering no one outside your closest friends and family will likely even notice you&#39;ve signed off I recognize that I come across as curmudgeonly when talking about this issue is there any other way to tackle it but it&#39;s important to discuss because this quest for self-importance plays an important role in convincing people to continue to thoughtlessly fragment their time and attention for some people of course this 30-day experiment will be difficult and generate lots of issues if you&#39;re a college student or online personality for example the abstention will complicate your life and will be noted but for most I suspect the net result of this experiment if not a massive overhaul in your internet habits will be a more grounded view of the roles social media plays in your daily existence these Services aren&#39;t necessarily as advertised the lifeblood of our modern connected world they&#39;re just products developed by private companies funded lavishly marketed carefully and designed ultimately to capture then sell your personal information and attention to advertisers they can be fun but in the scheme of your life and what you want to accomplish there are lightweight Whimsy one unimportant distraction among many threatening to derail you from something deeper or maybe social media tools are at the core of your existence you won&#39;t know either way until you sample life without them don&#39;t use the internet to entertain yourself Arnold Bennett was an English writer born near the turn of the 20th century a tumultuous time for his home country&#39;s economy the Industrial Revolution which had been roaring for decades by this point had wrenched enough Surplus capital from the Empire&#39;s resources to generate a new class the white collar worker it was now possible to have a job in which you spent a set number of hours a week in an office and in exchange received a steady salary sufficient to support a household such a lifestyle is blandly familiar in our current age but to Bennett and his contemporaries it was novel and in many ways distressing Chief among Bennett&#39;s concerns was that members of this new class were missing out on the opportunities it presented to live a full life take the case of a Londoner who works in an office whose office hours are from 10 to 6 and who spends 50 minutes morning and night in traveling between his house door and his office door Bennett writes in his 1910 self-help classic how to live on 24 hours a day this hypothetical London salaryman he notes has a little more than 16 hours left in the day beyond these work-related hours to Bennett this is a lot of time but most people in this situation tragically don&#39;t realize its potential the great and profound mistake which my typical man makes in regard to his day he elaborates is that even though he doesn&#39;t particularly enjoy his work seeing it as something to get through he persists in looking upon those hours from 10 to 6 as the day to which the 10 hours preceding them and the six hours following them are nothing but a prologue and epilogue this is an attitude that Bennett condemns as utterly illogical and unhealthy what&#39;s the alternative to this state of affairs Bennett suggests that his typical man see his 16 free hours as a day within a day explaining during those 16 hours he is free he is not a wage earner he is not preoccupied with monetary cares he&#39;s just as good as a man with a private income accordingly the typical man should instead use this time as an aristocrat would to perform rigorous self-improvement a task that according to Bennett involves primarily reading great literature and poetry Bennett wrote about these issues more than a century ago you might expect that in the intervening decades a period in which this middle class exploded in size worldwide our thinking about Leisure Time would have evolved but it has not if anything with the rise of the internet and the low brow attention economy it supports the average 40-hour week employee especially those in my tech savvy millennial generation has seen the quality of his or her Leisure Time remain degraded consisting primarily of a blur of distracted clicks on least common denominator Digital entertainment if Bennett were brought back to life today he&#39;d likely fall into despair at the lack of progress in this area of human development to be clear I&#39;m indifferent to the moral underpinnings behind Bennett&#39;s suggestions his vision of elevating the souls and minds of the middle class by reading poetry and great books feels somewhat Antiquated and classist but the logical Foundation of his proposal that you both should and can make deliberate use of your time outside work remains relevant today especially with respect to the goal of this rule which is to reduce the impact of Network Tools on your ability to perform deep work in more detail in the strategies discussed so far in this rule we haven&#39;t spent much time yet on a class of Network Tools that are particularly relevant to the fight for depth entertainment focused websites designed to capture and hold your attention for as long as possible at the time of this writing the most popular examples of such sites include the Huffington Post BuzzFeed Business Insider and Reddit this list will undoubtedly continue to evolve but what this General category of site shares is the use of carefully crafted titles and easily digestible content often honed by algorithms to be maximally attention catching once you&#39;ve landed on one article in one of these sites links on the side or bottom of the page beckon you to click on another then another every available trick of human Psychology from listing titles as popular or trending to the use of arresting photos is used to keep you engaged at this particular moment for example some of the most popular articles on BuzzFeed include 17 words that mean something totally different when spelled backward and 33 dogs winning at everything these sites are especially harmful after the work day is over where the freedom in your schedule enables them to become Central to your leisure time if you&#39;re waiting in line or waiting for the plot to pick up in a TV show or waiting to finish eating a meal they provide a cognitive crutch to ensure you eliminate any chance of boredom as I argued in rule number two however such behavior is dangerous as it weakens your mind&#39;s General ability to resist distraction making deep work difficult later when you really want to concentrate to make matters worse these Network Tools are not something you join and therefore they&#39;re not something you can remove from your life by quitting rendering the previous two strategies irrelevant they&#39;re always available just a click away fortunately Arnold Bennett identified the solution to this problem a hundred years earlier put more thought into your leisure time in other words this strategy suggests that when it comes to your relaxation don&#39;t default to whatever catches your attention at the moment but instead dedicate some Advanced thinking to the question of how you want to spend your day within a day addictive websites of the type mentioned previously thrive in a vacuum if you haven&#39;t given yourself something to do in a given moment they&#39;ll always beckon as an appealing option if you instead fill this free time with something of more quality their grip on your attention will loosen it&#39;s crucial therefore that you figure out in advance what you&#39;re going to do with your evenings and weekends before they begin structured Hobbies provide good fodder for these hours as they generate specific actions with specific goals to fill your time a set program of reading a la Bennett where you spend regular time each night making progress on a series of deliberately chosen books is also a good option as is of course exercise or the enjoyment of good in-person company in my own life for example I managed to read a surprising number of books in a typical year given the demands on my time as a professor writer and father on average I&#39;m typically reading three to five books at a time this is possible because one of my favorite pre-planned leisure activities after my kids bedtime is to read an interesting book as a result my smartphone and computer and the distractions they can offer typically remain neglected between the end of the work day and the next morning at this point you might worry that adding such structure to your relaxation will defeat the purpose of relaxing which many believe requires complete freedom from plans or obligations won&#39;t a structured evening leave you exhausted not refreshed the next day at work Bennett to his credit anticipated this complaint as he argues such worries misunderstand what energizes the human spirit what you say that full energy given to those 16 hours will lessen the value of the business eight not so on the contrary it will assuredly increase the value of the business eight one of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity they do not Tire like an arm or a leg all they want is change not rest except in sleep in my experience this analysis is spot on if you give your mind to something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours you&#39;ll end the day more fulfilled and begin the next one more relaxed than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in semi-conscious and unstructured web surfing to summarize if you want to eliminate the addictive pull of entertainment sites on your time and attention give your brain a quality alternative not only will this preserve your ability to resist distraction and concentrate but you might even fulfill Arnold Bennett&#39;s ambitious goal of experiencing perhaps for the first time what it means to live and not just exist Rule Number Four drain the shallows in the summer of 2007 the software company 37 signals now called Basecamp launched an experiment they shorten their work week from five days to four their employees seem to accomplish the same amount of work with one last day so they made this change permanent every year from May through October 37 signals employees work only Monday to Thursday with the exception of customer support which still operates the full week as company co-founder Jason freed quipped in a blog post about the decision people should enjoy the weather in the summer it didn&#39;t take long before the grumbles began in the business press a few months after fried announced his company&#39;s decision to make four day weeks permanent journalist Tara Weiss wrote a critical piece for Forbes titled why a four-day Work Week doesn&#39;t work she summarized her problem with this strategy as follows packing 40 hours into four days isn&#39;t necessarily an efficient way to work many people find that eight hours are tough enough requiring them to stay for an extra two could cause morale and productivity to decrease was quick to respond in a blog post titled Forbes misses the point of the four-day work week he begins by agreeing with Weiss&#39;s premise that it would be stressful for employees to cram 40 hours of effort into four days but as he clarifies that&#39;s not what he&#39;s suggesting the point of the four-day work week is about doing less work he writes it&#39;s not about four 10-hour days it&#39;s about four normalish eight-hour days this might seem confusing at first freed earlier claimed that his employees get just as much done in four days as in five days now however he&#39;s claiming that his employees are working fewer hours how can both be true the difference it turns out concerns the role of shallow work as freed explains very few people work even eight hours a day you&#39;re lucky if you get a few good hours in between all the meetings interruptions web surfing office politics and personal business that permeate the typical work day fewer official working hours help squeeze the fat out of the typical work week once everyone has less time to get their stuff done they respect that time even more people become stingy with their time and that&#39;s a good thing they don&#39;t waste it on things that just don&#39;t matter when you have fewer hours you usually spend them more wisely in other words the reduction in the 37 signals work week disproportionately eliminated shallow as compared to deep work and because the latter was left largely untouched the important stuff continued to get done the shallow stuff that can seem so urgent in the moment turned out to be unexpectedly dispensable a natural reaction to this experiment is to wonder what would happen if 37 signals had gone one step further if eliminating hours of shallow work had little impact on the results produced what would happen if they not only eliminated shallow work but then replace this newly recovered time with more deep work fortunately for our curiosity the company soon put this Bolder idea to the test as well freed had always been interested in the policies of technology companies like Google that gave their employees 20 percent of their time to work on self-directed projects while he liked this idea he felt that carving one day out of an otherwise busy week was not enough to support the type of unbroken deep work that generates true breakthroughs I&#39;d take five days in a row over five days spread out over five weeks he explained so our theory is that we&#39;ll see better results when people have a long stretch of uninterrupted time to test this Theory 37 signals implemented something radical the company gave its employees the entire month of June off to work deeply on their own projects this month would be a period free of any shallow work obligations no status meetings no memos and blessedly no PowerPoint at the end of the month the company held a pitch day in which employees pitched the ideas they&#39;d been working on summarizing the experiment in an Inc magazine article freed dubbed it a success the pitch day produced two projects that were soon put into production a better Suite of tools for handling customer support and a data visualization system that helps the company understand how their customers use their products these projects are predicted to bring substantial value to the company but they almost certainly would not have been produced in the absence of the unobstructed deep work time provided to the employees to tease out their potential required dozens of hours of unimpeded effort how can we afford to put our business on hold for a month to mess around with new ideas freed asked rhetorically how can we afford not to 37 signals experiments highlight an important reality the shallow work that increasingly dominates the time and Detention of knowledge workers is less vital than it often seems in the moment for most businesses if you eliminated significant amounts of this shallowness their bottom line would likely remain unaffected and is Jason freed discovered if you not only eliminate shallow work but also replace this recovered time with more of the deep alternative not only will the business continue to function it can become more successful this rule asks you to apply these insights to your personal work life the strategies that follow are designed to help you ruthlessly identify the shallowness in your current schedule then call it down to minimum levels leaving more time for the Deep efforts that ultimately matter most before diving into the details of these strategies however we should first confront the reality that there&#39;s a limit to this anti-shallow thinking the value of deep work vastly outweighs the value of shallow but this doesn&#39;t mean that you must quixotically pursue a schedule in which all of your time is invested in depth for one thing a non-trivial amount of shallow work is needed to maintain most knowledge work jobs you might be able to avoid checking your email every 10 minutes but you won&#39;t likely last long if you never respond to important messages in this sense we should see the goal of this rule as tanning shallow Works footprint in your schedule not eliminating it then there&#39;s the issue of cognitive capacity deep work is exhausting because it pushes you toward the limit of your abilities performance psychologists have extensively studied how much such efforts can be sustained by an individual in a given day in their seminal paper on deliberate practice Anders Erickson and his collaborators survey these studies they note that for someone new to such practice citing in particular a child in the early stages of developing an expert level skill an hour a day is a reasonable limit for those familiar with the rigors of such activities the limit expands to something like four hours but rarely more the implication is that once you&#39;ve hit your deep work limit in a given day you&#39;ll experience diminishing rewards if you try to cram in more shallow work therefore doesn&#39;t become dangerous until after you add enough to begin to crowd out your bounded deep efforts for the day at first this caveat might seem optimistic the typical work day is eight hours the most Adept deep thinker cannot spend more than four of these hours in a state of true depth it follows that you can safely spend half the day wallowing in the shallows without adverse effect the danger missed by this analysis is how easily this amount of time can be consumed especially once you consider the impact of meetings appointments calls and other scheduled events for many jobs these time drains can leave you with surprisingly little time left for solo work my job as a professor for example is traditionally less plagued by such commitments but even so they often take large chunks out of my time especially during the Academic Year turning to a random day in my calendar from the previous semester I&#39;m writing this during a quiet summer month for example I see I had a meeting from 11 to 12. another from 1 to 2 30 and a class to teach from three to five my eight hour work day in this example is already reduced by four hours even if I squeezed all remaining shallow work emails tasks into a single half hour I&#39;d still fall short of the goal of four hours of daily deep work put another way even though we&#39;re not capable of spending a full day in a state of blissful depth this reality shouldn&#39;t reduce the urgency of reducing shallow work as the typical knowledge work day is more easily fragmented than many suspect to summarize I&#39;m asking you to treat shallow work with suspicion because its damage is often vastly underestimated and its importance vastly overestimated this type of work is inevitable but you must keep it confined to a point where it doesn&#39;t impede your ability to take full advantage of the deeper efforts that ultimately determine your impact the strategies that follow will help you act on this reality schedule every minute of your day if you&#39;re between the ages of 25 and 34 years old and live in Britain you likely watch more television than you realize in 2013 the British TV licensing Authority surveyed television Watchers about their habits the 25 to 34 year olds taking the survey estimated that they spend somewhere between 15 and 16 hours per week watching TV this sounds like a lot but it&#39;s actually a significant underestimate we know this because when it comes to television watching habits we have access to the ground truth the broadcasters audience research board the British equivalent of the American Nielsen company places meters in a representative sample of households these meters record without bias or wishful thinking exactly how much people actually watch the 25 to 34 year olds who thought they watched 15 hours a week it turns out watch more like 28 hours this bad estimate of time usage is not unique to British television watching when you consider different groups self-estimating different behaviors similar gaps stubbornly remain in a Wall Street Journal article on the topic business writer Laura vanderkam pointed out several more such examples a survey by the national sleep Foundation revealed that Americans think they&#39;re sleeping on average somewhere around seven hours a night the American time use survey which has people actually measure their sleep corrected this number to 8.6 hours another study found that people who claimed to work 60 to 64 hours per week were actually averaging more like 44 hours per week while those claiming to work more than 75 hours were actually working less than 55. these examples underscore an important point we spend much of our day on autopilot not giving much thought to what we&#39;re doing with our time this is a problem it&#39;s difficult to prevent the trivial from creeping into every corner of your schedule if you don&#39;t face without flinching your current balance between deep and shallow work and then adopt the habit of pausing before action and asking what makes the most sense right now the strategy described in the following paragraphs is designed to force you into these behaviors it&#39;s an idea that might seem extreme at first but will soon prove indispensable in your quest to take full advantage of the value of deep work schedule every minute of your day here&#39;s my suggestion at the beginning of each workday turn to a new page of lined paper in a notebook you dedicate to this purpose down the left hand side of the page Mark every other line with an hour of the day covering the full set of hours you typically work now comes the important part divide the hours of your workday into blocks and assign activities to the blocks for example you might block off 9 A.M to 11AM for writing a client&#39;s press release to do so actually draw a box that covers the lines corresponding to these hours then write press release Inside the Box not every block need be dedicated to a work task there might be time blocks for lunch or relaxation breaks to keep things reasonably clean the minimum length of a block should be 30 minutes I.E one line on your page this means for example that instead of having a unique small box for each small task on your plate for the day respond to boss&#39;s email submit reimbursement form ask Carl about report you can batch similar things into more generic task blocks you might find it useful in this case to draw a line from a task block to the open right hand side of the page where you can list out the full set of small tasks you plan to accomplish in that block when you&#39;re done scheduling your day every minute should be part of a block you have in effect given every minute of your work day a job now as you go through your day use this schedule to guide you it&#39;s here of course that most people will begin to run into trouble two things can and likely will go wrong with your schedule once the day progresses the first is that your estimates will prove wrong you might put aside two hours for writing a press release for example and in reality it takes two and a half hours the second problem is that you&#39;ll be interrupted and new obligations will unexpectedly appear on your plate these events will also break your schedule this is okay if your schedule is disrupted you should at the next available moment take a few minutes to create a revised schedule for the time that remains in the day you can turn to a new page you can erase and redraw blocks or do as I do cross out the blocks for the remainder of the day and create new blocks to the right of the old ones on the page I draw my block skinny so I have room for several revisions on some days you might rewrite your schedule half a dozen times don&#39;t despair if this happens your goal is not to stick to a given schedule at all costs it&#39;s instead to maintain at all times a thoughtful say in what you&#39;re doing with your time going forward even if these decisions are reworked again and again as the day unfolds if you find that schedule revisions become overwhelming in their frequency there are a few tactics that can inject some more stability first you should recognize that almost definitely you&#39;re going to underestimate it first how much time you require for most things when people are new to this habit they tend to use their schedule as an incarnation of Wishful Thinking a best case scenario for their day over time you should make an effort to accurately if not somewhat conservatively predict the time tasks will require the second tactic that helps is the use of overflow conditional blocks if you&#39;re not sure how long a given activity might take block off the expected time then follow this with an additional block that has a split purpose if you need more time for the preceding activity use this additional block to keep working on it if you finish the activity on time however have an alternate use already assigned for the extra block for example some non-urgent tasks this allows unpredictability in your day without requiring you to keep changing your schedule on paper for example returning to our press release example you might schedule two hours for writing the press release but then follow it by an additional hour block that you can use to keep writing the release if needed but otherwise assigned to catching up with email the third tactic I suggest is to be liberal with your use of task blocks deploy many throughout your day and make them longer than required to handle the tasks you plan in the morning lots of things come up during the typical knowledge workers day having regularly occurring blocks of time to address these surprises keeps things running smoothly before leaving you to put this strategy in practice I should address a common objection in my experience pitching the values of daily schedules I found that many people worry that this level of planning will become burdensomely restrictive here for example is part of a comment from a reader named Joseph on a blog post I wrote on this topic I think you far understate the role of uncertainty I worry about readers applying these observations too seriously to the point of an obsessive and unhealthy relationship with one&#39;s schedule that seems to exaggerate the importance of minute counting over getting lost in activities which if we&#39;re talking about artists is often the only really sensible course of action I understand these concerns and Joseph is certainly not the first to raise them fortunately however they&#39;re also easily addressed in my own daily scheduling discipline in addition to regularly scheduling significant blocks of time for speculative thinking and discussion I maintain a rule that If I Stumble onto an important Insight then this is a perfectly valid reason to ignore the rest of my schedule for the day with the exception of course of things that cannot be skipped I can then stick with this unexpected Insight until it loses Steam at this point I&#39;ll step back and rebuild my schedule for any time that remains in the day in other words I not only allow spontaneity in my schedule I encourage it Joseph&#39;s critique is driven by the mistaken idea that the goal of a schedule is to force your behavior into a rigid plan this type of scheduling however isn&#39;t about constraint it&#39;s instead about thoughtfulness it&#39;s a simple habit that forces you to continually take a moment throughout your day and ask what makes sense for me to do with the time that remains it&#39;s the habit of asking that returns results not your unyielding Fidelity to the answer I would go so far as to argue that someone following this combination of comprehensive scheduling and a willingness to adapt or modify the plan as needed will likely experience more creative insights than someone who adopts some more traditionally spontaneous approach where the day is left open and unstructured without structure it&#39;s easy to allow your time to devolve into the shallow email social media web surfing this type of shallow Behavior though satisfying in the moment is not conducive to creativity with structure on the other hand you can ensure that you regularly schedule blocks to Grapple with a new idea or work deeply on something challenging or brainstorm for a fixed period the type of commitment more likely to instigate innovation recall for example the discussion in rule number one about the rigid rituals followed by many great creative thinkers and because you&#39;re willing to abandon your plan when an Innovative idea arises you&#39;re just as well suited as the distracted creative to follow up when the Muse strikes to summarize the motivation for this strategy is the recognition that a deep work habit requires you to treat your time with respect a good first step toward this respectful handling is the advice outlined here decide in advance what you&#39;re going to do with every minute of your work day it&#39;s natural at first to resist this idea as it&#39;s undoubtedly easier to continue to allow the twin forces of internal whim and external requests to drive your schedule but you must overcome this distrust of structure if you want to approach your true potential as someone who creates things that matter quantify the depth of every activity an advantage of scheduling your day is that you can determine how much time you&#39;re actually spending in Shallow activities extracting this Insight from your schedules however can become tricky in practice as it&#39;s not always clear exactly how shallow you should consider a given task to expand on this challenge let&#39;s start by reminding ourselves of the formal definition of shallow work that I introduced in the introduction shallow work non-cognitively demanding logistical style tasks often performed while distracted these efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate some activities clearly satisfy this definition checking email for example or scheduling a conference call is unquestionably shallow in nature but the classification of other activities can be more ambiguous consider the following tasks example number one editing a draft of an academic article that you and a collaborator will soon submit to a journal example number two building a PowerPoint presentation about this quarter sales figures example number three attending a meeting to discuss the current status of an important project and to agree on the next steps it&#39;s not obvious at first how to categorize these examples the first two describe tasks that can be quite demanding and the final example seems important to advance a key work objective the purpose of this strategy is to give you an accurate metric for resolving such ambiguity providing you with a way to make clear and consistent decisions about where given work tasks fall on the shallow to deep scale to do so it asks that you evaluate activities by asking a simple but surprisingly Illuminating question how long would it take in months to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task to illustrate this approach let&#39;s apply this question to our examples of ambiguous tasks analyzing example number one to properly edit an academic paper requires that you understand the nuances of the work so you can make sure it&#39;s being described precisely and the nuances of the broader literature so you can make sure it&#39;s being cited properly these requirements require Cutting Edge knowledge of an academic field a task that in the age of specialization takes years of diligent study at The Graduate level and Beyond when it comes to this example the answer to our question would therefore be quite large perhaps on the scale of 50 to 75 months analyzing example number two the second example doesn&#39;t fare so well by this analysis to create a PowerPoint presentation that describes your quarterly sales requires three things first knowledge of how to make a PowerPoint presentation second an understanding of the standard format of these quarterly performance presentations within your organization and third an understanding of what sales metrics your organization tracks and how to convert them into the right graphs the hypothetical college graduate imagined by our question we can assume would already know how to use PowerPoint and learning the standard format for your organization&#39;s presentations shouldn&#39;t require more than a week the real question therefore is how long it takes a bright college graduate to understand the metrics you track where to find the results and how to clean those up and translate them into graphs and charts that are appropriate for a slide presentation this isn&#39;t a trivial task but for a bright college grad it wouldn&#39;t require more than an additional month or so of training so we can use two months as our conservative answer analyzing example number three meetings can be tricky to analyze they can seem tedious at times but they&#39;re often also presented as playing a key role in your organization&#39;s most important activities the method presented here helps cut through this veneer how long would it take to train a bright recent college graduate to take your place in a planning meeting he or she would have to understand the project well enough to know its milestones and the skills of its participants our hypothetical grad might also need some insight into the interpersonal Dynamics and the reality of how such projects are executed at the organization at this point you might wonder if this college grad would also need a deep expertise in the topic tackled by the project for a planning meeting probably not such meetings rarely dive into substantive content and tend to feature a lot of small talk and posturing in which participants try to make it seem like they&#39;re committing to a lot without actually having to commit give a bright recent graduate three months to learn the ropes and he or she could take your place without issue in such a gab Fest so we&#39;ll use three months as our answer this question is meant as a thought experiment I&#39;m not going to ask you to actually hire a recent college graduate to take over tasks that score low but the answers it provides will help you objectively quantify the shallowness or depth of various activities if our hypothetical college graduate requires many months of training to replicate a task then this indicates that the task leverages hard one expertise as argued earlier tasks that leverage your expertise tend to be deep tasks and they can therefore provide a double benefit they return more value per time spent and they stretch your abilities leading to Improvement on the other hand a task that our hypothetical college graduate can pick up quickly is one that does not leverage expertise and therefore it can be understood as shallow what should you do with this strategy once you know where your activities fall on the Deep to shallow scale bias your time toward the former when we consider our case studies for example we see that the first task is something that you would want to prioritize as a good use of time while the second and third are activities of a type that should be minimized they might feel productive but their return on time investment is measly of course how one bias is away from shallow and toward depth is not always obvious even after you know how to accurately label your commitments this brings us to the strategies that follow which will provide specific guidance on how to accomplish this tricky goal ask your boss for a shallow work budget here&#39;s an important question that&#39;s rarely asked what percentage of my time should be spent on shallow work this strategy suggests that you ask it if you have a boss in other words have a conversation about this question you&#39;ll probably have to first Define for him or her what shallow and deep work means if you work for yourself ask yourself this question in both cases settle on a specific answer then and this is the important part try to stick to this budget the strategies that proceed and follow this one will help you achieve this goal for most people in most non-entry level knowledge work jobs the answer to the question will be somewhere in the 30 to 50 percent range there&#39;s a psychological distaste surrounding the idea of spending the majority of your time on unskilled tasks so fifty percent is a natural upper limit while at the same time most bosses will begin to worry that if this percentage gets too much lower than 30 percent you&#39;ll be reduced to a knowledge work hermit who thinks big thoughts but never responds to emails obeying this budget will likely require changes to your behavior you&#39;ll almost certainly end up forced into saying no to projects that seem infused with shallowness while also more aggressively reducing the amount of shallowness in your existing projects this budget might lead you to drop the need for a weekly status meeting in preference for results driven reporting let me know when you&#39;ve made significant progress then we&#39;ll talk it might also lead you to start spending more Mornings in communication isolation or decide it&#39;s not as important as you once thought to respond quickly and in detail to every cc&#39;d email that crosses your inbox these changes are all positive for your quest to make deep work Central to your working life on the one hand they don&#39;t ask you to abandon your core shallow obligations a move that would cause problems and resentment as you&#39;re still spending a lot of time on such efforts on the other hand they do force you to place a hard limit on the amount of less urgent obligations you allow to slip insidiously into your schedule this limit frees up space for significant amounts of deep effort on a consistent basis the reason why these decisions should start with a conversation with your boss is that this agreement establishes implicit support from your workplace if you work for someone else this strategy provides cover when you turn down an obligation or restructure a project to minimize shallowness you can justify the move because it&#39;s necessary for you to hit your prescribed Target mix of work types as I discussed in Chapter 2 part of the reason shallow work persists in large quantities in knowledge work is that we rarely see the total impact of such efforts on our schedules we instead tend to evaluate these behaviors one by one in the moment a perspective from which each task can seem quite reasonable and convenient the tools from earlier in this rule however allow you to make this impact explicit you can now confidently say to your boss this is the exact percentage of my time spent last week on shallow work and force him or her to give explicit approval for that ratio faced with these numbers and the economic reality they clarify it&#39;s incredibly wasteful for example to pay a highly trained professional to send email messages and attend meetings for 30 hours a week a boss will be led to the Natural conclusion that you need to say no to some things and to streamline others even if this makes life less convenient for the boss or for you or for your co-workers because of course in the end a business&#39;s goal is to generate value not to make sure its employees lives are as easy as possible if you work for yourself this exercise will force you to confront the reality of how little time in your busy schedule you&#39;re actually producing value these hard numbers will provide you the confidence needed to start scaling back on the shallow activities that are sapping your time without these numbers it&#39;s difficult for an entrepreneur to say no to any opportunity that might generate some positive return I have to be on Twitter I have to maintain an active Facebook presence I have to tweak the widgets on my blog you tell yourself because when considered in isolation to say no to any one of these activities seems like you&#39;re being lazy by instead picking and sticking with a shallow to deep ratio you can replace this guilt-driven unconditional acceptance with the more healthy habit of trying to get the most out of the time you put aside for shallow work therefore still exposing yourself to many opportunities but keeping these efforts constrained to a small enough fraction of your time and attention to enable the Deep work that ultimately drives your business forward of course there&#39;s always the possibility that when you ask this question the answer is Stark no boss will explicitly answer one hundred percent of your time should be shallow unless your entry level at which point you need to delay this exercise until you&#39;ve built enough skills to add deep efforts to your official work responsibilities but a boss might reply in so many words as much shallow work is needed for you to promptly do whatever we need from you at the moment in this case the answer is still useful as it tells you that this isn&#39;t a job that supports deep work and a job that doesn&#39;t support deep work is not a job that can help you succeed in our current information economy you should in this case thank the boss for the feedback and then promptly start planning how you can transition into a new position that values depth finish your work by 5 30. in the seven days preceding my first writing these words I participated in 65 different email conversations among these 65 conversations I sent exactly five emails after 5 30 pm the immediate story told by these statistics is that with few exceptions I don&#39;t send emails after 5 30. but given how intertwined email has become with work in general there&#39;s a more surprising reality hinted by this Behavior I don&#39;t work after 5 30 pm I call this commitment fixed schedule productivity as I fix the firm goal of not working past a certain time then work backward to find productivity strategies that allow me to satisfy this declaration I&#39;ve practiced fixed schedule productivity happily for more than half a decade now and it&#39;s been crucial to my efforts to build a productive professional life centered on deep work in the sections ahead I will try to convince you to adopt this strategy as well let me start my pitch for fixed schedule productivity by first noting that according to Conventional wisdom in the academic world I inhabit this tactic should fail professors especially Junior professors are notorious for adopting grueling schedules that extend into the night and through weekends consider for example a blog post published by a young computer science Professor whom I&#39;ll call Tom in this post which Tom wrote in the winter of 2014 he replicates his schedule for a recent day in which he spent 12 hours at his office this schedule includes five different meetings and three hours of administrative tasks which he describes as tending to bushels of emails filling out bureaucratic forms organizing meeting notes planning future meetings by his estimation he spent only one and a half out of 12 total hours sitting in his office tackling real work which he defines as efforts that make progress toward a research deliverable it&#39;s no wonder that Tom feels coerced into working well beyond the standard workday I&#39;ve already accepted the reality that I&#39;ll be working on weekends he concludes in another post very few Junior faculty can avoid such a fate and yet I have even though I don&#39;t work at night and rarely work on weekends between arriving at Georgetown in the fall of 2011 and beginning work on this chapter in the fall of 2014. I&#39;ve published somewhere around 20 peer-reviewed articles I also won two competitive grants published one non-academic book and have almost finished writing another which you&#39;re listening to at the moment all while avoiding the grueling schedules deemed necessary by the toms of the world what explains this paradox we can find a compelling answer in a widely disseminated article published in 2013 By an academic further along in her career and far more accomplished than I Rodika nagpal the Fred cavlay professor of computer science at Harvard University nagpal opens the article by claiming that much of the stress suffered by tenure track professors is self-imposed scary myths and scary data abound about life is a tenure track faculty at an R1 research focused University she begins before continuing to explain how she finally decided to disregard the conventional wisdom and instead deliberately do specific things to preserve my happiness this deliberate effort LED not Paul to enjoy her pre-tenure time tremendously nagpal goes on to detail several examples of these efforts but there&#39;s one tactic in particular that should sound familiar as nugpal admits early in her academic career she found herself trying to cram work into every free hour between 7 AM and midnight because she has kids this time especially in the evening was often severely fractured it didn&#39;t take long before she decided this strategy was unsustainable so she set a limit of 50 hours a week and worked backward to determine what rules and habits were needed to satisfy this constraint not Paul in other words deployed fixed schedule productivity we know this strategy didn&#39;t hurt her academic career as she ended up earning tenure on schedule and then jumping to the full Professor level after only three additional years an impressive ascent how did she pull this off according to her article one of the main techniques for respecting her hour limit was to set drastic quotas on the major sources of shallow Endeavors in her academic life for example she decided she would travel only five times per year for any purpose as trips can generate a surprisingly large load of urgent shallow obligations from making lodging arrangements to writing talks five trips a year may still sound like a lot but for an academic it&#39;s light to emphasize this point note that Matt Welsh a former colleague of nagpal in the Harvard computer science department he now works for Google once wrote a blog post in which he claimed it was typical for junior faculty to travel 12 to 24 times a year imagine the shallow efforts nagpaul avoided in sidestepping an extra 10 to 15 trips the travel quota is just one of several tactics that nagpal used to control her workday she also for example placed limits on the number of papers she would review per year but what all her tactics shared was a commitment to ruthlessly capping the shallow while protecting the Deep efforts that is original research that ultimately determined her professional fate returning to my own example it&#39;s a similar commitment that enables me to succeed with fixed scheduling I too am incredibly cautious about my use of the most dangerous word in one&#39;s productivity vocabulary yes it takes a lot to convince me to agree to something that yields shallow work if you ask for my involvement in University business that&#39;s not absolutely necessary I might respond with a defense I learned from the department chair who hired me talk to me after tenure another tactic that works well for me is to be clear in my refusal but ambiguous in my explanation for the refusal the key is to avoid providing enough specificity about the excuse that the requester has the opportunity to diffuse it if for example I turned down a time-consuming speaking invitation with the excuse that I have other trips scheduled for around the same time I don&#39;t provide details which might leave the requester the ability to suggest a way to fit his or her event into my existing obligations but instead just say sounds interesting but I can&#39;t make it due to schedule conflicts in turning down obligations I also resist the urge to offer a consolation prize that ends up devouring almost as much of my schedule EG sorry I can&#39;t join your committee but I&#39;m happy to take a look at some of your proposals as they come together and offer my thoughts a clean break is best in addition to carefully guarding my obligations I&#39;m incredibly conscientious about managing my time because my time is limited each day I cannot afford to allow a large deadline to creep up on me or a morning to be wasted on something trivial because I didn&#39;t take a moment to craft a smart plan the damocally in cap on the workday enforced by fixed schedule productivity has a way of keeping my organization efforts sharp without this looming cut off I&#39;d likely end up more lacks in my habits to summarize these observations nagpal and I can both succeed in Academia without Tom style overload due to two reasons first we&#39;re asymmetric in the culling forced by our fixed schedule commitment by ruthlessly reducing the shallow while preserving the depth this strategy frees up our time without diminishing the amount of new value we generate indeed I would go so far as to argue that the reduction in Shallow frees up more energy for the Deep alternative allowing us to produce more than if we had defaulted to a more typical crowded schedule second the limits to our time necessitate more careful thinking about our organizational habits also leading to more value produced as compared to longer but less organized schedules the key claim of this strategy is that these same benefits hold for most knowledge work fields that is even if you&#39;re not a professor fix schedule productivity can yield powerful benefits in most knowledge work jobs it can be difficult in the moment to turn down a shallow commitment that seems harmless in isolation be it accepting an invitation to get coffee or agreeing to jump on a call a commitment to fix schedule productivity however shifts you into a scarcity mindset suddenly an obligation beyond your deepest efforts is suspect and seen as potentially disruptive your default answer becomes no the bar for gaining access to your time and attention Rises precipitously and you begin to organize the efforts that pass these obstacles with a ruthless efficiency it might also lead you to test assumptions about your company&#39;s work culture that you thought were Ironclad but turn out to be malleable it&#39;s common for example to receive emails from your boss after hours fix schedule productivity would have you ignore these messages until the next morning many suspect that this would cause problems as such responses are expected but in many cases the fact that your boss happens to be clearing her inbox at night doesn&#39;t mean that she expects an immediate response a lesson this strategy would soon help you discover fix schedule productivity in other words is a meta habit that&#39;s simple to adopt but Broad in its impact if you have to choose just one behavior that reorients your focus toward the Deep this one should be high on your list of possibilities if you&#39;re still not sure however about the idea that artificial limits on your workday can make you more successful I urge you to once again turn your attention to the career of fixed schedule Advocate radhika Nepal in a satisfying coincidence at almost the exact same time that Tom was lamenting online about his unavoidably intense workload as a young Professor nagpal was celebrating the latest of the many professional triumphs she has experienced despite her fixed schedule her research was featured on the cover of the journal science become hard to reach no discussion of shallow work is complete without considering email this quintessential shallow activity is particularly Insidious in its grip on most knowledge workers attention as it delivers a steady stream of distractions addressed specifically to you ubiquitous email access has become so ingrained in our professional habits that we&#39;re beginning to lose the sense that we have any say in its role in our life as John Freeman warns in his 2009 book The Tyranny of email with the rise of this technology we are slowly eroding our ability to explain in a careful complex way why it is so wrong for us to complain resist or redesign our work days so that they are manageable email seems a fate accompli resistance is futile this strategy pushes back at this fatalism just because you cannot avoid this tool altogether doesn&#39;t mean you have to seed all authority over its role in your mental landscape in the following sections I describe three tips that will help you regain authority over how this technology accesses your time and attention and arrest the erosion of autonomy identified by Freeman resistance is not futile you have more control over your electronic communication than you might at first assume tip number one make people who send you email do more work most non-fiction authors are easy to reach they include an email address on their author websites along with an open invitation to send them any request or suggestion that comes to mind many even encourage this feedback as a necessary commitment to The elusive but much touted importance of community building among their readers but here&#39;s the thing I don&#39;t buy it if you visit the contact page on my author website there&#39;s no general purpose email address instead I list different individuals you can contact for specific purposes my literary agent for rights requests for example or my speaking agent for speaking requests if you want to reach me I offer only a special purpose email address that comes with conditions and a lowered expectation that I&#39;ll respond if you have an offer opportunity or introduction that might make my life more interesting email me at interesting calnewport.com for the reason stated above I&#39;ll only respond to those proposals that are a good match for my schedule and interests I call this approach a sender filter as I&#39;m asking my correspondence to filter themselves before attempting to contact me this filter has significantly reduced the time I spend in my inbox before I began using a sender filter I had a standard general purpose email address listed on my website not surprisingly I used to receive a large volume of long emails asking for advice on specific and often quite complicated student or career questions I like to help individuals but these requests became overwhelming they didn&#39;t take the sender&#39;s long to craft but they would require a lot of explanation and writing on my part to respond my sender filter has eliminated most such communication and in doing so has drastically reduced the number of messages I encounter in my writing inbox as for my own interest in helping my readers I now redirect this energy towards settings I carefully choose to maximize impact instead of allowing any student in the world to send me a question for example I now work closely with a small number of student groups where I&#39;m quite accessible and can offer more substantial and effective mentoring another benefit of a sender filter is that it resets expectations the most crucial line in my description is the following I&#39;ll only respond to those proposals that are a good match for my schedule and interests this seems minor but it makes a substantial difference in how my correspondents think about their messages to me the default social conventions surrounding email is that unless you&#39;re famous if someone sends you something you owe him or her a response for most therefore an inbox full of messages generates a major sense of obligation by instead resetting your correspondence expectations to the reality that you&#39;ll probably not respond the experience is transformed the inbox is now a collection of opportunities that you can glance at when you have the free time seeking out those that make sense for you to engage but the pile of unread messages no longer generates a sense of obligation you could if you wanted to ignore them all and nothing bad would happen psychologically this can be freeing I worried when I first began using a sender filter that it would seem pretentious as if my time was more valuable than that of my readers and that it would upset people but this fear wasn&#39;t realized most people easily accept the idea that you have a right to control your own incoming communication as they would like to enjoy this same right more important people appreciate clarity most are okay to not receive a response if they don&#39;t expect one in general those with a minor public presence such as authors overestimate how much people really care about your replies to their messages in some cases this expectation reset might even earn you more credit when you do respond for example an editor of an online publication once sent me a guest post opportunity with the Assumption set by my filter that I would likely not respond when I did it proved a happy surprise here&#39;s her summary of the interaction so when I emailed Cal to ask if he wanted to contribute to the publication my expectations were set he didn&#39;t have anything on his sender filter about wanting to guest blog so there wouldn&#39;t have been any hard feelings if I&#39;d never heard a peep then when he did respond I was thrilled my particular sender filter is just one example of this General strategy consider consultant clay Herbert who is an expert in running crowdfunding campaigns for technology startups a specialty that attracts a lot of Correspondence hoping to glean some helpful advice as a forbes.com article on sender filters reports at some point the number of people reaching out exceeded Herbert&#39;s capacity so he created filters that put the onus on the person asking for help though he started from a similar motivation as me Herbert&#39;s filters ended up taking a different form to contact him you must first consult an FAQ to make sure your question has not already been answered which was the case for a lot of the messages Herbert was processing before his filters were in place if you make it through this FAQ sieve he then asks you to fill out a survey that allows him to further screen for connections that seem particularly relevant to his expertise for those who make it past this step Herbert enforces a small fee you must pay before communicating with him this fee is not about making extra money but is instead about selecting individuals who are serious about receiving and acting on advice Herbert&#39;s filters still enable him to help people and encounter interesting opportunities but at the same time they have reduced his incoming communication to a level he can easily handle to give another example consider Antonio centeno who runs the popular real man style blog centeno&#39;s sender filter lays out a two-step process if you have a question he diverts you to a public location to post it centeno thinks it&#39;s wasteful to answer the same questions again and again in private one-on-one conversations if you make it past this step he then makes you commit to by clicking check boxes the following three promises I am not asking Antonio a style question I could find searching Google for 10 minutes I am not spamming Antonio with a cut and pasting generic request to promote my unrelated business I will do a good deed for some random stranger if Antonio responds within 23 hours the message box in which you can type your message doesn&#39;t appear on the contact page until after you&#39;ve clicked The Box by all three promises to summarize the Technology&#39;s underlying email are transformative but the current social conventions guiding how we apply this technology are underdeveloped the notion that all messages regardless of purpose or sender arrive in the same undifferentiated inbox and that there&#39;s an expectation that every message deserves a timely response is absurdly unproductive the sender filter is a small but useful step toward a better State of Affairs and is an idea whose time has come at least for the increasing number of entrepreneurs and Freelancers who both receive a lot of incoming communication and have the ability to dictate their accessibility I&#39;d also love to see similar rules become ubiquitous for intra-office communication in large organizations but for the reasons argued in Chapter 2 were probably a long way from that reality if you&#39;re in a position to do so consider sender filters as a way of reclaiming some control over your time and attention tip number two do more work when you send or reply to emails consider the following standard emails email number one it was great to meet you last week I&#39;d love to follow up on some of those issues we discussed do you want to grab coffee email number two we should get back to the research problem we discussed during my last visit remind me where we are with that email number three I took a stab at that article we discussed it&#39;s attached thoughts these three examples should be familiar to most knowledge workers as they&#39;re representative of many of the messages that fill their inboxes they&#39;re also potential productivity landmines how you respond to them will have a significant impact on how much time and attention the resulting conversation ultimately consumes in particular interrogative emails like these generate an initial instinct to dash off the quickest possible response that will clear the message temporarily out of your inbox a quick response will in the short term provide you with some minor relief because you&#39;re bouncing the responsibility implied by the message off your court and back on to the senders this relief however is short-lived as this responsibility will continue to bounce back again and again continually sapping your time and attention I suggest therefore that the right strategy when faced with a question of this type is to pause a moment before replying and take the time to answer the following key prompt what is the project represented by this message and what is the most efficient in terms of messages generated process for bringing this project to a successful conclusion once you&#39;ve answered this question for yourself replace a quick response with one that takes the time to describe the process you identified points out the current step and emphasizes the step that comes next I call this the process-centric approach to email and it&#39;s designed to minimize both the number of emails you receive and the amount of mental clutter they generate to better explain this process and why it works consider the following process-centric responses to the sample emails from earlier process-centric response to email number one I&#39;d love to grab coffee let&#39;s meet at the Starbucks on campus below I listed two days next week when I&#39;m free for each day I list it three times if any of those day and time combinations work for you let me know I&#39;ll consider your reply confirmation for the meeting if none of those date and time combinations work give me a call at the number below and we&#39;ll hash out a time that works looking forward to it process Centric response to email number two I agree that we should return to this problem here&#39;s what I suggest sometime in the next week email me everything you remember about our discussion on the problem once I receive that message I&#39;ll start a shared directory for the project and add it to a document that summarizes what you sent me combined with my own memory of our past discussion in the document I&#39;ll highlight the two or three most promising next steps we can then take a crack at those next steps for a few weeks and check back in I suggest we schedule a phone call for a month from now for this purpose below I listed some dates and times when I&#39;m available for a call when you respond with your notes indicate the date and time combination that works best for you and will consider that reply confirmation for the call I look forward to digging into this problem process Centric response to email number three thanks for getting back to me I&#39;m going to read this draft of the article and send you back an edited version annotated with comments on Friday the 10th in this version I send back I&#39;ll edit what I can do myself and add comments to draw your attention to places where I think you&#39;re better suited to make the Improvement at that point you should have what you need to polish and submit the final draft so I&#39;ll leave you to do that no need to reply to this message or to follow up with me after I return the edits unless of course there&#39;s an issue in crafting these sample responses I started by identifying the project implied by the message notice the word project is used Loosely here it can cover things that are large and obviously projects such as making progress on a research problem example number two but it applies just as easily to small logistical challenges like setting up a coffee meeting example number one I then took a minute or two to think through a process that gets us from the current state to a desired outcome with a minimum of messages required the final step was to write a reply that clearly describes this process and where we stand these examples centered on an email reply but it should be clear that a similar approach also works when writing an email message from scratch the process-centric approach to email can significantly mitigate the impact of this technology on your time and attention there are two reasons for this effect first it reduces the number of emails in your inbox sometimes significantly something as simple as scheduling a coffee meeting can easily spiral into a half a dozen or more messages over a period of many days if you&#39;re not careful about your replies this in turn reduces the time you spend in your inbox and reduces the brain power you must expend when you do second to steal terminology from David Allen a good process-centric message immediately closes the loop with respect to the project at hand when a project is initiated by an email that you send or receive it squats in your mental landscape becoming something that&#39;s on your plate in the sense that it has been brought to your attention and eventually needs to be addressed this method closes this open loop as soon as it forms by working through the whole process adding to your task lists and calendar any relevant commitments on your part and bringing the other party up to speed your mind can reclaim the mental real estate the project once demanded less mental clutter means more mental resources available for deep thinking process-centric emails might not seem natural at first for one thing they require that you spend more time thinking about your messages before you compose them in the moment this might seem like you&#39;re spending more time on email but the important point to remember is that the extra two to three minutes you spend at this point will save you many more minutes Reading and Responding to unnecessary extra messages later the other issue is that process Centric messages can seem stilted and overly technical the current social conventions surrounding email promote a conversational tone that clashes with the more systematic schedules or decision trees commonly used in process-centric communication If This concerns you I suggest that you add a longer conversational preamble to your messages you can even separate the process-centric portion of the message from the conversational opening with the divider line or label it proposed next steps so that its technical tone seems more appropriate in context in the end these minor hassles are worth it by putting more thought up front into what&#39;s really being proposed by the email messages that flit in and out of your inbox you&#39;ll greatly reduce the negative impact of this technology on your ability to do work that actually matters tip number three don&#39;t respond as a graduate student at MIT I had the opportunity to interact with famous academics in doing so I noticed that many shared a fascinating and somewhat rare approach to email their default behavior when receiving an email message is to not respond over time I learned the philosophy driving this Behavior when it comes to email they believed it&#39;s the sender&#39;s responsibility to convince the receiver that a reply is worthwhile if you didn&#39;t make a convincing case and sufficiently minimize the effort required by the professor to respond you didn&#39;t get a response for example the following email would likely not generate a reply with many of the famous names at the Institute hi professor I&#39;d love to stop by some time to talk about topic X are you available responding to this message requires too much work are you available is too vague to be answered quickly also there&#39;s no attempt to argue that this chat is worth the professor&#39;s time with these critiques in mind here&#39;s a version of the same message that would be more likely to generate a reply hi professor I&#39;m working on a project similar to topic x with my advisor Professor y is it okay if I stop by in the last 15 minutes of your office hours on Thursday to explain what we&#39;re up to in more detail and see if it might complement your current project unlike the first message this one makes a clear case for why this meeting makes sense and minimizes the effort needed from the receiver to respond this tip asks that you replicate to the extent feasible in your professional context this professional ambivalence to email to help you in this effort try applying the following three rules to sort through which messages require a response and which do not professorial email sorting do not reply to an email message if any of the following applies it&#39;s ambiguous or otherwise makes it hard for you to generate a reasonable response it&#39;s not a question or proposal that interests you nothing really good would happen if you did respond and nothing really bad would happen if you didn&#39;t in all cases there are many obvious exceptions if an ambiguous message about a project you don&#39;t care about comes from your company&#39;s CEO for example you&#39;ll respond but looking Beyond these exceptions this professorial approach asks you to become way more ruthless when deciding whether or not to click reply this tip can be uncomfortable at first because it will cause you to break a key convention currently surrounding email replies are assumed regardless of the relevance or appropriateness of the message there&#39;s also no way to avoid that some bad things will happen if you take this approach at the minimum some people might get confused or upset especially if they&#39;ve never seen standard email conventions questioned or ignored here&#39;s the thing this is okay as the author Tim Ferriss once wrote develop the habit of letting small bad things happen if you don&#39;t you&#39;ll never find time for the life-changing big things it should comfort you to realize that as the professors at MIT discovered people are quick to adjust their expectations to the specifics of your communication habits the fact that you didn&#39;t respond to their hastily scribed messages is probably not a central event in their lives once you get past the discomfort of this approach you&#39;ll begin to experience its Rewards there are two common tropes bandied around when people discuss solutions to email overload one says that sending emails generates more emails while the other says that wrestling with ambiguous or irrelevant emails is a major source of inbox related stress the approach suggested here responds aggressively to both issues you send fewer emails and ignore those that aren&#39;t easy to process and by doing so will significantly weaken the grip your inbox maintains over your time and attention conclusion the story of Microsoft&#39;s founding has been told so many times that it&#39;s entered the realm of Legend in the winter of 1974 a young Harvard student named Bill Gates sees the Altair the world&#39;s first personal computer on the cover of popular Electronics Gates realizes that there&#39;s an opportunity to design software for the machine so he drops everything and with the help of Paul Allen and Monty Davidoff spends the next eight weeks hacking together a version of the basic programming language for the Altair this story is often cited as an example of Gates&#39;s insight and boldness but recent interviews have revealed another trait that played a crucial role in the tales happy ending Gates&#39;s prettier natural deep work ability as Walter Isaacson explained in a 2013 article on the topic for the Harvard Gazette Gates worked with such intensity for such lengths during this 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 or two wake up and pick up right where he left off an ability that is still impressed Paul Allen describes as a prodigious feat of concentration in his book The innovators Isaacson later summarized Gates&#39;s unique tendency toward depth as follows the one trait that differentiated gates from Allen was Focus Allen&#39;s mind would flit between many ideas and passions but Gates Was a Serial obsessor it&#39;s here in this story of Gates&#39;s obsessive Focus that we encounter the strongest form of my argument for deep work it&#39;s easy amid the turbulence of a rapidly evolving Information Age to default to dialectical grumbling the curmudgeons Among Us are vaguely uneasy about the attention people pay to their phones and pine for the days of unhurried concentration while the digital hipsters equate such Nostalgia with lutism and boredom and believe that increased connection is the foundation for a utopian future Marshall mcluhan declared that the medium is the message but our current conversation on these topics seems to imply that the medium is morality either you&#39;re on board with the Facebook future or see it as our downfall as I emphasized in this book&#39;s introduction I have no interest in this debate a commitment to deep work is not a moral stance and it&#39;s not a philosophical statement it is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done deep work is important in other words not because distraction is evil but because it enabled Bill Gates to start a billion dollar industry in less than a semester this is also a lesson as it turns out that I&#39;ve personally relearned again and again in my own career I&#39;ve been a depth devotee for more than a decade but even I am still regularly surprised by its power when I was in graduate school the period when I first encountered and started prioritizing this skill I found that deep work allowed me to write a pair of quality peer-reviewed papers each year a respectable rate for a student while rarely having to work past five on weekdays or work it all on weekends a rarity among my peers as I neared my transition to professorship however I began to worry as a student and a postdoc my time commitments were minimal leaving me most of my day to shape as I desired I knew I would lose this luxury in the next phase of my career and I wasn&#39;t confident in my ability to integrate enough deep work into this more demanding schedule to maintain my productivity instead of just stewing in my anxiety I decided to do something about it I created a plan to bolster my deep work muscles these training efforts were deployed during my last two years at MIT while I was a postdoc starting to look for Professor positions my main tactic was to introduce artificial constraints on my schedule so as to better approximate the more limited free time I expected as a professor in addition to my rule about not working at night I started to take extended lunch breaks in the middle of the day to go for a run and then eat lunch back at my apartment I also signed a deal to write my fourth book so good they can&#39;t ignore you during this period a project of course that soon levied its own intense demands on my time to compensate for these new constraints I refined my ability to work deeply among other methods I began to more carefully block out deep work hours and preserve them against incursion I also developed an ability to carefully work through thoughts during the many hours I spent on foot each week a boon to my productivity and became obsessive about finding disconnected locations conducive to focus during the summer for example I would often work Under the Dome in Barker engineering Library a pleasingly cavernous location that becomes too crowded when class is in session and during the winter I sought more obscure locations for some silence eventually developing a preference for the small but well-appointed Lewis music library at some point I even bought a 50 high-end gridlined lab notebook to work on mathematical proofs believing that its expense would induce more care in my thinking I ended up surprised by how well this re-commitment to depth ended up working after I&#39;d taken a job as a computer science professor at Georgetown University in the fall of 2011. my obligations did in fact drastically increase but I had been training for this moment not only did I preserve my research productivity it actually improved my previous rate of two good papers a year which I maintained as an unencumbered graduate student leapt to four good papers a year on average once I became a much more encumbered professor impressive as this was to me however I was soon to learn that I had not yet reached the limits of what deep work could produce this lesson would come during my third year as a professor during my third year at Georgetown which spanned the fall of 2013 through the summer of 2014. I turned my attention back to my deep work habits searching for more opportunities to improve a big reason for this recommitment to depth is the book you&#39;re currently listening to most of which was written during this period writing a 70 000 word book manuscript of course placed a sudden new constraint on my already busy schedule and I wanted to make sure my academic productivity didn&#39;t take a corresponding hit another reason I turned back to depth was the looming 10-year process I had a year or two of Publications left before my tenure case was submitted this was the time in other words to make a statement about my abilities especially given that my wife and I were planning on growing our family with a second child in the final year before tenure the final reason I turned back to depth was more personal and admittedly a touch petulant I had applied and been rejected for a well-respected grant that many of my colleagues were receiving I was upset and embarrassed so I decided that instead of just complaining or wallowing in self-doubt I would compensate for losing the grant by increasing the rate and impressiveness of my Publications allowing them to declare on my behalf that I actually did know what I was doing even if this one particular Grant application didn&#39;t go my way I was already an Adept deep worker but these three forces drove me to push this Habit to an extreme I became ruthless in turning down time-consuming commitments and began to work more in isolated locations outside my office I placed a tally of my deep work hours in a prominent position near my desk and got upset when it failed to grow at a fast enough rate perhaps most impactful I returned to my MIT habit of working on problems in my head whenever a good time presented itself be it walking the dog or commuting whereas earlier I tended to increase my deep work only as a deadline approached this year I was relentless most every day of most every week I was pushing my mind to Grapple with results of consequence regardless of whether or not a specific deadline was near I solved proofs on subway rides and while shoveling snow when my son napped on the weekend I would Pace the yard thinking and when stuck in traffic I would methodically work through problems that were stymying me as this year progressed I became a deep work machine and the result of this transformation caught me off guard during the same year that I wrote a book and my oldest son entered the terrible twos I managed to more than double my average academic productivity publishing nine peer-reviewed papers all the while maintaining my prohibition on work in the evenings I&#39;m the first to admit that my year of extreme depth was perhaps a bit too extreme it proved cognitively exhausting and going forward I&#39;ll likely moderate this intensity but this experience reinforces the point that opened this conclusion deep work is way more powerful than most people understand it&#39;s a commitment to this skill that allowed Bill Gates to make the most of an unexpected opportunity to create a new industry and that allowed me to double my academic productivity the same year I decided to concurrently write a book to leave the distracted masses to join the focused few I&#39;m arguing is a transformative experience the Deep life of course is not for everybody it requires hard work and drastic changes to your habits for many there&#39;s a comfort in the artificial busyness of Rapid email messaging and social media posturing while the Deep life demands that you leave much of that behind there&#39;s also an uneasiness that surrounds any effort to produce the best things you&#39;re capable of producing as this forces you to confront the possibility that your best is not yet that good it&#39;s safer to comment on our culture than to step into the rooseveltian ring and attempt to wrestle it into something better but if you&#39;re willing to sidestep these Comforts and fears and instead struggle to deploy your mind to its fullest capacity to create things that matter then you&#39;ll discover as others have before you the depth generates a life rich with productivity and meaning in part one I quoted writer Winifred Gallagher saying I&#39;ll live the focused life because it&#39;s the best kind there is I agree so does Bill Gates and hopefully now that you&#39;ve finished this book you agree too

deep work rules for focused success in   a distracted World written 
by Cal Newport introduction in the Swiss Canton of Saint Gallen near the 
northern Banks of Lake Zurich is a village   named bollingan in 1922 the psychiatrist Carl 
Jung chose this spot to begin building a retreat   he began with a basic two-story Stone House he 
called the tower after returning from a trip   to India where he observed the practice of adding 
meditation rooms to homes he expanded the complex   to include a private office in my retiring 
room I am by myself Jung said of the space I   keep the key with me all the time no one else 
is allowed in there except with my permission   in his book daily rituals journalist Mason 
Curry sorted through various sources on Jung   to recreate the psychiatrist&amp;#39;s work habits at 
the tower you would rise at 7am Curry reports   and after a big breakfast he would spend two hours 
of undistracted riding time in his private office   his afternoons would often consist of meditation 
or long walks in the surrounding Countryside   there was no electricity at the tower so as 
day gave way to night light came from oil   lamps and heat from the fireplace 
Jung would retire to bed by 10 pm   the feeling of repose and renewal that I had in 
this Tower was intense from the start he said   though it&amp;#39;s tempting to think of bollingan tower 
as a vacation home if we put it into the context   of Jung&amp;#39;s career at this point it&amp;#39;s clear that 
the Lakeside retreat was not built as an escape   from work in 1922 when Jung bought the property he 
could not afford to take a vacation only one year   earlier in 1921 he had published psychological 
types a seminal book that solidified many   differences that had been long developing between 
Jung&amp;#39;s thinking and the ideas of his one-time   friend and Mentor Sigmund Freud to disagree with 
Freud in the 1920s was a bold move to back up his   book Yoon needed to stay sharp and produce 
a stream of smart articles and books further   supporting and establishing analytical psychology 
the eventual name for his new school of thought   Jung&amp;#39;s lectures and Counseling Practice kept 
him busy in Zurich this is clear but he wasn&amp;#39;t   satisfied with busyness alone he wanted to change 
the way we understood the unconscious and this   goal required deeper more careful thought than 
he could manage amid his hectic City lifestyle   Jung retreated to bollingan not to escape his 
professional life but instead to advance it Carl Jung went on to become one of the most 
influential thinkers of the 20th century   there are of course many reasons for his eventual 
success in this book however I&amp;#39;m interested in   his commitment to the following skill which almost 
certainly played a key role in his accomplishments   deep work professional activities performed in a 
state of distraction-free concentration that push   your cognitive capabilities to their limit these 
efforts create new value improve your skill and   are hard to replicate deep work is necessary to 
ring every last drop of value out of your current   intellectual capacity we now know from Decades of 
research in both Psychology and Neuroscience that   the state of mental strain that accompanies deep 
work is also necessary to improve your abilities   deep work in other words was exactly the 
type of effort needed to stand out in a   cognitively demanding field like academic 
psychiatry in the early 20th century   the term deep work is my own and is not 
something Carl Jung would have used but   his actions during this period were those of 
someone who understood the underlying concept   Jung built a tower out of stone in the woods to 
promote deep work in his professional life a task   that required time energy and money it also took 
him away from more immediate Pursuits as Mason   Curry writes Jung&amp;#39;s regular Journeys to balinggan 
reduced the time he spent on his clinical work   noting although he had many patients who relied 
on him Jung was not shy about taking time off   deep work though a burden to prioritize was 
crucial for his goal of changing the world   indeed if you study the lives of other influential 
figures from both distant and recent history   you&amp;#39;ll find that a commitment to deep work is a 
common theme the 16th century essayist Michelle de   montane for example pre-figured Jung by working in 
a private Library he built in the southern Tower   guarding the stone walls of his French Chateau 
while Mark Twain wrote much of The Adventures of   Tom Sawyer in a shed on the property of the Quarry 
Farm in New York where he was spending the summer   Twain&amp;#39;s study was so isolated from the main house 
that his family took to blowing a horn to attract   his attention for meals moving forward in history 
consider the screenwriter and director Woody Allen   in the 44-year period between 1969 and 2013. 
Woody Allen wrote and directed 44 films that   received 23 Academy Award nominations 
an absurd rate of artistic productivity   throughout this period Allen never owned a 
computer instead completing all his writing   free from electronic distraction on a 
German Olympia sm-3 manual typewriter   Allen is joined in his rejection of computers by 
Peter Higgs a theoretical physicist who performs   his work in such disconnected isolation 
that journalists couldn&amp;#39;t find him after   it was announced he had won the Nobel Prize JK 
Rowling on the other hand does use a computer but   was famously absent from social media during 
the writing of her Harry Potter novels even   though this period coincided with the rise of the 
technology and its popularity among media figures   rolling staff finally started a Twitter account in 
her name in the fall of 2009 as she was working on   the Casual Vacancy and for the first year and a 
half her only tweet read this is the real me but   you won&amp;#39;t be hearing from me often I&amp;#39;m afraid 
as pen and paper is my priority at the moment   deep work of course is not limited to the 
historical or technophobic Microsoft CEO Bill   Gates famously conducted think weeks twice a year 
during which he would isolate himself often in a   Lakeside Cottage to do nothing but read and think 
big thoughts it was during a 1995 think week that   Gates wrote his famous internet tidal wave memo 
that turned Microsoft&amp;#39;s attention to an upstart   company called Netscape Communications and in 
an ironic twist Neil Stevenson the acclaimed   cyberpunk author who helped form our popular 
conception of the internet age is near impossible   to reach electronically his website offers no 
email address and features an essay about why he   is purposefully bad at using social media here&amp;#39;s 
how he once explained the Omission if I organize   my life in such a way that I get lots of long 
consecutive uninterrupted time chunks I can write   novels if I instead get interrupted a lot what 
replaces it instead of a novel that will be around   for a long time there is a bunch of email messages 
that I have sent out to individual persons the ubiquity of deep work among influential 
individuals is important to emphasize because   it stands in sharp contrast to the behavior 
of most modern knowledge workers a group   that&amp;#39;s rapidly forgetting the value of going 
deep the reason knowledge workers are losing   their familiarity with deep work is well 
established Network Tools this is a broad   category that captures communication services 
like email and SMS social media networks like   Twitter and Facebook and the shiny tangle of 
infotainment sites like BuzzFeed and Reddit   in aggregate the rise of these tools combined 
with ubiquitous access to them through smartphones   and networked office computers has fragmented 
most knowledge workers attention into slivers   a 2012 McKinsey study found that the 
average knowledge worker now spends   more than 60 percent of the work week engaged in 
electronic communication and internet searching   with close to 30 percent of a worker&amp;#39;s time 
dedicated to reading and answering email alone   this state of fragmented attention cannot 
accommodate deep work which requires long   periods of uninterrupted thinking at the same 
time however modern knowledge workers are not   loafing in fact they report that they are as busy 
as ever what explains the discrepancy a lot can   be explained by another type of effort which 
provides a counterpart to the idea of deep work shallow work non-cognitively demanding logistical 
style tasks often performed while distracted   these efforts tend to not create much new 
value in the world and are easy to replicate   in an age of Network Tools in other words 
knowledge workers increasingly replace deep   work with the shallow alternative constantly 
sending and receiving email messages like   human Network routers with frequent 
breaks for quick hits of distraction   larger efforts that would be well served by deep 
thinking such as forming a new business strategy   or writing an important Grant application get 
fragmented into distracted dashes that produce   muted quality to make matters worse for depth 
there&amp;#39;s increasing evidence that this shift   toward the shallow is not a choice that can be 
easily reversed spend enough time in a state of   frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce 
Your Capacity to perform deep work what the net   seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity 
for concentration and contemplation admitted   journalist Nicholas Carr in an oft-cited 2008 
Atlantic article and I&amp;#39;m not the only one Carr   expanded this argument into a book the shallows 
which became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize   to write the shallows appropriately enough Carr 
had to move to a cabin and forcibly disconnect   the idea that Network Tools are pushing our 
work from the deep toward the shallow is not new   the shallows was just the first in a series of 
recent books to examine the internet&amp;#39;s effect   on our brains and work habits these subsequent 
titles include William Powers Hamlet&amp;#39;s Blackberry   John Freeman&amp;#39;s the tyranny of email and Alex 
sujang kin pang&amp;#39;s the distraction addiction   all of which agree more or less that Network 
Tools are distracting us from work that requires   unbroken concentration while simultaneously 
degrading our capacity to remain focused   given this existing body of evidence I will 
not spend more time in this book trying to   establish this point we can I hope stipulate 
that Network Tools negatively impact deep work   I&amp;#39;ll also sidestep any Grand arguments about 
the long-term societal consequence of this   shift as such arguments tend to open in 
passable Rifts on one side of the debate   are techno Skeptics like Geron Lanier and John 
Freeman who suspect that many of these tools   at least in their current state damage Society 
while on the other side techno-optimists like   Clive Thompson argue that their changing Society 
for sure but in ways that&amp;#39;ll make us better off   Google for example might reduce our memory but we 
no longer need good memories as in the moment we   can now search for anything we need to know I have 
no stance on this philosophical debate my interest   in this matter instead veers toward a thesis of 
much more pragmatic and individualized interest   our work culture shift toward the shallow 
whether you think it&amp;#39;s philosophically good   or bad is exposing a massive economic 
and personal opportunity for the few   who recognize the potential of resisting this 
trend and prioritizing depth an opportunity   that not too long ago was leveraged by a board 
young consultant from Virginia named Jason Ben there are many ways to discover that you&amp;#39;re not 
valuable in our economy for Jason Ben the lesson   was made clear when he realized not long after 
taking a job as a Financial Consultant that the   vast majority of his work responsibilities could 
be automated by a clutch together Excel script   The Firm that hired Ben produced reports 
for banks involved in complex deals   it was about as interesting as it sounds Ben 
joked in one of our interviews the report creation   process required hours of manual manipulation 
of data in a series of Excel spreadsheets   when he first arrived it took Ben up to six hours 
per report to finish this stage the most efficient   veterans at the firm could complete this task in 
around half the time this didn&amp;#39;t sit well with Ben   the way it was taught to me the process seemed 
clunky and manually intensive Ben recalls he   knew that Excel has a feature called macros that 
allows users to automate common tasks Ben read   articles on the topic and soon put together a new 
worksheet wired up with a series of these macros   that could take the six hour process of manual 
data manipulation and replace it essentially   with a button click a report writing process that 
originally took him a full work day could now be   reduced to less than an hour Ben is a smart guy he 
graduated from an elite College the University of   Virginia with a degree in economics and like many 
in his situation he had Ambitions for his career   it didn&amp;#39;t take him long to realize that these 
Ambitions would be thwarted so long as his main   professional skills could be captured in an Excel 
macro he decided therefore he needed to increase   his value to the world after a period of research 
Ben reached a conclusion he would he declared to   his family quit his job as a human spreadsheet 
and become a computer programmer as is often the   case with such Grand plans however there was a 
hitch Jason Ben had no idea how to write code   as a computer scientist I can confirm an obvious 
point programming computers is hard most new   developers dedicate a four-year college education 
to learning the ropes before their first job   and even then competition for the best spots is 
fierce Jason Ben didn&amp;#39;t have this time after his   Excel Epiphany he quit his job at the financial 
firm and moved home to prepare for his next step   his parents were happy he had a plan but 
they weren&amp;#39;t happy about the idea that   this return home might be long term Ben needed 
to learn a hard skill and needed to do so fast   it&amp;#39;s here that Ben ran into the same problem that 
holds back many knowledge workers from navigating   into more explosive career trajectories learning 
something complex like computer programming   requires intense uninterrupted concentration 
on cognitively demanding Concepts the type   of concentration that drove Carl Jung to the 
woods surrounding Lake Zurich this task in other   words is an act of deep work most knowledge 
workers however as I argued earlier in this   introduction have lost their ability to perform 
deep work Ben was no exception to this trend   I was always getting on the Internet and 
checking my email I couldn&amp;#39;t stop myself it was a   compulsion Ben said describing himself during the 
period leading up to his quitting his Finance job   to emphasize his difficulty with depth Ben 
told me about a project that a supervisor   at the finance firm once brought to him they 
wanted me to write a business plan he explained   Ben didn&amp;#39;t know how to write a business 
plan so he decided he would find and read   five different existing plans comparing and 
contrasting them to understand what was needed   this was a good idea but Ben had a problem I 
couldn&amp;#39;t stay focused there were days during   this period he now admits when he spent almost 
every minute 98 of my time surfing the web the   business plan project a chance to distinguish 
himself early in his career fell to the Wayside   by the time he quit Ben was well aware of his 
difficulties with deep work so when he dedicated   himself to learning how to code he knew he had 
to simultaneously teach his mind how to go deep   his method was drastic but effective I locked 
myself in a room with no computer just textbooks   note cards and a highlighter he would highlight 
the computer programming textbooks transfer the   ideas to note cards and then practice them 
out loud these periods free from electronic   distraction were hard at first but Ben gave 
himself no other option he had to learn this   material and he made sure there was nothing in 
that room to distract him Over time however he   got better at concentrating eventually getting 
to a point where he was regularly clocking five   or more disconnected hours per day in the room 
focused without distraction on learning this hard   new skill I probably read something like 18 books 
on the topic by the time I was done he recalls   after two months locked away studying Ben attended 
the notoriously difficult Dev boot camp a hundred   hour a week crash course in web application 
programming while researching the program Ben   found a student with a PhD from Princeton who had 
described Dev as the hardest thing I&amp;#39;ve ever done   in my life given both his preparation and his 
newly honed ability for deep work Ben excelled   some people show up not prepared he said 
they can&amp;#39;t focus they can&amp;#39;t learn quickly   only half the students who started the 
program with Ben ended up graduating on time   Ben not only graduated but was 
also the top student in his class   the Deep work paid off Ben quickly landed a job 
as a developer at a San Francisco Tech startup   with 25 million dollars in Venture funding 
and its pick of employees when Ben quit his   job as a Financial Consultant only half a year 
earlier he was making forty thousand dollars a   year his new job as a computer developer paid 
a hundred thousand dollars an amount that can   continue to grow essentially without limit in the 
Silicon Valley Market along with his skill level   when I last spoke with Ben he was thriving in 
his new position a newfound devotee of deep   work he rented an apartment across the street 
from his office allowing him to show up early   in the morning before anyone else arrived 
and work without distraction on good days I   can get in four hours of focus before the first 
meeting he told me then maybe another three to   four hours in the afternoon and I do mean Focus 
no email no Hacker News a website popular among   Tech types just programming for someone who 
admitted to sometimes spending up to 98 of his   day in his old job surfing the web Jason Ben&amp;#39;s 
transformation is nothing short of astonishing Jason Ben&amp;#39;s story highlights a crucial lesson 
deep work is not some nostalgic affectation   of writers in early 20th century philosophers 
it&amp;#39;s instead a skill that has great value today   there are two reasons for this value the first 
has to do with learning we have an information   economy that&amp;#39;s dependent on complex systems that 
change rapidly some of the computer languages Ben   learned for example didn&amp;#39;t exist 10 years ago 
and will likely be outdated 10 years from now   similarly someone coming up in the field of 
marketing in the 1990s probably had no idea that   today they&amp;#39;d need to master digital Analytics 
to remain valuable in our economy therefore   you must Master the art of quickly learning 
complicated things this task requires deep work   if you don&amp;#39;t cultivate this ability you&amp;#39;re 
likely to fall behind this technology advances   the second reason that deep work is valuable 
is because the impacts of the digital Network   Revolution cut both ways if you can create 
something useful its reachable audience   EG employers or customers is essentially 
Limitless which greatly magnifies your reward   on the other hand if what you&amp;#39;re producing is 
mediocre then you&amp;#39;re in trouble as it&amp;#39;s too easy   for your audience to find a better alternative 
online whether you&amp;#39;re a computer programmer   writer marketer consultant or entrepreneur 
your situation has become similar to Jung   trying to outwit Freud or Jason Ben trying to 
hold his own in a hot startup to succeed you   have to produce the absolute best stuff you&amp;#39;re 
capable of producing a task that requires depth   the growing necessity of deep work is new 
in an industrial economy there was a small   skilled labor and professional class for which 
deep work was crucial but most workers could do   just fine without ever cultivating an ability to 
concentrate without distraction they were paid   to crank widgets and not much about their 
job would change in the decades they kept   it but as we shift to an information economy 
more and more of our population are knowledge   workers and deep work is becoming a key currency 
even if most haven&amp;#39;t yet recognized this reality   deep work is not in other words an old-fashioned 
skill falling into irrelevance it&amp;#39;s instead a   crucial ability for anyone looking to move 
ahead in a globally competitive information   economy that tends to chew up and spit out those 
who aren&amp;#39;t earning their keep the real rewards   are reserved not for those who are comfortable 
using Facebook a shallow task easily replicated   but instead for those who are comfortable 
building the Innovative distributed systems   that run the service a decidedly deep task hard to 
replicate deep work is so important that we might   consider it to use the phrasing of business writer 
Eric Barker the superpower of the 21st Century we have now seen two strands of thought one 
about the increasing scarcity of deep work   and the other about its increasing 
value which we can combine into the   idea that provides the foundation for 
everything that follows in this book   the Deep work hypothesis the ability to perform 
deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly   the same time it is becoming increasingly 
valuable in our economy as a consequence   the few who cultivate this skill and then make 
it the core of their working life will thrive   this book has two goals pursued in two parts 
the first tackled in part one is to convince   you that the Deep work hypothesis is true 
the second tackled in part two is to teach   you how to take advantage of this Reality by 
training your brain and transforming your work   habits to place deep work at the core of 
your professional life before diving into   these details however I&amp;#39;ll take a moment to 
explain how I became such a devotee of depth I&amp;#39;ve spent the past decade cultivating my 
own ability to concentrate on hard things   to understand the origins of this interest it 
helps to know that I&amp;#39;m a theoretical computer   scientist who performed my doctoral training 
in mit&amp;#39;s famed theory of computation group a   professional setting where the ability to focus 
is considered a crucial occupational skill   during these years I shared a graduate student 
office down the hall from a MacArthur genius grant   winner a professor who was hired at MIT before 
he was old enough to legally drink it wasn&amp;#39;t   uncommon to find this theoretician sitting in the 
common space staring at markings on a whiteboard   with a group of visiting Scholars arrayed around 
him also sitting quietly and staring this could   go on for hours I&amp;#39;d go to lunch I&amp;#39;d come back 
still staring this particular Professor is hard   to reach he&amp;#39;s not on Twitter and if he doesn&amp;#39;t 
know you he&amp;#39;s unlikely to respond to your email   last year he published 16 papers this type of 
fierce concentration permeated the atmosphere   during my student years not surprisingly I 
soon developed a similar commitment to death   to the Chagrin of both my friends and the various 
publicists I&amp;#39;ve worked with on my books I&amp;#39;ve   never had a Facebook or Twitter account or any 
other social media presence outside of a Blog   I don&amp;#39;t web Surf and get most of my news from 
my home delivered Washington Post and NPR   I&amp;#39;m also generally hard to reach 
my author website doesn&amp;#39;t provide   a personal email address and I didn&amp;#39;t own my 
first smartphone until 2012 when my pregnant   wife gave me an ultimatum you have to have 
a phone that works before our son is born   on the other hand my commitment to depth has 
rewarded me in the 10-year period following   my college graduation I published four 
books earned a PhD wrote peer-reviewed   academic papers at a high rate and was hired as 
a tenure track professor at Georgetown University   I maintain this voluminous production while 
rarely working past 5 or 6 PM during the work week   this compressed schedule is possible because 
I&amp;#39;ve invested significant effort to minimize   the shallow in my life while making sure I 
get the most out of the time this frees up   I build my days around a core of carefully chosen 
deep work with the shallow activities I absolutely   cannot avoid batched into smaller bursts at 
the peripheries of my schedule three to four   hours a day five days a week of uninterrupted and 
carefully directed concentration it turns out can   produce a lot of valuable output my commitment to 
depth has also returned non-professional benefits   for the most part I don&amp;#39;t touch a computer 
between the time when I get home from work   and the next morning when the new work day begins 
the main exception being blog posts which I like   to write after my kids go to bed this ability to 
fully disconnect as opposed to the more standard   practice of sneaking in a few quick work email 
checks or giving into frequent surveys of social   media sites allows me to be present with my 
wife and two sons in the evenings and read a   surprising number of books for a busy father of 
two more generally the lack of distraction in my   life tones down that background hum of nervous 
mental energy that seems to increasingly pervade   people&amp;#39;s daily lives I&amp;#39;m comfortable being bored 
and this can be a surprisingly rewarding skill   especially on a lazy DC summer night listening 
to a Nationals game slowly unfold on the radio this book is best described as an attempt to 
formalize and explain my attraction to depth over   shallowness and to detail the types of strategies 
that have helped me act on this attraction   I&amp;#39;ve committed this thinking to words in part to 
help you follow my lead in rebuilding your life   around deep work but this isn&amp;#39;t the whole story my 
other interest in distilling and clarifying these   thoughts is to further develop my own practice 
my recognition of the deep work hypothesis has   helped me Thrive but I&amp;#39;m convinced that I haven&amp;#39;t 
yet reached my full value producing potential   as you struggle and ultimately Triumph with 
the ideas and rules and the chapters ahead you   can be assured that I&amp;#39;m following suit ruthlessly 
calling the shallow and painstakingly cultivating   the intensity of my depth you&amp;#39;ll learn how I fare 
in this book&amp;#39;s conclusion when Carl Jung wanted to   revolutionize the field of Psychiatry he built a 
retreat in the woods Jung&amp;#39;s bollingan Tower became   a place where he could maintain his ability 
to think deeply and then apply the skill to   produce work of such stunning originality that it 
changed the world in the chapters ahead I&amp;#39;ll try   to convince you to join me in the effort to build 
our own personal balingan Towers to cultivate an   ability to produce real value in an increasingly 
distracted world and to recognize a truth embraced   by the most productive and important personalities 
of generations past a deep life is a good life part one the idea chapter one deep work is valuable as election 
day loomed in 2012 traffic at the New York Times   website spiked as is normal during moments of 
national importance but this time something was   different a wildly disproportionate fraction 
of this traffic more than 70 percent by some   reports was visiting a single location in the 
sprawling domain it wasn&amp;#39;t a front page breaking   news story and it wasn&amp;#39;t commentary from one of 
the paper&amp;#39;s Pulitzer prize-winning columnists it   was instead a Blog run by a baseball stats geek 
turned election forecaster named Nate silver   less than a year later ESPN and ABC News lured 
silver away from the times which tried to retain   him by promising a staff of up to a dozen riders 
in a major deal that would give Silver&amp;#39;s operation   a role in everything from Sports to weather to 
network news segments to improbably enough Academy   Awards telecasts though there is debate about 
the methodological rigor of Silver&amp;#39;s hand-tuned   models there are few who deny that in 2012 this 
35 year old data whiz was a winner in our economy   another winner is David heinermeier Hansen a 
computer programming star who created the Ruby   on Rails website development framework 
which currently provides the foundation   for some of the web&amp;#39;s most popular 
destinations including Twitter and Hulu   Hanson is a partner in the influential development 
firm base camp called 37 signals until 2014.   Hanson doesn&amp;#39;t talk publicly about the magnitude 
of his profit share from base camp or his other   Revenue sources but we can assume they&amp;#39;re 
lucrative given that Hanson splits his time   between Chicago Malibu and Marbella Spain where 
he dabbles in high performance race car driving   our third and final example of a clear winner 
in our economy is John door a general partner   in the famed Silicon Valley venture capital 
fund Kleiner Perkins Caufield and buyers   door helped fund many of the key companies 
fueling the current technological Revolution   including Twitter Google Amazon Netscape and Sun 
Microsystems the return on these Investments has   been astronomical doors net worth as of this 
writing is more than three billion dollars why have silver Hanson endure done so well 
there are two types of answers to this question   the first are micro in scope and focus on 
the personality traits and tactics that   help drive this Trio&amp;#39;s rise the second 
type of answers are more macro in that   they focus Less on the individuals and 
more on the type of work they represent   though both approaches to this core question 
are important the macro answers will prove   most relevant to our discussion as they better 
illuminate what our current economy Rewards   to explore this macro perspective we turn to 
a pair of MIT economists Eric benjolsson and   Andrew McAfee who in their influential 2011 book 
Race Against the Machine provide a compelling   case that among various forces at Play It&amp;#39;s the 
rise of digital technology in particular that&amp;#39;s   Transforming Our labor markets in unexpected 
ways we are in the early throes of a great   restructuring Bryn yolfson and McAfee explain 
early in their book our Technologies are racing   ahead but many of our skills and organizations are 
lagging behind for many workers this lag predicts   bad news as intelligent machines improve and the 
gap between machine and human abilities shrinks   employers are becoming increasingly likely 
to hire new machines instead of new people   and when only a human will do improvements in 
Communications and collaboration technology   are making remote work easier than ever before 
motivating companies to Outsource key roles to   Stars leaving the local talent pool underemployed 
this reality is not however universally grim   as brinjalsen and McAfee emphasize this great 
restructuring is not driving down all jobs but is   instead dividing them though an increasing number 
of people will lose in this new economy as their   skills become automatable or easily outsourced 
there are others who will not only survive but   Thrive becoming more valued and therefore more 
rewarded than before brinjal Center McAfee aren&amp;#39;t   alone in proposing this bimodal trajectory for 
the economy in 2013 for example the George Mason   Economist Tyler Cowan published average is over a 
book that Echoes this thesis of a digital division   but what makes brinjalsson and McAfee&amp;#39;s 
analysis particularly useful is that they   proceed to identify three specific groups 
that will fall on the lucrative side of   this divide and reap a disproportionate amount 
of the benefits of the intelligent Machine age   not surprisingly it&amp;#39;s to these three groups 
that silver Hansen and door happen to belong   let&amp;#39;s touch on each of these groups in turn to 
better understand why they&amp;#39;re suddenly so valuable the high-skilled workers renovsen and McAfee 
call the group personified by Nate silver the   high skilled workers advances such as Robotics and 
voice recognition are automating many low-skilled   positions but as these economists emphasize other 
Technologies like data visualization analytics   high-speed Communications and rapid prototyping 
have augmented the contributions of more abstract   and data-driven reasoning increasing the values of 
these jobs in other words those with the oracular   ability to work with and tease valuable results 
out of increasingly complex machines will thrive   Tyler Cowan summarizes this reality more bluntly   the key question will be are you good at 
working with intelligent machines or not   Nate silver of course with his comfort in feeding 
data into large databases then siphoning it out   into his mysterious Monte Carlo simulations is 
the epitome of the high-skilled worker intelligent   machines are not an obstacle to Silver&amp;#39;s 
success but instead provide its precondition the superstars the ace programmer David 
heinermeier Hansen provides an example   of the second group that brinjin and McAfee 
predict will thrive in our new economy Superstars   high-speed data networks and collaboration tools 
like email and virtual meeting software have   destroyed regionalism in many sectors of knowledge 
work it no longer makes sense for example to hire   a full-time programmer put aside office space 
and pay benefits when you can instead pay one   of the world&amp;#39;s best programmers like Hanson for 
just enough time to complete the project at hand   in this scenario you&amp;#39;ll probably get a 
better result for less money while Hanson   can service many more clients per year 
and will therefore also end up better off   the fact that Hanson might be working 
remotely from Marbella Spain while your   office is in Des Moines Iowa doesn&amp;#39;t matter 
to your company as advances in communication   and collaboration technology make the process 
near seamless this reality does matter however   to the less skilled local programmers living 
in Des Moines and in need of a steady paycheck   this same Trend holds for the growing number of 
fields where technology makes productive remote   work possible Consulting marketing writing design 
and so on CE the talent Market is made universally   accessible those at the peak of the market 
Thrive while the rest suffer in a seminal 1981   paper The Economist Sherwin Rosen worked out the 
mathematics Behind These winner take all markets   one of his key insights was to explicitly Model 
Talent labeled innocuously with the variable   Q in his formulas as a factor with imperfect 
substitution which Rosen explains as follows   hearing a succession of mediocre singers does 
not add up to a single outstanding performance   in other words Talent is not a commodity you can 
buy in bulk and combine to reach the needed levels   there&amp;#39;s a premium to being the best therefore if 
you&amp;#39;re in a marketplace where the consumer has   access to all performers and everyone&amp;#39;s Q value 
is clear the consumer will choose the very best   even if the talent advantage of the best is 
small compared to the next rung down on the   skill ladder the superstars still win the bulk 
of the market in the 1980s when Rosen studied   this effect he focused on examples like movie 
stars and musicians where there existed Clear   markets such as music stores and movie theaters 
where an audience has access to different   performers and can accurately approximate their 
talent before making a purchasing decision   the rapid rise of communication and collaboration 
Technologies has transformed many other formerly   local markets into a similarly Universal 
Bazaar the small company looking for a   computer programmer or public relations consultant 
now has access to an international marketplace of   talent in the same way that the Advent of the 
record store allowed the Small Town music fan   to bypass local musicians to buy albums from the 
world&amp;#39;s best bands the Superstar effect in other   words has a broader application today than Rosen 
could have predicted 30 years ago an increasing   number of individuals in our economy are now 
competing with the rock stars of their sectors the owners the final group that will thrive in 
our new economy the group epitomized by John   door consists of those with capital to invest 
in the new technologies that are driving the   great restructuring as we&amp;#39;ve understood 
since Marx access to Capital provides   massive advantages it&amp;#39;s also true however that 
some periods offer more advantages than others   as brynoffson and McAfee point out post-war 
Europe was an example of a bad time to be   sitting on a pile of cash as the combination 
of Rapid inflation and aggressive taxation   wiped out old fortunes with surprising speed 
what we might call the Downton Abbey effect   the great restructuring unlike the post-war 
period is a particularly good time to have   access to Capital to understand why first recall 
that bargaining Theory a key component in standard   economic thinking argues that when money is made 
through the combination of capital investment and   labor the rewards are returned roughly speaking 
proportional to the input as digital technology   reduces the need for labor in many Industries the 
proportion of the rewards returned to those who   own the intelligent machines is growing a venture 
capitalist in today&amp;#39;s economy can fund a company   like Instagram which was eventually sold for a 
billion dollars while employing only 13 people   when else in history could such a small amount of 
Labor be involved in such a large amount of value   with so little input from labor the proportion 
of this wealth that flows back to the machine   owners in this case the Venture investors is 
without precedent it&amp;#39;s no wonder that a venture   capitalist I interviewed for my last book admitted 
to me with some concern everyone wants my job let&amp;#39;s pull together the threads spun so far 
current economic thinking as I&amp;#39;ve surveyed   argues that the unprecedented growth and impact of 
technology are creating a massive restructuring of   our economy in this new economy three groups 
will have a particular Advantage those who   can work well and creatively with intelligent 
machines those who are the best at what they   do and those with access to Capital to be clear 
this great restructuring identified by economists   like brynjolsen McAfee and Cowan is not the only 
economic trend of importance at the moment and the   three groups mentioned previously are not the only 
groups who will do well but what&amp;#39;s important for   this book&amp;#39;s argument is that these Trends even if 
not alone are important and these groups even if   they are not the only such groups will thrive if 
you can join any of these groups therefore you&amp;#39;ll   do well if you cannot you might still do well but 
your position is more precarious the question we   must now face is the obvious one how does one 
join these winners at the risk of quelling a   rising enthusiasm I should first confess that I 
have no secret for quickly amassing capital and   becoming the next John door if I had such Secrets 
it&amp;#39;s unlikely I&amp;#39;d share them in a book the other   two winning groups however are accessible 
how to access them is the goal we tackle next how to become a winner in the new economy I just 
identified two groups that are poised to thrive   and that I claim are accessible those who can 
work creatively with intelligent machines and   those who are stars in their field what&amp;#39;s the 
secret to Landing in these lucrative sectors   of the widening digital divide I argue that 
the following two core abilities are crucial   two core abilities for thriving in the new economy 
one the ability to quickly Master hard things   2. the ability to produce at an elite level in 
terms of both quality and speed let&amp;#39;s begin with   the first ability to start we must remember that 
we&amp;#39;ve been spoiled by the intuitive and drop dead   simple user experience of many consumer-facing 
Technologies like Twitter and the iPhone   these examples however are consumer products not 
serious tools most of the intelligent machines   driving the great restructuring are significantly 
more complex to understand and master   consider Nate silver our earlier example 
of someone who thrives by working well with   complicated technology if we dive deeper into 
his methodology we discover that generating   data-driven election forecasts is not as easy as 
typing who will win more votes into a search box   he instead maintains a large database of poll 
results thousands of polls from more than 250   posters that he feeds into stata a popular 
statistical analysis system produced by a   company called staticorp these are not easy 
tools to master here for example is the type   of command you need to understand to work with 
a modern database like silver uses create view   cities as select name population altitude from 
capitals Union select name population altitude   from non-underscore capitals databases of this 
type are interrogated in a language called SQL   you send them commands like the one I just 
read to interact with their stored information   understanding how to manipulate these 
databases is subtle the example command   for example creates a view a virtual database 
table that pulls together data from multiple   existing tables and that can then be addressed 
by the SQL commands like a standard table   when to create views and how to do so 
well is a tricky question one of many   that you must understand and master to tease 
reasonable results out of real-world databases   working with our Nate silver case study consider 
the other technology he relies on stata this is   a powerful tool and definitely not something you 
can learn intuitively after some modest tinkering   here for example is a description of the features 
added to the most recent version of this software   stated 13 adds many new features such as treatment 
effects multi-level glm power and sample size   generalized sem forecasting effect sizes project 
manager long strings and blobs and much more   silver uses this complex software with 
its generalized sem and blobs to build   intricate models with interlocking Parts multiple 
regressions conducted on custom parameters which   are then referenced as custom weights used in 
probabilistic expressions and so on the point   of providing these details is to emphasize that 
intelligent machines are complicated and hard to   master to join the group of those who can work 
well with these machines therefore requires that   you hone your ability to master hard things and 
because these Technologies change rapidly this   process of mastering hard things never ends you 
must be able to do it quickly again and again   this ability to learn hard things quickly 
of course isn&amp;#39;t just necessary for working   well with intelligent machines it also 
plays a key role in the attempt to become   a superstar in just about any field even 
those that have little to do with technology   to become a world-class yoga instructor for 
example requires that you master an increasingly   complex set of physical skills to excel in a 
particular area of medicine to give another   example requires that you be able to quickly 
Master the latest research on relevant procedures   to summarize these observations more 
succinctly if you can&amp;#39;t learn you can&amp;#39;t thrive   now consider the second core ability from the 
list described earlier producing at an elite level   if you want to become a superstar mastering the 
relevant skills is necessary but not sufficient   you must then transform that latent potential 
into tangible results that people value many   Developers for example can program computers 
well but David Hansen are examples Superstar   from earlier leveraged this ability to produce 
Ruby on Rails the project that made his reputation   Ruby on Rails required Hanson to push his 
current skills to their limit and produce   unambiguously valuable and concrete results 
this ability to produce also applies to those   looking to master intelligent machines it wasn&amp;#39;t 
enough for Nate silver to learn how to manipulate   large data sets and run statistical analyzes he 
needed to then show that he could use this skill   to tease information from these machines the 
large audience cared about silver worked with   many stats Geeks during his days at baseball 
prospectus but it was silver alone who put in   the effort to adapt these skills to the new and 
more lucrative territory of election forecasting   this provides another General observation for 
joining the ranks of winners in our economy   if you don&amp;#39;t produce you won&amp;#39;t Thrive no 
matter how skilled or talented you are   having established two abilities that are 
fundamental to getting ahead in our new   technology disrupted world we can now ask 
the obvious follow-up question how does one   cultivate these core abilities it&amp;#39;s here that 
we arrive at a central thesis of this book   the two core abilities just described depend on 
your ability to perform deep work if you haven&amp;#39;t   mastered this foundational skill you&amp;#39;ll struggle 
to learn hard things or produce at an elite level   the dependence of these abilities on 
deep work isn&amp;#39;t immediately obvious it   requires a closer look at the science of 
learning concentration and productivity   the sections ahead provide this closer look 
and by doing so will help this connection   between deep work and economic success shift 
for you from unexpected to unimpeachable deep work helps you quickly learn hard things let 
your mind become a lens thanks to the converging   rays of attention let your soul be all intent 
on whatever it is that is established in your   mind as a dominant wholly absorbing idea this 
advice comes from antonan certiage a Dominican   Friar and professor of moral philosophy who 
during the early part of the 20th century   penned a slim but influential volume titled the 
intellectual life wrote the book as a guide to the   development and deepening of the mind for those 
called to make a living in the world of ideas   throughout the intellectual life certiage 
recognizes the necessity of mastering   complicated material and helps prepare the reader 
for this challenge for this reason his book proves   useful in our quest to better understand how 
people quickly Master hard cognitive skills   to understand satyaja&amp;#39;s advice let&amp;#39;s 
return to the quote from earlier   in these words which are echoed in many forms 
in the intellectual life certiage argues that   to advance your understanding of your field you 
must tackle the relevant topics systematically   allowing your converging rays of attention to 
uncover the truth latent in each in other words he   teaches to learn requires intense concentration 
this idea turns out to be ahead of its time   in reflecting on the life of the Mind in the 
1920s certiage uncovered a fact about mastering   cognitively demanding tasks that would take 
the academy another seven decades to formalize   this task of formalization began in Earnest 
in the 1970s when a branch of psychology   sometimes called performance psychology began to 
systematically explore what separates experts in   many different fields from everyone else in 
the early 1990s K Anders Erickson a professor   at Florida State University pulled together 
these strands into a single coherent answer   consistent with the growing research literature 
that he gave a Punchy name deliberate practice   Erickson opens his seminal paper on the topic 
with a powerful claim we deny that these   differences between expert performers and normal 
adults are immutable instead we argue that the   differences between expert performers and normal 
adults reflect a lifelong period of deliberate   effort to improve performance in a specific domain 
American culture in particular loves the storyline   of the Prodigy do you know how easy this is for 
me Matt Damon&amp;#39;s character famously cries in the   movie Good Will Hunting as he makes quick work of 
proofs that stymie the world&amp;#39;s top mathematicians   the line of research promoted by Erickson and 
now widely accepted with caveats destabilizes   these myths to master a cognitively demanding 
task requires this specific form of practice   there are a few exceptions made for natural 
Talent on this point too certiage seems to have   been ahead of his time arguing in the intellectual 
life Men of Genius themselves were great only by   bringing all their power to bear on the point on 
which they had decided to show their full measure   Erickson couldn&amp;#39;t have said it better this brings 
us to the question of what deliberate practice   actually requires its core components are usually 
identified as follows one your attention is   focused tightly on a specific skill you&amp;#39;re trying 
to improve or an idea you&amp;#39;re trying to master   two you receive feedback so you can correct 
your approach to keep your attention exactly   where it&amp;#39;s most productive the first component 
is of particular importance to our discussion   as it emphasizes that deliberate practice cannot 
exist alongside distraction and that it instead   requires uninterrupted concentration as 
Ericsson emphasizes diffused attention   is almost antithetical to the focused 
attention required by deliberate practice   as psychologists Ericsson and the other 
researchers in his field are not interested   in why deliberate practice Works they&amp;#39;re 
just identifying it as an effective Behavior   in the intervening decades since Ericsson&amp;#39;s first 
major papers on the topic however neuroscientists   have been exploring the physical mechanisms 
that drive people&amp;#39;s improvements on hard tasks   as the journalist Daniel Coyle surveys in his 2009 
book The Talent Code these scientists increasingly   believe the answer includes myelin a layer of 
fatty tissue that grows around neurons acting   like an insulator that allows the cells to fire 
faster and cleaner 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&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;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   by contrast if you&amp;#39;re trying to learn a complex 
new skill say SQL database Management in a state   of low concentration perhaps you also have your 
Facebook feed open you&amp;#39;re firing too many circuits   simultaneously and haphazardly to isolate the 
group of neurons you actually want to strengthen   in the century that has passed since Anton first 
wrote about using the mind like a lens to focus   rays of attention we have advanced from this 
elevated metaphor to a decidedly less poetic   explanation expressed in terms of oligodendrocyte 
cells but this sequence of thinking about thinking   points to an inescapable conclusion to learn hard 
things quickly you must Focus intensely without   distraction to learn in other words is an act of 
deep work if you&amp;#39;re comfortable going deep you&amp;#39;ll   be comfortable mastering the increasingly complex 
systems and skills needed to thrive in our economy   if you instead remain one of the many for 
whom depth is uncomfortable and distraction   ubiquitous you shouldn&amp;#39;t expect these 
systems and skills to come easily to you deep work helps you produce at an elite level   Adam Grant produces at an elite level when I 
met Grant in 2013 he was the youngest Professor   to be awarded tenure in the history of 
the Wharton School of Business at Penn   a year later when I started writing this 
chapter and was just beginning to think   about my own tenure process the claim was updated 
he&amp;#39;s now the youngest full professor at Wharton   the reason Grant Advanced so quickly in his 
corner of Academia is simple he produces   in 2012 Grant published seven articles all of them 
in major journals this is an absurdly high rate   for his field in which professors tend to work 
alone or in small professional collaborations and   do not have large teams of students and post-docs 
to support their research in 2013 this count fell   to five this is still absurdly high but below his 
recent standards he can be excused for this dip   however because the same year he published a book 
titled give and take which popularized some of   his research on relationships in business to say 
that this book was successful is an understatement   it ended up featured on the cover of the New 
York Times magazine and went on to become a   massive best seller when Grant was awarded full 
professorship in 2014 he&amp;#39;d already written more   than 60 peer-reviewed Publications in addition to 
his best-selling book soon after meeting Grant my   own academic career on my mind I couldn&amp;#39;t 
help but ask him about his productivity   fortunately for me he was happy to share his 
thoughts on the subject it turns out that Grant   thinks a lot about the mechanics of producing at 
an elite level he sent me for example a collection   of PowerPoint slides from a workshop he attended 
with several other professors in his field the   event was focused on data-driven observations 
about how to produce academic work at an Optimum   rate these slides included detailed pie charts of 
time allocation per season a flow chart capturing   relationship development with co-authors and a 
suggested reading list with more than 20 titles   these business professors do not live the 
cliche of the absent-minded academic lost   in books and occasionally stumbling on a big idea 
they see productivity as a scientific problem to   systematically solve a goal Adam Grant seems to 
have achieved though Grant&amp;#39;s productivity depends   on many factors there&amp;#39;s one idea in particular 
that seems Central to his method the batching   of hard but important intellectual work into 
long uninterrupted stretches Grant performs   this batching at multiple levels within the year 
he Stacks his teaching into the fall semester   during which he can turn all of his attention to 
teaching well and being available to his students   this method seems to work as Grant is currently 
the highest rated teacher at Wharton and the   winner of multiple teaching Awards by batching 
his teaching in the fall Grant can then turn   his attention fully to research in the spring and 
summer and Tackle this work with less distraction   Grant also batches his attention on a smaller time 
scale within a semester dedicated to research he   alternates between periods where his door is 
open to students and colleagues and periods   where he isolates himself to focus completely 
and without distraction on a single research task   he typically divides the writing of a 
scholarly paper into three discrete tasks   analyzing the data writing a full draft and 
editing the draft into something publishable   during these periods which can last up to three 
or four days he&amp;#39;ll often put an out of office Auto   responder on his email so correspondence will know 
not to expect a response it sometimes confuses my   colleagues he told me they say you&amp;#39;re not out 
of office I see you in your office right now   but to Grant it&amp;#39;s important to enforce strict 
isolation until he completes the task at hand   my guess is that Adam Grant doesn&amp;#39;t work 
substantially more hours than the average   professor at an elite research institution 
generally speaking this is a group prone to   workaholism but he still manages to produce more 
than just about anyone else in his field I argue   that his approach to batching helps explain this 
Paradox in particular by consolidating his work   into intense and uninterrupted pulses he&amp;#39;s 
leveraging the following law of productivity   high quality work produced equals 
time spent times intensity of focus   if you believe this formula then grants habits 
make sense by maximizing his intensity when he   works he maximizes the results he produces per 
unit of time spent working this is not the first   time I&amp;#39;ve encountered this formulaic conception 
of productivity it first came to my attention when   I was researching my second book How to Become a 
Straight A Student many years earlier during that   research process I interviewed around 50 ultra 
high scoring college undergraduates from some of   the country&amp;#39;s most competitive schools something 
I noticed in these interviews is that the very   best students often studied less than the group 
of students right below them on the GPA rankings   one of the explanations for this phenomenon 
turned out to be the formula detailed earlier   the best students understood the role intensity 
plays in productivity and therefore went out of   their way to maximize their concentration 
radically reducing the time required to   prepare for tests or write papers without 
diminishing the quality of their results   the example of Adam Grant implies that 
this intensity formula applies Beyond just   undergraduate GPA it is also relevant to other 
cognitively demanding tasks but why would this be   an interesting explanation comes from Sophie 
Leroy a business professor at the University   of Minnesota in a 2009 paper titled intriguingly 
why is it so hard to do my work Leroy introduced   an effect she called attention residue in 
the introduction to this paper she noted   that other researchers have studied the effect 
of multitasking trying to accomplish multiple   tasks simultaneously on performance but that in 
the modern knowledge work office once you got to   a high enough level it was more common to find 
people working on multiple projects sequentially   going from one meeting to the next starting 
to work on one project and soon after having   to transition to another is just part 
of life in organizations Leroy explains   the problem this research identifies with this 
work strategy is that when you switch from   some task a to another task B your attention 
doesn&amp;#39;t immediately follow a residue of your   attention remains stuck thinking about the 
original task this residue gets especially   thick if your work on task a was unbounded 
and of low intensity before you switched but   even if you finish task a before moving on 
your attention remains divided for a while   Leroy studied the effect of this attention residue 
on performance by forcing task switches in the   laboratory in one such experiment for example 
she started her subjects working on a set of word   puzzles in one of the trials she would interrupt 
them and tell them that they needed to move on to   a new and challenging task in this case reading 
resumes and making hypothetical hiring decisions   in other trials she let the subjects finish 
the puzzles before giving them the next task   in between puzzling and hiring she would deploy a 
quick lexical decision game to quantify the amount   of residue left from the first task the results 
from this and her similar experiments were clear   people experiencing attention residue after 
switching tasks are likely to demonstrate   poor performance on that next task and the more 
intense the residue the worse the performance   the concept of attention residue helps 
explain why the intensity formula is   true and therefore helps explain Grant&amp;#39;s 
productivity by working on a single hard   task for a long time without switching Grant 
minimizes the negative impact of attention   residue from his other obligations allowing 
him to maximize performance on this one task   when Grant is working for days in isolation on 
a paper in other words he&amp;#39;s doing so at a higher   level of Effectiveness than the standard Professor 
following a more distracted strategy in which   the work is repeatedly interrupted by residue 
slathering interruptions even if you&amp;#39;re unable   to fully replicate Grant&amp;#39;s extreme isolation we&amp;#39;ll 
tackle different strategies for scheduling depth   in part two the attention residue concept is still 
telling because it implies that the common habit   of working in a state of semi-distraction is 
potentially devastating to your performance   it might seem harmless to take a quick 
glance at your inbox every 10 minutes or so   indeed many justify this Behavior as better than 
the old practice of leaving an inbox open on the   screen at all times a straw man habit that few 
follow anymore but Lee Roy teaches us that this   is not in fact much of an improvement that quick 
check introduces a new Target for your attention   even worse by seeing messages that you cannot deal 
with at the moment which is almost always the case   you&amp;#39;ll be forced to turn back to the primary 
task with a secondary task left unfinished   the attention residue left by such 
unresolved switches dampens your performance   when we step back from these individual 
observations we see a clear argument form   to produce at your peak level you need to work 
for extended periods with full concentration   on a single task free from distraction put 
another way the type of work that optimizes   your performance is deep work if you&amp;#39;re not 
comfortable going deep for extended periods   of time it&amp;#39;ll be difficult to get your 
performance to the peak levels of quality   and quantity increasingly necessary to thrive 
professionally unless your talent and skills   absolutely dwarf those of your competition the 
Deep workers among them will out produce you what about Jack Dorsey I&amp;#39;ve now made my argument 
for why deep work supports abilities that are   becoming increasingly important in our economy 
before we accept this conclusion however we must   face a type of question that often arises when 
I discuss this topic what about Jack Dorsey Jack   Dorsey helped found Twitter after stepping down 
as CEO he then launched the Payment Processing   Company Square to quote a Forbes profile he is a 
disrupter on a massive scale and a repeat offender   he is also someone who does not spend 
a lot of time in a state of deep work   Dorsey doesn&amp;#39;t have the luxury of long 
periods of uninterrupted thinking because   at the time when the Forbes profile was written 
he maintained management duties at both Twitter   where he remained chairman and square leading to a 
tightly calibrated schedule that ensures that the   companies have a predictable weekly Cadence and 
that also ensures that dorsey&amp;#39;s time and attention   are severely fractured Dorsey reports for example 
that he ends the average day with 30 to 40 sets of   meeting notes that he reviews and filters at night 
in the small spaces between all these meetings he   believes in serendipitous availability I do a lot 
of my work at stand-up tables which anyone can   come up to Dorsey said I get to hear all these 
conversations around the company this style of   work is not deep to use a term from our previous 
section dorsey&amp;#39;s attention residue is likely   slathered on thick as he darts from one meeting 
to another letting people interrupt him freely   in the brief interludes in between and yet we 
cannot say that dorsey&amp;#39;s work is shallow because   shallow work as defined in the introduction is 
low value and easily replicable while what Jack   Dorsey does is incredibly valuable and highly 
rewarded in our economy as of this writing he   was among the top one thousand richest people 
in the world with a net worth over 1.1 billion   Jack Dorsey is important to our discussion because 
he&amp;#39;s an Exemplar of a group we cannot ignore   individuals who Thrive without depth when I 
titled the motivating question of this section   what about Jack Dorsey I was providing a 
specific example of a more General query   if deep work is so important why are 
there distracted people who do well   to conclude this chapter I want to address this 
question so it doesn&amp;#39;t nag at your attention as   we dive deeper into the topic of depth in the 
sections ahead to start we must first note   that Jack Dorsey is a high-level executive 
of a large company two companies in fact   individuals with such positions play a major role 
in the category of those who Thrive without depth   because the lifestyle of such Executives is 
famously and unavoidably distracted here&amp;#39;s   Carrie Trainor CEO of Vimeo trying to answer 
the question of how long he can go without email   I can go a good solid Saturday without without 
well most of the day time without it I mean I&amp;#39;ll   check it but I won&amp;#39;t necessarily respond at the 
same time of course these executives are better   compensated and more important in the American 
economy today than in any other time in history   Jack dorsey&amp;#39;s success without depth is common 
at this Elite level of management once we&amp;#39;ve   stipulated this reality we must then step back 
to remind ourselves that it doesn&amp;#39;t undermine the   general value of depth why because the necessity 
of distraction in these Executives work lives is   highly specific to their particular jobs a good 
chief executive is essentially a hard to automate   decision engine not unlike IBM&amp;#39;s jeopardy playing 
Watson system they have built up a hard-won   repository of experience and have honed and 
proved an instinct for their Market they&amp;#39;re then   presented inputs throughout the day in the form 
of emails meetings site visits and the like that   they must process and act on to ask a CEO to spend 
four hours thinking deeply about a single problem   is a waste of what makes him or her valuable it&amp;#39;s 
better to hire three smart subordinates to think   deeply about the problem and then bring their 
solutions to the executive for a final decision   this specificity is important because it tells 
us that if you&amp;#39;re a high level executive at a   major company you probably don&amp;#39;t need the advice 
in the sections that follow on the other hand it   also tells us that you cannot extrapolate the 
approach of these Executives to other jobs   the fact that Dorsey encourages interruption 
or Kerry Trainor checks his email constantly   doesn&amp;#39;t mean that you&amp;#39;ll share their success if 
you follow suit their behaviors are characteristic   of their specific roles as corporate officers 
this rule of specificity should be applied to   similar counter examples that come to mind 
while listening to the rest of this book   there are we must continually remember certain 
corners of our economy where depth is not valued   in addition to Executives we can also include for 
example certain types of salesmen and lobbyists   for whom constant connection is their most valued 
currency there are even those who manage to grind   out distracted success in fields where depth 
would help but at the same time don&amp;#39;t be too   hasty to label your job as necessarily non-deep 
just because your current habits make deep work   difficult doesn&amp;#39;t mean that this lack of depth 
is fundamental to doing your job well in the   next chapter for example I tell the story of a 
group of high-powered management Consultants who   were convinced that constant email connectivity 
was necessary for them to service their clients   when a Harvard Professor forced them to disconnect 
more regularly as part of a research study they   found to their surprise that this connectivity 
didn&amp;#39;t matter nearly as much as they had assumed   the clients didn&amp;#39;t really need to reach them at 
all times and their performance as consultants   improved once their attention became less 
fractured similarly several managers I know   tried to convince me that they&amp;#39;re most valuable 
when they&amp;#39;re able to respond quickly to their   team&amp;#39;s problems preventing project log jams they 
see their role as enabling others productivity   not necessarily protecting their own follow-up 
discussions however soon uncovered that this   goal didn&amp;#39;t really require attention fracturing 
connectivity indeed many software companies now   deploy the scrum project management methodology 
which replaces a lot of this ad hoc messaging   with regular highly structured and ruthlessly 
efficient status meetings often held standing   up to minimize the urge to bloviate this approach 
frees up more managerial time for thinking deeply   about the problems their teams are tackling often 
improving the overall value of what they produce   put another way deep work is not the only skill 
valuable in our economy and it&amp;#39;s possible to do   well without fostering this ability but the niches 
where this is advisable are increasingly rare   unless you have strong evidence that distraction 
is important for your specific profession you&amp;#39;re   best served for the reasons argued earlier in this 
chapter by giving serious consideration to depth chapter 2. deep work is rare   in 2012 Facebook unveiled the plans for a new 
headquarters designed by Frank Gary at the center   of this new building is what CEO Mark Zuckerberg 
called the largest open floor plan in the world   more than 3 000 employees will work on movable 
Furniture spread over a 10-acre expanse   Facebook of course is not the only Silicon Valley 
heavyweight to embrace the open Office concept   when Jack Dorsey whom we met at the end 
of the last chapter bought the old San   Francisco Chronicle building to House Square 
he configured the space so that his developers   work in common spaces on Long shared desks we 
encourage people to stay out in the open because   we believe in Serendipity and people walking by 
each other teaching new things Dorsey explained   another big business Trend in recent 
years is the rise of instant messaging   a Times article notes that this technology is no 
longer the province of Chatty teenagers it is now   helping companies benefit from new productivity 
gains and improvements in customer response time   a senior project manager at IBM boasts we 
send 2.5 million IMS within IBM each day   one of the more successful recent entrants into 
the business I am space is Hall a Silicon Valley   startup that helps employees move Beyond just 
chat and engage in real-time collaboration a   San francisco-based developer I know described to 
me what it was like to work in a company that uses   Hall the most efficient employees he explained set 
up their Text Editor to flash an alert on their   screen when a new question or comment is posted 
to the company&amp;#39;s Hall account they can then with   a sequence of practiced keystrokes jump over to 
Hall type in their thoughts and then jump back   to their coding with barely a pause my friends 
seemed impressed when describing their speed   a third trend is the push for Content producers 
of all types to maintain a social media presence   the New York Times a Bastion of Old World Media 
values now encourages its employees to tweet a   hint taken by the more than 800 writers editors 
and photographers for the paper who now maintain   a Twitter account does not outlier Behavior it&amp;#39;s 
Instead The New Normal when the novelist Jonathan   Franzen wrote a piece for the guardian calling 
Twitter a coercive development in the literary   world he was widely ridiculed as out of touch the 
online magazine slate called Francis complaints a   lonely war on the internet and fellow novelist 
Jennifer weiner wrote a response in the new   Republic in which she argued franzen&amp;#39;s a category 
of one a lonely voice issuing ex Cathedral edicts   that can only apply to himself the sarcastic 
hashtag Jonathan Franzen hates soon became a fad   I mentioned these three business Trends because 
they highlight a paradox in the last chapter   I argued that deep work is more valuable 
than ever before in our shifting economy   if this is true however you would expect 
to see this skill promoted not just by   ambitious individuals but also by organizations 
hoping to get the most out of their employees   as the examples provided emphasize this is not 
happening many other ideas are being prioritized   is more important than deep work in the 
business world including as we just encountered   serendipitous collaboration rapid communication 
and inactive presence on social media it&amp;#39;s bad   enough that so many Trends are prioritized ahead 
of deep work but to add insult to injury many of   these Trends actively decrease one&amp;#39;s ability to 
go deep open offices for example might create   more opportunities for collaboration but they do 
so at the cost of massive distraction to quote the   results of experiments conducted for a British TV 
special titled The Secret Life Of Office Buildings   if you were just getting into some work and a 
phone goes off in the background it ruins what you   were concentrating on said the neuroscientist 
who ran the experiments for the show   even though you were not aware at the time the 
brain responds to distractions similar issues   apply to the rise of real-time messaging email 
inboxes in theory can distract you only when   you choose to open them whereas instant messenger 
systems are meant to be always active magnifying   the impact of interruption Gloria Mark a professor 
of informatics at the University of California   Irvine is an expert on the science of attention 
fragmentation in a well-cited study Mark and her   co-authors observed knowledge workers in real 
offices and found that an interruption even if   short delays the total time required to complete 
a task by a significant fraction this was reported   by subjects as being very detrimental she&amp;#39;s 
summarized with typical academic understatement   forcing content producers onto social media also 
has negative effects on the ability to go deep   serious journalists for example need to focus on 
doing serious journalism diving into complicated   sources pulling out connective threads crafting 
persuasive prose so to ask them to interrupt this   deep thinking throughout the day to participate 
in the frothy back and forth of online tittering   seems irrelevant and somewhat demeaning at 
best and devastatingly distracting at worst   the respected New Yorker staff writer George 
Packer captured this fear well in an essay   about why he does not tweet Twitter is crack for 
media addicts it scares me not because I&amp;#39;m morally   Superior to it but because I don&amp;#39;t think I could 
handle it I&amp;#39;m afraid I&amp;#39;d end up letting my son go   hungry tellingly when he wrote that essay Packer 
was busy writing his book The unwinding which   came out soon after and promptly won the national 
book award despite or perhaps aided by his lack   of social media use to summarize big trends in 
business today actively decrease people&amp;#39;s ability   to perform deep work even though the benefits 
promised by these Trends EG increased Serendipity   faster responses to requests and more exposure are 
arguably dwarfed by the benefits that flow from a   commitment to deep work EG the ability to learn 
hard things fast and produce at an elite level   the goal of this chapter is to explain this 
paradox the rareness of deep work I&amp;#39;ll argue is   not due to some fundamental weakness of the habit 
when we look closer at why we Embrace distraction   in the workplace we&amp;#39;ll find the reasons are more 
arbitrary than we might expect based on flawed   thinking combined with the ambiguity and confusion 
that often Define knowledge work my objective is   to convince you that Although our current Embrace 
of distraction is a real phenomenon it&amp;#39;s built on   an unstable foundation and can be easily dismissed 
once you decide to cultivate a deep work ethic the metric black hole in the fall of 2012 
Tom Cochran the chief technology officer   of Atlantic media became alarmed at how 
much time he seemed to spend on email   so like any good techie he decided to quantify 
this unease observing his own behavior he   measured that in a single week he received 511 
email messages and sent 284. this averaged to   around 160 emails per day over a five-day work 
week calculating further Cochrane noted that   even if he managed to spend only 30 seconds per 
message on average this still added up to almost   an hour and a half per day dedicated to moving 
information around like a human Network router   this seemed like a lot of time spent on something 
that wasn&amp;#39;t a primary piece of his job description   as Cochrane recalls in a blog post he wrote 
about his experiment for the Harvard Business   review these simple statistics got him thinking 
about the rest of his company just how much time   were employees of Atlantic media spending moving 
around information instead of focusing on the   specialized tasks they were hired to perform 
determined to answer this question Cochrane   gathered company-wide statistics on emails sent 
per day and the average number of words per email   he then combined these numbers with the employee&amp;#39;s 
average typing speed reading speed and salary   the result he discovered that Atlantic media 
was spending well over a million dollars a   year to pay people to process emails with 
every message sent or received tapping the   company for around 95 cents of labor costs a 
free and frictionless method of communication   Cochrane summarized had soft costs equivalent to 
procuring a small company Learjet Tom cochrane&amp;#39;s   experiment yielded an interesting result about 
the literal cost of a seemingly harmless Behavior   but the real importance of this story is the 
experiment itself and in particular its complexity   it turns out to be really difficult to answer a 
simple question such as what&amp;#39;s the impact of our   current email habits on the bottom line Cochrane 
had to conduct a company-wide survey and gather   statistics from the it infrastructure he also had 
to pull together salary data and information on   typing and reading speed and run the whole thing 
through a statistical model to spit out his final   result and even then the outcome is fungible 
as it&amp;#39;s not able to separate out for example   how much value was produced by this frequent 
expensive email use to offset some of its cost   this example generalizes to most behaviors 
that potentially impede or improve deep work   even though we abstractly accept that distraction 
has costs and depth has value these impacts is Tom   Cochrane discovered are difficult to measure 
this isn&amp;#39;t a trait unique to habits related   to distraction and depth generally speaking as 
knowledge work makes more complex demands of the   labor force it becomes harder to measure the value 
of an individual&amp;#39;s efforts the French Economist   Thomas picketty made this point explicit in his 
study of the extreme growth of executive salaries   the enabling assumption driving his argument 
is that it is objectively difficult to measure   individual contributions to a firm&amp;#39;s output in 
the absence of such measures irrational outcomes   such as executive salaries way out of proportion 
to the executive&amp;#39;s marginal productivity can occur   even though some details of piketty&amp;#39;s theory are 
controversial the underlying assumption that it&amp;#39;s   increasingly difficult to measure individuals 
contributions is generally considered to quote   one of his critics undoubtedly true we should 
not therefore expect the bottom line impact of   depth destroying behaviors to be easily detected 
as Tom Cochrane discovered such metrics fall into   an opaque region resistant to easy measurement 
a region I call the metric black hole of course   just because it&amp;#39;s hard to measure metrics related 
to deep work doesn&amp;#39;t automatically lead to the   conclusion that businesses will dismiss it we 
have many examples of behaviors for which it&amp;#39;s   hard to measure their bottom line impact but that 
nevertheless flourish in our business culture   think for example of the three trends that opened 
this chapter or the outsize executive salaries   that puzzled Thomas picketty but without clear 
metrics to support it any business behavior is   vulnerable to unstable whim and shifting forces 
and in this volatile scrum deep work has fared   particularly poorly the reality of this metric 
black hole is the backdrop for the arguments   that follow in this chapter in these upcoming 
sections I&amp;#39;ll describe various mindsets and   biases that have pushed business away from Deep 
work and toward more distracting alternatives   none of these behaviors would survive long 
if it was clear that they were hurting   the bottom line but the metric black hole 
prevents this Clarity and allows the shift   toward distraction we increasingly 
encounter in the professional world the principle of least resistance when it 
comes to distracting behaviors embraced in the   workplace we must give a position of dominance 
to the now ubiquitous culture of connectivity   where one is expected to read and respond 
to emails and related communication quickly   in researching this topic Harvard Business 
School Professor Leslie perlow found that the   professional she surveyed spent around 20 to 
25 hours a week outside the office monitoring   email believing it important to answer any email 
internal or external within an hour of its arrival   you might argue as many do that this behavior 
is necessary in many fast-paced businesses   but here&amp;#39;s where things get interesting Perlo 
tested this claim in more detail she convinced   Executives at the Boston Consulting Group a 
high pressure management consulting firm with   an ingrained culture of connectivity to let her 
fiddle with the work habits of one of their teams   she wanted to test a simple question does it 
really help your work to be constantly connected   to do so she did something extreme she forced 
each member of the team to take one day out of   the work week completely off no connectivity 
to anyone inside or outside the company   at first the team resisted the experiment she 
recalled about one of the trials the partner   in charge who had been very supportive of 
the basic idea was suddenly nervous about   having to tell her client that each member 
of her team would be off one day a week   the Consultants were equally nervous and worried 
that they were putting their careers in Jeopardy   but the teen didn&amp;#39;t lose their clients and 
its members did not lose their jobs instead   the Consultants found more enjoyment in their 
work better communication among themselves more   learning as we might have predicted given the 
connection between depth and skill development   highlighted in the last chapter and perhaps most 
important a better product delivered to the client   this motivates an interesting question why do 
so many follow the lead of the Boston Consulting   Group and Foster a culture of connectivity 
even though it&amp;#39;s likely as Perlo found in   her study that it hurts employees well-being 
and productivity and probably doesn&amp;#39;t help   the bottom line I think the answer can be found 
in the following reality of workplace Behavior   the principle of least resistance in a business 
setting without clear feedback on the impact of   various behaviors to the bottom line we will tend 
toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment   to return to our question about why cultures 
of connectivity persist the answer according   to our principle is because it&amp;#39;s easier there 
are at least two big reasons why this is true   the first concerns responsiveness to your needs 
if you work in an environment where you can get   an answer to a question or a specific piece of 
information immediately when the need arises   this makes your life easier at least in the moment 
if you couldn&amp;#39;t count on this quick response time   you&amp;#39;d instead have to do more advanced planning 
for your work be more organized and be prepared   to put things aside for a while and turn your 
attention elsewhere while waiting for what you   requested all of this would make the day-to-day 
of your working life harder even if it produced   more satisfaction and a better outcome in the 
long term the rise of professional instant   messaging mentioned earlier in this chapter can 
be seen as this mindset pushed toward an extreme   if receiving an email reply within an hour 
makes your day easier then getting an answer   via instant message in under a minute would 
improve this game by an order of magnitude   the second reason that a culture of connectivity 
makes life easier is that it creates an   environment where it becomes acceptable to run 
your day out of your inbox responding to the   latest missive with alacrity While others pile 
up behind it all the while feeling satisfyingly   productive more on this soon if email were to move 
to the periphery of your workday you&amp;#39;d be required   to deploy a more thoughtful approach to figuring 
out what you should be working on and for how long   this type of planning is hard consider for example 
David Allen&amp;#39;s getting things done task management   methodology which is a well-respected system 
for intelligently managing competing workplace   obligations this system proposes a 15 element flow 
chart for making a decision on what to do next   it&amp;#39;s significantly easier to Simply 
chime in on the latest cc&amp;#39;d email thread   I&amp;#39;m picking on constant connectivity as a case 
study in this discussion but it&amp;#39;s just one of   many examples of business behaviors that are 
antithetical to depth and likely reducing the   bottom line value produced by the company that 
nonetheless thrives because in the absence of   metrics most people fall back on what&amp;#39;s easiest 
to name another example consider the common   practice of setting up regularly occurring 
meetings for projects these meetings tend to   pile up and Fracture schedules to the point where 
sustained Focus during the day becomes impossible   why do they persist they&amp;#39;re easier for many 
these standing meetings become a simple but   blunt form of personal organization instead 
of trying to manage their time and obligations   themselves they let the impending meeting 
each week force them to take some action on   a given project and more generally provide 
a highly visible simulacrum of progress   also consider the frustratingly common practice 
of forwarding an email to one or more colleagues   labeled with a short open-ended interrogative 
such as thoughts these emails take the sender   only a handful of seconds to write but 
can command many minutes if not hours   in some cases of time and attention from their 
recipients to work toward a coherent response   a little more care in crafting the message by the 
sender could reduce the overall time spent by all   Parties by a significant fraction so why are these 
easily avoidable and time-sucking emails so common   from the sender&amp;#39;s perspective they&amp;#39;re easier 
it&amp;#39;s a way to clear something out of their   inbox at least temporarily with a minimum 
amount of energy invested the principle of   least resistance protected from scrutiny by 
the metric black hole supports work cultures   that save us from the short-term discomfort of 
concentration and planning at the expense of   long-term satisfaction and the production of real 
value by doing so this principle drives us toward   shallow work in an economy that increasingly 
rewards depth it&amp;#39;s not however the only Trend   that leverages the metric black hole to reduce 
depth we must also consider the always present   and always vexing demand toward productivity 
the topic will turn our attention to next busyness as a proxy for productivity there 
are a lot of things difficult about being   a professor at a research-oriented university but 
one benefit that this profession enjoys is clarity   how well or how poorly you&amp;#39;re doing as an academic 
researcher can be boiled down to a simple question   are you publishing important papers the answer to 
this question can even be Quantified as a single   number such as the H index of a formula named 
for its inventor George Hirsch that processes   your publication and citation counts into a single 
value that approximates your impact on your field   in computer science for example an H index score 
above 40 is difficult to achieve and once reached   is considered the mark of a strong long-term 
career on the other hand if your H index is   in single digits when your case goes up for 
10-year review you&amp;#39;re probably in trouble   Google Scholar a tool popular among academics 
for finding research papers even calculates   your H index automatically so you can be reminded 
multiple times per week precisely where you stand   in case you&amp;#39;re wondering as of the morning 
when I&amp;#39;m writing this chapter I&amp;#39;m a 21.   this Clarity simplifies decisions about what 
work habits a professor adopts or abandons   here for example is the late Nobel 
prize-winning physicist Richard   Feynman explaining in an interview one of 
his less Orthodox productivity strategies   to do real good physics work you 
need absolute solid lengths of time   it needs a lot of concentration if you have a job 
administrating anything you don&amp;#39;t have the time   so I have invented another myth for myself that 
I&amp;#39;m irresponsible I&amp;#39;m actively irresponsible I   tell everyone I don&amp;#39;t do anything if anyone asks 
me to be on a committee for admissions no I tell   them I&amp;#39;m irresponsible was adamant in avoiding 
administrative duties because he knew they would   only decrease his ability to do the one thing 
that mattered most in his professional life   to do real good physics work Feynman we can 
assume was probably bad at responding to   emails and would likely switch universities if 
you would try to move him into an open office   or demand that he tweet clarity about what 
matters provides clarity about what does not   I mentioned the example of professors because 
they&amp;#39;re somewhat exceptional among knowledge   workers most of whom don&amp;#39;t share this transparency 
regarding how well they&amp;#39;re doing their job here&amp;#39;s   the social critic Matthew Crawford&amp;#39;s description 
of this uncertainty managers themselves inhabit a   bewildering psychic landscape and are made anxious 
by the vague imperatives that they must answer to   though Crawford was speaking specifically to the 
plight of the knowledge work middle manager the   bewildering psychic landscape he references 
applies to many positions in this sector   as Crawford describes in his 2009 Ode to the 
trades shop class as soulcraft he quit his   job as a Washington DC Think Tank director to 
open a motorcycle repair shop exactly to escape   this bewilderment the feeling of taking 
a broken machine struggling with it then   eventually enjoying a tangible indication 
that he had succeeded the bike driving out   of the shop under its own power provides a 
concrete sense of accomplishment he struggled   to replicate when his day revolved vaguely 
around reports and communication strategies   a similar reality creates problems for 
many knowledge workers they want to prove   that they&amp;#39;re productive members of the team and 
are earning their keep but they&amp;#39;re not entirely   clear what this goal constitutes they have no 
Rising H index or rack of repaired motorcycles   to point to as evidence of their worth to 
overcome this Gap many seem to be turning   back to the last time when productivity was 
more universally observable the Industrial Age   to understand this claim recall that with the 
rise of assembly lines came the rise of the   efficiency movement identified with its founder 
Frederick Taylor who would famously stand with   a stopwatch monitoring the efficiency of worker 
movements looking for ways to increase the speed   at which they accomplish their tasks in Taylor&amp;#39;s 
era productivity was unambiguous widgets created   per unit of time it seems that in today&amp;#39;s 
business landscape many knowledge workers   bereft of other ideas are turning toward 
this old definition of productivity and   trying to solidify their value in the otherwise 
bewildering landscape of their professional lives   David Allen for example even uses the specific 
phrase cranking widgets to describe a productive   workflow knowledge workers I&amp;#39;m arguing are 
tending toward increasingly visible busyness   because they lack a better way to demonstrate 
their value let&amp;#39;s give this tendency a name   busyness as proxy for productivity in the 
absence of clear indicators of what it   means to be productive and valuable in their 
jobs many knowledge workers turn back toward   an industrial indicator of productivity 
doing lots of stuff in a visible manner   this mindset provides another explanation for 
the popularity of many depth destroying behaviors   if you send and answer emails at all hours if 
you schedule and attend meetings constantly if   you weigh in on instant message systems like hall 
within seconds when someone poses a new question   or if you roam your open Office bouncing ideas off 
all whom you encounter all of these behaviors make   you seem busy in a public manner if you&amp;#39;re using 
busyness as a proxy for productivity then these   behaviors can seem crucial for convincing yourself 
and others that you&amp;#39;re doing your job well   this mindset is not necessarily irrational for 
some their jobs really do depend on such Behavior   in 2013 for example Yahoo&amp;#39;s new CEO Marissa 
Mayer banned employees from working at home   she made this decision after checking the server 
logs for the virtual private Network that Yahoo   employees use to remotely log into company servers 
mayor was upset because the employees working from   home didn&amp;#39;t sign in enough throughout the day 
she was in some sense punishing her employees   for not spending more time checking email one 
of the primary reasons to log into the servers   if you&amp;#39;re not visibly busy she signaled I&amp;#39;ll 
assume you&amp;#39;re not productive viewed objectively   however this concept is anachronistic knowledge 
work is not an assembly line and extracting value   from information is an activity that&amp;#39;s often 
at odds with busyness not supported by it   remember for example Adam Grant the academic 
from our last chapter who became the youngest   full professor at Wharton by repeatedly shutting 
himself off from the outside world to concentrate   on writing such behavior is the opposite of being 
publicly busy if Grant worked for Yahoo Marissa   Mayer might have fired him but this deep strategy 
turned out to produce a massive amount of value   we could of course eliminate this anachronistic 
commitment to busyness if we could easily   demonstrate its negative impact on the bottom 
line but the metric black hole enters the scene at   this point and prevents such clarity this potent 
mixture of job ambiguity and lack of metrics to   measure the effectiveness of different strategies 
allows behavior that can seem ridiculous when   viewed objectively to thrive in the increasingly 
bewildering psychic landscape of our daily work   as we&amp;#39;ll see next however even those who 
have a clear understanding of what it   means to succeed in their knowledge work 
job can still be lured away from depth   all it takes is an ideology seductive enough 
to convince you to discard common sense The Cult of the internet consider Alyssa Rubin 
she&amp;#39;s the New York Times bureau chief in Paris   before that she was the bureau chief in Kabul 
Afghanistan where she reported from the front   lines on the post-war reconstruction around 
the time I was writing this chapter she was   publishing a series of hard-hitting articles that 
looked at the French government&amp;#39;s complicity and   the Rwandan genocide Reuben in other words is 
a serious journalist who is good at her craft   she also at what I can only assume is the 
persistent urging of her employer tweets Reuben&amp;#39;s   Twitter profile reveals a steady and somewhat 
desultory string of missives one every two to four   days as if Reuben receives a regular notice from 
the time social media desk a real thing reminding   her to appease her followers with few exceptions 
the tweets simply mention an article she recently   read and liked Reuben is a reporter not a media 
personality her value to her paper is her ability   to cultivate important sources pull together 
facts and write articles that make us splash   it&amp;#39;s the Alyssa Rubens of the world who provide 
the times with its reputation and it&amp;#39;s this   reputation that provides the foundation for 
the paper&amp;#39;s commercial success in an age of   ubiquitous and addictive click bait so why is 
Alyssa Rubin urged to regularly interrupt this   necessarily deep work to provide for free shallow 
content to a service run by an unrelated Media   company based out of Silicon Valley and perhaps 
even more important why does this Behavior seem   so normal to most people if we can answer these 
questions we&amp;#39;ll better understand the final Trend   I want to discuss relevant to the question of 
why deep work has become so paradoxically rare   a foundation for our answer can be found in 
a warning provided by the late communication   theorist and New York University Professor 
Neil Postman writing in the early 1990s as   the personal computer revolution first accelerated 
Postman argue that our society was sliding into a   troubling relationship with technology we were 
he noted no longer discussing the trade-offs   surrounding new technologies balancing the new 
efficiencies against the new problems introduced   if it&amp;#39;s high tech we began to instead 
assume then it&amp;#39;s good case closed   he called such a culture a technopoly and 
he didn&amp;#39;t mince words in warning against it   technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in 
precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave   New World he argued in his 1993 book on the topic 
it does not make them illegal it does not make   them immoral it does not even make them unpopular 
it makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant   Postman died in 2003 but if he were alive 
today he would likely Express amazement   about how quickly his fears from the 1990s came 
to fruition a slide driven by the unforeseen   and sudden rise of the internet fortunately 
postman has an intellectual heir to continue   this argument in the internet age the hyper 
citational social critic evgenie Moore is off   in his 2013 book to save everything click here 
morsov attempts to pull back the curtains on   our technopolic obsession with the internet a 
term he purposefully places in scare quotes to   emphasize its role as an ideology saying 
it&amp;#39;s this propensity to view the internet   as a source of wisdom and policy advice that 
transforms it from a fairly uninteresting set of   cables and network routers into a seductive and 
exciting ideology perhaps today&amp;#39;s Uber ideology   in murazav&amp;#39;s critique we&amp;#39;ve made the internet 
synonymous with the Revolutionary future of   business and government to make your company more 
like the internet is to be with the times and to   ignore these Trends is to be the proverbial 
buggy wit maker in an automotive age we no   longer see internet tools as products released by 
for-profit companies funded by investors hoping   to make a return and run by 20-somethings who 
are often making things up as they go along   we&amp;#39;re instead quick to idolize these digital 
doodads as a signifier of progress and a   harbinger of a dare I say Brave New World this 
internet centrism to steal another morizoff term   is what technopoly looks like today it&amp;#39;s 
important that we recognize this reality   because it explains the question that opened 
this section the New York Times maintains a   social media desk and pressures its writers like 
Alyssa Rubin toward distracting Behavior because   in an internet-centric technopoly such behavior 
is not up for discussion the alternative to not   embrace all things internet is as Postman 
would say invisible and therefore irrelevant   this invisibility explains the Uproar mentioned 
earlier that arose when Jonathan Franzen dared   suggests that novelists shouldn&amp;#39;t tweet it 
riled people not because they&amp;#39;re well versed   in book marketing and disagreed with franzen&amp;#39;s 
conclusion but because it surprised them that   anyone serious would suggest the irrelevance of 
social media in an internet-centric technopoly   such a statement is the equivalent of 
a flag burning desecration not debate   perhaps the near Universal reach of this mindset 
is best captured in an experience I had recently   on my commute to the Georgetown campus where I 
work waiting for the light to change so I could   cross Connecticut Avenue I idled behind a truck 
from a refrigerated supply chain logistics company   refrigerated shipping is a complex competitive 
business that requires equal skill managing trade   unions and Route scheduling it&amp;#39;s the ultimate old 
school industry and in many ways is the opposite   of the lean consumer-facing Tech startups that 
currently receive so much attention what struck me   is I waited in traffic behind this truck however 
was not the complexity or scale of this company   but instead a graphic that had been commissioned 
and then it fixed probably at significant expense   on the back of this entire fleet of trucks 
a graphic that read like us on Facebook   deep work is at a severe disadvantage in 
a technopoly because it builds on values   like quality craftsmanship and Mastery that are 
decidedly old-fashioned and non-technological   even worse to support deep work often requires 
the rejection of much of what is new and high tech   deep work is exiled in favor of more 
distracting high-tech behaviors like   the professional use of social media not because 
the former is empirically inferior to the latter   indeed if we had hard metrics relating the impact 
of these behaviors on the bottom line our current   technopoly would likely crumble but the 
metric black hole prevents such Clarity   and allows us instead to elevate all things 
internet into morazov&amp;#39;s feared Uber ideology   in such a culture we should not be surprised 
that deep work struggles to compete against   the shiny thromb of tweets likes tagged 
photos walls posts and all the other   behaviors that were now taught are necessary 
for no other reason than that they exist bad for business good for you deep work should 
be a priority in today&amp;#39;s business climate   but it&amp;#39;s not I&amp;#39;ve just summarized various 
explanations for this paradox among them   are the realities that deep work is hard and 
shallow work is easier that in the absence of   clear goals for your job the visible busyness that 
surrounds shallow work becomes self-preserving   and that our culture has developed a belief that 
if a behavior relates to the internet then it&amp;#39;s   good regardless of its impact on our ability to 
produce valuable things all of these Trends are   enabled by the difficulty of directly measuring 
the value of depth or the cost of ignoring it   if you believe in the value of depth this reality 
spells bad news for businesses in general as it&amp;#39;s   leading them to miss out on potentially massive 
increases in their value production but for you   as an individual good news lurks the myopia 
of your peers and employers uncovers a great   personal advantage assuming the trends outlined 
here continue depth will become increasingly rare   and therefore increasingly valuable having just 
established that there&amp;#39;s nothing fundamentally   flawed about deep work and nothing fundamentally 
necessary about the distracting behaviors that   displace it you can therefore continue with 
confidence with the ultimate goal of this book   to systematically develop your personal ability 
to go deep and by doing so reap great rewards chapter 3. deep work is Meaningful Rick fur is a 
blacksmith he specializes in ancient and medieval   metal working practices which he painstakingly 
recreates in his shop Door County Forge works   I do all my work by hand and use tools that 
multiply my Force without limiting my creativity   or interaction with the material he explains in 
his artist statement what may take me a hundred   Blows By Hand can be accomplished in one by a 
large swaging machine this is the antithesis   of my goal and to that end all my work shows 
evidence of the two hands that made it a 2012   PBS documentary provides a glimpse into Furr&amp;#39;s 
world we learned that he works in a converted   Barn in Wisconsin farm country not far inland 
from the scenic Sturgeon Bay of Lake Michigan   fur often leaves the barn doors open to vent 
the heat of the forges one suspects his efforts   framed by Farm Fields stretching to the horizon 
the setting is idyllic but the work can seem at   first encounter brutish in the documentary 
fur is trying to recreate a viking era sword   he begins by using a 1500 year old technique 
to smelt Crucible steel an unusually pure for   the period form of the metal the result is an 
Ingot not much bigger than three or four stacked   smartphones this dense Ingot must then be shaped 
and Polished into a long and elegant sword blade   this part the initial breakdown is terrible fur 
says to the camera as he methodically heats the   Ingot hits it with a hammer turns it hits it 
then puts it back in the Flames to start over   the narrator reveals that it will take eight 
hours of this hammering to complete the shaping   as you watch for a work however the sense of 
the labor shifts it becomes clear that he&amp;#39;s not   drearily whacking at the metal like a miner with 
a pickaxe every hit though forceful is carefully   controlled he peers intently at the metal through 
thin framed intellectual glasses which seem out of   place perched above his heavy beard and broad 
shoulders turning it just so for each impact   you have to be very gentle with it or you will 
crack it he explains after a few more Hammer   strikes he adds you have to nudge it slowly 
it breaks down then you start to enjoy it   at one point about halfway through the smithing 
after fur has finished hammering out the desired   shape he begins rotating the metal carefully in 
a narrow trough of burning charcoal as he stares   at the blade something clicks it&amp;#39;s ready he lifts 
the sword red with heat holding it away from his   body as he strides swiftly toward a pipe filled 
with oil and plunges in the blade to cool it   after a moment of relief that the blade did not 
crack into pieces a common Occurrence at this   step fur pulls it from the oil the residual 
heat of the metal lights the fuel engulfing   the sword&amp;#39;s full length in yellow flames 
fur holds the burning sword up above his   head with a single powerful arm and stares 
at it a moment before blowing out the fire   during this brief pause the flame illuminates 
his face and his admiration is palpable   to do it right it is the most complicated 
thing I know how to make fur explains   and it&amp;#39;s that challenge that drives me I 
don&amp;#39;t need a sword but I have to make them Rick Furr is a master Craftsman whose 
work requires him to spend most of his   day in a state of depth even a small slip in 
concentration can ruin dozens of hours of effort   he&amp;#39;s also someone who clearly finds great meaning 
in his profession this connection between deep   work and a good life is familiar and widely 
accepted when considering the world of Craftsmen   the satisfactions of manifesting oneself 
concretely in the world through manual competence   have been known to make a man quiet and easy 
explains Matthew Crawford and we believe him but   when we shift our attention to knowledge work this 
connection is muddied part of the issue is clarity   Craftsmen like fur tackle professional challenges 
that are simple to Define but difficult to execute   a useful imbalance when seeking purpose knowledge 
work exchanges this Clarity for ambiguity it can   be hard to Define exactly what a given knowledge 
worker does and how it differs from another   on our worst days it can seem that all knowledge 
work boils down to the same exhausting Royal of   emails in PowerPoint with only the charts used in 
the slides differentiating one career from another   fur himself identifies this blandness when he 
writes the world of information super highways   and cyberspace has left me rather cold and 
disenchanted another issue muddying the   connection between depth and meaning and 
knowledge work is the cacophony of voices   attempting to convince knowledge workers to 
spend more time engaged in Shallow activities   as elaborated in the last chapter we live in an 
era where anything internet related is understood   by default to be Innovative and necessary depth 
destroying behaviors such as immediate email   responses and an active social media presence 
are lauded while avoidance of these Trends   generate suspicion no one would fault Rick fur 
for not using Facebook but if a knowledge worker   makes this same decision then he&amp;#39;s labeled an 
eccentric as I&amp;#39;ve learned from personal experience   just because this connection between depth and 
meaning is less clear in knowledge work however   doesn&amp;#39;t mean that it&amp;#39;s non-existent the goal of 
this chapter is to convince you that deep work can   generate as much satisfaction in an information 
economy as it so clearly does in a craft economy   in the sections ahead I&amp;#39;ll make 
three arguments to support this claim   these arguments roughly follow a trajectory 
from the conceptually narrow to Broad starting   with a neurological perspective moving to the 
psychological and ending with the philosophical   I&amp;#39;ll show that regardless of the angle from 
which you attack the issue of depth and   knowledge work it&amp;#39;s clear that by embracing 
depth over shallowness you can tap the same   veins of meaning that drive Craftsmen like 
Rick fur the thesis of this final chapter in   part one therefore is that a deep life is not just 
economically lucrative but also a life well lived a neurological argument for depth the science 
writer Winfred Gallagher stumbled onto a   connection between attention and happiness 
after an unexpected and terrifying event a   cancer diagnosis not just cancer she clarifies 
but a particularly nasty fairly Advanced kind   as Gallagher recalls in her 2009 book wrapped 
as she walked away from the hospital after the   diagnosis she formed a sudden and strong intuition 
this disease wanted to monopolize my attention but   as much as possible I would focus on my life 
instead the cancer treatment that followed was   exhausting and terrible but Gallagher couldn&amp;#39;t 
help noticing in that corner of her brain honed   by a career in non-fiction writing that her 
commitment to focus on what was good in her   life movies walks and a 630 Martini worked 
surprisingly well her life during this period   should have been mired in fear and pity but 
it was instead she noted often quite Pleasant   her curiosity peaked Gallagher set out to better 
understand the role that attention that is what   we choose to focus on and what we choose to 
ignore plays in defining the quality of our life   after five years of science reporting she 
came away convinced that she was witness   to a grand unified theory of the Mind like 
fingers pointing to the Moon other diverse   disciplines from anthropology to education 
behavioral economics to family counseling   similarly suggest that the skillful management of 
attention is the Cena quanon of the good life and   the key to improving virtually every aspect of 
your experience this concept upends the way most   people think about their subjective experience 
of life we tend to place a lot of emphasis on   our circumstances assuming that what happens 
to us or fails to happen determines how we feel   from this perspective the small scale details 
of how you spend your day aren&amp;#39;t that important   because what matters are the large-scale outcomes 
such as whether or not you get a promotion or move   to that nicer apartment according to Gallagher 
Decades of research contradict this understanding   our brains instead construct our world 
view based on what we pay attention to   if you focus on a cancer diagnosis you and 
your life become unhappy and dark but if   you focus instead on an evening Martini you in 
your life become more pleasant even though the   circumstances in both scenarios are the same as 
Gallagher summarizes who you are what you think   feel and do what you love is the sum of what you 
focus on in wrapped Gallagher surveys the research   supporting this understanding of the Mind she 
cites for example the University of North Carolina   psychologist Barbara Frederickson a researcher who 
specializes in the cognitive appraisal of emotions   after a bad or disrupting occurrence in your 
life frederickson&amp;#39;s research shows what you   choose to focus on exerts significant 
leverage on your attitude going forward   these simple choices can provide 
a reset button to your emotions   she provides the example of a couple fighting 
over inequitable splitting of household chores   rather than continuing to focus on your partner&amp;#39;s 
selfishness and sloth she suggests you might focus   on the fact that at least a festering conflict 
has been aired which is the first step toward a   solution to the problem and to your improved 
mood this seems like a simple exhortation to   look on the bright side but Fredrickson found 
that skillful use of these emotional leverage   points can generate a significantly more 
positive outcome after negative events   scientists can watch this effect in action 
all the way down to the neurological level   Stanford psychologist Laura karstensen to name 
one such example used in fmri scanner to study   the brain behavior of subjects presented with both 
positive and negative imagery she found that for   young people their amygdala a center of emotion 
fired with activity at both types of imagery   when she instead scanned the elderly the 
amygdala fired only for the positive images   karstensen hypothesizes that the elderly subjects 
had trained the prefrontal cortex to inhibit the   amygdala in the presence of negative stimuli 
these elderly subjects were not happier because   their life circumstances were better than those 
of the young subjects they were instead happier   because they had rewired their brains to ignore 
the negative and Savor the positive by skillfully   managing their attention they improved their 
world without changing anything concrete about it we can now step back and use Gallagher&amp;#39;s Grand 
Theory to better understand the role of deep   work in cultivating a good life this Theory tells 
us that your world is the outcome of what you pay   attention to so consider for a moment the type 
of mental World constructed when you dedicate   significant time to deep endeavors there&amp;#39;s a 
gravity and sense of importance inherent in   deep work whether you&amp;#39;re Rick fur smitting a sword 
or a computer programmer optimizing an algorithm   Gallagher&amp;#39;s Theory therefore predicts that if 
you spend enough time in this state your mind   will understand your world as rich in meaning 
and importance there is however a hidden but   equally important benefit to cultivating wrapped 
attention in your workday such concentration   hijacks your attention apparatus preventing 
you from noticing the many smaller and Less   Pleasant things that unavoidably and persistently 
populate Our Lives the psychologist nahali chick   sent mahali whom we&amp;#39;ll learn more about in 
the next section explicitly identifies this   Advantage when he emphasizes the advantage 
of cultivating concentration so intense that   there is no attention left over to think about 
anything irrelevant or to worry about problems   danger is especially pronounced in knowledge 
work which due to its dependence on ubiquitous   connectivity generates a devastatingly appealing 
Buffet of distraction most of which will if given   enough attention leech meaning and importance 
from the world constructed by your mind   to help make this claim more concrete I&amp;#39;ll use 
myself as a test case consider for example the   last five emails I sent before I began 
writing the first draft of this chapter   following are the subject lines of these 
messages along with summaries of their contents   re-urgent Cal Newport brand registration 
confirmation this message was in response to   a standard scam in which a company tries to trick 
website owners into registering their domain in   China I was annoyed that they kept spamming me so 
I lost my cool and responded feudally of course by   telling them their scam would be more convincing 
if they spelled website correctly in their emails   re Sr this message was a conversation with a 
family member about an article he saw in the   Wall Street Journal re important advice this 
email was part of a conversation about optimal   retirement investment strategies re-forward study 
hacks this email was part of a conversation in   which I was attempting to find a time to meet 
with someone I know who was visiting my city a   task Complicated by his fractured schedule during 
his visit re just curious this message was part   of a conversation in which a colleague and I were 
reacting to some thorny office politics issues of   the type that are frequent and cliched in academic 
departments these emails provide a nice case study   of the type of shallow concerns that Vie for your 
attention in a knowledge work setting some of   the issues presented in these sample messages 
are benign such as discussing an interesting   article some are vaguely stressful such as the 
conversation on retirement saving strategies a   type of conversation which almost always concludes 
with you not doing the right things some are   frustrating such as trying to arrange a meeting 
around busy schedules and some are explicitly   negative such as angry responses to scammers 
or worried discussions about office politics   many knowledge workers spend most of their working 
day interacting with these types of shallow   concerns even when they&amp;#39;re required to complete 
something more involved the habit of frequently   checking inboxes ensures that these issues remain 
at the Forefront of their attention Gallagher   teaches us that this is a foolhardy way to go 
about your day as it ensures that your mind will   construct an understanding of your working life 
that&amp;#39;s dominated by stress irritation frustration   and triviality the world represented by your inbox 
in other words isn&amp;#39;t a pleasant world to inhabit   even if your colleagues are all genial and 
your interactions are always upbeat and   positive by allowing your attention to drift 
over the seductive landscape of the shallow   you run the risk of falling into another 
neurological trap identified by Gallagher   five years of reporting on attention have 
confirmed some home truths Gallagher reports   among them is the notion that the idle mind 
is the devil&amp;#39;s workshop when you lose focus   your mind tends to fix on what could be wrong 
with your life instead of what&amp;#39;s right a work   day driven by the shallow from a neurological 
perspective is likely to be a draining and   upsetting day even if most of the shallow things 
that capture your attention seem harmless or fun   the implication of these findings is clear in 
work and especially knowledge work to increase   the time you spend in a state of depth is to 
Leverage The Complex Machinery of the human   brain in a way that for several different 
neurological reasons maximizes the meaning   and satisfaction you&amp;#39;ll associate with your 
working life after running my tough experiment   with cancer I have a plan for living the rest 
of my life Gallagher concludes in her book   I&amp;#39;ll choose my targets with care then give 
them my wrapped attention in short I&amp;#39;ll   live the focused life because it&amp;#39;s the best 
kind there is we&amp;#39;d be wise to follow her lead a psychological argument for depth   our second argument for why depth generates 
meaning comes from the work of one of the   world&amp;#39;s best known and most misspelled 
psychologists mahali cheekset mahali   in the early 1980s cheek sent mahali working with 
Reed Larson a young colleague at the University of   Chicago invented a new technique for understanding 
the psychological impact of everyday behaviors   at the time it was difficult to accurately measure 
the psychological impact of different activities   if you brought someone into a laboratory and asked 
her to remember how she felt at a specific point   many hours ago she was unlikely to recall if you 
instead gave her a diary and asked her to record   how she felt throughout the day she wouldn&amp;#39;t 
be likely to keep up the entries with diligence   it&amp;#39;s simply too much work cheek sent mahali 
and Larson&amp;#39;s breakthrough was to leverage new   technology for the time to bring the question to 
the subject right when it mattered in more detail   they outfitted experimental subjects with pagers 
these pagers would beep at randomly selected   intervals in modern incarnations of this method 
smartphone apps play the same role when the Beeper   went off the subjects would record what they 
were doing at the exact moment and how they felt   in some cases they would be provided with a 
journal in which to record this information while   in others they would be given a phone number to 
call to answer questions posed by a field worker   because the beeps were only occasional but hard 
to ignore the subjects were likely to follow   through with the experimental procedure and 
because the subjects were recording responses   about an activity at the very moment they were 
engaged in it the responses were more accurate   cheek sent mahali and Larson called the 
approach the experience sampling method esm   and it provided unprecedented insight into how we 
actually feel about the Beats of our daily lives   among many breakthroughs cheek sent mahali&amp;#39;s 
work with esm helped validate a theory he had   been developing over the preceding decade the best 
moments usually occur when a person&amp;#39;s body or mind   is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort 
to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile   Sheik sent mahali calls this mental state flow a 
term he popularized with a 1990 book of the same   title at the time this finding pushed back against 
conventional wisdom most people assumed and still   do that relaxation makes them happy we want to 
work less and spend more time in the hammock   but the results from cheek sent mahali&amp;#39;s esm 
studies revealed that most people have this wrong   ironically he writes jobs are actually easier to 
enjoy than free time because like flow activities   they have built-in goals feedback rules and 
challenges all of which encourage one to   become involved in one&amp;#39;s work to concentrate and 
lose oneself in it free time on the other hand   is unstructured and requires much greater effort 
to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed   when measured empirically people were happier at 
work and less happy relaxing than they suspected   and is the esm studies confirmed the more such 
flow experiences that occur in a given week the   higher the subject&amp;#39;s life satisfaction human 
beings it seems are at their best when immersed   deeply in something challenging there is of 
course overlap between the theory of flow and   the ideas of Winifred Gallagher highlighted in the 
last section both Point toward the importance of   depth over shallowness but they focus on two 
different explanations for this importance   Gallagher&amp;#39;s writing emphasizes that 
the content of what we focus on matters   if we give wrapped attention to important 
things and therefore also ignore shallow   negative things we&amp;#39;ll experience our working 
life as more important and positive cheek sent   mahali&amp;#39;s theory of Flow by contrast is mostly 
agnostic to the content of our attention though   he would likely agree with the research cited by 
Gallagher his theory notes that the feeling of   going deep is in itself very rewarding our minds 
like this challenge regardless of the subject the connection between deep work and flow should 
be clear deep work is an activity well suited   to generate a flow State the phrases used by 
cheek sent mahali to describe what generates   flow include Notions of stretching your mind to 
its limits concentrating and losing yourself in   an activity all of which also describe deep work 
and as we just learned flow generates happiness   combining these two ideas we get a powerful 
argument from psychology in favor of depth   Decades of research stemming from cheek scent 
mahali&amp;#39;s original esm experiments validate that   the act of going deep orders the Consciousness in 
a way that makes life worthwhile cheek sent mahali   even goes so far as to argue that modern companies 
should embrace this reality suggesting that jobs   should be redesigned so that they resemble 
as closely as possible flow activities noting   however that such a redesign would be difficult 
and disruptive see for example my arguments   from the previous chapter cheek sent mahali then 
explains that it&amp;#39;s even more important that the   individual learn how to seek out opportunities 
for flow this ultimately is the lesson to come   away with from our brief foray into the world 
of experimental psychology to build your working   life around the experience of flow produced by 
Deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction a philosophical argument for depth our final 
argument for the connection between depth and   meaning requires us to step back from the more 
concrete worlds of neuroscience and psychology and   instead adopt a philosophical perspective I&amp;#39;ll 
turn for help in this discussion to a pair of   Scholars who know this topic well Herbert Dreyfus 
who taught philosophy at Berkeley for more than   four decades and Sean doran&amp;#39;s Kelly who at the 
time of this writing is the chair of Harvard&amp;#39;s   philosophy Department in 2011 Dreyfus and Kelly 
published a book all things shining which explores   how Notions of sacredness and meaning have 
evolved throughout the history of human culture   they set out to reconstruct this history because 
they&amp;#39;re worried about its endpoint in our current   ERA the world used to be in its various forms a 
world of sacred shining things Dreyfus and Kelly   explained early in the book The Shining things now 
seem far away what happened between then and now   the short answer the authors argue is 
Descartes from Descartes skepticism came   the radical belief that the individuals seeking 
certainty trumped a God or King bestowing truth   the resulting Enlightenment of course led to 
the concept of Human Rights and freed many from   oppression but as Dreyfus and Kelly emphasize for 
all its good in the political arena in the domain   of the metaphysical this thinking stripped the 
world of the order and sacredness essential to   creating meaning in a post-enlightenment world 
we have tasked ourselves to identify what&amp;#39;s   meaningful and what&amp;#39;s not an exercise that can 
seem arbitrary and induce a creeping nihilism   the enlightenment&amp;#39;s metaphysical Embrace of 
the autonomous individual leads not just to a   boring life Dreyfus and Kelly worry it leads 
almost inevitably to a nearly unlivable one   this problem might at first seem far 
removed from our quest to understand   the satisfaction of depth but when we 
proceed to Dreyfus and Kelly&amp;#39;s solution   we will discover Rich new insights into the 
sources of meaning in professional Pursuits   this connection should seem less surprising 
when it&amp;#39;s revealed that Dreyfus and Kelly&amp;#39;s   response to Modern nihilism Builds on the very 
subject that opened this chapter the Craftsman   craftsmanship Dreyfus and Kelly argue in their 
book&amp;#39;s conclusion provides a key to reopening   a sense of sacredness in a responsible manner 
to illustrate this claim they use an organizing   example an account of a master wheel right the 
now lost profession of shaping wooden wagon wheels   because each piece of wood is distinct it 
has its own personality they write after a   passage describing the details of the wheel 
rights craft the woodworker has an intimate   relationship with the wood he works its subtle 
virtues call out to be cultivated and cared for   in this appreciation for the subtle virtues of his 
medium they note the Craftsman has stumbled onto   something crucial in a post-enlightenment world 
a source of meaning cited outside the individual   the wheel right doesn&amp;#39;t decide arbitrarily 
which Virtues Of The Wood he works are valuable   and which are not this value is inherent in 
the wood and the task it&amp;#39;s meant to perform   as Dreyfus and Kelly explain such 
sacredness is common to craftsmanship   the task of a Craftsman they conclude is not 
to generate meaning but rather to cultivate in   himself the skill of Discerning the meanings that 
are already there this frees the Craftsmen of the   nihilism of autonomous individualism providing 
an ordered world of meaning at the same time   this meaning seems safer than the sources cited 
in previous eras the wheel right the authors   imply cannot easily use the inherent quality of 
a piece of pine to justify a despotic monarchy returning to the question of professional 
satisfaction Dreyfus and Kelly&amp;#39;s interpretation   of craftsmanship as a path to meaning provides 
a nuanced understanding of why the work of those   like Rick fur resonates with so many of 
us the look of satisfaction on Furr&amp;#39;s face   as he works to extract Artistry from crude 
Metals these philosophers would argue is a   look expressing appreciation for something Elusive 
and valuable in modernity a glimpse of the sacred   once understood we can connect the sacredness 
inherent in traditional craftsmanship to the   world of knowledge work to do so there 
are two key observations we must first   make the first might be obvious but requires 
emphasis there&amp;#39;s nothing intrinsic about the   manual trades when it comes to generating this 
particular source of meaning any Pursuit be it   physical or cognitive that supports high levels 
of skill can also generate a sense of sacredness   to elaborate this point let&amp;#39;s jump from the 
old-fashioned examples of carving wood or   smithing metal to the modern example of computer 
programming consider this quote from the coding   Prodigy Santiago Gonzalez describing his work to 
an interviewer beautiful code is short and concise   so if you were to give that code to another 
programmer they would say oh that&amp;#39;s well written   code it&amp;#39;s much like as if you were writing a 
poem Gonzalez discusses computer programming   similarly to the way Woodworkers discuss their 
craft in the passages quoted by Dreyfus and Kelly   the pragmatic programmer a well-regarded 
book in the computer programming field makes   this connection between code and old style 
craftsmanship more directly by quoting the   medieval Quarry workers Creed in its preface we 
who cut mere Stones must always be envisioning   cathedrals the book then elaborates that computer 
programmers must see their work in the same way   within the overall structure of a project there 
is always room for individuality and craftsmanship   100 years from now our engineering may seem 
as archaic as the techniques used by medieval   Cathedral Builders seem to today&amp;#39;s civil engineers 
while our craftsmanship will still be honored   you don&amp;#39;t in other words need to be toiling in an 
open-air Barn for your efforts to be considered   the type of craftsmanship that can generate 
Dreyfus and Kelly&amp;#39;s meaning a similar potential   for craftsmanship can be found in most skilled 
jobs in the information economy whether you&amp;#39;re   a writer marketer consultant or lawyer your work 
is craft and if you hone your ability and apply   it with respect and care then like the skilled 
wheel right you can generate meaning in the daily   efforts of your professional life it&amp;#39;s here that 
some might respond that their knowledge work job   cannot possibly become such a source of meaning 
because their job subject is much too mundane   but this is flawed thinking that our consideration 
of traditional craftsmanship can help correct   in our current culture we place a lot of emphasis 
on job description our obsession with the advice   to follow your passion the subject of my last book 
for example is motivated by the flawed idea that   what matters most for your career satisfaction 
is the specifics of the job you choose   in this way of thinking there are some rarified 
jobs that can be a source of satisfaction perhaps   working in a non-profit or starting a software 
company while all others are soulless and Bland   the philosophy of Dreyfus and Kelly frees us from 
such traps the Craftsman they cite don&amp;#39;t have   rarified jobs throughout most of human history to 
be a blacksmith or a wheel right wasn&amp;#39;t glamorous   but this doesn&amp;#39;t matter as the specifics of the 
work are irrelevant the meaning uncovered by such   efforts is due to the skill and appreciation 
inherent in craftsmanship not the outcomes of   their work put another way a wooden wheel is not 
Noble but its shaping can be the same applies to   knowledge work you don&amp;#39;t need a rarified job you 
need instead a rarified approach to your work   the second key observation about this 
line of argument is that cultivating   craftsmanship is necessarily a deep task and 
therefore requires a commitment to deep work   recall that I argued in chapter 1 the Deep 
work is necessary to hone skills and to   then apply them at an elite level the core 
activities in craft deep work therefore is   key to extracting meaning from your profession 
in the manner described by Dreyfus and Kelly   it follows that to embrace deep work in your 
own career and to direct it toward cultivating   your skill is an effort that can transform a 
knowledge work job from a distracted draining   obligation into something satisfying a portal 
to a world full of shining wondrous things Homo sapiens deep pensus the first two 
chapters of part one were pragmatic   they argued that deep work is becoming 
increasingly valuable in our economy   at the same time that it also is becoming 
increasingly rare for somewhat arbitrary reasons   this represents a classic Market mismatch if you 
cultivate this skill you&amp;#39;ll Thrive professionally   this Final Chapter by contrast has little to 
add to this practical discussion of workplace   advancement and yet it&amp;#39;s absolutely necessary 
for these earlier ideas to gain traction   the sections ahead describe a rigorous program 
for transforming your professional life into   one centered on depth this is a difficult 
transition and as with many such efforts   well-reasoned pragmatic arguments can motivate 
you only to a certain point eventually the goal   you pursue needs to resonate at a more human 
level this chapter argues that when it comes to   the Embrace of depth such resonance is inevitable 
whether you approach the activity of going deep   from the perspective of Neuroscience psychology 
or lofty philosophy these paths all seem to lead   back to a connection between depth and meaning 
it&amp;#39;s as if our species has evolved into one that   flourishes in depth and wallows in shallowness 
becoming what we might call homo sapiens deepenses   I earlier quoted Winifred Gallagher the converted 
disciple of depth saying I&amp;#39;ll live the focused   life because it&amp;#39;s the best kind there is this 
is perhaps the best way to sum up the argument   of this chapter and of part one more broadly a 
deep life is a good life any way you look at it part two the rules rule number one work deeply soon after I met 
David Dewayne for a drink at a Dupont Circle   bar he brought up the eudaimonia machine Duane is 
an architecture professor and therefore likes to   explore the intersection between the conceptual 
and the concrete the eudaimonia machine is a good   example of this intersection the machine which 
takes its name from the ancient Greek concept of   eudaimonia a state in which you&amp;#39;re achieving your 
full human potential turns out to be a building   the goal of the machine David explained is to 
create a setting where the users can get into   a state of deep human flourishing creating work 
that&amp;#39;s at the absolute extent of their personal   abilities it is in other words a space designed 
for the sole purpose of enabling the deepest   possible deep work I was as you might expect 
intrigued as Dwayne explained the machine to   me he grabbed a pen to sketch its proposed layout 
the structure is a one-story narrow rectangle made   up of five rooms placed in a line one after the 
other there&amp;#39;s no shared hallway you have to pass   through one room to get to the next as Dewayne 
explains the lack of circulation is critical   because it doesn&amp;#39;t allow you to bypass any of 
the spaces as you get deeper into the machine   the first room you enter when coming 
off the street is called the gallery   in Duane&amp;#39;s plan this room would contain examples 
of deep work produced in the building it&amp;#39;s meant   to inspire the users of the machine creating 
a culture of healthy stress and peer pressure   as you leave the gallery you next enter the 
salon in here Dwayne imagines access to high   quality coffee and perhaps even a full bar there 
are also couches and Wi-Fi the salon is designed   to create a mood that hovers between intense 
curiosity and argumentation this is a place   to debate brood and in general work through the 
ideas that you&amp;#39;ll develop deeper in the machine   beyond the salon you enter the library this room 
stores a permanent record of all work produced   in the machine as well as the books and other 
resources used in this previous work there will be   copiers and scanners for Gathering and collecting 
the information you need for your project   Dwayne describes the library as 
the hard drive of the machine   the next room is the office space it contains 
a standard conference room with a white board   and some cubicles with desks the office Dwayne 
explains is for low intensity activity to use   our terminology this is the space to complete 
the shallow efforts required by your project   Duane imagines an administrator with a desk in the 
office who could help its users improve their work   habits to optimize their efficiency this brings 
us to the final room of the machine a collection   of what Dwayne calls deep work Chambers he adopted 
the term deep work from my articles on the topic   each chamber is conceived to be six by 
ten feet and protected by thick sound   proof walls Duane&amp;#39;s plans call for 18 inches 
of insulation the purpose of the deep work   chamber is to allow for total focus and 
uninterrupted workflow Duane explains he   imagines a process in which you spend 90 minutes 
inside take a 90-minute break and repeat two or   three times at which point your brain will have 
achieved its limit of concentration for the day   for now the eudaimonium machine exists only 
as a collection of architectural drawings but   even as a plan its potential to support 
impactful work excites Duane this design   remains in my mind the most interesting piece 
of architecture I&amp;#39;ve ever produced he told me in an ideal world one in which the 
true value of deep work is accepted   and celebrated we&amp;#39;d all have access to 
something like the eudaimonia machine   perhaps not David Dewayne&amp;#39;s exact design but 
more generally speaking a work environment   and culture designed to help us extract 
as much value as possible from our brains   unfortunately this vision is far from our current 
reality we instead find ourselves in distracting   open offices where inboxes cannot be neglected and 
meetings are incessant a setting where colleagues   would rather you respond quickly to their latest 
email than produce the best possible results   as a listener of this book in other words 
you&amp;#39;re a disciple of depth in a shallow world   this rule the first of four such rules in 
part two of this book is designed to reduce   this conflict you might not have access to your 
own eudaimonia machine but the strategies that   follow will help you simulate its effects in 
your otherwise distracted professional life   they&amp;#39;ll show you how to transform deep work from 
an aspiration into a regular and significant part   of your daily schedule rules number two through 
number four will then help you get the most out   of this deep work habit by presenting among other 
things strategies for training your concentration   ability and fighting back encroaching 
distractions before proceeding to these   strategies however I want to First address a 
question that might be nagging you why do we   need such involved interventions put another way 
once you accept that deep work is valuable isn&amp;#39;t   it enough to just start doing more of it do 
we really need something as complicated as the   eudaimonia machine or its equivalent for something 
as simple as remembering to concentrate more often   unfortunately when it comes to replacing 
distraction with Focus matters are not so simple   to understand why this is true let&amp;#39;s take a closer 
look at one of the main obstacles to going deep   the urge to turn your attention towards something 
more superficial most people recognize that this   urge can complicate efforts to concentrate 
on hard things but most underestimate its   regularity and strength consider a 2012 study 
led by psychologists Wilhelm Hoffman and Roy   Baumeister that outfitted 205 adults with beepers 
that activated it randomly selected times this is   the experience sampling method discussed in part 
one when the Beeper sounded the subject was asked   to pause for a moment to reflect on desires 
that he or she was currently feeling or had   felt in the last 30 minutes and then answer a set 
of questions about these desires after a week the   researchers had gathered more than 7 500 samples 
here&amp;#39;s the short version of what they found   people fight desires all day long as Baumeister 
summarized in his subsequent book willpower   co-authored with the science writer John Tierney 
desire turned out to be the norm not the exception   the five most common desires these subjects fought 
include not surprisingly eating sleeping and sex   but the top five list also included desires 
for taking a break from hard work checking   email and social networking sites surfing the 
web listening to music or watching television   The Lure of the internet and television proved 
especially strong the subjects succeeded in   resisting these particularly addictive 
distractions only around half the time   these results are bad news for this Rule&amp;#39;s 
goal of helping you cultivate a deep work   habit they tell us that you can expect to be 
bombarded with the desire to do anything but   work deeply throughout the day and if you&amp;#39;re 
like the German subjects from the Hoffman and   Baumeister study these competing desires 
will often win out you might respond at   this point that you will succeed where these 
subjects failed because you understand the   importance of depth and will therefore be more 
rigorous in your will to remain concentrated   Noble sentiment but the Decades of research 
that preceded this study underscore its futility   a now voluminous line of inquiry initiated in a 
series of pioneering papers also written by Roy   Baumeister has established the following important 
and at the time unexpected truth about willpower   you have a finite amount of willpower 
that becomes depleted as you use it   your will in other words is not a manifestation 
of your character that you can deploy without   limit it&amp;#39;s instead like a muscle that tires this 
is why the subjects in the Hoffman and Baumeister   study had such a hard time fighting desires 
over time these distractions drained their   finite pool of willpower until they could 
no longer resist the same will happen to   you regardless of your intentions unless 
that is you&amp;#39;re smart about your habits   this brings me to the motivating idea behind the 
strategies that follow the key to developing a   deep work habit is to move Beyond Good Intentions 
and add routines and rituals to your working   life designed to minimize the amount of your 
limited willpower necessary to transition into   and maintain a state of unbroken concentration if 
you suddenly decide for example in the middle of a   distracted afternoon spent web browsing to switch 
your attention to a cognitively demanding task   you&amp;#39;ll draw heavily from your finite willpower to 
rest your attention away from the online shininess   such attempts will therefore frequently fail on 
the other hand if you deployed smart routines and   rituals perhaps a set time and quiet location 
used for your deep tasks each afternoon you&amp;#39;d   require much less willpower to start and keep 
going in the long run you therefore succeed   with these deep efforts far more often with 
this in mind the six strategies that follow   can be understood as an arsenal of routines and 
rituals designed with the science of limited   willpower in mind to maximize the amount of deep 
work you consistently accomplish in your schedule   among other things they&amp;#39;ll ask you to commit to 
a particular pattern for scheduling this work and   develop rituals to sharpen your concentration 
before starting each session some of these   strategies will deploy simple heuristics to hijack 
your brain&amp;#39;s motivation Center While others are   designed to recharge your willpower Reserves at 
the fastest possible rate you could just try to   make deep work a priority but supporting this 
decision with the strategies that follow or   strategies of your own devising that are motivated 
by the same principles will significantly increase   the probability that you succeed in making deep 
work a crucial part of your professional life decide on your depth philosophy the famed computer 
scientist Donald knuth cares about deep work   as he explains on his website what I do takes long 
hours of studying an uninterruptible concentration   a doctoral candidate named Brian Chappelle who 
is a father with a full-time job also values deep   work as it&amp;#39;s the only way he can make progress 
on his dissertation given his limited time   Chappelle told me that his first encounter with 
the idea of deep work was an emotional moment   I mentioned these examples because although 
knuth and Chappelle agree on the importance of   depth they disagree on their philosophies for 
integrating this depth into their work lives   as I&amp;#39;ll detail in the next section knuth deploys 
a form of monasticism that prioritizes deep work   by trying to eliminate or minimize all other 
types of work Chappelle by contrast deploys   a rhythmic strategy in which he works for 
the same hours 5 to 7 30 a.m every weekday   morning without exception before beginning a 
workday punctuated by standard distractions   both approaches work but not universally 
knuth&amp;#39;s approach might make sense for someone   whose primary professional obligation is to think 
big thoughts but if Chappelle adopted a similar   rejection of all things shallow he&amp;#39;d likely 
lose his job you need your own Philosophy for   integrating deep work into your professional life 
as argued in this Rule&amp;#39;s introduction attempting   to schedule deep work in an ad hoc fashion is not 
an effective way to manage your limited willpower   but this example highlights a general warning 
about this selection you must be careful to   choose a philosophy that fits your specific 
circumstances as a mismatch here can derail your   deep work habit before it has a chance to solidify 
this strategy will help you avoid this Fate by   presenting four different depth philosophies that 
I&amp;#39;ve seen work exceptionally well in practice   the goal is to convince you that there are many 
different ways to integrate deep work into your   schedule and it&amp;#39;s therefore worth taking the 
time to find an approach that makes sense for you the monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling 
let&amp;#39;s return to Donald knuth he&amp;#39;s famous for   many Innovations in computer science including 
notably the development of a rigorous approach   to analyzing algorithm performance among 
his peers however knuth also maintains an   aura of infamy for his approach to electronic 
communication if you visit knuth&amp;#39;s website at   Stanford with the intention of finding his email 
address you&amp;#39;ll instead discover the following note   I have been a happy man ever since January 1st 
1990 when I no longer had an email address I&amp;#39;d   used email since about 1975 and it seems to me 
that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime   email is a wonderful thing for people whose role 
in life is to be on top of things but not for me   my role is to be on the bottom of things 
what I do takes long hours of studying and   uninterruptible concentration knuth goes on 
to acknowledge that he doesn&amp;#39;t intend to cut   himself off completely from the world he notes 
that writing his books requires communication   with thousands of people and that he wants 
to be responsive to questions and comments   his solution he provides an 
address a postal mailing address   he says that his Administrative Assistant will 
sort through any letters arriving at that address   and put aside those that she thinks are relevant 
anything that&amp;#39;s truly urgent she&amp;#39;ll bring to   knuth promptly and everything else he&amp;#39;ll handle 
in a big batch once every three months or so   knuth deploys what I call the monastic philosophy 
of deep work scheduling this philosophy attempts   to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or 
radically minimizing shallow obligations   practitioners of the monastic philosophy tend to 
have a well-defined and highly valued professional   goal that they&amp;#39;re pursuing and the bulk of their 
professional success comes from doing this one   thing exceptionally well it&amp;#39;s this Clarity that 
helps them eliminate the thicket of shallow   concerns that tend to trip up those whose value 
proposition in the Working World is more varied   knuth for example explains his professional 
goal as follows I try to learn certain areas of   computer science exhaustively then I try to digest 
that knowledge into a form that is accessible to   people who don&amp;#39;t have time for such study trying 
to pitch knuth on the intangible returns of   building an audience on Twitter or the unexpected 
opportunities that might come through a more   liberal use of email will fail as these behaviors 
don&amp;#39;t directly Aid his goal to exhaustively   understand specific corners of computer science 
and then write about them in an accessible manner   another person committed to monastic deep work 
is the acclaimed science fiction writer Neil   Stevenson if you visit Stevenson&amp;#39;s author website 
you&amp;#39;ll notice a lack of email or mailing address   we can gain insight into this Omission from 
a pair of essays that Stevenson posted on his   early website hosted on the well back in the 
early 2000s and which have been preserved by   the internet archive in one such essay 
archived in 2003 Stevenson summarizes   his communication policy as follows persons 
who wish to interfere with my concentration   are politely requested not to do so and 
warned that I don&amp;#39;t answer email lest my   communication policies key message get lost 
in the verbiage I will put it here succinctly   all of my time and attention are spoken for 
several times over please do not ask for them   to further justify this policy Stevenson wrote 
an essay titled why I am a bad correspondent   at the core of his explanation for his 
inaccessibility is the following decision   the productivity equation he writes is a 
non-linear one in other words this accounts for   why I am a bad correspondent and why I very rarely 
accept speaking engagements if I organize my life   in such a way that I get lots of long consecutive 
uninterrupted time chunks I can write novels   but as those chunks get separated and fragmented 
my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly   Stevenson sees two mutually exclusive options 
he can write good novels at a regular rate or   he can answer a lot of individual emails into 
10 conferences and as a result produce lower   quality novels at a slower rate he chose the 
former option and this Choice requires him to   avoid as much as possible any source of shallow 
work in his professional life this issue is so   important to Stevenson that he went on to explore 
its implications positive and negative in his 2008   science fiction epic anatham which considers 
a world where an intellectual Elite live in   monastic orders isolated from the distracted 
masses and Technology thinking Deep Thoughts   in my experience the monastic philosophy 
makes many knowledge workers defensive   the clarity with which its adherents identify 
their value to the world I suspect touches a   raw nerve for those whose contribution to 
the information economy is more complex   notice of course that more complex does not 
mean lesser a high-level manager for example   might play a vital role in the functioning of a 
billion dollar company even if she cannot point   to something discreet like a completed novel and 
say this is what I produce this year therefore   the pool of individuals to whom the monastic 
philosophy applies is limited and that&amp;#39;s okay   if you&amp;#39;re outside this pool it&amp;#39;s radical 
Simplicity shouldn&amp;#39;t evince too much Envy   on the other hand if you&amp;#39;re inside this pool 
someone whose contribution to the world is   discreet clear and individualized then you should 
give this philosophy serious consideration as   it might be the deciding factor between an 
average career and one that will be remembered the bimodal philosophy of deep work scheduling   this book opened with a story about the 
Revolutionary psychologist and thinker Carl Jung   in the 1920s at the same time that Jung was 
attempting to break away from the strictures   of his mentor Sigmund Freud he began regular 
retreats to a rustic Stone House he built in   the woods outside the small town of bollingan when 
there Jung would lock himself every morning into   a minimally appointed room to write without 
interruption he would then meditate and walk   in the woods to clarify his thinking in 
preparation for the next day&amp;#39;s writing   these efforts I argued were aimed at increasing 
the intensity of Jung&amp;#39;s deep work to a level that   would allow him to succeed in intellectual 
combat with Freud and his many supporters   in recalling this story I want to emphasize 
something important Jung did not deploy a monastic   approach to deep work Donald knuth and Neil 
Stevenson are examples from earlier attempted to   completely eliminate distraction and shallowness 
from their professional lives Jung by contrast   sought this elimination only during the periods 
he spent at his retreat the rest of Jung&amp;#39;s time   was spent in Zurich where his life was anything 
but monastic he ran a busy clinical practice   that often had him seeing patients until late at 
night he was an active participant in the Zurich   coffeehouse culture and he gave and attended many 
lectures in the city&amp;#39;s respected universities   Einstein received his Doctorate from one 
University in Zurich and later taught at another   he also interestingly enough knew Young and the 
two shared several dinners to discuss the key   ideas of Einstein&amp;#39;s special relativity Jung&amp;#39;s life 
in Zurich in other words is similar in many ways   to the modern archetype of the hyper-connected 
digital age knowledge worker replace Zurich with   San Francisco and letter with tweet and we 
could be discussing some hot shot Tech CEO   Jung&amp;#39;s approach is what I call the bimodal 
philosophy of deep work this philosophy asks   that you divide your time dedicating some clearly 
defined stretches to deep Pursuits and leaving the   rest open to everything else during the Deep time 
the bimodal worker will act monastically seeking   intense and uninterrupted concentration during 
the shallow time such focus is not prioritized   this division of time between deep and open 
can happen on multiple scales for example on   the scale of a week you might dedicate a four 
day weekend to depth and the rest to open time   similarly on the scale of a year you might 
dedicate one season to contain most of your   deep stretches as many academics do 
over the summer or while on sabbatical   the bimodal philosophy believes the Deep 
work can produce extreme productivity but   only if the subject dedicates enough time to such 
Endeavors to reach maximum cognitive intensity   the state in which real breakthroughs occur 
this is why the minimum unit of time for deep   work in this philosophy tends to be at least one 
full day to put aside a few hours in the morning   for example is too short to count as a deep 
work stretch for an adherent of this approach   at the same time the bimodal philosophy is 
typically deployed by people who cannot succeed   in the absence of substantial commitments to 
non-deep Pursuits um for example needed his   clinical practice to pay the bills and the Zurich 
coffeehouse scene to stimulate his thinking the   approach of Shifting between two modes provides 
a way to serve both needs well to provide a more   modern example of the bimodal philosophy in action 
we can once again consider Adam Grant the Wharton   business school Professor whose thoughtfulness 
about work habits was first introduced in part one   as you might recall Grant&amp;#39;s scheduled during 
his rapid rise through the professorship ranks   at Wharton provides a nice bimodality case study 
on the scale of the academic year he stacked his   courses into one semester so that he could focus 
the other two on deep work during these deep   semesters he then applied the bimodal approach on 
the weekly scale he would perhaps once or twice a   month take a period of two to four days to become 
completely monastic he would shut his door put   an out of office Auto responder on his email 
and work on his research without interruption   outside of these deep sessions Grant remained 
famously open and accessible in some sense he had   to be his 2013 best seller give and take promotes 
the practice of giving of your time and attention   without expectation of something in return 
as a key strategy in professional advancement   those who deploy the bimodal philosophy of deep 
work admire the productivity of the monastics   but also respect the value they receive from 
the shallow behaviors in their working lives   perhaps the biggest obstacle to implementing 
this philosophy is that even short periods of   deep work require a flexibility that many 
fear they lack in their current positions   if even an hour away from your inbox makes 
you uncomfortable then certainly the idea   of Disappearing for a day or more at a time will 
seem impossible but I suspect bimodal working is   compatible with more types of jobs than you might 
guess earlier for example I described a study by   Harvard Business School Professor Leslie perlow 
in this study a group of management Consultants   were asked to disconnect for a full day each work 
week the Consultants were afraid the client would   Rebel it turned out that the client didn&amp;#39;t care 
as Yoon Grant and perlow&amp;#39;s subjects discovered   people will usually respect your right to 
become inaccessible if these periods are   well-defined and well advertised and outside 
these stretches you&amp;#39;re once again easy to find the rhythmic philosophy of deep work scheduling   in the early days of the Seinfeld show Jerry 
Seinfeld remained a working comic with a busy   tour schedule it was during this period that 
a writer and comic named Brad Isaac who was   working Open Mic nights at the time ran into 
Seinfeld at a club waiting to go on stage as   Isaac later explained in a now classic Lifehacker 
article I saw my chance I had to ask Seinfeld if   he had any tips for a young comic what he told me 
was something that would benefit me for a lifetime   Seinfeld began his advice to Isaac with some 
common sense noting the way to be a better comic   was to create better jokes and then explaining 
that the way to create better jokes was to write   every day Seinfeld continued by describing a 
specific technique he used to help maintain   this discipline he keeps a calendar on his wall 
every day that he writes jokes he crosses out the   date on the calendar with a big red X after 
a few days you&amp;#39;ll have a chain Seinfeld said   just keep at it and the chain will grow longer 
every day you&amp;#39;ll like seeing that chain especially   when you get a few weeks under your belt 
your only job next is to not break the chain   this chain method as some now call it 
soon became a hit among writers and   fitness enthusiasts communities that thrive 
on the ability to do hard things consistently   for our purposes it provides a specific example 
of a general approach to integrating depth into   your life the rhythmic philosophy this philosophy 
argues that 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&amp;#39;re going to go deep the chain method 
is a good example of the rhythmic philosophy of   deep work scheduling because it combines 
a simple scheduling heuristic do the work   every day with an easy way to remind yourself 
to do the work the big red x&amp;#39;s on the calendar   another common way to implement the rhythmic 
philosophy is to replace the visual aid of the   chain method with a set starting time 
that you use every day for deep work   in much the same way that maintaining visual 
indicators of your work progress can reduce the   barrier to entry for going deep eliminating 
even the simplest scheduling decisions such   as when during the day to do the work also 
reduces this barrier consider the example of   Brian Chappelle the busy doctoral candidate 
I introduced in the opening to this strategy   Chappelle adopted the rhythmic philosophy of deep 
work scheduling out of necessity around the time   that he was ramping up his dissertation writing 
he was offered a full-time job at a center on the   campus where he was a student professionally this 
was a good opportunity and Chappelle was happy   to accept it but academically a full-time job 
especially when coupled with the recent arrival   of Chappelle&amp;#39;s first child made it difficult to 
find the depth needed to write thesis chapters   Chappelle began by attempting a vague commitment 
to deep work he made a rule that deep work   needed to happen in 90-minute chunks recognizing 
correctly that it takes time to ease into a state   of concentration and he decided he would try to 
schedule these chunks in an ad hoc manner whenever   appropriate openings in his schedule arose not 
surprisingly this strategy didn&amp;#39;t yield much   productivity in a dissertation boot camp Chappelle 
had attended the year before he&amp;#39;d managed to   produce a full thesis chapter in a single week of 
rigorous deep work after he accepted his full-time   job he managed to produce only a single additional 
chapter in the entire first year he was working   it was the glacial writing progress during 
this year the drove Chappelle to embrace   the rhythmic method he made a rule that he would 
wake up and start working by 5 30 every morning   he would then work until 7 30 make breakfast and 
go to work already done with his dissertation   obligations for the day please buy early progress 
he soon pushed his wake-up time to 4 45 to squeeze   out even more morning depth when I interviewed 
Chappelle for this book he described his rhythmic   approach to deep work scheduling as both 
astronomically productive and guilt-free   his routine was producing four to five 
pages of academic prose per day and was   capable of generating drafts of thesis 
Chapters at a rate of one chapter every   two or three weeks a phenomenal output for 
someone who also worked a nine-to-five job   who&amp;#39;s to say that I can&amp;#39;t be that prolific he 
concluded why not me the rhythmic philosophy   provides an interesting contrast to the bimodal 
philosophy it perhaps fails to achieve the most   intense levels of deep thinking sought in the 
day-long concentration sessions favored by the   bimodalist the trade-off however is that this 
approach works better with the reality of human   nature by supporting deep work with Rock Solid 
routines that make sure a little bit gets done on   a regular basis the rhythmic scheduler will often 
log a larger total number of deep hours per year   the decision between rhythmic and bimodal 
can come down to your self-control in such   scheduling matters if you&amp;#39;re Carl Jung and are 
engaged in an intellectual dog fight with Sigmund   Freud supporters you&amp;#39;ll likely have no trouble 
recognizing the importance of finding time to   focus on your ideas on the other hand if you&amp;#39;re 
writing a dissertation with no one pressuring you   to get it done the habitual nature of the rhythmic 
philosophy might be necessary to maintain progress   for many however it&amp;#39;s not just self-control issues 
that bias them toward the rhythmic philosophy but   also the reality that some jobs don&amp;#39;t allow you 
to disappear for days at a time when the need to   go deep arises for a lot of bosses the standard is 
that you&amp;#39;re free to focus as hard as you want so   long as the boss&amp;#39;s emails are still answered 
promptly this is likely the biggest reason   why the rhythmic philosophy is one of the most 
common among deep workers in standard office jobs the journalistic philosophy 
of deep work scheduling   in the 1980s the journalist Walter Isaacson was in 
his 30s and well along in his rapid Ascent through   the ranks of Time Magazine by this point he was 
undoubtedly on the radar of the thinking class   Christopher Hitchens for example writing 
in the London Review of Books during this   period called him one of the best 
magazine journalists in America   the time was right for Isaacson to write a big 
important book a necessary step on the latter   of journalistic achievement so Isaacson chose 
a complicated topic an intertwined narrative   biography of six figures who played an important 
role in early Cold War policy and teamed up with a   fellow young time editor Evan Thompson to produce 
an appropriately weighty book an 864-page epic   titled the wise men six friends and the world 
they made this book which was published in 1986   was well received by the right people the New York 
Times called it a richly textured account while   the San Francisco Chronicle exalted that the two 
Young Writers had fashioned a cold war Plutarch   less than a decade later Isaacson reached the Apex 
of his journalism career when he was appointed   editor of time which she Then followed with a 
second act as the CEO of a think tank and an   incredibly popular biographer of figures including 
Benjamin Franklin Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs   what interests me about Isaacson however is 
not what he accomplished with his first book   but how he wrote it in uncovering this story I 
must draw from a fortunate personal connection   as it turns out in the Years leading up to the 
publication of the wise men my uncle John Paul   Newport who was also a journalist in New 
York at the time shared his summer Beach   rental with Isaacson to this day my uncle 
remembers isaacson&amp;#39;s impressive work habits   it was always amazing he said he could Retreat 
up to the bedroom for a while when the rest of   us were chilling on the patio or whatever to 
work on his book he&amp;#39;d go up for 20 minutes or   an hour we&amp;#39;d hear the typewriter pounding then 
he&amp;#39;d come down as relaxed as the rest of us the   work never seemed to faze him he just happily 
went up to work when he had the spare time   Isaacson was methodic anytime he could find some 
free time he would switch into a deep work mode   and hammer away at his book this is how it turns 
out one can write a 900 page book on the side   while spending the bulk of Wednesday becoming one 
of the country&amp;#39;s best magazine writers I call this   approach in which you fit deep work wherever you 
can into your schedule the journalist philosophy   this name is a nod to the fact that journalists 
Like Walter Isaacson are trained to shift into a   writing mode on a moment&amp;#39;s notice as is required 
by the deadline driven nature of their profession   this approach is not for the Deep work 
novice as I established in the opening   to this rule the ability to rapidly switch 
your mind from shallow to deep mode doesn&amp;#39;t   come naturally without practice such switches can 
seriously deplete your finite willpower Reserves   this habit also requires a sense of confidence 
in your abilities a conviction that what you&amp;#39;re   doing is important and will succeed 
this type of conviction is typically   built on a foundation of existing professional 
accomplishment Isaacson for example likely had   an easier time switching to writing mode than 
say a first-time novelist because Isaacson had   worked himself up to become a respected writer 
by this point he knew he had the capacity to   write an epic biography and understood it to 
be a key task in his professional advancement   this confidence goes a long way in motivating hard 
efforts I&amp;#39;m partial to the journalistic philosophy   of deep work because it&amp;#39;s my main approach 
to integrating these efforts into my schedule   in other words I&amp;#39;m not monastic in my deep work 
though I do find myself occasionally jealous of   my fellow computer scientist Donald knuth&amp;#39;s 
Unapologetic disconnection I don&amp;#39;t deploy   multi-day depth binges like the bimodalists and 
though I am intrigued by the rhythmic philosophy   my schedule has a way of thwarting attempts 
to enforce a daily habit instead in an Ode to   Isaacson I face each week as it arrives and do 
my best to squeeze out as much depth as possible   to write this book for example I had to take 
advantage of free stretches of time wherever they   popped up if my kids were taking a good nap I&amp;#39;d 
grab my laptop and lock myself in the home office   if my wife wanted to visit her parents in 
nearby Annapolis on a weekend day I take   advantage of the extra child care to disappear 
to a quiet corner of their house to write   if a meeting at work was canceled or 
an afternoon left open I might Retreat   to one of my favorite libraries on campus to 
squeeze out a few hundred more words and so on   I should admit that I&amp;#39;m not pure in my 
application of the journalist&amp;#39;s philosophy I   don&amp;#39;t for example make all my deep work decisions 
on a moment-to-moment basis i instead tend to map   out when I&amp;#39;ll work deeply during each week at 
the beginning of the week and then refine these   decisions as needed at the beginning of each 
day see rule number three for more details on   my scheduling routines by reducing the need 
to make decisions about deep work Moment by   moment I can preserve more mental energy for the 
deep thinking itself in the final accounting the   journalistic philosophy of deep work scheduling 
remains difficult to pull off but if you&amp;#39;re   confident in the value of what you&amp;#39;re trying 
to produce and practiced in the skill of going   deep a skill we will continue to develop in the 
strategies that follow it can be a surprisingly   robust way to squeeze out large amounts of 
depth from an otherwise demanding schedule ritualize and often overlooked observation about 
those who use their minds to create valuable   things is that their rarely haphazard in their 
work habits consider the Pulitzer prize-winning   biographer Robert Carro as revealed in a 2009 
magazine profile every inch of cairo&amp;#39;s New York   office is governed by rules where he places his 
books how he Stacks his notebooks what he puts   on his wall even what he wears to the office 
everything is specified by a routine that has   very little over cairo&amp;#39;s long career I trained 
myself to be organized he explained Charles Darwin   had a similarly strict structure for his working 
life during the period when he was perfecting On   the Origin of Species as his son Francis later 
remembered he would rise promptly at seven to   take a short walk he would then eat breakfast 
alone and retire to his study from 8 to 9 30.   the next hour was dedicated to reading his letters 
from the day before after which he would return   to his study from 10 30 until noon after this 
session he would mull over challenging ideas while   walking on a prescribed route that started at his 
greenhouse and then circled a path on his property   he would walk until satisfied with his 
thinking then declare his work day done   the journalist Mason Curry who spent half a 
decade cataloging the habits of famous thinkers   and writers and from whom I learned the previous 
two examples summarized this tendency towards   systemization as follows there is a popular notion 
that artists work from inspiration that there is   some strike or bolt or bubbling up of creative 
Mojo from who knows where but I hope my work makes   clear that waiting for inspiration to strike is a 
terrible terrible plan in fact perhaps the single   best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying 
to do creative work is to ignore inspiration   in a New York Times column on the topic David 
Brooks summarizes this reality more bluntly   great creative minds think like 
artists but work like accountants this strategy suggests the following to make the 
most out of your deep work sessions build rituals   of the same level of strictness and idiosyncrasy 
as the important thinkers mentioned previously   there&amp;#39;s a good reason for this mimicry great minds 
like Cairo and Darwin didn&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;s no way to win a Pulitzer Prize or 
conceive a grand Theory without pushing your brain   to its limit their rituals minimize the friction 
in this transition to depth allowing them to go   deep more easily and stay in the state longer 
if they had instead waited for inspiration to   strike before settling into serious work their 
accomplishments would likely have been greatly   reduced there&amp;#39;s no one correct deep work ritual 
the right fit depends on both the person and the   type of project pursued but there are some general 
questions that any effective ritual must address   where you&amp;#39;ll work and for how long your ritual 
needs to specify a location for your deep work   efforts this location can be as simple as 
your normal office with the door shut and   desk cleaned off a colleague of mine likes to put 
a hotel style do not disturb sign on his office   door when he&amp;#39;s tackling something difficult if 
it&amp;#39;s possible to identify a location used only   for depth for instance a conference room or quiet 
library the positive effect can be even greater if   you work in an open Office plan this need to find 
a deep work Retreat becomes particularly important   regardless of where you work be sure to also give 
yourself a specific time frame to keep the session   a discrete Challenge and not an open-ended 
slog how you&amp;#39;ll work once you start to work   your ritual needs rules and processes to keep your 
efforts structured for example you might Institute   a ban on any internet use or maintain a metric 
such as words produced per 20-minute interval   to keep your concentration honed without this 
structure you&amp;#39;ll have to mentally litigate again   and again what you should and should not be doing 
during these sessions and keep trying to assess   whether you&amp;#39;re working sufficiently hard these 
are unnecessary drains on your willpower Reserves   how you&amp;#39;ll support your work your ritual needs 
to ensure your brain gets the support it needs   to keep operating at a high level of depth 
for example the ritual might specify that you   start with a good cup of coffee or make sure you 
have access to enough food of the right type to   maintain energy or integrate light exercise 
such as walking to help keep the Mind clear   as Nietzsche said it is only ideas 
gained from walking that have any worth   this support might also include environmental 
factors such as organizing the raw materials of   your work to minimize energy dissipating friction 
as we saw with cairo&amp;#39;s example to maximize your   success you need to support your efforts to 
go deep at the same time this support needs   to be systematized so that you don&amp;#39;t waste mental 
energy figuring out what you need in the moment   these questions will help you get started in 
crafting your deep work ritual but keep in mind   that finding a ritual that sticks might require 
experimentation so be willing to work at it I   assure you that the effort&amp;#39;s worth it once you&amp;#39;ve 
evolved something that feels right the impact can   be significant to work deeply is a big deal and 
should not be an activity undertaken lightly   surrounding such efforts with a complicated 
and perhaps to the outside world quite strange   ritual accepts this reality providing your 
mind with the structure and commitment it   needs to slip into the state of focus where 
you can begin to create things that matter make grand gestures in the early winter of 
2007 JK Rowling was struggling to complete   the Deathly Hallows the final book in her Harry 
Potter series the pressure was intense as this   book bore the responsibility of tying together the 
six that preceded it in a way that would satisfy   the series hundreds of millions of fans Rowling 
needed to work deeply to satisfy these demands   but she was Finding unbroken concentration 
increasingly difficult to achieve at her home   office in Edinburgh Scotland as I was finishing 
Deathly Hallows there came a day where the window   cleaner came the kids were at home the dogs were 
barking rolling recalled in an interview it was   too much so JK Rowling decided to do something 
extreme to shift her mindset where it needed to be   she checked into a suite in the five-star Balmoral 
hotel located in the heart of downtown Edinburgh   so I came to this hotel because it&amp;#39;s a beautiful 
hotel but I didn&amp;#39;t intend to stay here she   explained but the first day&amp;#39;s writing went well 
so I kept coming back and I ended up finishing the   last of the Harry Potter books here in retrospect 
it&amp;#39;s not surprising that Rowling ended up staying   the setting was perfect for her project the 
Balmoral known as one of Scotland&amp;#39;s most luxurious   hotels is a classic Victorian building complete 
with ornate stonework and a tall Clock Tower it&amp;#39;s   also located only a couple of blocks away from 
Edinburgh Castle one of Rowling&amp;#39;s Inspirations in   dreaming up Hogwarts Rowling&amp;#39;s decision to check 
into a luxurious hotel suite near Edinburgh Castle   is an example of a curious but effective strategy 
in the world of deep work the grand gesture   the concept is simple by leveraging a radical 
change to your normal environment coupled   perhaps with a significant investment of effort 
or money all dedicated towards supporting a deep   work task you increase the perceived importance 
of the task this boost in importance reduces your   mind&amp;#39;s instinct to procrastinate and delivers 
an injection of motivation and energy writing   a chapter of a Harry Potter novel for example is 
hard work and will require a lot of mental energy   regardless of where you do it but when paying more 
than a thousand dollars a day to write the chapter   in a suite of an old hotel down the street from 
a hogwarts-style castle mustering the energy to   begin and sustain this work is easier than if 
you were instead in a distracting home office   when you study the habits of other well-known deep 
workers the grand gesture strategy comes up often   Bill Gates for example was famous during his time 
as Microsoft CEO for taking think weeks during   which he would leave behind his normal work and 
family obligations to retreat to a cabin with a   stack of papers and books his goal was to think 
deeply without distraction about the big issues   relevant to his company it was during one of 
these weeks for example that he famously came   to the conclusion that the internet was going to 
be a major force in the industry there was nothing   physically stopping gates from thinking deeply 
in his office in Microsoft&amp;#39;s Seattle headquarters   but the novelty of his week-long Retreat helped 
him achieve the desired levels of concentration   the MIT physicist and award-winning novelist 
Alan Lightman also leverages grand gestures   in his case he Retreats each summer to a tiny 
Island in Maine to think deeply and recharge   at least as of 2000 when he described this 
gesture in an interview the island not only   lacked internet but didn&amp;#39;t even have phone service 
as he then Justified it&amp;#39;s really about two and   a half months that I&amp;#39;ll feel like I can recover 
some silence in my life which is so hard to find   not everyone has the freedom to spend two 
months in Maine but many writers including   Dan pink and Michael Pollan simulate The 
Experience year-round by building often at   significant expense and effort riding cabins on 
their properties pollen for his part even wrote   a book about his experience building his cabin in 
the woods behind his former Connecticut home these   outbuildings aren&amp;#39;t strictly necessary for these 
Riders who need only a laptop and a flat surface   to put it on to apply their trade but it&amp;#39;s not 
the amenities of the cabins that generate their   value it&amp;#39;s instead the grand gesture represented 
in the design and building of the cabin for the   sole purpose of enabling better writing not 
every Grand gesture need be so permanent after   the pathologically competitive Bell Labs physicist 
William Shockley was scooped in the invention of   the transistor as I detail in the next strategy 
two members of his team made the Breakthrough   at a time when Shockley was away working on 
another project he locked himself in a hotel room   in Chicago where he had traveled ostensibly to 
attend a conference he didn&amp;#39;t emerge from the room   until he had ironed out the details for a better 
design that had been rattling around in his mind   when he finally did leave the room he air mailed 
his notes back to Murray Hill New Jersey so that a   colleague could paste them into his lab notebook 
and sign them to time stamp the innovation   The Junction form of the transistor that 
Shockley worked out in this burst of depth   ended up earning him a share of the Nobel 
Prize subsequently awarded for the invention   an even more extreme example of a one-time Grand 
gesture yielding results is a story involving   Peter shankman an entrepreneur and social media 
pioneer as a popular speaker Shanklin spends much   of his time flying he eventually realized that 
thirty thousand feet was an ideal environment for   him to focus as he explained in a blog post locked 
in a seat with nothing in front of me nothing to   distract me nothing to set off my ooh shiny DNA I 
have nothing to do but be it one with my thoughts   it was sometime after this realization that 
shankman signed a book contract that gave him   only two weeks to finish the entire manuscript 
meeting this deadline would require incredible   concentration to achieve this state shankman did 
something unconventional he booked a round-trip   business class ticket to Tokyo he wrote during 
the whole flight to Japan drank an espresso   in the business class Lounge once he arrived in 
Japan then turned around and flew back once again   writing the whole way arriving back in the States 
only 30 hours after he first left with a completed   manuscript now in hand the trip cost four thousand 
dollars and was worth every penny he explained   in all of these examples it&amp;#39;s not just the change 
of environment or seeking of quiet that enables   more depth the dominant force is the psychology 
of committing so seriously to the task at hand   to put yourself in an exotic location to focus on 
a writing project or to take a week off from work   just to think or to lock yourself in a hotel 
room until you complete an important invention   these gestures push your deep goal 
to a level of mental priority that   helps unlock the needed mental resources 
sometimes to go deep you must first go big don&amp;#39;t work alone the relationship between 
deep work and collaboration is tricky it&amp;#39;s   worth taking the time to untangle however because 
properly leveraging collaboration can increase the   quality of deep work in your professional life 
it&amp;#39;s helpful to start our discussion of this   topic by taking a step back to consider what 
it first seems to be an unresolvable conflict   in part one of this book I criticized Facebook 
for the design of its new headquarters   in particular I noted that the company&amp;#39;s goal to 
create the world&amp;#39;s largest open Office Space a   giant room that will reportedly hold 2 800 workers 
represents an absurd attack on concentration   both intuition and a growing body of research 
underscore the reality that sharing a workspace   with a large number of co-workers is incredibly 
distracting creating an environment that the   warts attempts to think seriously in a 2013 
article summarizing Recent research on this   topic Business Week went so far as to call for 
an end to the tyranny of the open plan office   and yet these open Office designs are not embraced 
haphazardly as Maria konikova reports in the New   Yorker when this concept first emerged its goal 
was to facilitate communication and idea flow   this claim resonated with American 
businesses looking to embrace an aura   of startup unconventionality Josh tirangel 
the editor of Bloomberg businessweek for   example explained the lack of offices 
in Bloomberg&amp;#39;s headquarters as follows   open plan is pretty spectacular it ensures that 
everyone is attuned to the broad Mission and it   encourages curiosity between people who work 
in different disciplines Jack Dorsey Justified   the open layout of the square headquarters by 
explaining we encourage people to stay out in   the open because we believe in Serendipity and 
people walking by each other teaching new things   for the sake of discussion let&amp;#39;s call this 
principle that when you allow people to bump   into each other smart collaborations and new ideas 
emerge the theory of serendipitous creativity   when Mark Zuckerberg decided to build the world&amp;#39;s 
largest office we can reasonably conjecture this   Theory helped drive his decision just as it has 
driven many of the moves toward open workspaces   elsewhere in Silicon Valley and Beyond other less 
exalted factors like saving money and increasing   supervision also play a role but they&amp;#39;re not 
as sexy and are therefore less emphasized   this decision between promoting concentration 
and promoting Serendipity seems to indicate that   deep work an individual Endeavor is incompatible 
with generating creative insights a collaborative   endeavor this conclusion however is flawed it&amp;#39;s 
based I argue on an incomplete understanding   of the theory of serendipitous creativity to 
support this claim let&amp;#39;s consider the origins   of this particular understanding of what Spurs 
breakthroughs the theory in question has many   sources but I happen to have a personal 
connection to one of the more well-known   during my seven years at MIT I worked on the 
site of the institute&amp;#39;s famed building 20.   this structure located at the intersection of 
Maine and Vassar streets in East Cambridge and   eventually demolished in 1998 was thrown together 
as a temporary shelter during World War II meant   to house the Overflow from the school&amp;#39;s bustling 
radiation Laboratory as noted by a 2012 New Yorker   article the building was initially seen as a 
failure ventilation was poor and hallways were   dim the walls were thin the roof leaked and the 
building was broiling in the summer and freezing   in the winter when the war ended however the 
influx of scientists to Cambridge continued MIT   needed space so instead of immediately demolishing 
building 20 as they had promised local officials   in exchange for lacks permitting they continued 
using it as an overflow space the result was that   a mismatch of different departments from nuclear 
science to Linguistics to electronics shared the   low slung building alongside more esoteric tenants 
such as a machine shop and a piano repair facility   because the building was cheaply constructed 
these groups felt free to rearrange space   as needed walls and Floors could be 
shifted and Equipment bolted to the beams   in recounting the story of Gerald zacharias&amp;#39;s work 
on the first atomic clock the aforementioned New   Yorker article points to the importance of his 
ability to remove two floors from his building   20 lab so he could install the three-story 
cylinder needed for his experimental apparatus   in MIT lore it&amp;#39;s generally believed that this 
haphazard combination of different disciplines   thrown together in a large reconfigurable 
building led to chance encounters and a   spirit of inventiveness that generated 
breakthroughs at a fast pace innovating   topics as diverse as Chomsky grammars Lauren 
navigational Radars and video games all within   the same productive post-war decades when the 
building was finally demolished to make way for   the 300 million dollar Frank Gary design status 
Center where I spent my time its loss was mourned   in tribute to the plywood Palace it replaced 
the interior design of the status Center   includes Boards of Unfinished plywood and exposed 
concrete with construction markings left intact   around the same time that building 20 was 
hastily constructed a more systematic pursuit   of serendipitous creativity was underway 200 miles 
to the Southwest in Murray Hill New Jersey it was   here that Bell Labs director Mervin Kelly guided 
the construction of a new home for the lab that   would purposefully encourage interaction between 
its diverse mix of scientists and engineers Kelly   dismissed the standard university style approach 
of housing different departments in different   buildings and instead connected the spaces into 
one contiguous structure joined by long hallways   some so long that when you stood at one end it 
would appear to converge to a vanishing point   is Bell Labs chronicler John gertner notes about 
this design traveling the Hall&amp;#39;s length without   encountering a number of acquaintances problems 
diversions and ideas was almost impossible   a physicist on his way to lunch in the cafeteria 
was like a magnet rolling past iron filings   this strategy mixed with Kelly&amp;#39;s aggressive 
recruitment of some of the world&amp;#39;s best   Minds yielded some of the most concentrated 
innovation in the history of modern civilization   in the decades following the second world war the 
lab produced among other achievements the first   solar cell laser communication satellite cellular 
communication system and fiber optic networking   at the same time their theorists formulated 
both information Theory and coding Theory their   astronomers won the Nobel Prize for empirically 
validating The Big Bang Theory and perhaps most   important of all their physicists invented 
the transistor the theory of serendipitous   creativity in other words seems well justified 
by the historical record the transistor we can   argue with some confidence probably required Bell 
labs and its ability to put solid-state physicists   Quantum theorists and world-class experimentalists 
in one building where they could serendipitously   encounter one another and learn from their varied 
expertise this was an invention unlikely to come   from a lone scientist thinking deeply in the 
academic equivalent of Carl Jung&amp;#39;s Stone Tower   but it&amp;#39;s here that we must Embrace more Nuance in 
understanding what really generated innovation in   sites such as building 20 and Bell labs to do 
so let&amp;#39;s return once again to my own experience   at MIT when I arrived as a new PhD student in 
the fall of 2004 I was a member of the first   incoming class to be housed in the new status 
Center which as mentioned replaced building 20.   because the center was new incoming students 
were given tours that touted its features   Frank Gary we learned arrange the offices 
around common spaces and introduced open   stairwells between adjacent floors all in an 
effort to support the type of serendipitous   encounters that had defined its predecessor 
but what struck me at the time was a feature   that hadn&amp;#39;t occurred to Gary but had been recently 
added at the faculty&amp;#39;s insistence special gaskets   installed into the office door jambs to improve 
sound proofing the professors at MIT some of the   most Innovative technologists in the world wanted 
nothing to do with an open Office style workspace   they instead demanded the ability to close 
themselves off this combination of soundproofed   offices connected to large common areas yields 
a hub and spoke architecture of innovation in   which both serendipitous encounter and isolated 
deep thinking are supported it&amp;#39;s a setup that   straddles a spectrum where on one extreme we find 
the solo thinker isolated from inspiration but   free from distraction and On The Other Extreme we 
find the fully collaborative thinker in an open   Office flush with inspiration but struggling to 
support the deep thinking needed to build on it   if we turn our attention back to building 20 and 
Bell Labs we see that this is the architecture   they deployed as well neither building offered 
anything resembling a modern open Office plan   they were instead constructed using the standard 
layout of private offices connected to Shared   hallways their creative Mojo had more to do with 
the fact that these offices shared a small number   of long connecting spaces forcing researchers to 
interact whenever they needed to travel from one   location to another these Mega hallways in 
other words provided highly effective hubs   we can therefore still dismiss the depth 
destroying open Office concept without   dismissing the innovation-producing 
theory of serendipitous creativity   the key is to maintain both in a hub and spoke 
style Arrangement expose yourself to ideas and   hubs on a regular basis but maintain a spoke 
in which to work deeply on what you encounter   this division of efforts however is not the 
full story as even when one returns to a Spoke   solo work is still not necessarily the best 
strategy consider for example the previously   mentioned invention of the point contact 
transistor at Bell labs this breakthrough   was supported by a large group of researchers 
all with separate Specialties who came together   to form the solid-state physics research group 
a team dedicated to inventing a smaller and more   reliable alternative to the vacuum tube 
this group&amp;#39;s collaborative conversations   were necessary preconditions to the transistor a 
clear example of the usefulness of Hub Behavior   once the research group laid the intellectual 
groundwork for the component The Innovation   process shifted to a Spoke what makes this 
particular Innovation process an interesting   case however is that even when it shifted to 
a spoke it remained collaborative it was two   researchers in particular the experimentalist 
Walter Bratton and the quantum theorist John   bardeen who over a period of one month in 1947 
made the series of breakthroughs that led to   the first working solid-state transistor Bratton 
and bardeen worked together during this period   in a small lab often side by side pushing each 
other toward better and more effective designs   these efforts consisted primarily of deep work 
but a type of deep work we haven&amp;#39;t yet encountered   Bratton would concentrate intensely to engineer an 
experimental design that could exploit bardeen&amp;#39;s   latest theoretical Insight then bardeen would 
concentrate intensely to make sense of what   bratton&amp;#39;s latest experiments revealed trying 
to expand his theoretical framework to match   the observations this back and forth represents a 
collaborative form of deep work common in academic   circles that leverages what I call the Whiteboard 
effect for some types of problems working with   someone else at the proverbial shared whiteboard 
can push you deeper than if you were working alone   the presence of the other party waiting for your 
next Insight be it someone physically in the   same room or collaborating with you virtually can 
short-circuit the natural instinct to avoid depth   we can now step back and draw some practical 
conclusions about the role of collaboration   and deep work the success of building 20 
and Bell Labs indicates that isolation is   not required for productive deep work indeed 
their example indicates that for many types   of work especially when pursuing Innovation 
collaborative deep work can yield better results   this strategy therefore asks that you consider 
this option in contemplating how best to integrate   depth into your professional life in doing so 
however keep the following two guidelines in mind   first distraction remains a destroyer of 
depth therefore the Hub and spoke model   provides a crucial template separate your pursuit 
of serendipitous encounters from your efforts to   think deeply and build on these inspirations you 
should try to optimize each effort separately as   opposed to mixing them together into a sludge that 
impedes both goals second even when you Retreat to   a spoke to think deeply when it&amp;#39;s reasonable to 
leverage the Whiteboard effect do so by working   side by side with someone on a problem you can 
push each other toward deeper levels of depth   and therefore toward the generation of more and 
more valuable output as compared to working alone   when it comes to deep work in other words consider 
the use of collaboration when appropriate as   it can push your results to a new level at 
the same time don&amp;#39;t lionize this quest for   interaction and positive Randomness to the point 
where it crowds Out The Unbroken concentration   ultimately required to ring something useful 
out of the swirl of ideas all around us execute like a business the story has become 
lore in the world of business Consulting   in the mid-1990s Harvard Business School Professor 
Clayton Christensen received a call from Andy   Grove the CEO and chairman of Intel Grove had 
encountered christensen&amp;#39;s research on disruptive   innovation and asked him to fly out to California 
to discuss the Theory&amp;#39;s implications for Intel   on arrival Christensen walked through the basics 
of disruption entrenched companies are often   unexpectedly dethroned by startups that begin with 
cheap offerings at the low end of the market but   then over time improve their cheap products just 
enough to begin to steal high-end market share   Grove recognized that Intel faced this 
threat from low-end processors produced   by upstart companies like AMD and cyrix 
fueled by his Newfound understanding of   disruption Grove devised the strategy that 
led to the Celeron family of processors   a lower performance offering that helped Intel 
successfully fight off the challenges from Below   there is however a lesser-known piece to this 
story as Christensen recalls Grove asked him   during a break in this meeting how do I do 
this Christensen responded with a discussion   of business strategy explaining how Grove 
could set up a new business unit and so on   Grove cut him off with a Gruff reply you are 
such a naive academic I asked you how to do   it and you told me what I should do I know what 
I need to do I just don&amp;#39;t know how to do it as   Christensen later explained this division between 
what and how is crucial but is overlooked in the   professional world it&amp;#39;s often straightforward 
to identify a strategy needed to achieve a goal   but what trips up companies is figuring out 
how to execute the strategy once identified   I came across this story in a forward Christensen 
wrote for a book titled the four disciplines of   execution which built on extensive Consulting 
case studies to describe four disciplines   abbreviated for DX for helping companies 
successfully Implement high-level strategies   what struck me as I read was that this gap between 
what and how was relevant to my personal quest to   spend more time working deeply just as Andy Grove 
had identified the importance of competing in the   low end processor Market I had identified the 
importance of prioritizing depth what I needed   was help figuring out how to execute this strategy 
intrigued by these parallels I set out to adapt   the 4dx framework to my personal work habits and 
ended up surprised by how helpful they proved in   driving me toward effective action on my goal of 
working deeply these ideas may have been forged   for the world of big business but the underlying 
Concepts seemed to apply anywhere that something   important needs to get done against the backdrop 
of many competing obligations and distractions   with this in mind I&amp;#39;ve summarized in the following 
sections the four disciplines of the 4dx framework   and for each I describe how I adapted it to the 
specific concerns of developing a deep work habit   discipline number one focus on the wildly 
important as the authors of the four 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&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;t spark a lot of enthusiasm 
to instead have a specific goal that would return   tangible and substantial professional benefits 
will generate a steadier stream 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&amp;#39;t try to   say no to the trivial distractions you find on 
the information smorgasbord try to say yes to the   subject that arouses a terrifying longing and let 
the terrifying longing crowd out everything else   for example when I first began experimenting 
with 4dx I set the specific important goal of   publishing five high quality peer-reviewed 
papers in the upcoming Academic Year   this goal was ambitious as it was more 
papers than I had been publishing and   there were tangible rewards attached to it 
tenure review was looming combined these two   properties helped the goal Stoke my motivation 
discipline number two act on the lead measures   once you&amp;#39;ve identified a wildly important goal 
you need to measure your success in 4dx there are   two types of metrics for this purpose lag measures 
and Lead measures lag measures describe the thing   you&amp;#39;re ultimately trying to improve for example if 
your goal is to increase customer satisfaction in   your bakery then the relevant lag measure is 
your customer satisfaction scores as the 4dx   authors explain the problem with lag measures is 
that they come too late to change your behavior   when you receive them the performance 
that drove them is already in the past   lead measures on the other hand measure the 
new behaviors that will drive success on the   lag measures in the bakery example a good lead 
measure might be the number of customers who   receive free samples this is a number you can 
directly increase by giving out more samples   as you increase this number your lag measures 
will likely eventually improve as well   in other words lead measures turn your attention 
to improving the behaviors you directly control   in the near future that will then have a positive 
impact on your long-term goals for an individual   focused on deep work it&amp;#39;s easy to identify the 
relevant lead measure time spent in a state of   deep work dedicated toward your wildly important 
goal returning to my example this Insight had an   important impact on how I directed my academic 
research I used to focus on lag measures such as   papers published per year these measures however 
lacked influence on my day-to-day Behavior because   there was nothing I could do in the short term 
that could immediately generate a noticeable   change to this long-term metric when I shifted to 
tracking deep work hours suddenly these measures   became relevant to my day-to-day every hour extra 
of deep work was immediately reflected in my Tally   discipline number three 
keep a compelling scorecard   people play differently when they&amp;#39;re keeping score 
the 4dx authors explain they then elaborate that   when attempting to drive your team&amp;#39;s engagement 
toward your organization&amp;#39;s wildly important   goal it&amp;#39;s important that they have a public 
place to record and track their lead measures   this scoreboard creates a sense of competition 
that drives them to focus on these measures even   when other demands Vie for their attention it 
also provides a reinforcing source of motivation   once the team notices their success with a lead 
measure they become invested in perpetuating   this performance in the preceding discipline I 
argued that for an individual focused on deep   work hours spent working deeply should be the lead 
measure it follows therefore that the individual&amp;#39;s   scoreboard should be a physical artifact in the 
workspace that displays the individual&amp;#39;s current   deep work hour count in my early experiments with 
4dx I settled on a simple but effective solution   for implementing the scorecard I took a piece of 
cardstock and divided it into rows one for each   week of the current semester I then labeled each 
row with the dates of the week and taped it to the   wall next to my computer monitor where it couldn&amp;#39;t 
be ignored as each week progressed I kept track of   the hours spent in deep work that week with a 
simple tally of tick marks in that week&amp;#39;s row   to maximize the motivation generated by the 
scorecard whenever I reached an important   milestone in an academic paper I.E solving a key 
proof I would Circle the tally mark corresponding   to the hour where I finish the result this served 
two purposes first it allowed me to connect at a   visceral level accumulated deep work hours and 
tangible results second it helped calibrate my   expectations for how many hours of deep work 
were needed per result this reality which was   larger than I first assumed helped spermi 
to squeeze more such hours into each week   discipline number four create a Cadence of 
accountability the 4dx authors elaborate that   the final step to help maintain a focus on lead 
measures is to put in place a rhythm of regular   and frequent meetings of any team that owns a 
wildly important goal during these meetings the   team members must confront their scoreboard commit 
to specific actions to help improve the score   before the next meeting and describe what happened 
with the commitments they made at the last meeting   they note that this review can be condensed to 
only a few minutes but it must be regular for   its effect to be felt the authors argue that it&amp;#39;s 
this discipline where execution really happens   for an individual focused on his or her 
own deep work habit there&amp;#39;s likely no team   to meet with but this doesn&amp;#39;t exempt you 
from the need for regular accountability   in multiple places throughout this book I discuss 
and recommend the habit of a weekly review in   which you make a plan for the work week ahead see 
Rule Number Four during my experiments with 4dx I   used a weekly review to look over my scorecard 
to celebrate good weeks help understand what   led to bad weeks and most important figure out 
how to ensure a good score for the days ahead   this led me to adjust my schedule 
to meet the needs of my lead measure   enabling significantly more deep work than 
if I had avoided such reviews altogether the 40x framework is based on the fundamental 
premise that execution is more difficult than   strategizing after hundreds and hundreds 
of case studies its inventors managed to   isolate a few basic disciplines that seem to work 
particularly well in conquering this difficulty   it&amp;#39;s no surprise therefore that these same 
disciplines can have a similar effect on   your personal goal of cultivating a deep work 
habit to conclude let&amp;#39;s return one last time   to my own example as I noted earlier when 
I first embraced 4dx I adopted the goal of   publishing five peer-reviewed papers in the 
2013-2014 Academic Year this was an ambitious   goal given that I had published only four 
papers the previous year a feat I was proud of   throughout this 4dx experiment the clarity of 
this goal coupled with the simple but unavoidable   feedback of my lead measure scorecard pushed 
me to a level of depth I hadn&amp;#39;t before achieved   in retrospect it was not so much the intensity of 
my deep work periods that increased but instead   their regularity whereas I used to Cluster my deep 
thinking near paper submission deadlines The 4dx   Habit kept my mind concentrated throughout the 
full year it ended up I must admit an exhausting   year especially given that I was writing this book 
at the same time but it also turned out to produce   a convincing endorsement for the 4dx framework 
by the summer of 2014 I had nine full papers   accepted for publication more than doubling what 
I had managed to accomplish in any preceding year be lazy in a 2012 article written for a New York 
Times blog the SAS 10 cartoonist Tim Kreider   provided a memorable self-description I am not 
busy I am the laziest ambitious person I know   kreider&amp;#39;s distaste for frenetic work however 
was put to the test in the months leading up to   the writing of his post here&amp;#39;s his description 
of the period I&amp;#39;ve insidiously started because   of professional obligations to become busy every 
morning my inbox was full of emails asking me to   do things I did not want to do or presenting 
me with problems that I now had to solve   his solution he fled to what he calls an 
undisclosed location a place with no TV   and no internet going online requires 
a bike ride to the local library and   where he could remain non-responsive to the 
pinprick onslaught of small obligations that   seem harmless in isolation but aggregate 
to Serious injury to his deep work habit   I&amp;#39;ve remembered about buttercups stink bugs and 
the Stars Kreider says about his Retreat from   activity I read and I&amp;#39;m finally getting some 
real writing done for the first time in months   it&amp;#39;s important for our purposes to recognize that 
Kreider is no Thoreau he didn&amp;#39;t Retreat from the   world of busyness to underscore a complicated 
social critique his move to an undisclosed   location was instead motivated by a surprising but 
practical Insight it made him better at his job   here&amp;#39;s crider&amp;#39;s explanation idleness is not 
just a vacation an Indulgence or a vice it   is as indispensable to the brain as Vitamin D 
is to the body and deprived of it we suffer a   mental Affliction as disfiguring as rickets it is 
paradoxically necessary to getting any work done   when Kreider talks of getting work done of course 
he&amp;#39;s not referencing shallow tasks for the most   part the more time you can spend immersed in 
Shallow work the more of it that gets accomplished   as a writer and artist however Kreider is instead 
concerned with deep work the serious efforts that   produce things the world values these efforts he&amp;#39;s 
convinced need the support of a mind regularly   released to leisure this strategy argues that 
you should follow kreider&amp;#39;s lead by injecting   regular and substantial freedom from professional 
concerns into your day providing you with the   idleness paradoxically required to get deep work 
done there are many ways to accomplish this goal   you could for example use kreider&amp;#39;s approach 
of retreating from the world of shallow   tasks altogether by hiding out in an undisclosed 
location but this isn&amp;#39;t practical for most people   instead I want to suggest a more applicable but 
still quite powerful heuristic at the end of the   workday shut down your consideration of work 
issues until the next morning no after dinner   email check no mental replays of conversations and 
no scheming about how you&amp;#39;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 to 
encounter kreider&amp;#39;s Buttercup stink bugs and stars   before describing some tactics that 
support this strategy I want to First   explore why a shutdown will be profitable 
to your ability to produce valuable output   we have of course Tim kreider&amp;#39;s personal 
endorsement but it&amp;#39;s worth taking the   time to also understand the science behind 
the value of downtime a closer examination   of this literature reveals the following 
three possible explanations for this value   reason number one downtime AIDS insights 
consider the following excerpt from a 2006   paper that appeared in the journal science the 
scientific literature has emphasized the benefits   of conscious deliberation in decision making for 
hundreds of years the question addressed here is   whether this view is Justified we hypothesize 
that it is not lurking in this Bland statement   is a bold claim the authors of this study led 
by the Dutch psychologist app Dexter house set   out to prove that some decisions are better 
left to your unconscious mind to untangle   in other words to actively try to work through 
these decisions will lead to a worse outcome   than loading up the relevant information and 
then moving on to something else while letting   the subconscious layers of your mind mull things 
over Dexter House&amp;#39;s team isolated this effect by   giving subjects the information needed for 
a complex decision regarding a car purchase   half the subjects were told to Think Through 
the information and then make the best decision   the other half were distracted by easy puzzles 
after they read the information and were then   put on the spot to make a decision without 
having had time to consciously deliberate   the distracted group ended up performing better 
observations from experiments such as this one LED   Dexter house and his collaborators to introduce 
unconscious thought Theory utt an attempt to   understand the different roles conscious and 
unconscious deliberation play in decision making   at a high level this theory proposes that for 
decisions that require the application of strict   rules the conscious mind must be involved for 
example if you need to do a math calculation   only your conscious mind is able to follow the 
precise arithmetic rules needed for correctness   on the other hand for decisions that involve 
large amounts of information and multiple vague   and perhaps even conflicting constraints 
your unconscious mind is well suited to   tackle the issue utt hypothesizes that this 
is due to the fact that these regions of your   brain have more neuronal bandwidth available 
allowing them to move around more information   and sift through more potential Solutions 
than your conscious centers of thinking your   conscious mind according to this theory is like 
a home computer on which you can run carefully   written programs that return correct answers 
to limited problems whereas your unconscious   mind is like Google&amp;#39;s vast data centers in 
which statistical algorithms sift through   terabytes of unstructured information teasing out 
surprising useful solutions to difficult questions   the implication of this line of research is 
that providing your conscious brain time to   rest enables your unconscious mind to take a shift 
sorting through your most challenging professional   challenges a shutdown habit therefore is not 
necessarily reducing the amount of time you&amp;#39;re   engaged in productive work but is instead 
diversifying the type of work you deploy   reason number two downtime helps 
recharge the energy needed to work deeply   a frequently cited 2008 paper appearing in the 
journal&amp;#39;s psychological science describes a   simple experiment subjects were split into two 
groups one group was asked to take a walk on a   Wooded Path in an arboretum near the Ann Arbor 
Michigan campus where the study was conducted   the other group was sent on a walk through the 
bustling center of the city both groups were then   given a concentration sapping task called backward 
digit span the core finding of the study is that   the nature group performed up to 20 percent 
better on the task the nature Advantage still   held the next week when the researchers brought 
back the same subjects and switched the locations   it wasn&amp;#39;t the people who determined performance 
but whether or not they got a chance to prepare by   walking through the woods this study it turns out 
is one of many that validate attention restoration   Theory art which claims that spending time in 
nature can improve your ability to concentrate   this Theory which was first proposed in the 
1980s by the University of Michigan psychologists   Rachel Kaplan and Stephen Kaplan the latter 
of which co-authored the 2008 study discussed   here along with Mark Berman and John Unitas 
is based on the concept of attention fatigue   to concentrate requires what art calls directed 
attention this resource is finite if you exhaust   it you&amp;#39;ll struggle to concentrate for our purposes 
we can think of this Resource as the same thing as   baumeister&amp;#39;s limited willpower reserves we 
discussed in the introduction to this rule   the 2008 study argues that walking on busy city 
streets requires you to use directed attention   as you must navigate complicated tasks like 
figuring out when to cross a street to not   get run over or when to maneuver around the 
slow group of tourists blocking the sidewalk   after just 50 minutes of this focused navigation 
the subject store of directed attention was low   walking through Nature by contrast 
exposes you to what lead author Mark   Berman calls inherently fascinating 
stimuli using sunsets as an example   these stimuli invoke attention modestly allowing 
focused attention mechanisms a chance to replenish   put another way when walking through nature you&amp;#39;re 
freed from having to direct your attention is   there a few challenges to navigate like crowded 
Street Crossings and experience enough interesting   stimuli to keep your mind sufficiently occupied 
to avoid the need to actively aim your attention   this state allows your directed 
attention resources time to replenish   after 50 minutes of such replenishment the 
subjects enjoyed a boost in their concentration   you might of course argue that perhaps being 
outside watching a sunset puts people in a   good mood and being in a good mood is what really 
helps performance on these tasks but in a sadistic   twist the researchers debunked that hypothesis by 
repeating the experiment in the harsh Ann Arbor   winter walking outside in brutal cold conditions 
didn&amp;#39;t put the subjects in a good mood but they   still ended up doing better on concentration tasks 
what&amp;#39;s important to our purpose is observing that   the implications of art expand beyond the benefits 
of nature the core mechanism of this theory is the   idea that you can restore your ability to direct 
your attention if you give this activity a rest   walking in nature provides such a mental respite 
but so too can any number of relaxing activities   so long as they provide similar inherently 
fascinating stimuli and freedom from directed   concentration having a casual conversation with 
a friend listening to music while making dinner   playing a game with your kids going for a 
run the types of activities that will fill   your time in the evening if you enforce a work 
shutdown play the same attention restoring role   as walking in nature but on the other hand if 
you keep interrupting your evening to check and   respond to email or put aside a few hours after 
dinner to catch up on an approaching deadline   you&amp;#39;re robbing your directed attention centers of 
the uninterrupted rest they need for restoration   even if these work dashes consume only a 
small amount of time they prevent you from   reaching the levels of deeper relaxation 
in which attention restoration could occur   only the confidence that you&amp;#39;re done with work 
until the next day can convince your brain to   downshift to the level where it can begin to 
recharge for the next day to follow put another   way trying to squeeze a little more work out of 
your evenings might reduce your Effectiveness   the next day enough that you end up getting less 
done than if you had instead respected a shutdown   reason number three the work that evening 
downtime replaces is usually not that important   the final argument for maintaining a clear 
endpoint to your work day requires us to   return briefly to Anders Ericsson the 
inventor of deliberate practice theory   as you might recall from part one deliberate 
practice is the systematic stretching of   your ability for a given skill it is the 
activity required to get better at something   deep work and deliberate practice as I&amp;#39;ve argued 
overlap substantially for our purposes here we can   use deliberate practice as a general purpose 
stand-in for cognitively demanding efforts   in Erickson&amp;#39;s seminal 1993 paper on the topic 
titled the role of deliberate practice in the   acquisition of expert performance he dedicates 
a section to reviewing what the research   literature reveals about an individual&amp;#39;s 
capacity for cognitively demanding work   Ericsson notes that for a novice somewhere around 
an hour a day of intense concentration seems to   be a limit while for experts this number can 
expand to as many as four hours but rarely more   one of the studies cited for example catalogs the 
practice habits of a group of elite violin players   training at Berlin&amp;#39;s University this study found 
the elite players average around three and a half   hours per day in a state of deliberate practice 
usually separated into two distinct periods   the less accomplished players spent less time in 
a state of depth the implication of these results   is that your capacity for deep work in a given day 
is limited if you&amp;#39;re careful about your schedule   using for example the type of productivity 
strategies described in rule number four you   should hit your daily deep work capacity during 
your work day it follows therefore that by evening   you&amp;#39;re beyond the point where you can continue 
to effectively work deeply any work you do fit   into the night therefore won&amp;#39;t be the type of high 
value activities that really Advance your career   your efforts will instead likely be confined 
to low value shallow tasks executed at a slow   low energy pace by deferring evening work in other 
words you&amp;#39;re not missing out on much of importance the three reasons just described support the 
general strategy of maintaining a strict endpoint   to your workday let&amp;#39;s conclude by filling 
in some details concerning implementation   to succeed with this strategy you must first 
accept the commitment that once your workday   shuts down you cannot allow even the smallest 
incursion of professional concerns into your field   of attention this includes crucially checking 
email as well as browsing work-related websites   in both cases even a brief intrusion of work can 
generate a self-reinforcing stream of distraction   that impedes the shutdown advantages described 
earlier for a long time to follow most people   are familiar for example with the experience 
of glancing at an alarming email on a Saturday   morning and then having its implications haunt 
your thoughts for the rest of the weekend   another key commitment for succeeding with this 
strategy is to support your commitment by shutting   down with a strict shutdown ritual that you 
use at the end of the workday to maximize the   probability that you succeed in more detail this 
ritual should ensure that every incomplete task   goal or project has been reviewed and that for 
each you have confirmed that either one you have   a plan you trust for its completion or two it&amp;#39;s 
captured in a place where it will be Revisited   when the time is right the process should be an 
algorithm a series of steps you always conduct   one after another when you&amp;#39;re done have a set 
phrase you say that indicates completion to   end my own ritual I say shut down complete this 
final step sounds cheesy but it provides a simple   cue to your mind that it&amp;#39;s safe to release 
work-related thoughts for the rest of the day   to make this suggestion more concrete let me walk 
through the steps of my own shutdown ritual which   I first developed around the time I was writing 
my doctoral dissertation and have deployed in   one form or another ever since the first thing 
I do is take a final look at my email inbox to   ensure that there&amp;#39;s nothing requiring an Urgent 
Response before the day ends the next thing I   do is transfer any new tasks that are on my 
mind or were scribbled down earlier in the   day into my official task lists I use Google 
Docs for storing my task lists as I like the   ability to access them from any computer but 
the technology here isn&amp;#39;t really relevant   once I have these task lists open I quickly skim 
every task in every list and then look at the next   few days on my calendar these two actions ensure 
that there&amp;#39;s nothing urgent I&amp;#39;m forgetting or any   important deadlines or appointments sneaking up on 
me I have at this point reviewed everything that&amp;#39;s   on my professional plate to end the ritual I use 
this information to make a rough plan for the   next day once the plan is created I say shut down 
complete and my work thoughts are done for the day   the concept of a shutdown ritual might at first 
seem extreme but there&amp;#39;s a good reason for it   the zigarnik effect this effect which is named 
for the experimental work of the early 20th   century psychologist Bloom is a garnik describes 
the ability of incomplete tasks to dominate our   attention it tells us that if you simply stop 
whatever you&amp;#39;re doing at 5 pm and declare I&amp;#39;m done   with work until tomorrow you&amp;#39;ll likely struggle 
to keep your mind clear of professional issues   as the many obligations left unresolved in your 
mind will as in bloom is the garnix experiments   keep battling for your attention throughout 
the evening a battle that they&amp;#39;ll often win   at first this challenge might seem unresolvable 
as any busy knowledge worker can attest there   are always tasks left incomplete the idea that you 
can ever reach a point where all your obligations   are handled is a fantasy fortunately we don&amp;#39;t 
need to complete a task to get it off our minds   writing to our rescue in this matter is 
our friend from earlier in the rule the   psychologist Roy Baumeister who wrote a paper with 
EJ massacampo playfully titled consider it done   in this study the two researchers began by 
replicating the zagarnik effect in their   subjects in this case the researchers assigned a 
task and then cruelly engineered interruptions but   then found that they could significantly reduce 
the effects impact by asking the subject soon   after the interruption to make a plan for how 
they would later complete the incomplete task   to quote the paper committing to a specific plan 
for a goal May therefore not only facilitate   attainment of the goal but may also free cognitive 
resources for other Pursuits the shutdown ritual   described earlier leverages this tactic to battle 
the zagarnik effect while it doesn&amp;#39;t force you to   explicitly identify a plan for every single task 
in your task list a burdensome requirement it does   force you to capture every task in a common list 
and then review these tasks before making a plan   for the next day this ritual ensures that no task 
will be forgotten each will be reviewed daily and   tackled when the time is appropriate your mind 
in other words is released from its duty to keep   track of these obligations at every moment your 
shutdown ritual has taken over that responsibility   shutdown rituals can become annoying as they 
add an extra 10 to 15 minutes to the end of   your workday and sometimes even more but they&amp;#39;re 
necessary for reaping the rewards of systematic   idleness summarized previously from my experience 
it should take a week or two before the shutdown   habit sticks that is until your mind trusts 
your ritual enough to actually begin to release   work-related thoughts in the evening but once 
it does stick the ritual will become a permanent   fixture in your life to the point that skipping 
the routine will fill you with a sense of unease   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&amp;#39;re done be 
done your average email response time might   suffer some but you&amp;#39;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 rule number two Embrace boredom to better 
understand how one Masters the art of deep   work I suggest visiting the knesses Israel 
synagogue in Spring Valley New York at 6 a.m   on a weekday morning if you do you&amp;#39;ll likely 
find at least 20 cars in the parking lot   inside you&amp;#39;ll encounter a couple dozen members of 
the congregation working over texts some might be   reading silently mouthing the words of an ancient 
language While others are paired together debating   at one end of the room a rabbi will be 
leading a larger group in a discussion   this early morning gathering in Spring 
Valley represents just a small fraction   of the hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Jews who 
will wake up early that morning as they do every   weekday morning to practice a central tenet of 
their faith to spend time every day studying the   complex written traditions of rabbinic Judaism 
I was introduced to This World by Adam Marlin   a member of the knesses Israel congregation and 
one of the regulars at its morning study group   as Marlin explained to me his goal with this 
practice is to decipher one talmud page each   day though he sometimes fails to make it even 
this far often working with a shivruda study   partner to push his understanding closer to his 
cognitive limit what interests me about Marlin   is not his knowledge of ancient texts but instead 
the type of effort required to gain this knowledge   when I interviewed him he emphasized the 
mental intensity of his morning ritual   it&amp;#39;s an extreme and serious discipline consisting 
mostly of the deep work stuff you write about   he explained I run a growing business but 
this is often the hardest brain strain I do   this strain is not unique to Marlin but is 
instead ingrained in the practice as his   Rabbi once explained to him you cannot consider 
yourself as fulfilling this daily obligation   unless you have stretched to the reaches of 
your mental capacity unlike many Orthodox   Jews Marlin came late to his faith not starting 
his rigorous talmud training until his twenties   this bit of trivia proves useful to our purposes 
because it allows Marlin a clear before and   after comparison concerning the impact of these 
mental calisthenics and the results surprised him   though Marlin was exceptionally well educated when 
he began the practice he holds three different ivy   league degrees he soon met fellow adherents who 
had only ever attended small religious schools   but could still dance intellectual circles around 
him a number of these people are highly successful   professionally he explained to me but it wasn&amp;#39;t 
some fancy school that pushed their intellect   higher it became clear it was instead their daily 
study that started as early as the fifth grade   after a while Marlon began to notice positive 
changes in his own ability to think deeply   I&amp;#39;ve recently been making more highly creative 
insights in my business life he told me I&amp;#39;m   convinced it&amp;#39;s related to this daily mental 
practice this consistent strain has built my   mental muscle over years and years this was not 
the goal when I started but it is the effect Adam Marlin&amp;#39;s experience underscores an important 
reality about deep work the ability to concentrate   intensely is a skill that must be trained this 
idea might sound obvious once it&amp;#39;s pointed out but   it represents a departure from how most people 
understand such matters in my experience it&amp;#39;s   common to treat undistracted concentration as a 
habit like flossing something that you know how   to do and know is good for you but that you&amp;#39;ve 
been neglecting due to a lack of motivation   this mindset is appealing because it implies you 
can transform your working life from distracted to   focused overnight if you can simply muster enough 
motivation but this understanding ignores the   difficulty of focus and the hours of practice 
necessary to strengthen your mental muscle   the creative insights that Adam Marlin now 
experiences in his professional life in other   words have little to do with a one-time decision 
to think deeper and much to do with the commitment   to training this ability early every morning there 
is however an important corollary to this idea   efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if 
you don&amp;#39;t simultaneously wean your mind from a   dependence on distraction much in the same way 
that athletes must take care of their bodies   outside of their training sessions you&amp;#39;ll struggle 
to achieve the deepest levels of concentration   if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the 
slightest hint of boredom we can find evidence   for this claim in the research of Clifford nass 
the late Stanford Communications Professor who   is well known for his study of behavior in the 
digital age among other insights NASA&amp;#39;s research   revealed that constant attention switching online 
has a lasting negative effect on your brain here&amp;#39;s   Nas summarizing these findings in a 2010 interview 
with NPR&amp;#39;s iraflato so we have scales that allow   us to divide up people into people who multitask 
all the time and people who rarely do and the   differences are remarkable people who multitask 
all the time can&amp;#39;t filter out irrelevancy   they can&amp;#39;t manage a working memory they&amp;#39;re 
chronically distracted they initiate much larger   parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the 
task at hand they&amp;#39;re pretty much mental wrecks at   this point flato asks Nas whether the chronically 
distracted recognized this rewiring of their brain   the people we talk with continually said Look What 
I really have to concentrate I turn off everything   and I am laser focused and unfortunately they&amp;#39;ve 
developed habits of mind that make it impossible   for them to be laser focused they&amp;#39;re suckers 
for irrelevancy they just can&amp;#39;t keep on task   once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand 
distraction Mass discovered it&amp;#39;s hard to shake the   addiction even when you want to concentrate 
to put this more concretely if every moment   of potential boredom in your life say having 
to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in   a restaurant until a friend arrives is relieved 
with a quick glance at your smartphone then your   brain has likely been rewired to a point where 
like the mental wrecks in NASA&amp;#39;s research it&amp;#39;s   not ready for deep work even if you regularly 
schedule time to practice this concentration rule number one taught you how to integrate 
deep work into your schedule and support it   with routines and rituals designed to help 
you consistently reach the current limit   of your concentration ability rule number two 
will help you significantly improve this limit   the strategies that follow are motivated by the 
key idea that getting the most out of your deep   work habit requires training and is clarified 
previously this training must address two goals   improving your ability to concentrate intensely 
and overcoming your desire for distraction   these strategies cover a variety of 
approaches from quarantining distraction   to mastering a special form of meditation 
that combine to provide a practical roadmap   for your journey from a mind wrecked by 
constant distraction and unfamiliar with   concentration to an instrument that 
truly does deliver laser-like Focus don&amp;#39;t take breaks from distraction 
instead take breaks from Focus   many assume that they can switch between a state 
of distraction and one of concentration as needed   but as I just argued this assumption is optimistic 
once you&amp;#39;re wired for distraction you crave it   motivated by this reality this strategy is 
designed to help you rewire your brain to a   configuration better suited to staying on task 
before diving into the details let&amp;#39;s start by   considering a popular suggestion for distraction 
addiction that doesn&amp;#39;t quite solve our problem   the internet Sabbath sometimes called a digital 
detox in its basic form this ritual asks you   to put aside regular time typically one day a 
week where you refrain from Network Technology   in the same way that the Sabbath in the Hebrew 
Bible induces a period of quiet and reflection   well suited to appreciate God and His works 
the internet Sabbath is meant to remind you of   what you miss when you are glued to a screen it&amp;#39;s 
unclear who first introduced the internet Sabbath   concept but credit for popularizing the idea 
often goes to the journalist William Powers who   promoted the practice in his 2010 reflection on 
technology and human happiness Hamlet&amp;#39;s BlackBerry   his powers later summarizes in an interview 
do what the row did which is learn to have a   little disconnectedness within the connected world 
don&amp;#39;t run away a lot of advice for the problem of   distraction follows this General template of 
finding occasional time to get away from the   clatter some put aside one or two months a year 
to escape these tethers others follow Powers one   day a week advice While others put aside an hour 
or two every day for the same purpose all forms   of this advice provide some benefit but once we 
see the distraction problem in terms of brain   wiring it becomes clear that an internet Sabbath 
cannot by itself cure a distracted brain if you   eat healthy just one day a week you&amp;#39;re unlikely to 
lose weight as the majority of your time is still   spent gorging similarly if you spend just one day 
a week resisting distraction you&amp;#39;re unlikely to   diminish your brain&amp;#39;s craving for these stimuli 
as most of your time is still spent giving into it   I propose an alternative to the internet Sabbath 
instead of scheduling the occasional break from   distractions so you can focus you should instead 
schedule the occasional break from Focus to give   in to distraction to make this suggestion more 
concrete let&amp;#39;s make the simplifying assumption   that internet use is synonymous with seeking 
distracting stimuli you can of course use   the internet in a way that&amp;#39;s focused and deep but 
for a distraction addict this is a difficult task   similarly let&amp;#39;s consider working in the absence 
of the internet to be synonymous with more focused   work you can of course find ways to be distracted 
without a network connection but these tend to be   easier to resist with these rough categorizations 
established the strategy works as follows   schedule in advance when you&amp;#39;ll use the internet 
and then avoid it all together outside these times   I suggest that you keep a notepad 
near your computer at work   on this pad record the next time you&amp;#39;re 
allowed to use the internet until you   arrive at that time absolutely no network 
connectivity is allowed no matter how tempting   the idea motivating this strategy is that the use 
of a distracting service does not by itself reduce   your brain&amp;#39;s ability to focus it&amp;#39;s instead the 
constant switching from low stimuli high value   activities to high stimuli low value activities 
at the slightest hint of boredom or cognitive   challenge that teaches your mind to never tolerate 
an absence of novelty this constant switching can   be understood analogously as weakening the 
mental muscles responsible for organizing   the many sources vying for your attention by 
segregating internet use and therefore segregating   distractions you&amp;#39;re minimizing the number of times 
you give in to distraction and by doing so you let   these attention-selecting muscles strengthen for 
example if you&amp;#39;ve scheduled your next internet   block 30 minutes from the current moment 
and you&amp;#39;re beginning to feel bored and crave   distraction the next 30 minutes of resistance 
become a session of concentration calisthenics   a full day of scheduled distraction therefore 
becomes a full day of similar mental training   while the basic idea behind this strategy is 
straightforward putting it into practice can   be tricky to help you succeed here are three 
important points to consider Point number one   this strategy works even if your job requires 
lots of internet use and or prompt email replies   if you&amp;#39;re required to spend hours every day 
online or answer emails quickly that&amp;#39;s fine   this simply means that your internet blocks will 
be more numerous than those of someone whose job   requires less connectivity the total number 
or duration of your internet blocks doesn&amp;#39;t   matter nearly as much is making sure that the 
Integrity of your offline blocks remains intact   imagine for example that over a two hour 
period between meetings you must schedule   an email check every 15 minutes further 
imagine that these checks require on average   five minutes it&amp;#39;s sufficient therefore 
to schedule an internet block every 15   minutes through this two hour stretch with the 
rest of the time dedicated to offline blocks   in this example you&amp;#39;ll end up spending around 
90 minutes out of this two hour period in a   state where you&amp;#39;re offline and actively resisting 
distraction this works out to be a large amount   of concentration training that&amp;#39;s achieved without 
requiring you to sacrifice too much connectivity   Point number two regardless of how you 
schedule your internet blocks you must   keep the time outside these blocks 
absolutely free from internet use   this objective is easy to state in principle but 
quickly becomes tricky in the messy reality of   the standard workday an inevitable issue you&amp;#39;ll 
face when executing this strategy is realizing   early on in an offline block that there&amp;#39;s some 
crucial piece of information online that you need   to retrieve to continue making progress on your 
current task if your next internet block doesn&amp;#39;t   start for a while you might end up stuck the 
Temptation in this situation is to quickly give   in look up the information then return to your 
offline block you must resist this temptation   the internet is seductive you may think you&amp;#39;re 
just retrieving a single key email from your   inbox but you&amp;#39;ll find it hard not to glance at the 
other urgent messages that have recently arrived   it doesn&amp;#39;t take many of these exceptions before 
your mind begins to treat the barrier between   internet and offline blocks as permeable 
diminishing the benefits of this strategy   it&amp;#39;s crucial in this situation therefore that 
you don&amp;#39;t immediately abandon an offline block   even when stuck if it&amp;#39;s possible switch to another 
offline activity for the remainder of the current   block or perhaps even fill in this time relaxing 
if this is infeasible perhaps you need to get the   current offline activity done promptly then the 
correct response is to change your schedule so   that your next internet block begins sooner 
the key in making this change however is to   not schedule the next internet block to occur 
immediately instead enforce at least a five   minute gap between the current moment and the 
next time you can go online this Gap is minor   so it won&amp;#39;t excessively impede your progress but 
from a behavioralist perspective it&amp;#39;s substantial   because it separates the sensation of wanting to 
go online from the reward of actually doing so Point number three scheduling internet use at 
home as well as at work can further improve your   concentration training if you find yourself glued 
to a smartphone or laptop throughout your evenings   and weekends then it&amp;#39;s likely that your behavior 
outside of work is undoing many of your attempts   during the work day to rewire your brain which 
makes little distinction between the two settings   in this case I would suggest that you maintain 
the strategy of scheduling internet use even   after the workday is over to simplify matters 
when scheduling internet use after work you can   allow time-sensitive communication into your 
offline blocks I.E texting with a friend to   agree on where you&amp;#39;ll meet for dinner as well as 
time sensitive information retrieval I.E looking   up the location of the restaurant on your phone 
outside of these pragmatic exceptions however   when in an offline block put your phone away 
ignore texts and refrain from internet usage   as in the workplace variation of the strategy 
if the internet plays a large and important   role in your evening entertainment that&amp;#39;s 
fine schedule lots of long internet blocks   the key here isn&amp;#39;t to avoid or even to reduce 
the total amount of time you spend engaging in   distracting Behavior but is instead to give 
yourself plenty of opportunities throughout   your evening to resist switching to these 
distractions at the slightest hint of boredom   one place where this strategy becomes particularly 
difficult outside work is when you&amp;#39;re forced to   wait for example standing in line at a store 
it&amp;#39;s crucial in these situations that if you&amp;#39;re   in an offline block you simply gird yourself 
for the temporary boredom and fight through   it with only the company of your thoughts to 
Simply wait and be bored has become a novel   experience in Modern Life but from the perspective 
of concentration training it&amp;#39;s incredibly valuable to summarize to succeed with deep work you must 
rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting   distracting stimuli this doesn&amp;#39;t mean that 
you have to eliminate distracting behaviors   it&amp;#39;s sufficient that you instead eliminate the 
ability of such behaviors to hijack your attention   the simple strategy proposed here 
of scheduling internet blocks goes   a long way toward helping you 
regain this attention autonomy work like Teddy Roosevelt if you attended Harvard 
College during the 1876-1877 school year you would   have likely noticed a wiry mutton-chopped Brash 
and impossibly energetic freshman named Theodore   Roosevelt if you then proceeded to befriend this 
young man you would have soon noticed a paradox   on the one hand his attention might appear to 
be hopelessly scattered spread over what one   classmate called an amazing array of interests 
a list that biographer Edmund Morris catalogs   to contain boxing wrestling bodybuilding dance 
lessons poetry readings and the continuation   of a lifelong obsession with naturalism 
Roosevelt&amp;#39;s landlord on Winthrop Street   was not pleased with her young tenants tendency 
to dissect and stuff specimens in his rented room   this latter interest developed to the point 
that Roosevelt published his first book The   Summer birds of the Adirondacks in 
the summer after his freshman year   it was well received in the bulletin of the nuttal 
ornithological club a publication needless to say   which takes bird books quite seriously and was 
good enough to lead Morris to assess Roosevelt at   this young age to be one of the most knowledgeable 
young naturalists in the United States   to support this extracurricular exuberance 
Roosevelt had to severely restrict the time   left available for what should have been 
his primary focus his studies at Harvard   Morris used Roosevelt&amp;#39;s diary and letters 
from this period to estimate that the future   president was spending no more than a quarter 
of the typical day studying one might expect   therefore that Roosevelt&amp;#39;s grades would crater 
but they didn&amp;#39;t he wasn&amp;#39;t the top student in his   class but he certainly didn&amp;#39;t struggle either 
in his freshman year he earned honor grades in   five out of his seven courses the explanation for 
this Roosevelt Paradox turns out to be his unique   approach to tackling this schoolwork Roosevelt 
would begin his scheduling by considering the   eight hours from 8 30 a.m to 4 30 pm he would 
then remove the time spent in recitation and   classes his athletic training which was once a 
day and lunch the fragments that remained were   then considered time dedicated exclusively 
to studying as noted these fragments didn&amp;#39;t   usually add up to a large number of total hours 
but he would get the most out of them by working   only on schoolwork during these periods and doing 
so with a blistering intensity the amount of time   he spent at his desk was comparatively small 
explained Morris but his concentration was so   intense and his reading so rapid that he could 
afford more time off from school work than most this strategy asks you to inject the occasional 
dash of roosevelty and intensity into your own   workday in particular identify a deep task 
that is something that requires deep work   to complete that&amp;#39;s high on your priority list 
estimate how long you&amp;#39;d normally put aside for   an obligation of this type then give yourself a 
hard deadline that drastically reduces this time   if possible commit publicly to the deadline 
for example by telling the person expecting   the finished project when they should expect 
it if this isn&amp;#39;t possible or if it puts your   job in Jeopardy then motivate yourself by setting 
a countdown timer on your phone and propping it   up where you can&amp;#39;t avoid seeing it as you work 
at this point there should be only one possible   way to get the Deep task done in time working with 
great intensity no email breaks no daydreaming no   Facebook browsing no repeated trips to the coffee 
machine like Roosevelt at Harvard attacked the   task with every free neuron until it gives way 
under your unwavering barrage of concentration   try this experiment no more than once a week at 
First giving your brain practice with intensity   but also giving it and your stress levels time to 
rest in between once you feel confident in your   ability to trade concentration for completion 
time increase the frequency of these Roosevelt   dashes remember however to always keep yourself 
imposed deadlines right at the edge of feasibility   you should be able to consistently beat the buzzer 
or at least be close but to do so should require   teeth gritting concentration the main motivation 
for this strategy is straightforward deep work   requires levels of concentration well beyond 
where most knowledge workers are comfortable   Roosevelt Dash&amp;#39;s leverage artificial deadlines to 
help you systematically increase the level you can   regularly achieve providing in some sense interval 
training for the attention centers of your brain   an additional benefit is that these dashes are 
incompatible with distraction there&amp;#39;s no way   you can give in to distraction and still make 
your deadlines therefore every completed Dash   provides a session in which you&amp;#39;re potentially 
bored and really want to seek more novel stimuli   but you resist as argued in the previous strategy 
the more you practice resisting such urges the   easier such resistance becomes after a few months 
of deploying this strategy your understanding of   what it means to focus will likely be transformed 
as you reach levels of intensity stronger than   anything you&amp;#39;ve experienced before and if 
you&amp;#39;re anything like a young Roosevelt you   can then repurpose the extra free time it 
generates toward the finer Pleasures in life   like trying to impress the always Discerning 
members of the nuttal ornithological club meditate productively during the two years I 
spent as a postdoctoral associate at MIT my wife   and I lived in a small but Charming apartment 
on Pinckney Street in historic Beacon Hill   though I lived in Boston and worked in 
Cambridge the two locations were close   only a mile apart sitting on opposite 
banks of the Charles River intent on   staying fit even during the long and dark New 
England winter I decided to take advantage of   this proximity by traveling between home and 
work to the greatest extent possible on foot   my routine had me walk to campus in the morning 
crossing the Longfellow bridge in all weather   the city it turns out to my dismay is often slow 
to shovel The Pedestrian path after snowstorms   around lunch I would change into running gear and 
run back home on a longer path that followed the   banks of the Charles Crossing at the Massachusetts 
Avenue Bridge after a quick lunch and shower at   home I would typically take the subway across the 
river on the way back to campus saving perhaps a   third of a mile on the track and then walk home 
when the work day was done in other words I spent   a lot of time on my feet during this period 
it was this reality that led me to develop   the practice that I&amp;#39;ll now suggest you adopt in 
your own deep work training productive meditation   the goal of productive meditation is to take 
a period in which you&amp;#39;re occupied physically   but not mentally walking jogging driving 
showering and focus your attention on a   single well-defined professional problem depending 
on your profession this problem might be outlining   an article writing a talk making progress on a 
proof or attempting to sharpen a business strategy   as in mindfulness meditation you must continue 
to bring your attention back to the problem at   hand when it wanders or stalls I used to 
practice productive meditation in at least   one of my daily Cross River treks while living 
in Boston and as I improved so did my results   I ended up for example working out the chapter 
outlines for a significant portion of my last   book while on foot and made progress on many 
naughty technical problems in my academic research   I suggest that you adopt a productive 
meditation practice in your own life   you don&amp;#39;t necessarily need a serious session every 
day but your goal should be to participate in at   least two or three such sessions in a typical week 
fortunately finding time for this strategy is easy   as it takes advantage of periods that would 
otherwise be wasted such as walking the dog or   commuting to work and if Done Right can actually 
increase your professional productivity instead of   taking time away from your work in fact you might 
even consider scheduling a walk during your work   day specifically for the purpose of applying 
productive meditation to your most pressing   problem at the moment I&amp;#39;m not however suggesting 
this practice for its productivity benefits though   they&amp;#39;re nice I&amp;#39;m instead interested in its ability 
to rapidly improve your ability to think deeply   in my experience productive meditation Builds 
on both of the key ideas introduced at the   beginning of this rule by forcing you to resist 
distraction and return your attention repeatedly   to a well-defined problem it helps strengthen 
your distraction resisting muscles and by forcing   you to push your focus deeper and deeper on a 
single problem it sharpens your concentration   to succeed with productive meditation it&amp;#39;s 
important to recognize that like any form   of meditation it requires practice to do well 
when I first attempted this strategy back in   the early weeks of my post-doc I found myself 
hopelessly distracted ending long stretches of   thinking with little new to show for my efforts 
it took me a dozen or so sessions before I began   to experience Real Results you should expect 
something similar so patience will be necessary   to help accelerate this ramp up process however 
I have two specific suggestions to offer suggestion number one be wary of distractions and 
looping as a novice when you begin a productive   meditation session your mind&amp;#39;s First Act 
of rebellion will be to offer unrelated   but seemingly more interesting thoughts my mind 
for example was often successful at derailing my   attention by beginning to compose an email that I 
knew I needed to write objectively speaking this   train of thoughts sounds exceedingly dull but in 
the moment it can become impossibly tantalizing   when you notice your attention slipping away from 
the problem at hand gently remind yourself that   you can return to that thought later then 
redirect your attention back distraction   of this type in many ways is the obvious enemy to 
defeat in developing a productive meditation habit   a subtler but equally effective adversary is 
looping when faced with a hard problem your   mind as it was evolved to do will attempt to avoid 
excess expenditure of energy when possible one way   it might attempt to sidestep this expenditure 
is by avoiding diving deeper into the problem   by instead looping over and over again on what you 
already know about it for example when working on   a proof my mind has a tendency to rehash simple 
preliminary results again and again to avoid the   harder work of building on these results toward 
the needed solution you must be on your guard   for looping as it can quickly subvert an entire 
productive meditation session when you notice it   remark to yourself that you seem to be in a loop 
then redirect your attention toward the next step suggestion number two structure your deep 
thinking thinking deeply about a problem   seems like a self-evident activity but in reality 
it&amp;#39;s not when faced with a distraction-free mental   landscape a hard problem and time to think the 
next steps can become surprisingly non-obvious   in my experience it helps to have some 
structure for this deep thinking process   I suggest starting with a careful review of the 
relevant variables for solving the problem and   then storing these values in your working memory 
for example if you&amp;#39;re working on the outline for   a book chapter the relevant variables might be 
the main points you want to make in the chapter   if you&amp;#39;re instead trying to solve a mathematics 
proof these variables might be actual variables   or assumptions or lemmas once the relevant 
variables are identified Define the specific   Next Step question you need to answer using 
these variables in the book chapter example   this next step question might be how am I going to 
effectively open this chapter and for a proof it   might be what can go wrong if I don&amp;#39;t assume this 
property holds with the relevant variables stored   and the next step question identified you now 
have a specific Target for your attention assuming   you&amp;#39;re able to solve your next step question 
the final step of this structured approach   to deep thinking is to consolidate your gains 
by reviewing clearly the answer you identified   at this point you can push yourself to the next 
level of depth by starting the process over   this cycle of reviewing and storing variables 
identifying and tackling The Next Step question   then consolidating your gains is like an intense 
workout routine for your concentration ability   it will help you get more out of your 
productive meditation sessions and   accelerate the pace at which you 
improve your ability to go deep memorize a deck of cards given just five minutes 
Daniel kilov can memorize any of the following a   shuffled deck of cards a string of 100 random 
digits or 115 abstract shapes this last feat   establishing an Australian National Record 
it shouldn&amp;#39;t be surprising therefore that   kilov recently won back-to-back silver medals 
in the Australian memory championships what   is perhaps surprising given kilov&amp;#39;s history 
is that he ended up a mental athlete at all   I wasn&amp;#39;t born with an exceptional memory kilov 
told me indeed during high school he considered   himself forgetful and disorganized he also 
struggled academically and was eventually   diagnosed with attention deficit disorder it was 
after a chance encounter with tonsil Ali one of   the country&amp;#39;s most successful and visible memory 
Champions the kilov began to seriously train his   memory by the time he earned his college degree 
he had won his first national competition medal   this transformation into a world-class mental 
athlete was rapid but not unprecedented   in 2006 the American Science writer Joshua IV 
won the USA memory Championship after only a   year of intense training a journey he chronicled 
in his 2011 bestseller Moon walking with Einstein   but what&amp;#39;s important to us about key Love&amp;#39;s 
story is what happened to his academic   performance during this period of intensive 
memory development while training his brain   he went from a struggling student with attention 
deficit disorder to graduating from a demanding   Australian University with first-class honors 
he was soon accepted into the PHD program at   one of the country&amp;#39;s top universities where he 
currently studies under a renowned philosopher   one explanation for this transformation comes 
from research led by Henry rodiger who runs the   memory Lab at the University of Washington at St 
Louis in 2014 rodiger and his collaborators sent   a team equipped with a battery of cognitive tests 
to the extreme memory tournament held in San Diego   they wanted to understand what differentiated 
these Elite memorizers from the population at   Large we found that one of the biggest differences 
between memory athletes and the rest of us is in a   cognitive ability that&amp;#39;s not a direct measure 
of memory at all but of attention explained   rodiger in a New York Times blog post the 
ability in question is called attentional   control and it measures the subject&amp;#39;s ability 
to maintain their focus on essential information   a side effect of memory training in other 
words is an improvement in your general   ability to concentrate this ability can then be 
fruitfully applied to any task demanding deep work   Daniel kilov we can therefore conjecture didn&amp;#39;t 
become a star student because of his award-winning   memory it was instead his quest to improve this 
memory that incidentally gave him the Deep work   Edge needed to thrive academically the strategy 
described here asks you to replicate a key piece   of kilov&amp;#39;s training and therefore gain some 
of the same improvements to your concentration   in particular it asks you to learn a 
standard but quite impressive skill in   the repertoire of most mental athletes the 
ability to memorize a shuffled deck of cards the technique for card memorization I&amp;#39;ll teach 
you comes from someone who knows quite a bit   about this particular challenge Ron White a 
former USA memory Champion and World Record   holder in card memorization the first thing 
white emphasizes is that professional memory   athletes never attempt rote memorization that is 
where you simply look at information again and   again repeating it in your head this approach to 
retention though popular among burned out students   misunderstands how our brains work we&amp;#39;re not 
wired to quickly internalize abstract information   we are however really good at remembering 
scenes think back to a recent memorable event   in your life perhaps attending the opening 
session of a conference or meeting a friend   you haven&amp;#39;t seen in a while for a drink try 
to picture the scene as clearly as possible   most people in this scenario can conjure a 
surprisingly Vivid recollection of the event   even though you made no special effort to remember 
it at the time if you systematically counted the   unique details in this memory the total number 
of items would likely be surprisingly numerous   your mind in other words can quickly 
retain lots of detailed information if   it&amp;#39;s stored in the right way Ron White&amp;#39;s card 
memorization technique Builds on this insight   to prepare for this high volume memorization task 
white recommends that you begin by cementing in   your mind the mental image of walking through 
five rooms in your home perhaps you come in the   door walk through your front hallway then turn 
into the downstairs bathroom walk out the door   and enter the guest bedroom walk into the kitchen 
and then head down the stairs into your basement   in each room conjure a clear image of what you see 
once you can easily recall this mental walkthrough   of a well-known location fix in your mind a 
collection of 10 items in each of these rooms   white recommends that these items be large and 
therefore more memorable like a desk not a pencil   next establish an order in which you look at each 
of these items in each room for example in the   front hallway you might look at the entry mat then 
shoes on the floor by the mat then the bench above   the shoes and so on combined this is only 50 items 
so add two more items perhaps in your backyard to   get to the full 52 items you&amp;#39;ll later need when 
connecting these images to all the cards in a   standard deck practice this mental exercise of 
walking through the rooms and looking at items in   each room in a set order you should find that this 
type of memorization because it&amp;#39;s based on visual   images of familiar places and things will be much 
easier than the rote memorizing you might remember   from your school days the second step in preparing 
to memorize a deck of cards is to associate a   memorable person or thing with each of the 52 
possible cards to make this process easier try   to maintain some logical association between the 
card and the corresponding image white provides   the example of associating Donald Trump with 
the King of Diamonds as diamonds signify wealth   practice these associations until you can pull 
a card randomly from the deck and immediately   recall the associated image as before the use 
of memorable visual images and associations will   simplify the task of forming these connections the 
two steps mentioned previously are Advanced steps   things you do just once and can then leverage 
again and again in memorizing specific decks   once these steps are done you&amp;#39;re ready for the 
main event memorizing as quickly as possible the   order of 52 cards in a freshly shuffled deck the 
method here is straightforward begin your mental   walkthrough of your house as you encounter each 
item look at the next card from the shuffled deck   and imagine the corresponding memorable person 
or thing doing something memorable near that item   for example if the first item in location is 
the mat in your front entry and the first card   is the King of Diamonds you might picture Donald 
Trump wiping mud off of his expensive loafers on   the entry mat in your front hallway proceed 
carefully through the rooms associating the   proper mental images with objects in the proper 
order after you complete a room you might want   to walk through it a few times in a row to lock in 
the imagery once you&amp;#39;re done you&amp;#39;re ready to hand   the deck to a friend and Amaze him by rattling 
off the cards in order without peaking to do so   of course simply requires that you perform the 
mental walkthrough one more time connecting each   memorable person or thing to its corresponding 
card as you turn your attention to it if you practice this technique you&amp;#39;ll discover 
like many mental athletes who came before you   that you can eventually internalize a whole 
deck in just minutes more important than your   ability to impress friends of course is the 
training such activities provide your mind   proceeding through the steps described 
earlier requires that you focus your   attention again and again on a clear Target 
like a muscle responding to weights this will   strengthen your general ability to concentrate 
allowing you to go deeper with more ease it&amp;#39;s   worth emphasizing however the obvious point that 
there&amp;#39;s nothing special about card memorization   any structured thought process that requires 
unwavering attention can have a similar effect be   it studying the talmud like Adam Marlin from rule 
number two&amp;#39;s introduction or practicing productive   meditation or trying to learn the guitar 
part of a song by ear a past favorite of mine   if card memorization seems weird to you in 
other words then choose a replacement that   makes similar cognitive requirements the key to 
this strategy is not the specifics but instead the   motivating idea that your ability to concentrate 
is only as strong as your commitment to train it rule number three quit social media in 2013 
author and digital media consultant baratunde   Thurston launched an experiment he decided to 
disconnect from his online life for 25 days no   Facebook no Twitter No Foursquare a service 
that awarded him mayor of the year in 2011.   not even email he needed the break Thurston who is 
described by friends as the most connected man in   the world had by his own count participated 
in more than 59 000 Gmail conversations and   posted 1500 times on his Facebook wall 
in the year leading up to his experiment   I was burnt out fried done toast he explained 
we know about thurston&amp;#39;s experiment because   he wrote about it in a cover article for Fast 
Company magazine ironically titled hashtag unplug   as Thurston reveals in the article it didn&amp;#39;t 
take long to adjust to a disconnected life   by the end of that first week the quiet 
rhythm of my days seemed far less strange   he said I was less stressed about not 
knowing new things I felt that I still   existed despite not having shared documentary 
evidence of set existence on the internet   Thurston struck up conversations with strangers he 
enjoyed food without Instagram in the experience   he bought a bike turns out it&amp;#39;s easier to 
ride the thing when you&amp;#39;re not trying to   simultaneously check your Twitter the end came too 
soon Thurston lamented but he had startups to run   and books to Market so after the 25 days passed 
he reluctantly reactivated his online presence   thurston&amp;#39;s experiment neatly summarizes 
two important points about our culture&amp;#39;s   current relationship with social networks like 
Facebook Twitter and Instagram and infotainment   sites like Business Insider and BuzzFeed two 
categories of online distraction that I will   collectively call Network Tools in the sections 
ahead the first point is that we increasingly   recognize that these tools fragment our time and 
reduce our ability to concentrate this reality   no longer generates much debate we all feel it 
this is a real problem for many different people   but the problem is especially dire if you&amp;#39;re 
attempting to improve your ability to work deeply   in the preceding rule for example I described 
several strategies to help you sharpen your focus   these efforts will become significantly more 
difficult if you simultaneously behave like   a pre-experiment baritunde Thurston allowing 
your life outside such training to remain a   distracted blur of apps and browser tabs willpower 
is limited and therefore the more enticing tools   you have pulling at your attention the harder 
it&amp;#39;ll be to maintain focus on something important   to master the art of deep work therefore you must 
take back control of your time and attention from   the many diversions that attempt to steal them 
before we begin fighting back against these   distractions however we must better understand 
the battlefield this brings me to the second   important Point summarized by baritunde thurston&amp;#39;s 
story The impotence with which knowledge workers   currently discuss this problem of Network Tools 
and attention overwhelmed by these tools demands   on his time Thurston felt that his only option 
was to temporarily quit the internet altogether   this idea that a drastic internet sabbatical 
is the only alternative to the distraction   generated by social media and infotainment has 
increasingly pervaded our cultural conversation   the problem with this binary response to this 
issue is that these two choices are much too   crude to be useful the notion that you would quit 
the internet is of course an overstuffed straw   man infeasible for most unless you&amp;#39;re a journalist 
writing a piece about distraction no one is meant   to actually follow baritunde thurston&amp;#39;s lead and 
this reality provides justification for remaining   with the only offered alternative accepting 
our current distracted State as inevitable   for all the insight and Clarity that Thurston 
gained during his internet sabbatical for example   it didn&amp;#39;t take him long once the experiment ended 
to slide back into the fragmented state where he   began on the day when I first started writing 
this chapter which fell only six months after   thurston&amp;#39;s article originally appeared in Fast 
Company the reformed connector had already sent   a dozen Tweets in the few hours since he woke up 
this rule attempts to break us out of this rut by   proposing a third option accepting that these 
tools are not inherently evil and that some of   them might be quite vital to your success and 
happiness but at the same time also accepting   that the threshold for allowing a site regular 
access to your time and attention not to mention   personal data should be much more stringent and 
that most people should therefore be using many   fewer such tools I won&amp;#39;t ask you in other words 
to quit the internet altogether like baratunde   Thurston did for 25 days back in 2013 but I 
will ask you to reject the state of distracted   hyper-connectedness that drove him to that drastic 
experiment in the first place there is a middle   ground and if you are interested in developing 
a deep work habit you must fight to get there our first step toward finding this middle ground 
and network tool selection is to understand the   current default decision process deployed by most 
internet users in the fall of 2013 I received   insight into this process because of an article 
I wrote explaining why I never joined Facebook   though the piece was meant to be explanatory and 
not accusatory it nonetheless put many readers   on the defensive leading them to reply with 
justifications for their use of the service   here are some examples of these justifications 
entertainment was my initial draw to Facebook   I can see what my friends are up to and 
post funny photos make quick comments   when I first joined I didn&amp;#39;t know why by mere 
curiosity I joined a forum of short fiction   stories once there I improved my writing and made 
very good friends I use Facebook because a lot of   people I knew in high school are on there here&amp;#39;s 
what strikes me about these responses which are   representative of the large amount of feedback I 
received on this topic they&amp;#39;re surprisingly minor   I don&amp;#39;t doubt for example that the first commenter 
from this list finds some entertainment in using   Facebook but I would also assume that this 
person wasn&amp;#39;t suffering some severe deficit   of entertainment options before he or she signed 
up for the service I would further wager that this   user would succeed in staving off boredom even 
if the service were suddenly shut down Facebook   at best added one more arguably quite mediocre 
entertainment option to many that already existed   another commenter cited making friends in 
a writing Forum I don&amp;#39;t doubt the existence   of these friends but we can assume that these 
friendships are lightweight given that they&amp;#39;re   based on sending short messages back and forth 
over a computer network there&amp;#39;s nothing wrong with   such lightweight friendships but they&amp;#39;re unlikely 
to be at the center of this user&amp;#39;s social life   something similar can be said about the commenter 
who reconnected with high school friends this is   a nice diversion but hardly something Central to 
his or her sense of social connection or happiness   to be clear I&amp;#39;m not trying to denigrate 
the benefits identified previously there&amp;#39;s   nothing illusory or misguided about them what 
I&amp;#39;m emphasizing however is that these benefits   are minor and somewhat random by contrast if 
you&amp;#39;d instead ask someone to justify the use   of say the World Wide Web more generally or email 
the arguments would become much more concrete and   compelling to this observation you might reply 
that value is value if you can find some extra   benefit in using a service like Facebook even if 
it&amp;#39;s small then why not use it I call this way of   thinking the any benefit mindset as it identifies 
any possible benefit as sufficient justification   for using a network tool in more detail the 
any benefit approach to network tool selection   you&amp;#39;re justified in using a network 
tool if you can identify any possible   benefit to its use or anything you might 
possibly miss out on if you don&amp;#39;t use it   the problem with this approach of course is 
that it ignores all the negatives that come   along with the tools in question these services 
are engineered to be addictive robbing time and   detention from activities that more directly 
support your professional and personal goals   such as deep work eventually if you use these 
tools enough you&amp;#39;ll arrive at the state of burned   out hyper-distracted connectivity that plagued 
baritunde Thurston and millions of others like him   it&amp;#39;s here that we encounter the true 
Insidious nature of an any benefit mindset   the use of Network Tools can be harmful if 
you don&amp;#39;t attempt to weigh Pros against cons   but instead use any glimpse of some potential 
benefit as justification for unrestrained use   of a tool then you are unwittingly crippling your 
ability to succeed in the world of knowledge work   this conclusion if considered objectively 
shouldn&amp;#39;t be surprising in the context of   Network Tools we&amp;#39;ve become comfortable with the 
any benefit mindset but if we instead zoom out and   consider this mindset in the broader context 
of skilled labor it suddenly seems a bizarre   and a historical approach to choosing Tools in 
other words once you put aside the Revolutionary   rhetoric surrounding all things internet the 
sense summarized in part one that you&amp;#39;re either   fully committed to the revolution or a Luddite 
curmudgeon you&amp;#39;ll soon realize that Network Tools   are not exceptional they&amp;#39;re tools no different 
from a blacksmith&amp;#39;s hammer or an artist&amp;#39;s   brush used by skilled laborers to do their jobs 
better and occasionally to enhance their leisure   throughout history skilled laborers have applied 
sophistication and skepticism to their encounters   with new tools and their decisions about whether 
to adopt them there&amp;#39;s no reason why knowledge   workers cannot do the same when it comes to 
the internet the fact that the skilled labor   here now involves digital bits doesn&amp;#39;t change this 
reality to help understand what this more careful   tool curation might look like it makes sense to 
start by talking to someone who makes a living   working with non-digital tools and relies on a 
complex relationship with these tools to succeed   fortunately for our purposes I found just 
such an individual in a lanky English major   turned successful sustainable farmer 
named almost two aptly Forest Pritchard   Forrest Pritchard runs Smith Meadows a 
family farm located an hour west of DC   one of many farms clustered in The 
Valleys of the Blue Ridge Mountains   soon after taking control of the land from his 
parents as I learned Pritchard moved the operation   away from traditional monoculture crops and toward 
the then novel concept of grass-finished meat the   farm bypasses wholesaling you cannot find Smith 
Meadows steaks and Whole Foods to sell direct to   Consumers at the bustling farmers markets in the 
Washington DC metro area by all accounts the farm   is thriving in an industry that rarely rewards 
small operations I first encountered Pritchard at   our local farmers market in Tacoma Park Maryland 
where the Smith Meadows stand does good business   to see Pritchard usually standing a foot taller 
than most of his suburbanite customers wearing   the obligatory faded flannel of the farmer 
is to see a Craftsman confident in his trade   I introduced myself to him because farming is a 
skill dependent on the careful management of tools   and I wanted to understand how a Craftsman in a 
non-digital field approaches this crucial task   haymaking is a good example he told me not 
long into one of our conversations on the   topic it&amp;#39;s a subject where I can give you 
the basic idea without having to gloss over   the underlying economics when Pritchard took 
over Smith Meadows he explained the farm made   its own hay to use this animal feed during 
the winter months when grazing is impossible   haymaking is done with a piece of equipment 
called a hay baler a device you pull behind   a tractor that compresses and binds dried grass 
into bales if you raise animals on the East Coast   there&amp;#39;s an obvious reason to own and operate a 
hay baler your animals need hay why spend money   to buy in feed when you have perfectly good 
grass growing for free right in your own soil   if a farmer subscribed to the any benefit 
approach used by knowledge workers therefore   he would definitely buy a hay baler but as 
Pritchard explained to me after preemptively   apologizing for a moment of snark if a farmer 
actually adopted such a simplistic mindset I&amp;#39;d   be counting the days until the force sale goes up 
on the property Pritchard like most practitioners   of his trade instead deploys a more sophisticated 
thought process when assessing tools and after   applying this process to the hay baler Pritchard 
was quick to sell it Smith Meadows now purchases   all the hay it uses here&amp;#39;s why let&amp;#39;s start by 
exploring the costs of making hay Pritchard said   first there&amp;#39;s the actual cost of fuel and repairs 
and the shed to keep the baler you also have to   pay taxes on it these directly measurable costs 
however were the easy part of his decision   it was instead the opportunity costs that required 
more attention as he elaborated if I make hay all   summer I can&amp;#39;t be doing something else for example 
I now use that time instead to raise boilers   chickens meant for eating these generate positive 
cash flow because I can sell them but they also   produce manure which I can then use to enhance 
my soil then there&amp;#39;s the equally subtle issue of   assessing the secondary value of a purchased bale 
of hay as Pritchard explained when I&amp;#39;m buying in   Hay I&amp;#39;m trading cash for animal protein as 
well as manure once it passes through the   animal system which means I&amp;#39;m also getting more 
nutrients from my land in exchange for my money   I&amp;#39;m also avoiding compacting soils by driving 
heavy machinery over my ground All Summer Long   when making his final decision on the Baler 
Pritchard moved past the direct monetary costs   which were essentially Awash and instead shifted 
his attention to the more nuanced issue of the   long-term health of his fields for the reasons 
described previously Pritchard concluded that   buying in Hay results in healthier fields and 
is he summarized soil fertility is my Baseline   by this calculation the Baler had to go notice 
the complexity of pritchard&amp;#39;s tool decision this   complexity underscores an important reality the 
notion that identifying some benefit is sufficient   to invest money time and attention in a tool is 
near laughable to people in his trade of course   a hay baler offers benefits every tool at the farm 
supply store has something useful to offer at the   same time of course it offers negatives as well 
Pritchard expected this decision to be nuanced   he began with a clear Baseline in his case that 
soil health is a fundamental importance to his   professional success and then built off this 
Foundation toward a final call on whether to   use a particular tool I propose that if you&amp;#39;re 
a knowledge worker especially one interested   in cultivating a deep work habit you should treat 
your tool selection with the same level of care as   other skilled workers such as farmers following is 
my attempt to generalize this assessment strategy   I call it the Craftsman approach to Tool selection 
a name that emphasizes that tools are ultimately   aids to the larger goals of one&amp;#39;s craft the 
Craftsman approach to Tool selection identify the   core factors that determine success and happiness 
in your professional and personal life adopt a   tool only if its positive impacts on these factors 
substantially outweigh its negative impacts   notice that this Craftsman approach to 
Tool selection stands in opposition to   the any benefit approach whereas the any benefit 
mindset identifies any potential positive impact   as justification for using a tool the Craftsman 
variant requires that these positive impacts   affect factors at the core of what&amp;#39;s important 
to you and that they outweigh the negatives   even though the Craftsman approach rejects 
the Simplicity of the any benefit approach it   doesn&amp;#39;t ignore the benefits that currently 
drive people to network tools or make any   advanced proclamations about what&amp;#39;s good or 
bad technology it simply asks that you give   any particular Network tool the same type 
of measured nuanced accounting that Tools   in other trades have been subjected to 
throughout the history of skilled labor the three strategies that follow in this 
rule are designed to grow your comfort   with abandoning the any benefit mindset 
and instead applying the more thoughtful   Craftsman philosophy in curating the tools 
that lay claim to your time and attention   this guidance is important because the Craftsman 
approach is not cut and dry identifying what   matters most in your life and then attempting 
to assess the impacts of various tools on   these factors doesn&amp;#39;t reduce to a simple formula 
this task requires practice and experimentation   the strategies that follow provide some structure 
for this practice and experimentation by forcing   you to reconsider your Network Tools from many 
different angles combined they should help you   cultivate a more sophisticated relationship with 
your tools that will allow you to take back enough   control over your time and attention to enable 
the rest of the ideas in part two to succeed apply the law of the vital 
few to your internet habits   Malcolm Gladwell doesn&amp;#39;t use Twitter in a 2013 
interview he explained why who says my fans want   to hear from me on Twitter he then joked I know 
a lot of people would like to see less of me   Michael Lewis another Mega best-selling author 
also doesn&amp;#39;t use the service explaining in The   Wire I don&amp;#39;t tweet I don&amp;#39;t Twitter I couldn&amp;#39;t 
even tell you how to read or where to find a   Twitter message and is mentioned in part one the 
award-winning New Yorker scribe George Packer also   avoids the service and indeed only recently even 
succumbed to the necessity of owning a smartphone   these three writers don&amp;#39;t think Twitter is useless 
they&amp;#39;re quick to accept that other writers find it   useful Packers admission of non-twitter use in 
fact was written as a response to an unabashedly   pro-twitter article by the New York Times media 
critic David Carr a piece in which Carr effused   and now nearly a year later has Twitter turned 
my brain to Mush no I&amp;#39;m in narrative on more   things in a given moment than I ever thought 
possible and instead of spending a half hour   surfing in search of Illumination I get 
a sense of the day&amp;#39;s news and how people   are reacting to it in the time that it 
takes to wait for coffee at Starbucks at the same time however Gladwell Lewis and 
Packer don&amp;#39;t feel like the service offers   them nearly enough advantages to offset its 
negatives in their particular circumstances   Lewis for example worries that adding more 
accessibility will sap his energy and reduce his   ability to research and write great stories noting 
it&amp;#39;s amazing how overly accessible people are   there&amp;#39;s a lot of communication in my life 
that&amp;#39;s not enriching it&amp;#39;s impoverishing   while Packer for his part worries about 
distraction saying Twitter is crack for   media addicts he goes so far as to describe 
Carr&amp;#39;s Rave about the service as the most   frightening picture of the future that I&amp;#39;ve read 
thus far in the new decade we don&amp;#39;t have to argue   about whether these authors are right in their 
personal decisions to avoid Twitter and similar   tools because their sales numbers and awards speak 
for themselves we can instead use these decisions   as a courageous illustration of the Craftsman 
approach to Tool selection in action in a time   when so many knowledge workers and especially 
those in Creative fields are still trapped in the   any benefit mindset it&amp;#39;s refreshing to see a more 
mature approach to sorting through such services   but the very rareness of these examples reminds 
us that mature and confident assessments of this   type aren&amp;#39;t easy to make recall the complexity 
of the thought process highlighted earlier that   Forest Pritchard had to slog through to 
make a decision on his hay baler for many   knowledge workers and many of the tools in their 
lives these decisions will be equally complex   the goal of this strategy therefore is to 
offer some structure to this thought process   a way to reduce some of the complexity of 
deciding which tools really matter to you the first step of this strategy is to identify the 
main high-level goals in both your professional   and your personal life if you have a family for 
example then your personal goals might involve   parenting well and running an organized household 
in the professional sphere the details of these   goals depend on what you do for a living 
in my own work as a professor for example   I pursue two important goals one centered on 
being an Effective Teacher in the classroom   and effective mentor to my graduate students and 
another centered on being an effective researcher   while your goals will likely differ the key is to 
keep the list limited to what&amp;#39;s most important and   to keep the descriptions suitably high level if 
your goal includes a specific Target to reach a   million dollars in sales or to publish a half 
dozen papers in a single year then it&amp;#39;s too   specific for our purposes here when you&amp;#39;re done 
you should have a small number of goals for both   the personal and professional areas of your 
life once you&amp;#39;ve identified these goals list   for each the two or three most important 
activities that help you satisfy the goal   these activities should be specific enough 
to allow you to clearly picture doing them   on the other hand they should be General enough 
that they&amp;#39;re not tied to a one-time outcome   for example do better research is too general 
what does it look like to be doing better research   well finish paper on broadcast lower bounds in 
time for upcoming conference submission is too   specific it&amp;#39;s a one-time outcome a good activity 
in this context would be something like regularly   read and understand The Cutting Edge results in 
my field the next step in this strategy is to   consider the Network Tools you currently use for 
each such tool go through the Key activities you   identified and ask whether the use of the tool has 
a substantially positive impact a substantially   negative impact or little impact on your regular 
and successful participation in the activity   now comes the important decision keep using 
this tool only if you concluded that it has   substantial positive impacts and that 
these outweigh the negative impacts   to help illustrate this strategy in action 
let&amp;#39;s consider a case study for the purposes   of this example assume that Michael Lewis if 
asked would have produced The Following goal   and corresponding important activities for 
his writing career professional goal to craft   well-written narrative driven stories that change 
the way people understand the world Key activities   supporting this goal research patiently 
and deeply write carefully and with purpose   now imagine that Lewis was using this goal 
to determine whether or not to use Twitter   our strategy requires him to investigate 
Twitter&amp;#39;s impact on the Key activities he listed   that support his goal there&amp;#39;s no convincing way to 
argue that Twitter would make Lewis substantially   better at either of these activities deep research 
for Lewis I assume requires him to spend weeks and   months getting to know a small number of sources 
he&amp;#39;s a master of the long-form journalism skill of   drawing out a source of story over many sessions 
and careful writing of course requires freedom   from distraction in both cases Twitter at best has 
no real impact and at worst could be substantially   negative depending on Lewis&amp;#39;s susceptibility 
to the services addictive attributes   the conclusion would therefore be 
that Lewis shouldn&amp;#39;t use Twitter   you might argue at this point that confining 
our example to this single goal is artificial   as it ignores the areas where a service like 
Twitter has its best chance of contributing   for writers in particular Twitter is often 
presented as a tool to establish connections with   your audience that ultimately lead to more sales 
for a writer like Michael Lewis however marketing   doesn&amp;#39;t likely Merit its own goal when he 
assesses what&amp;#39;s important in his professional life   this follows because his reputation guarantees 
that he will receive massive coverage in   massively influential media channels if the book 
is really good his Focus therefore is much more   productively applied to the goal of writing the 
best possible book then instead trying to squeeze   out a few extra sales through inefficient author 
driven means in other words the question is not   whether Twitter has some conceivable benefit 
to Lewis it&amp;#39;s instead whether Twitter used   significantly and positively affects the most 
important activities in his professional life   what about a less famous writer in this case book 
marketing might play a more primary role in his or   her goals but when forced to identify the two or 
three most important activities supporting this   goal it&amp;#39;s unlikely that the type of lightweight 
one-on-one contact enabled by Twitter would make   the list this is the result of simple math imagine 
that our hypothetical author diligently sends 10   individualized tweets a day five days a week 
Each of which connects one-on-one with a new   potential reader now imagine that 50 of the 
people contacted in this manner become loyal   fans who will definitely buy the author&amp;#39;s next 
book over the two-year period it might take to   write this book this yields 2 000 sales a 
modest boost at Best in a marketplace where   best seller status requires two or three times 
more sales per week the question once again is   not whether Twitter offers some benefits but 
instead whether it offers enough benefits to   offset its drag on your time and attention two 
resources that are especially valuable to a writer   having seen an example of this approach 
applied to a professional context let&amp;#39;s   next consider the potentially more disruptive 
setting of personal goals in particular let&amp;#39;s   apply this approach to one of our culture&amp;#39;s most 
ubiquitous and fiercely defended tools Facebook   when justifying the use of Facebook or similar 
social networks most people cite its importance   to their social lives with this in mind let&amp;#39;s 
apply our strategy to understand whether   Facebook makes the cut due to its positive 
impact on this aspect of our personal goals   to do so we&amp;#39;ll once again work with a hypothetical 
goal and key supporting activities personal goal   to maintain close and rewarding friendships 
with a group of people who are important to me   Key activities supporting this goal one regularly 
take the time for meaningful connection with those   who are most important to me eg a long talk 
a meal joint activity two give of myself to   those who are most important to me EG making 
non-trivial sacrifices that improve their lives   not everyone will share this exact goal or 
supporting activities but hopefully you&amp;#39;ll   stipulate that they apply to many people let&amp;#39;s now 
step back and apply our strategies filtering logic   to the example of Facebook in the context of this 
personal goal this service of course offers any   number of benefits to your social life to name 
a few that are often mentioned it allows you to   catch up with people you haven&amp;#39;t seen in a while 
it allows you to maintain lightweight contact with   people you know but don&amp;#39;t run into regularly 
it allows you to more easily monitor important   events in people&amp;#39;s lives such as whether or not 
they&amp;#39;re married or what their new baby looks   like and it allows you to stumble onto online 
communities or groups that match your interests   these are real benefits that Facebook undeniably 
offers but none of these benefits provide a   significant positive impact to the two Key 
activities we listed both of which are offline   and effort intensive our strategy therefore would 
return a perhaps surprising but clear conclusion   of course Facebook offers benefits to your social 
life but none are important enough to what really   matters to you in this area to justify giving it 
access to your time and attention to be clear I&amp;#39;m   not arguing that everyone should stop using 
Facebook I&amp;#39;m instead showing that for this   specific representative case study the strategy 
proposed here would suggest dropping this service   I can&amp;#39;t imagine however other plausible scenarios 
that would lead to the opposite conclusion   consider for example a college freshman for 
someone in this situation it might be more   important to establish new friendships than to 
support existing relationships the activities   this student identifies for supporting his 
goal of a thriving social life therefore might   include something like attend lots of events 
and socialize with lots of different people   if this is a key activity and you&amp;#39;re on a 
college campus then a tool like Facebook   would have a substantially positive impact and 
should be used to give another example consider   someone in the military who&amp;#39;s deployed overseas 
for this hypothetical Soldier keeping infrequent   lightweight touch with friends and family left 
back home is a plausible priority and one that   might once again be best supported through 
social networks which should be clear from   these examples is that this strategy if applied 
as described will lead many people who currently   use tools like Facebook or Twitter to abandon 
them but not everyone you might at this point   complain about the arbitrariness of allowing 
only a small number of activities to dominate   your decisions about such tools as we established 
previously for example Facebook has many benefits   to your social life why would one abandon it 
just because it doesn&amp;#39;t happen to help the   small number of activities that we judged most 
important what&amp;#39;s key to understand here however   is that this radical reduction of priorities 
is not arbitrary but is instead motivated by   an idea that has arisen repeatedly in any number 
of different fields from client profitability to   social equality to prevention of crashes in 
computer programs the law of the vital few   in many settings eighty percent of a given effect 
is due to just 20 percent of the possible causes   for example it might be the case that 80 percent 
of a business&amp;#39;s profits come from just 20 percent   of its clients eighty percent of a nation&amp;#39;s wealth 
is held by its richest 20 percent of citizens   or eighty percent of computer software crashes 
come from just 20 percent of the identified bugs   there&amp;#39;s a formal mathematical underpinning to 
this phenomenon an 80 20 split is roughly what   you would expect when describing a power law 
distribution over impact a type of distribution   that shows up often when measuring quantities in 
the real world but it&amp;#39;s probably most useful when   applied heuristically as a reminder that in many 
cases contributions to an outcome are not evenly   distributed moving forward let&amp;#39;s assume that this 
law holds for the important goals in your life   as we noted many different activities can 
contribute to your achieving these goals the law   of the vital few however reminds us that the most 
important 20 or so of these activities provide   the bulk of the benefit assuming that you could 
probably list somewhere between 10 and 15 distinct   and potentially beneficial activities for each of 
your life goals this law says that it&amp;#39;s the top   two or three such activities the number that this 
strategy asks you to focus on that make most of   the difference in whether or not you succeed with 
the goal even if you accept this result however   you still might argue that you shouldn&amp;#39;t ignore 
the other eighty percent of possible beneficial   activities it&amp;#39;s true that these less important 
activities don&amp;#39;t contribute nearly as much to your   goal as your top one or two but they can provide 
some benefit so why not keep them in the mix   as long as you don&amp;#39;t ignore the more important 
activities it seems like it can&amp;#39;t hurt to also   support some of the less important alternatives 
this argument however misses the key point that   all activities regardless of their importance 
consume your same Limited store of time and   attention if you service low impact activities 
therefore you&amp;#39;re taking away time you could be   spending on higher impact activities it&amp;#39;s a 
zero-sum game and because your time returns   substantially more rewards when invested in high 
impact activities than when invested in low impact   activities the more of it you shift to the latter 
the lower your overall benefit the business World   understands this map this is why it&amp;#39;s not uncommon 
to see a company fire unproductive clients   if eighty percent of their profits come from 20 
percent of their clients then they make more money   by redirecting the energy from low Revenue clients 
to better service the small number of lucrative   contracts each hour spent on the latter returns 
more Revenue than each hour spent on the former   the same holds true for your professional and 
personal goals by taking the time consumed by   low impact activities like finding old friends 
on Facebook and reinvesting it in high impact   activities like taking a good friend out to lunch 
you end up more successful in your goal to abandon   a network tool using this logic therefore is not 
to miss out on its potential small benefits but is   instead to get more out of the activities 
you already know to yield large benefits   to return to where we started for Malcolm Gladwell 
Michael Lewis and George Packer Twitter doesn&amp;#39;t   support the 20 of activities that generate the 
bulk of the success in their writing careers even   though in isolation this service might return some 
minor benefits when their careers are viewed as   a whole they&amp;#39;re likely more successful not using 
Twitter and redirecting that time to more fruitful   activities than if they added it into their 
schedule as one more thing to manage you should   take the same care in deciding which tools you 
allow to claim your own limited time and attention quit social media when Ryan Nicodemus decided to 
simplify his life one of his first targets was   his possessions at the time Ryan lived alone in a 
spacious three-bedroom condo for years driven by a   consumerist impulse he had been trying his best to 
fill this ample space now it was time to reclaim   his life from his stuff the strategy he deployed 
was simple to describe but radical in concept   he spent an afternoon packing everything he owned 
into cardboard boxes as if he was about to move   in order to transform what he described as 
a difficult undertaking into something less   onerous he called it a packing party explaining 
everything&amp;#39;s more exciting when it&amp;#39;s a party right   once the packing was done Nicodemus then spent 
the next week going through his normal routine   if he needed something that was packed he 
would unpack it and put it back where it   used to go at the end of the week he noticed 
that the vast majority of his stuff remained   untouched in its boxes so he got rid of it stuff 
accumulates in people&amp;#39;s lives in part because   when faced with a specific Act of elimination 
it&amp;#39;s easy to worry what if I need this one day   and then use this worry as an excuse to 
keep the item in question sitting around   nicodemus&amp;#39;s packing party provided him 
with definitive evidence that most of his   stuff was not something he needed and it 
therefore supported his quest to simplify the last strategy provided a systematic method 
to help you begin sorting through the Network   Tools the currently lay claim to your time and 
attention this strategy offers you a different   but complementary approach to these same issues 
and it&amp;#39;s inspired by Ryan nicodemus&amp;#39;s approach   to getting rid of his useless stuff in more 
detail this strategy asks that you perform the   equivalent of a packing party on the social media 
services that you currently use instead of packing   however you&amp;#39;ll instead ban yourself from using 
them for 30 days all of them Facebook Instagram   Google Plus Twitter Snapchat Vine or whatever 
other services have risen to popularity since I   first wrote these words don&amp;#39;t formally deactivate 
these services and this is important don&amp;#39;t mention   online that you&amp;#39;ll be signing off just stop using 
them cold turkey if someone reaches out to you   by other means and asks why your activity 
on a particular service has fallen off you   can explain but don&amp;#39;t go out of your way to tell 
people after 30 days of this self-imposed network   isolation ask yourself the following two questions 
about each of the services you temporarily quit   one would the last 30 days have been notably 
better if I&amp;#39;d been able to use this service   two did people care that I wasn&amp;#39;t using this 
service if your answer is no to both questions   quit the service permanently if your answer was 
a clear yes then return to using the service   if your answers are qualified or ambiguous it&amp;#39;s 
up to you whether you return to the service though   I would encourage you to lean toward quitting 
you can always rejoin later this strategy picks   specifically on social media because among the 
different network tools that can claim your time   and attention these Services if used without limit 
can be particularly devastating to your quest to   work deeper they offer personalized information 
arriving on an unpredictable intermittent   schedule making them massively addictive and 
therefore capable of severely damaging your   attempts to schedule and succeed with any Act 
of concentration given these dangers you might   expect that more knowledge workers would avoid 
these tools altogether especially those like   computer programmers or writers whose livelihood 
explicitly depends on the outcome of deep work   but part of what makes social media Insidious is 
that the companies that profit from your attention   have succeeded with a masterful marketing coup 
convincing our culture that if you don&amp;#39;t use   their products you might miss out this fear 
that you might miss out has obvious parallels   to nicodemus&amp;#39;s fear that the voluminous stuff 
in his closets might one day prove useful which   is why I&amp;#39;m suggesting a corrective strategy 
that parallels his packing party by spending   a month without these Services you can replace 
your fear that you might miss out on events on   conversations on shared cultural experience with a 
dose of reality for most people this reality will   confirm something that seems obvious only once 
you&amp;#39;ve done the hard work of freeing yourself from   the marketing messages surrounding these tools 
they&amp;#39;re not really all that important in your life   the reason why I ask you to not announce your 
30-day experiment is because for some people   another part of the delusion that binds them 
to social media is the idea that people want   to hear what you have to say and that they might 
be disappointed if you suddenly leave them bereft   of your commentary I&amp;#39;m being somewhat facetious 
here in my wording but this underlying sentiment   is nonetheless common and important to tackle as 
of this writing for example the average number of   followers for a Twitter user is 208. when you know 
that more than 200 people volunteered to hear what   you have to say it&amp;#39;s easy to begin to believe that 
your activities on these services are important   speaking from experience as someone who makes 
a living trying to sell my ideas to people this   is a powerfully addictive feeling but here&amp;#39;s 
the reality of audiences in a social media era   before these Services existed building an audience 
of any size beyond your immediate friends and   family required hard competitive work in the early 
2000s for example anyone could start a blog but to   gain even just a handful of unique visitors per 
month required that you actually put in the work   to deliver information that&amp;#39;s valuable enough to 
capture someone&amp;#39;s attention I know this difficulty   well my first blog was started in the fall of 
2003. it was called cleverly enough inspiring   moniker I used it to Muse on my life as a 21 year 
old college student there were I&amp;#39;m embarrassed to   admit long stretches where no one read it a term 
I&amp;#39;m using literally as I learned in the decade   that followed a period in which I patiently and 
painstakingly built an audience for my current   blog study hacks from a handful of readers to 
hundreds of thousands per month is that earning   people&amp;#39;s attention online is hard hard work 
except now it&amp;#39;s not part of what fueled social   media&amp;#39;s rapid Ascent I contend is its ability to 
short-circuit this connection between the hard   work of producing real value and the positive 
reward of having people pay attention to you   it is instead replaced this Timeless capitalist 
exchange with a shallow collectivist alternative   I&amp;#39;ll pay attention to what you say if you pay 
attention to what I say regardless of its value   a blog or magazine or television program 
that contained the content that typically   populates a Facebook wall or Twitter feed for 
example would attract on average no audience   but when captured within the social conventions 
of these services that same content will attract   attention in the form of likes and comments the 
implicit agreement motivating this behavior is   that in return for receiving for the most part 
undeserved attention from your friends and   followers you&amp;#39;ll return the favor by lavishing 
similarly undeserved attention on them you like   my status update and all like yours this agreement 
gives everyone a simulacrum of importance without   requiring much effort in return by dropping off 
these services without notice you can test the   reality of your status as a Content producer for 
most people and most Services the news might be   sobering no one outside your closest friends and 
family will likely even notice you&amp;#39;ve signed off   I recognize that I come across as curmudgeonly 
when talking about this issue is there any other   way to tackle it but it&amp;#39;s important to discuss 
because this quest for self-importance plays   an important role in convincing people to continue 
to thoughtlessly fragment their time and attention   for some people of course this 30-day experiment 
will be difficult and generate lots of issues   if you&amp;#39;re a college student or online personality 
for example the abstention will complicate your   life and will be noted but for most I suspect the 
net result of this experiment if not a massive   overhaul in your internet habits will be a more 
grounded view of the roles social media plays   in your daily existence these Services aren&amp;#39;t 
necessarily as advertised the lifeblood of our   modern connected world they&amp;#39;re just products 
developed by private companies funded lavishly   marketed carefully and designed ultimately to 
capture then sell your personal information and   attention to advertisers they can be fun but 
in the scheme of your life and what you want   to accomplish there are lightweight Whimsy one 
unimportant distraction among many threatening to   derail you from something deeper or maybe social 
media tools are at the core of your existence   you won&amp;#39;t know either way until 
you sample life without them don&amp;#39;t use the internet to entertain 
yourself Arnold Bennett was an English   writer born near the turn of the 20th century a 
tumultuous time for his home country&amp;#39;s economy   the Industrial Revolution which had been roaring 
for decades by this point had wrenched enough   Surplus capital from the Empire&amp;#39;s resources to 
generate a new class the white collar worker   it was now possible to have a job in which 
you spent a set number of hours a week in an   office and in exchange received a steady 
salary sufficient to support a household   such a lifestyle is blandly familiar in 
our current age but to Bennett and his   contemporaries it was novel and in many ways 
distressing Chief among Bennett&amp;#39;s concerns was   that members of this new class were missing out on 
the opportunities it presented to live a full life   take the case of a Londoner who works in an office 
whose office hours are from 10 to 6 and who spends   50 minutes morning and night in traveling between 
his house door and his office door Bennett writes   in his 1910 self-help classic how to live on 24 
hours a day this hypothetical London salaryman   he notes has a little more than 16 hours left in 
the day beyond these work-related hours to Bennett   this is a lot of time but most people in this 
situation tragically don&amp;#39;t realize its potential   the great and profound mistake which my typical 
man makes in regard to his day he elaborates is   that even though he doesn&amp;#39;t particularly enjoy 
his work seeing it as something to get through   he persists in looking upon those hours from 10 
to 6 as the day to which the 10 hours preceding   them and the six hours following them 
are nothing but a prologue and epilogue   this is an attitude that Bennett condemns 
as utterly illogical and unhealthy   what&amp;#39;s the alternative to this state of affairs 
Bennett suggests that his typical man see his   16 free hours as a day within a day explaining 
during those 16 hours he is free he is not a wage   earner he is not preoccupied with monetary cares 
he&amp;#39;s just as good as a man with a private income   accordingly the typical man should instead 
use this time as an aristocrat would to   perform rigorous self-improvement a task that 
according to Bennett involves primarily reading   great literature and poetry Bennett wrote 
about these issues more than a century ago   you might expect that in the intervening decades 
a period in which this middle class exploded in   size worldwide our thinking about Leisure Time 
would have evolved but it has not if anything   with the rise of the internet and the low brow 
attention economy it supports the average 40-hour   week employee especially those in my tech savvy 
millennial generation has seen the quality of   his or her Leisure Time remain degraded consisting 
primarily of a blur of distracted clicks on least   common denominator Digital entertainment if 
Bennett were brought back to life today he&amp;#39;d   likely fall into despair at the lack of progress 
in this area of human development to be clear I&amp;#39;m   indifferent to the moral underpinnings behind 
Bennett&amp;#39;s suggestions his vision of elevating   the souls and minds of the middle class by 
reading poetry and great books feels somewhat   Antiquated and classist but the logical Foundation 
of his proposal that you both should and can make   deliberate use of your time outside work remains 
relevant today especially with respect to the   goal of this rule which is to reduce the impact of 
Network Tools on your ability to perform deep work   in more detail in the strategies discussed 
so far in this rule we haven&amp;#39;t spent much   time yet on a class of Network Tools that are 
particularly relevant to the fight for depth   entertainment focused websites designed to capture 
and hold your attention for as long as possible   at the time of this writing the most popular 
examples of such sites include the Huffington   Post BuzzFeed Business Insider and Reddit 
this list will undoubtedly continue to   evolve but what this General category of site 
shares is the use of carefully crafted titles   and easily digestible content often honed by 
algorithms to be maximally attention catching   once you&amp;#39;ve landed on one article in one of 
these sites links on the side or bottom of the   page beckon you to click on another then another 
every available trick of human Psychology from   listing titles as popular or trending to the use 
of arresting photos is used to keep you engaged   at this particular moment for example some of 
the most popular articles on BuzzFeed include 17   words that mean something totally different when 
spelled backward and 33 dogs winning at everything   these sites are especially harmful 
after the work day is over where the   freedom in your schedule enables them 
to become Central to your leisure time   if you&amp;#39;re waiting in line or waiting for the 
plot to pick up in a TV show or waiting to finish   eating a meal they provide a cognitive crutch 
to ensure you eliminate any chance of boredom   as I argued in rule number two however such 
behavior is dangerous as it weakens your mind&amp;#39;s   General ability to resist distraction making 
deep work difficult later when you really want   to concentrate to make matters worse these 
Network Tools are not something you join   and therefore they&amp;#39;re not something you can 
remove from your life by quitting rendering   the previous two strategies irrelevant 
they&amp;#39;re always available just a click away   fortunately Arnold Bennett identified the solution 
to this problem a hundred years earlier put more   thought into your leisure time in other words 
this strategy suggests that when it comes to your   relaxation don&amp;#39;t default to whatever catches your 
attention at the moment but instead dedicate some   Advanced thinking to the question of how you want 
to spend your day within a day addictive websites   of the type mentioned previously thrive in a 
vacuum if you haven&amp;#39;t given yourself something   to do in a given moment they&amp;#39;ll always beckon as 
an appealing option if you instead fill this free   time with something of more quality their grip on 
your attention will loosen it&amp;#39;s crucial therefore   that you figure out in advance what you&amp;#39;re going 
to do with your evenings and weekends before they   begin structured Hobbies provide good fodder for 
these hours as they generate specific actions with   specific goals to fill your time a set program 
of reading a la Bennett where you spend regular   time each night making progress on a series of 
deliberately chosen books is also a good option   as is of course exercise or the enjoyment of good 
in-person company in my own life for example I   managed to read a surprising number of books 
in a typical year given the demands on my time   as a professor writer and father on average I&amp;#39;m 
typically reading three to five books at a time   this is possible because one of my favorite 
pre-planned leisure activities after my kids   bedtime is to read an interesting book as a result 
my smartphone and computer and the distractions   they can offer typically remain neglected between 
the end of the work day and the next morning   at this point you might worry that adding such 
structure to your relaxation will defeat the   purpose of relaxing which many believe requires 
complete freedom from plans or obligations   won&amp;#39;t a structured evening leave you 
exhausted not refreshed the next day at work   Bennett to his credit anticipated this complaint 
as he argues such worries misunderstand what   energizes the human spirit what you say that 
full energy given to those 16 hours will lessen   the value of the business eight not so on the 
contrary it will assuredly increase the value   of the business eight one of the chief things 
which my typical man has to learn is that the   mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard 
activity they do not Tire like an arm or a leg   all they want is change not rest except in 
sleep in my experience this analysis is spot on   if you give your mind to something meaningful 
to do throughout all your waking hours you&amp;#39;ll   end the day more fulfilled and begin 
the next one more relaxed than if you   instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in 
semi-conscious and unstructured web surfing   to summarize if you want to eliminate the 
addictive pull of entertainment sites on your   time and attention give your brain a quality 
alternative not only will this preserve your   ability to resist distraction and concentrate but 
you might even fulfill Arnold Bennett&amp;#39;s ambitious   goal of experiencing perhaps for the first 
time what it means to live and not just exist Rule Number Four drain the shallows in the summer 
of 2007 the software company 37 signals now called   Basecamp launched an experiment they shorten their 
work week from five days to four their employees   seem to accomplish the same amount of work with 
one last day so they made this change permanent   every year from May through October 37 signals 
employees work only Monday to Thursday with the   exception of customer support which still operates 
the full week as company co-founder Jason freed   quipped in a blog post about the decision 
people should enjoy the weather in the summer   it didn&amp;#39;t take long before the grumbles 
began in the business press a few months   after fried announced his company&amp;#39;s decision 
to make four day weeks permanent journalist   Tara Weiss wrote a critical piece for Forbes 
titled why a four-day Work Week doesn&amp;#39;t work   she summarized her problem with this strategy 
as follows packing 40 hours into four days   isn&amp;#39;t necessarily an efficient way to work 
many people find that eight hours are tough   enough requiring them to stay for an extra two 
could cause morale and productivity to decrease   was quick to respond in a blog post titled Forbes 
misses the point of the four-day work week he   begins by agreeing with Weiss&amp;#39;s premise that it 
would be stressful for employees to cram 40 hours   of effort into four days but as he clarifies 
that&amp;#39;s not what he&amp;#39;s suggesting the point of   the four-day work week is about doing less work 
he writes it&amp;#39;s not about four 10-hour days it&amp;#39;s   about four normalish eight-hour days this might 
seem confusing at first freed earlier claimed   that his employees get just as much done in 
four days as in five days now however he&amp;#39;s   claiming that his employees are working fewer 
hours how can both be true the difference it   turns out concerns the role of shallow work as 
freed explains very few people work even eight   hours a day you&amp;#39;re lucky if you get a few good 
hours in between all the meetings interruptions   web surfing office politics and personal 
business that permeate the typical work day   fewer official working hours help squeeze the fat 
out of the typical work week once everyone has   less time to get their stuff done they respect 
that time even more people become stingy with   their time and that&amp;#39;s a good thing they don&amp;#39;t 
waste it on things that just don&amp;#39;t matter   when you have fewer hours you usually spend 
them more wisely in other words the reduction   in the 37 signals work week disproportionately 
eliminated shallow as compared to deep work and   because the latter was left largely untouched 
the important stuff continued to get done   the shallow stuff that can seem so urgent in the 
moment turned out to be unexpectedly dispensable   a natural reaction to this experiment is to wonder 
what would happen if 37 signals had gone one step   further if eliminating hours of shallow work had 
little impact on the results produced what would   happen if they not only eliminated shallow work 
but then replace this newly recovered time with   more deep work fortunately for our curiosity 
the company soon put this Bolder idea to the   test as well freed had always been interested 
in the policies of technology companies like   Google that gave their employees 20 percent of 
their time to work on self-directed projects   while he liked this idea he felt that carving 
one day out of an otherwise busy week was   not enough to support the type of unbroken 
deep work that generates true breakthroughs   I&amp;#39;d take five days in a row over five days 
spread out over five weeks he explained so   our theory is that we&amp;#39;ll see better results when 
people have a long stretch of uninterrupted time   to test this Theory 37 signals implemented 
something radical the company gave its employees   the entire month of June off to work deeply on 
their own projects this month would be a period   free of any shallow work obligations no status 
meetings no memos and blessedly no PowerPoint   at the end of the month the company held a pitch 
day in which employees pitched the ideas they&amp;#39;d   been working on summarizing the experiment in an 
Inc magazine article freed dubbed it a success   the pitch day produced two projects 
that were soon put into production   a better Suite of tools for handling customer 
support and a data visualization system that   helps the company understand how their customers 
use their products these projects are predicted   to bring substantial value to the company but they 
almost certainly would not have been produced in   the absence of the unobstructed deep work time 
provided to the employees to tease out their   potential required dozens of hours of unimpeded 
effort how can we afford to put our business on   hold for a month to mess around with new ideas 
freed asked rhetorically how can we afford not to 37 signals experiments highlight an important 
reality the shallow work that increasingly   dominates the time and Detention of knowledge 
workers is less vital than it often seems in   the moment for most businesses if you eliminated 
significant amounts of this shallowness their   bottom line would likely remain unaffected 
and is Jason freed discovered if you not   only eliminate shallow work but also replace this 
recovered time with more of the deep alternative   not only will the business continue to 
function it can become more successful   this rule asks you to apply these insights to your 
personal work life the strategies that follow are   designed to help you ruthlessly identify the 
shallowness in your current schedule then call   it down to minimum levels leaving more time for 
the Deep efforts that ultimately matter most   before diving into the details of these strategies 
however we should first confront the reality that   there&amp;#39;s a limit to this anti-shallow thinking 
the value of deep work vastly outweighs the   value of shallow but this doesn&amp;#39;t mean that 
you must quixotically pursue a schedule in   which all of your time is invested in depth 
for one thing a non-trivial amount of shallow   work is needed to maintain most knowledge work 
jobs you might be able to avoid checking your   email every 10 minutes but you won&amp;#39;t likely last 
long if you never respond to important messages   in this sense we should see the goal of this 
rule as tanning shallow Works footprint in   your schedule not eliminating it then there&amp;#39;s 
the issue of cognitive capacity deep work is   exhausting because it pushes you toward the limit 
of your abilities performance psychologists have   extensively studied how much such efforts can 
be sustained by an individual in a given day   in their seminal paper on deliberate practice 
Anders Erickson and his collaborators survey   these studies they note that for someone new to 
such practice citing in particular a child in   the early stages of developing an expert level 
skill an hour a day is a reasonable limit for   those familiar with the rigors of such activities 
the limit expands to something like four hours but   rarely more the implication is that once you&amp;#39;ve 
hit your deep work limit in a given day you&amp;#39;ll   experience diminishing rewards if you try to cram 
in more shallow work therefore doesn&amp;#39;t become   dangerous until after you add enough to begin to 
crowd out your bounded deep efforts for the day   at first this caveat might seem optimistic the 
typical work day is eight hours the most Adept   deep thinker cannot spend more than four 
of these hours in a state of true depth   it follows that you can safely spend half the day 
wallowing in the shallows without adverse effect   the danger missed by this analysis is how easily 
this amount of time can be consumed especially   once you consider the impact of meetings 
appointments calls and other scheduled events   for many jobs these time drains can leave you 
with surprisingly little time left for solo work   my job as a professor for example is traditionally 
less plagued by such commitments but even so   they often take large chunks out of my 
time especially during the Academic Year   turning to a random day in my calendar from the 
previous semester I&amp;#39;m writing this during a quiet   summer month for example I see I had a meeting 
from 11 to 12. another from 1 to 2 30 and a class   to teach from three to five my eight hour work day 
in this example is already reduced by four hours   even if I squeezed all remaining shallow work 
emails tasks into a single half hour I&amp;#39;d still   fall short of the goal of four hours of daily 
deep work put another way even though we&amp;#39;re   not capable of spending a full day in a state of 
blissful depth this reality shouldn&amp;#39;t reduce the   urgency of reducing shallow work as the typical 
knowledge work day is more easily fragmented   than many suspect to summarize I&amp;#39;m asking you 
to treat shallow work with suspicion because   its damage is often vastly underestimated 
and its importance vastly overestimated   this type of work is inevitable but you must keep 
it confined to a point where it doesn&amp;#39;t impede   your ability to take full advantage of the deeper 
efforts that ultimately determine your impact   the strategies that follow will 
help you act on this reality schedule every minute of your day if 
you&amp;#39;re between the ages of 25 and 34   years old and live in Britain you likely 
watch more television than you realize   in 2013 the British TV licensing Authority 
surveyed television Watchers about their habits   the 25 to 34 year olds taking the survey estimated 
that they spend somewhere between 15 and 16 hours   per week watching TV this sounds like a lot 
but it&amp;#39;s actually a significant underestimate   we know this because when it comes to television 
watching habits we have access to the ground truth   the broadcasters audience research 
board the British equivalent of the   American Nielsen company places meters 
in a representative sample of households   these meters record without bias or wishful 
thinking exactly how much people actually watch   the 25 to 34 year olds who thought they watched 15 
hours a week it turns out watch more like 28 hours   this bad estimate of time usage is not unique 
to British television watching when you consider   different groups self-estimating different 
behaviors similar gaps stubbornly remain   in a Wall Street Journal article on the topic 
business writer Laura vanderkam pointed out   several more such examples a survey by 
the national sleep Foundation revealed   that Americans think they&amp;#39;re sleeping on average 
somewhere around seven hours a night the American   time use survey which has people actually measure 
their sleep corrected this number to 8.6 hours   another study found that people who claimed 
to work 60 to 64 hours per week were actually   averaging more like 44 hours per week while 
those claiming to work more than 75 hours   were actually working less than 55. these 
examples underscore an important point we   spend much of our day on autopilot not giving 
much thought to what we&amp;#39;re doing with our time   this is a problem it&amp;#39;s difficult to prevent the 
trivial from creeping into every corner of your   schedule if you don&amp;#39;t face without flinching your 
current balance between deep and shallow work and   then adopt the habit of pausing before action 
and asking what makes the most sense right now   the strategy described in the following paragraphs 
is designed to force you into these behaviors   it&amp;#39;s an idea that might seem extreme at 
first but will soon prove indispensable in   your quest to take full advantage of the value 
of deep work schedule every minute of your day here&amp;#39;s my suggestion at the beginning of each 
workday turn to a new page of lined paper in a   notebook you dedicate to this purpose down 
the left hand side of the page Mark every   other line with an hour of the day covering 
the full set of hours you typically work   now comes the important part divide the hours of 
your workday into blocks and assign activities   to the blocks for example you might block off 9 
A.M to 11AM for writing a client&amp;#39;s press release   to do so actually draw a box that covers the 
lines corresponding to these hours then write   press release Inside the Box not every block need 
be dedicated to a work task there might be time   blocks for lunch or relaxation breaks to keep 
things reasonably clean the minimum length of   a block should be 30 minutes I.E one line on your 
page this means for example that instead of having   a unique small box for each small task on your 
plate for the day respond to boss&amp;#39;s email submit   reimbursement form ask Carl about report you can 
batch similar things into more generic task blocks   you might find it useful in this case to draw a 
line from a task block to the open right hand side   of the page where you can list out the full set of 
small tasks you plan to accomplish in that block   when you&amp;#39;re done scheduling your day every minute 
should be part of a block you have in effect given   every minute of your work day a job now as you go 
through your day use this schedule to guide you   it&amp;#39;s here of course that most people will begin to 
run into trouble two things can and likely will go   wrong with your schedule once the day progresses 
the first is that your estimates will prove wrong   you might put aside two hours for writing a press 
release for example and in reality it takes two   and a half hours the second problem is that 
you&amp;#39;ll be interrupted and new obligations will   unexpectedly appear on your plate these events 
will also break your schedule this is okay if   your schedule is disrupted you should at the next 
available moment take a few minutes to create a   revised schedule for the time that remains in the 
day you can turn to a new page you can erase and   redraw blocks or do as I do cross out the blocks 
for the remainder of the day and create new blocks   to the right of the old ones on the page I draw my 
block skinny so I have room for several revisions   on some days you might rewrite your schedule half 
a dozen times don&amp;#39;t despair if this happens your   goal is not to stick to a given schedule at 
all costs it&amp;#39;s instead to maintain at all   times a thoughtful say in what you&amp;#39;re doing 
with your time going forward even if these   decisions are reworked again and again as the 
day unfolds if you find that schedule revisions   become overwhelming in their frequency there are 
a few tactics that can inject some more stability   first you should recognize that almost definitely 
you&amp;#39;re going to underestimate it first how much   time you require for most things when people are 
new to this habit they tend to use their schedule   as an incarnation of Wishful Thinking a best 
case scenario for their day over time you should   make an effort to accurately if not somewhat 
conservatively predict the time tasks will require   the second tactic that helps is the 
use of overflow conditional blocks   if you&amp;#39;re not sure how long a given activity might 
take block off the expected time then follow this   with an additional block that has a split purpose 
if you need more time for the preceding activity   use this additional block to keep working on it 
if you finish the activity on time however have an   alternate use already assigned for the extra block 
for example some non-urgent tasks this allows   unpredictability in your day without requiring 
you to keep changing your schedule on paper   for example returning to our press release 
example you might schedule two hours for   writing the press release but then follow 
it by an additional hour block that you can   use to keep writing the release if needed but 
otherwise assigned to catching up with email   the third tactic I suggest is to be liberal with 
your use of task blocks deploy many throughout   your day and make them longer than required 
to handle the tasks you plan in the morning   lots of things come up during the typical 
knowledge workers day having regularly   occurring blocks of time to address these 
surprises keeps things running smoothly before leaving you to put this strategy in 
practice I should address a common objection   in my experience pitching the values of 
daily schedules I found that many people   worry that this level of planning will become 
burdensomely restrictive here for example   is part of a comment from a reader named 
Joseph on a blog post I wrote on this topic   I think you far understate the role of uncertainty 
I worry about readers applying these observations   too seriously to the point of an obsessive and 
unhealthy relationship with one&amp;#39;s schedule that   seems to exaggerate the importance of minute 
counting over getting lost in activities which   if we&amp;#39;re talking about artists is often 
the only really sensible course of action   I understand these concerns and Joseph 
is certainly not the first to raise them   fortunately however they&amp;#39;re also easily addressed 
in my own daily scheduling discipline in addition   to regularly scheduling significant blocks of 
time for speculative thinking and discussion   I maintain a rule that If I Stumble onto an 
important Insight then this is a perfectly   valid reason to ignore the rest of my schedule 
for the day with the exception of course of things   that cannot be skipped I can then stick with 
this unexpected Insight until it loses Steam   at this point I&amp;#39;ll step back and rebuild my 
schedule for any time that remains in the day   in other words I not only allow spontaneity in 
my schedule I encourage it Joseph&amp;#39;s critique   is driven by the mistaken idea that the goal 
of a schedule is to force your behavior into   a rigid plan this type of scheduling however isn&amp;#39;t 
about constraint it&amp;#39;s instead about thoughtfulness   it&amp;#39;s a simple habit that forces you to 
continually take a moment throughout   your day and ask what makes sense for 
me to do with the time that remains   it&amp;#39;s the habit of asking that returns results 
not your unyielding Fidelity to the answer   I would go so far as to argue that someone 
following this combination of comprehensive   scheduling and a willingness to adapt or modify 
the plan as needed will likely experience more   creative insights than someone who adopts some 
more traditionally spontaneous approach where   the day is left open and unstructured without 
structure it&amp;#39;s easy to allow your time to devolve   into the shallow email social media web surfing 
this type of shallow Behavior though satisfying   in the moment is not conducive to creativity with 
structure on the other hand you can ensure that   you regularly schedule blocks to Grapple with a 
new idea or work deeply on something challenging   or brainstorm for a fixed period the type of 
commitment more likely to instigate innovation   recall for example the discussion in rule number 
one about the rigid rituals followed by many great   creative thinkers and because you&amp;#39;re willing to 
abandon your plan when an Innovative idea arises   you&amp;#39;re just as well suited as the distracted 
creative to follow up when the Muse strikes   to summarize the motivation for this strategy is 
the recognition that a deep work habit requires   you to treat your time with respect a good first 
step toward this respectful handling is the advice   outlined here decide in advance what you&amp;#39;re 
going to do with every minute of your work day   it&amp;#39;s natural at first to resist this 
idea as it&amp;#39;s undoubtedly easier to   continue to allow the twin forces of 
internal whim and external requests   to drive your schedule but you must 
overcome this distrust of structure   if you want to approach your true potential 
as someone who creates things that matter quantify the depth of every activity an advantage 
of scheduling your day is that you can determine   how much time you&amp;#39;re actually spending in 
Shallow activities extracting this Insight   from your schedules however can become tricky 
in practice as it&amp;#39;s not always clear exactly   how shallow you should consider a given task to 
expand on this challenge let&amp;#39;s start by reminding   ourselves of the formal definition of shallow 
work that I introduced in the introduction   shallow work non-cognitively demanding logistical 
style tasks often performed while distracted these   efforts tend not to create much new value 
in the world and are easy to replicate   some activities clearly satisfy this definition 
checking email for example or scheduling a   conference call is unquestionably shallow in 
nature but the classification of other activities   can be more ambiguous consider the following tasks 
example number one editing a draft of an academic   article that you and a collaborator will soon 
submit to a journal example number two building   a PowerPoint presentation about this quarter 
sales figures example number three attending   a meeting to discuss the current status of an 
important project and to agree on the next steps   it&amp;#39;s not obvious at first how to categorize 
these examples the first two describe tasks   that can be quite demanding and the final example 
seems important to advance a key work objective   the purpose of this strategy is to give you an 
accurate metric for resolving such ambiguity   providing you with a way to make clear and 
consistent decisions about where given work   tasks fall on the shallow to deep scale to do so 
it asks that you evaluate activities by asking   a simple but surprisingly Illuminating question 
how long would it take in months to train a smart   recent college graduate with no specialized 
training in my field to complete this task   to illustrate this approach let&amp;#39;s apply this 
question to our examples of ambiguous tasks   analyzing example number one to properly edit an 
academic paper requires that you understand the   nuances of the work so you can make sure it&amp;#39;s 
being described precisely and the nuances of   the broader literature so you can make sure it&amp;#39;s 
being cited properly these requirements require   Cutting Edge knowledge of an academic field a 
task that in the age of specialization takes   years of diligent study at The Graduate level 
and Beyond when it comes to this example the   answer to our question would therefore be quite 
large perhaps on the scale of 50 to 75 months   analyzing example number two the second 
example doesn&amp;#39;t fare so well by this analysis   to create a PowerPoint presentation that describes 
your quarterly sales requires three things first   knowledge of how to make a PowerPoint presentation 
second an understanding of the standard format of   these quarterly performance presentations within 
your organization and third an understanding of   what sales metrics your organization tracks 
and how to convert them into the right graphs   the hypothetical college graduate imagined by our 
question we can assume would already know how to   use PowerPoint and learning the standard format 
for your organization&amp;#39;s presentations shouldn&amp;#39;t   require more than a week the real question 
therefore is how long it takes a bright college   graduate to understand the metrics you track 
where to find the results and how to clean those   up and translate them into graphs and charts 
that are appropriate for a slide presentation   this isn&amp;#39;t a trivial task but for a bright 
college grad it wouldn&amp;#39;t require more than   an additional month or so of training so we 
can use two months as our conservative answer   analyzing example number three meetings can be 
tricky to analyze they can seem tedious at times   but they&amp;#39;re often also presented as playing a 
key role in your organization&amp;#39;s most important   activities the method presented here helps cut 
through this veneer how long would it take to   train a bright recent college graduate to take 
your place in a planning meeting he or she would   have to understand the project well enough to know 
its milestones and the skills of its participants   our hypothetical grad might also need some 
insight into the interpersonal Dynamics and   the reality of how such projects are executed at 
the organization at this point you might wonder   if this college grad would also need a deep 
expertise in the topic tackled by the project   for a planning meeting probably not such 
meetings rarely dive into substantive   content and tend to feature a lot of small 
talk and posturing in which participants   try to make it seem like they&amp;#39;re committing 
to a lot without actually having to commit   give a bright recent graduate three months to 
learn the ropes and he or she could take your   place without issue in such a gab Fest 
so we&amp;#39;ll use three months as our answer this question is meant as a thought 
experiment I&amp;#39;m not going to ask you   to actually hire a recent college graduate to 
take over tasks that score low but the answers   it provides will help you objectively quantify 
the shallowness or depth of various activities   if our hypothetical college graduate requires 
many months of training to replicate a task then   this indicates that the task leverages hard 
one expertise as argued earlier tasks that   leverage your expertise tend to be deep tasks 
and they can therefore provide a double benefit   they return more value per time spent and they 
stretch your abilities leading to Improvement   on the other hand a task that our hypothetical 
college graduate can pick up quickly is one that   does not leverage expertise and therefore it can 
be understood as shallow what should you do with   this strategy once you know where your activities 
fall on the Deep to shallow scale bias your time   toward the former when we consider our case 
studies for example we see that the first task   is something that you would want to prioritize as 
a good use of time while the second and third are   activities of a type that should be minimized they 
might feel productive but their return on time   investment is measly of course how one bias is 
away from shallow and toward depth is not always   obvious even after you know how to accurately 
label your commitments this brings us to the   strategies that follow which will provide specific 
guidance on how to accomplish this tricky goal ask your boss for a shallow work budget here&amp;#39;s 
an important question that&amp;#39;s rarely asked what   percentage of my time should be spent on shallow 
work this strategy suggests that you ask it if   you have a boss in other words have a conversation 
about this question you&amp;#39;ll probably have to first   Define for him or her what shallow and deep work 
means if you work for yourself ask yourself this   question in both cases settle on a specific answer 
then and this is the important part try to stick   to this budget the strategies that proceed and 
follow this one will help you achieve this goal   for most people in most non-entry level knowledge 
work jobs the answer to the question will be   somewhere in the 30 to 50 percent range there&amp;#39;s 
a psychological distaste surrounding the idea of   spending the majority of your time on unskilled 
tasks so fifty percent is a natural upper limit   while at the same time most bosses will begin to 
worry that if this percentage gets too much lower   than 30 percent you&amp;#39;ll be reduced to a knowledge 
work hermit who thinks big thoughts but never   responds to emails obeying this budget will 
likely require changes to your behavior you&amp;#39;ll   almost certainly end up forced into saying no to 
projects that seem infused with shallowness while   also more aggressively reducing the amount of 
shallowness in your existing projects this budget   might lead you to drop the need for a weekly 
status meeting in preference for results driven   reporting let me know when you&amp;#39;ve made significant 
progress then we&amp;#39;ll talk it might also lead you   to start spending more Mornings in communication 
isolation or decide it&amp;#39;s not as important as you   once thought to respond quickly and in detail 
to every cc&amp;#39;d email that crosses your inbox   these changes are all positive for your quest 
to make deep work Central to your working life   on the one hand they don&amp;#39;t ask you to abandon 
your core shallow obligations a move that   would cause problems and resentment as you&amp;#39;re 
still spending a lot of time on such efforts   on the other hand they do force you to 
place a hard limit on the amount of less   urgent obligations you allow to 
slip insidiously into your schedule   this limit frees up space for significant 
amounts of deep effort on a consistent basis   the reason why these decisions should start with a 
conversation with your boss is that this agreement   establishes implicit support from your workplace 
if you work for someone else this strategy   provides cover when you turn down an obligation 
or restructure a project to minimize shallowness   you can justify the move because it&amp;#39;s necessary 
for you to hit your prescribed Target mix of   work types as I discussed in Chapter 2 part of the 
reason shallow work persists in large quantities   in knowledge work is that we rarely see the total 
impact of such efforts on our schedules we instead   tend to evaluate these behaviors one by one in the 
moment a perspective from which each task can seem   quite reasonable and convenient the tools from 
earlier in this rule however allow you to make   this impact explicit you can now confidently say 
to your boss this is the exact percentage of my   time spent last week on shallow work and force him 
or her to give explicit approval for that ratio   faced with these numbers and the economic reality 
they clarify it&amp;#39;s incredibly wasteful for example   to pay a highly trained professional to send email 
messages and attend meetings for 30 hours a week   a boss will be led to the Natural conclusion 
that you need to say no to some things and   to streamline others even if this makes life 
less convenient for the boss or for you or for   your co-workers because of course in the end a 
business&amp;#39;s goal is to generate value not to make   sure its employees lives are as easy as possible 
if you work for yourself this exercise will force   you to confront the reality of how little time in 
your busy schedule you&amp;#39;re actually producing value   these hard numbers will provide you the 
confidence needed to start scaling back   on the shallow activities that are sapping your 
time without these numbers it&amp;#39;s difficult for an   entrepreneur to say no to any opportunity that 
might generate some positive return I have to be   on Twitter I have to maintain an active Facebook 
presence I have to tweak the widgets on my blog   you tell yourself because when considered 
in isolation to say no to any one of these   activities seems like you&amp;#39;re being lazy by instead 
picking and sticking with a shallow to deep ratio   you can replace this guilt-driven unconditional 
acceptance with the more healthy habit of trying   to get the most out of the time you put aside for 
shallow work therefore still exposing yourself to   many opportunities but keeping these efforts 
constrained to a small enough fraction of your   time and attention to enable the Deep work 
that ultimately drives your business forward   of course there&amp;#39;s always the possibility that when 
you ask this question the answer is Stark no boss   will explicitly answer one hundred percent of your 
time should be shallow unless your entry level at   which point you need to delay this exercise 
until you&amp;#39;ve built enough skills to add deep   efforts to your official work responsibilities 
but a boss might reply in so many words as much   shallow work is needed for you to promptly 
do whatever we need from you at the moment   in this case the answer is still useful as it 
tells you that this isn&amp;#39;t a job that supports   deep work and a job that doesn&amp;#39;t support deep 
work is not a job that can help you succeed   in our current information economy you should 
in this case thank the boss for the feedback   and then promptly start planning how you can 
transition into a new position that values depth finish your work by 5 30. in the seven days 
preceding my first writing these words I   participated in 65 different email conversations 
among these 65 conversations I sent exactly five   emails after 5 30 pm the immediate story 
told by these statistics is that with few   exceptions I don&amp;#39;t send emails after 5 30. but 
given how intertwined email has become with   work in general there&amp;#39;s a more surprising reality 
hinted by this Behavior I don&amp;#39;t work after 5 30 pm   I call this commitment fixed schedule productivity 
as I fix the firm goal of not working past a   certain time then work backward to find 
productivity strategies that allow me to satisfy   this declaration I&amp;#39;ve practiced fixed schedule 
productivity happily for more than half a decade   now and it&amp;#39;s been crucial to my efforts to build a 
productive professional life centered on deep work   in the sections ahead I will try to 
convince you to adopt this strategy as well let me start my pitch for fixed schedule 
productivity by first noting that according   to Conventional wisdom in the academic 
world I inhabit this tactic should fail   professors especially Junior professors are 
notorious for adopting grueling schedules   that extend into the night and through weekends 
consider for example a blog post published by a   young computer science Professor whom I&amp;#39;ll call 
Tom in this post which Tom wrote in the winter of   2014 he replicates his schedule for a recent 
day in which he spent 12 hours at his office   this schedule includes five different meetings 
and three hours of administrative tasks which he   describes as tending to bushels of emails 
filling out bureaucratic forms organizing   meeting notes planning future meetings by his 
estimation he spent only one and a half out of   12 total hours sitting in his office tackling 
real work which he defines as efforts that make   progress toward a research deliverable it&amp;#39;s 
no wonder that Tom feels coerced into working   well beyond the standard workday I&amp;#39;ve already 
accepted the reality that I&amp;#39;ll be working on   weekends he concludes in another post very few 
Junior faculty can avoid such a fate and yet I   have even though I don&amp;#39;t work at night and rarely 
work on weekends between arriving at Georgetown in   the fall of 2011 and beginning work on this 
chapter in the fall of 2014. I&amp;#39;ve published   somewhere around 20 peer-reviewed articles I 
also won two competitive grants published one   non-academic book and have almost finished writing 
another which you&amp;#39;re listening to at the moment   all while avoiding the grueling schedules 
deemed necessary by the toms of the world   what explains this paradox we can find a 
compelling answer in a widely disseminated   article published in 2013 By an academic further 
along in her career and far more accomplished than   I Rodika nagpal the Fred cavlay professor 
of computer science at Harvard University   nagpal opens the article by claiming that much of 
the stress suffered by tenure track professors is   self-imposed scary myths and scary data abound 
about life is a tenure track faculty at an R1   research focused University she begins before 
continuing to explain how she finally decided   to disregard the conventional wisdom and instead 
deliberately do specific things to preserve my   happiness this deliberate effort LED not Paul to 
enjoy her pre-tenure time tremendously nagpal goes   on to detail several examples of these efforts but 
there&amp;#39;s one tactic in particular that should sound   familiar as nugpal admits early in her academic 
career she found herself trying to cram work into   every free hour between 7 AM and midnight because 
she has kids this time especially in the evening   was often severely fractured it didn&amp;#39;t take long 
before she decided this strategy was unsustainable   so she set a limit of 50 hours a week and worked 
backward to determine what rules and habits were   needed to satisfy this constraint not Paul in 
other words deployed fixed schedule productivity   we know this strategy didn&amp;#39;t hurt her academic 
career as she ended up earning tenure on schedule   and then jumping to the full Professor level after 
only three additional years an impressive ascent   how did she pull this off according to her article 
one of the main techniques for respecting her   hour limit was to set drastic quotas on the major 
sources of shallow Endeavors in her academic life   for example she decided she would travel 
only five times per year for any purpose   as trips can generate a surprisingly large load 
of urgent shallow obligations from making lodging   arrangements to writing talks five trips a 
year may still sound like a lot but for an   academic it&amp;#39;s light to emphasize this point 
note that Matt Welsh a former colleague of   nagpal in the Harvard computer science 
department he now works for Google once   wrote a blog post in which he claimed it was 
typical for junior faculty to travel 12 to 24   times a year imagine the shallow efforts nagpaul 
avoided in sidestepping an extra 10 to 15 trips   the travel quota is just one of several tactics 
that nagpal used to control her workday she also   for example placed limits on the number of papers 
she would review per year but what all her tactics   shared was a commitment to ruthlessly capping the 
shallow while protecting the Deep efforts that is   original research that ultimately determined her 
professional fate returning to my own example it&amp;#39;s   a similar commitment that enables me to succeed 
with fixed scheduling I too am incredibly cautious   about my use of the most dangerous word in 
one&amp;#39;s productivity vocabulary yes it takes   a lot to convince me to agree to something that 
yields shallow work if you ask for my involvement   in University business that&amp;#39;s not absolutely 
necessary I might respond with a defense I learned   from the department chair who hired me talk to me 
after tenure another tactic that works well for me   is to be clear in my refusal but ambiguous in my 
explanation for the refusal the key is to avoid   providing enough specificity about the excuse that 
the requester has the opportunity to diffuse it if   for example I turned down a time-consuming 
speaking invitation with the excuse that I   have other trips scheduled for around the same 
time I don&amp;#39;t provide details which might leave   the requester the ability to suggest a way to fit 
his or her event into my existing obligations but   instead just say sounds interesting but I can&amp;#39;t 
make it due to schedule conflicts in turning down   obligations I also resist the urge to offer a 
consolation prize that ends up devouring almost   as much of my schedule EG sorry I can&amp;#39;t join your 
committee but I&amp;#39;m happy to take a look at some of   your proposals as they come together and offer 
my thoughts a clean break is best in addition to   carefully guarding my obligations I&amp;#39;m incredibly 
conscientious about managing my time because my   time is limited each day I cannot afford to allow 
a large deadline to creep up on me or a morning   to be wasted on something trivial because I 
didn&amp;#39;t take a moment to craft a smart plan   the damocally in cap on the workday enforced by 
fixed schedule productivity has a way of keeping   my organization efforts sharp without this looming 
cut off I&amp;#39;d likely end up more lacks in my habits   to summarize these observations nagpal and 
I can both succeed in Academia without Tom   style overload due to two reasons first we&amp;#39;re 
asymmetric in the culling forced by our fixed   schedule commitment by ruthlessly reducing the 
shallow while preserving the depth this strategy   frees up our time without diminishing the amount 
of new value we generate indeed I would go so   far as to argue that the reduction in Shallow 
frees up more energy for the Deep alternative   allowing us to produce more than if we had 
defaulted to a more typical crowded schedule   second the limits to our time necessitate 
more careful thinking about our organizational   habits also leading to more value produced as 
compared to longer but less organized schedules   the key claim of this strategy is that these 
same benefits hold for most knowledge work   fields that is even if you&amp;#39;re not a professor fix 
schedule productivity can yield powerful benefits   in most knowledge work jobs it can be difficult 
in the moment to turn down a shallow commitment   that seems harmless in isolation be it accepting 
an invitation to get coffee or agreeing to jump on   a call a commitment to fix schedule productivity 
however shifts you into a scarcity mindset   suddenly an obligation beyond your deepest efforts 
is suspect and seen as potentially disruptive   your default answer becomes no the bar for 
gaining access to your time and attention   Rises precipitously and you begin to organize 
the efforts that pass these obstacles with a   ruthless efficiency it might also lead you 
to test assumptions about your company&amp;#39;s   work culture that you thought were Ironclad but 
turn out to be malleable it&amp;#39;s common for example   to receive emails from your boss after hours fix 
schedule productivity would have you ignore these   messages until the next morning many suspect that 
this would cause problems as such responses are   expected but in many cases the fact that your boss 
happens to be clearing her inbox at night doesn&amp;#39;t   mean that she expects an immediate response a 
lesson this strategy would soon help you discover   fix schedule productivity in other words is 
a meta habit that&amp;#39;s simple to adopt but Broad   in its impact if you have to choose just one 
behavior that reorients your focus toward the   Deep this one should be high on your list 
of possibilities if you&amp;#39;re still not sure   however about the idea that artificial limits 
on your workday can make you more successful I   urge you to once again turn your attention to the 
career of fixed schedule Advocate radhika Nepal   in a satisfying coincidence at almost the exact 
same time that Tom was lamenting online about   his unavoidably intense workload as a young 
Professor nagpal was celebrating the latest   of the many professional triumphs she has 
experienced despite her fixed schedule   her research was featured on 
the cover of the journal science become hard to reach no discussion of shallow 
work is complete without considering email this   quintessential shallow activity is particularly 
Insidious in its grip on most knowledge workers   attention as it delivers a steady stream of 
distractions addressed specifically to you   ubiquitous email access has become so ingrained 
in our professional habits that we&amp;#39;re beginning   to lose the sense that we have any say in its 
role in our life as John Freeman warns in his   2009 book The Tyranny of email with the rise of 
this technology we are slowly eroding our ability   to explain in a careful complex way why it is so 
wrong for us to complain resist or redesign our   work days so that they are manageable email 
seems a fate accompli resistance is futile   this strategy pushes back at this fatalism just 
because you cannot avoid this tool altogether   doesn&amp;#39;t mean you have to seed all authority over 
its role in your mental landscape in the following   sections I describe three tips that will help you 
regain authority over how this technology accesses   your time and attention and arrest the erosion of 
autonomy identified by Freeman resistance is not   futile you have more control over your electronic 
communication than you might at first assume tip number one make people who 
send you email do more work   most non-fiction authors are easy to reach they 
include an email address on their author websites   along with an open invitation to send them any 
request or suggestion that comes to mind many   even encourage this feedback as a necessary 
commitment to The elusive but much touted   importance of community building among their 
readers but here&amp;#39;s the thing I don&amp;#39;t buy it   if you visit the contact page on my author 
website there&amp;#39;s no general purpose email   address instead I list different individuals you 
can contact for specific purposes my literary   agent for rights requests for example or 
my speaking agent for speaking requests   if you want to reach me I offer only a special 
purpose email address that comes with conditions   and a lowered expectation that I&amp;#39;ll respond if 
you have an offer opportunity or introduction that   might make my life more interesting email me at 
interesting calnewport.com for the reason stated   above I&amp;#39;ll only respond to those proposals that 
are a good match for my schedule and interests   I call this approach a sender filter as I&amp;#39;m 
asking my correspondence to filter themselves   before attempting to contact me this filter has 
significantly reduced the time I spend in my inbox   before I began using a sender filter I had a 
standard general purpose email address listed   on my website not surprisingly I used to receive 
a large volume of long emails asking for advice on   specific and often quite complicated student or 
career questions I like to help individuals but   these requests became overwhelming they didn&amp;#39;t 
take the sender&amp;#39;s long to craft but they would   require a lot of explanation and writing on my 
part to respond my sender filter has eliminated   most such communication and in doing so has 
drastically reduced the number of messages   I encounter in my writing inbox as for my 
own interest in helping my readers I now   redirect this energy towards settings I carefully 
choose to maximize impact instead of allowing any   student in the world to send me a question for 
example I now work closely with a small number   of student groups where I&amp;#39;m quite accessible and 
can offer more substantial and effective mentoring   another benefit of a sender filter is that it 
resets expectations the most crucial line in my   description is the following I&amp;#39;ll only respond 
to those proposals that are a good match for my   schedule and interests this seems minor but 
it makes a substantial difference in how my   correspondents think about their messages to me 
the default social conventions surrounding email   is that unless you&amp;#39;re famous if someone sends 
you something you owe him or her a response   for most therefore an inbox full of messages 
generates a major sense of obligation   by instead resetting your correspondence 
expectations to the reality that you&amp;#39;ll   probably not respond the experience is transformed 
the inbox is now a collection of opportunities   that you can glance at when you have the free 
time seeking out those that make sense for   you to engage but the pile of unread messages no 
longer generates a sense of obligation you could   if you wanted to ignore them all and nothing bad 
would happen psychologically this can be freeing   I worried when I first began using a sender filter 
that it would seem pretentious as if my time was   more valuable than that of my readers and that it 
would upset people but this fear wasn&amp;#39;t realized   most people easily accept the idea that you have 
a right to control your own incoming communication   as they would like to enjoy this same right more 
important people appreciate clarity most are okay   to not receive a response if they don&amp;#39;t expect 
one in general those with a minor public presence   such as authors overestimate how much people 
really care about your replies to their messages   in some cases this expectation reset might 
even earn you more credit when you do respond   for example an editor of an online publication 
once sent me a guest post opportunity with the   Assumption set by my filter that I would likely 
not respond when I did it proved a happy surprise   here&amp;#39;s her summary of the interaction so 
when I emailed Cal to ask if he wanted   to contribute to the publication my 
expectations were set he didn&amp;#39;t have   anything on his sender filter about wanting 
to guest blog so there wouldn&amp;#39;t have been any   hard feelings if I&amp;#39;d never heard a peep 
then when he did respond I was thrilled   my particular sender filter is just 
one example of this General strategy   consider consultant clay Herbert who is an expert 
in running crowdfunding campaigns for technology   startups a specialty that attracts a lot of 
Correspondence hoping to glean some helpful advice   as a forbes.com article on sender filters reports 
at some point the number of people reaching out   exceeded Herbert&amp;#39;s capacity so he created filters 
that put the onus on the person asking for help   though he started from a similar motivation as me 
Herbert&amp;#39;s filters ended up taking a different form   to contact him you must first consult an FAQ 
to make sure your question has not already   been answered which was the case for a lot of 
the messages Herbert was processing before his   filters were in place if you make it through this 
FAQ sieve he then asks you to fill out a survey   that allows him to further screen for connections 
that seem particularly relevant to his expertise   for those who make it past this step 
Herbert enforces a small fee you must   pay before communicating with him this 
fee is not about making extra money but   is instead about selecting individuals who are 
serious about receiving and acting on advice   Herbert&amp;#39;s filters still enable him to help people 
and encounter interesting opportunities but at   the same time they have reduced his incoming 
communication to a level he can easily handle   to give another example consider Antonio 
centeno who runs the popular real man style blog   centeno&amp;#39;s sender filter 
lays out a two-step process   if you have a question he diverts you to a public 
location to post it centeno thinks it&amp;#39;s wasteful   to answer the same questions again and again 
in private one-on-one conversations if you make   it past this step he then makes you commit to by 
clicking check boxes the following three promises   I am not asking Antonio a style question I 
could find searching Google for 10 minutes   I am not spamming Antonio with a cut and pasting 
generic request to promote my unrelated business   I will do a good deed for some random 
stranger if Antonio responds within 23 hours   the message box in which you can type your 
message doesn&amp;#39;t appear on the contact page   until after you&amp;#39;ve clicked The Box by all three 
promises to summarize the Technology&amp;#39;s underlying   email are transformative but the current social 
conventions guiding how we apply this technology   are underdeveloped the notion that all messages 
regardless of purpose or sender arrive in the   same undifferentiated inbox and that there&amp;#39;s 
an expectation that every message deserves   a timely response is absurdly unproductive 
the sender filter is a small but useful step   toward a better State of Affairs and is an idea 
whose time has come at least for the increasing   number of entrepreneurs and Freelancers who both 
receive a lot of incoming communication and have   the ability to dictate their accessibility 
I&amp;#39;d also love to see similar rules become   ubiquitous for intra-office communication in 
large organizations but for the reasons argued   in Chapter 2 were probably a long way from 
that reality if you&amp;#39;re in a position to do so   consider sender filters as a way of reclaiming 
some control over your time and attention tip number two do more work when you send or reply 
to emails consider the following standard emails   email number one it was great to meet you 
last week I&amp;#39;d love to follow up on some of   those issues we discussed do you want to grab 
coffee email number two we should get back to   the research problem we discussed during my 
last visit remind me where we are with that   email number three I took a stab at that 
article we discussed it&amp;#39;s attached thoughts   these three examples should be familiar to most 
knowledge workers as they&amp;#39;re representative of   many of the messages that fill their inboxes 
they&amp;#39;re also potential productivity landmines   how you respond to them will have a 
significant impact on how much time and   attention the resulting conversation ultimately 
consumes in particular interrogative emails like   these generate an initial instinct to dash off 
the quickest possible response that will clear   the message temporarily out of your inbox a quick 
response will in the short term provide you with   some minor relief because you&amp;#39;re bouncing the 
responsibility implied by the message off your   court and back on to the senders this relief 
however is short-lived as this responsibility   will continue to bounce back again and again 
continually sapping your time and attention   I suggest therefore that the right strategy 
when faced with a question of this type is   to pause a moment before replying and take 
the time to answer the following key prompt   what is the project represented by this message 
and what is the most efficient in terms of   messages generated process for bringing 
this project to a successful conclusion   once you&amp;#39;ve answered this question for yourself 
replace a quick response with one that takes the   time to describe the process you identified points 
out the current step and emphasizes the step   that comes next I call this the process-centric 
approach to email and it&amp;#39;s designed to minimize   both the number of emails you receive and 
the amount of mental clutter they generate   to better explain this process and why it works 
consider the following process-centric responses   to the sample emails from earlier process-centric 
response to email number one I&amp;#39;d love to grab   coffee let&amp;#39;s meet at the Starbucks on campus below 
I listed two days next week when I&amp;#39;m free for each   day I list it three times if any of those day and 
time combinations work for you let me know I&amp;#39;ll   consider your reply confirmation for the meeting 
if none of those date and time combinations work   give me a call at the number below and we&amp;#39;ll 
hash out a time that works looking forward to it   process Centric response to email number two I 
agree that we should return to this problem here&amp;#39;s   what I suggest sometime in the next week email 
me everything you remember about our discussion   on the problem once I receive that message I&amp;#39;ll 
start a shared directory for the project and add   it to a document that summarizes what you sent me 
combined with my own memory of our past discussion   in the document I&amp;#39;ll highlight the two or three 
most promising next steps we can then take a crack   at those next steps for a few weeks and check back 
in I suggest we schedule a phone call for a month   from now for this purpose below I listed some 
dates and times when I&amp;#39;m available for a call when   you respond with your notes indicate the date and 
time combination that works best for you and will   consider that reply confirmation for the call I 
look forward to digging into this problem process   Centric response to email number three thanks 
for getting back to me I&amp;#39;m going to read this   draft of the article and send you back an edited 
version annotated with comments on Friday the 10th   in this version I send back I&amp;#39;ll edit what I can 
do myself and add comments to draw your attention   to places where I think you&amp;#39;re better suited to 
make the Improvement at that point you should have   what you need to polish and submit the final draft 
so I&amp;#39;ll leave you to do that no need to reply   to this message or to follow up with me after I 
return the edits unless of course there&amp;#39;s an issue in crafting these sample responses I started by 
identifying the project implied by the message   notice the word project is used Loosely here it 
can cover things that are large and obviously   projects such as making progress on a research 
problem example number two but it applies just   as easily to small logistical challenges like 
setting up a coffee meeting example number one   I then took a minute or two to think 
through a process that gets us from   the current state to a desired outcome 
with a minimum of messages required   the final step was to write a reply that clearly 
describes this process and where we stand   these examples centered on an email reply but 
it should be clear that a similar approach   also works when writing an email message 
from scratch the process-centric approach   to email can significantly mitigate the impact 
of this technology on your time and attention   there are two reasons for this effect first 
it reduces the number of emails in your inbox   sometimes significantly something as simple as 
scheduling a coffee meeting can easily spiral into   a half a dozen or more messages over a period of 
many days if you&amp;#39;re not careful about your replies   this in turn reduces the time you spend in your 
inbox and reduces the brain power you must expend   when you do second to steal terminology from David 
Allen a good process-centric message immediately   closes the loop with respect to the project at 
hand when a project is initiated by an email   that you send or receive it squats in your mental 
landscape becoming something that&amp;#39;s on your plate   in the sense that it has been brought to your 
attention and eventually needs to be addressed   this method closes this open loop as soon as it 
forms by working through the whole process adding   to your task lists and calendar any relevant 
commitments on your part and bringing the other   party up to speed your mind can reclaim the mental 
real estate the project once demanded less mental   clutter means more mental resources available for 
deep thinking process-centric emails might not   seem natural at first for one thing they require 
that you spend more time thinking about your   messages before you compose them in the moment 
this might seem like you&amp;#39;re spending more time   on email but the important point to remember is 
that the extra two to three minutes you spend at   this point will save you many more minutes Reading 
and Responding to unnecessary extra messages later   the other issue is that process Centric messages 
can seem stilted and overly technical the current   social conventions surrounding email promote a 
conversational tone that clashes with the more   systematic schedules or decision trees commonly 
used in process-centric communication If This   concerns you I suggest that you add a longer 
conversational preamble to your messages you   can even separate the process-centric portion of 
the message from the conversational opening with   the divider line or label it proposed next steps 
so that its technical tone seems more appropriate   in context in the end these minor hassles are 
worth it by putting more thought up front into   what&amp;#39;s really being proposed by the email messages 
that flit in and out of your inbox you&amp;#39;ll greatly   reduce the negative impact of this technology 
on your ability to do work that actually matters tip number three don&amp;#39;t respond as a graduate 
student at MIT I had the opportunity to interact   with famous academics in doing so I noticed 
that many shared a fascinating and somewhat   rare approach to email their default behavior 
when receiving an email message is to not respond   over time I learned the philosophy driving 
this Behavior when it comes to email they   believed it&amp;#39;s the sender&amp;#39;s responsibility to 
convince the receiver that a reply is worthwhile   if you didn&amp;#39;t make a convincing 
case and sufficiently minimize   the effort required by the professor 
to respond you didn&amp;#39;t get a response   for example the following email would likely not 
generate a reply with many of the famous names   at the Institute hi professor I&amp;#39;d love to stop by 
some time to talk about topic X are you available responding to this message requires too 
much work are you available is too vague   to be answered quickly also there&amp;#39;s no attempt to 
argue that this chat is worth the professor&amp;#39;s time   with these critiques in mind here&amp;#39;s a version 
of the same message that would be more likely   to generate a reply hi professor I&amp;#39;m working 
on a project similar to topic x with my advisor   Professor y is it okay if I stop by in the last 
15 minutes of your office hours on Thursday   to explain what we&amp;#39;re up to in more detail and 
see if it might complement your current project   unlike the first message this 
one makes a clear case for why   this meeting makes sense and minimizes the 
effort needed from the receiver to respond   this tip asks that you replicate to the 
extent feasible in your professional context   this professional ambivalence to email to 
help you in this effort try applying the   following three rules to sort through which 
messages require a response and which do not   professorial email sorting do not reply to an 
email message if any of the following applies   it&amp;#39;s ambiguous or otherwise makes it hard 
for you to generate a reasonable response   it&amp;#39;s not a question or proposal that 
interests you nothing really good would   happen if you did respond and nothing 
really bad would happen if you didn&amp;#39;t in all cases there are many obvious exceptions 
if an ambiguous message about a project you   don&amp;#39;t care about comes from your company&amp;#39;s CEO 
for example you&amp;#39;ll respond but looking Beyond   these exceptions this professorial approach 
asks you to become way more ruthless when   deciding whether or not to click reply this 
tip can be uncomfortable at first because it   will cause you to break a key convention currently 
surrounding email replies are assumed regardless   of the relevance or appropriateness of the 
message there&amp;#39;s also no way to avoid that   some bad things will happen if you take this 
approach at the minimum some people might get   confused or upset especially if they&amp;#39;ve never seen 
standard email conventions questioned or ignored   here&amp;#39;s the thing this is okay as the author Tim 
Ferriss once wrote develop the habit of letting   small bad things happen if you don&amp;#39;t you&amp;#39;ll 
never find time for the life-changing big things   it should comfort you to realize that as the 
professors at MIT discovered people are quick   to adjust their expectations to the specifics 
of your communication habits the fact that you   didn&amp;#39;t respond to their hastily scribed messages 
is probably not a central event in their lives   once you get past the discomfort of this 
approach you&amp;#39;ll begin to experience its Rewards   there are two common tropes bandied around 
when people discuss solutions to email overload   one says that sending emails generates more 
emails while the other says that wrestling   with ambiguous or irrelevant emails is 
a major source of inbox related stress   the approach suggested here responds 
aggressively to both issues you send   fewer emails and ignore those that 
aren&amp;#39;t easy to process and by doing   so will significantly weaken the grip your 
inbox maintains over your time and attention conclusion the story of Microsoft&amp;#39;s founding 
has been told so many times that it&amp;#39;s entered   the realm of Legend in the winter of 1974 
a young Harvard student named Bill Gates   sees the Altair the world&amp;#39;s first personal 
computer on the cover of popular Electronics   Gates realizes that there&amp;#39;s an opportunity to 
design software for the machine so he drops   everything and with the help of Paul Allen and 
Monty Davidoff spends the next eight weeks hacking   together a version of the basic programming 
language for the Altair this story is often cited   as an example of Gates&amp;#39;s insight and boldness 
but recent interviews have revealed another trait   that played a crucial role in the tales happy 
ending Gates&amp;#39;s prettier natural deep work ability   as Walter Isaacson explained in a 2013 article 
on the topic for the Harvard Gazette Gates   worked with such intensity for such lengths 
during this 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 or two wake up 
and pick up right where he left off an ability   that is still impressed Paul Allen describes as 
a prodigious feat of concentration in his book   The innovators Isaacson later summarized Gates&amp;#39;s 
unique tendency toward depth as follows the one   trait that differentiated gates from Allen was 
Focus Allen&amp;#39;s mind would flit between many ideas   and passions but Gates Was a Serial obsessor it&amp;#39;s 
here in this story of Gates&amp;#39;s obsessive Focus that   we encounter the strongest form of my argument 
for deep work it&amp;#39;s easy amid the turbulence of   a rapidly evolving Information Age to default to 
dialectical grumbling the curmudgeons Among Us are   vaguely uneasy about the attention people pay to 
their phones and pine for the days of unhurried   concentration while the digital hipsters equate 
such Nostalgia with lutism and boredom and believe   that increased connection is the foundation for 
a utopian future Marshall mcluhan declared that   the medium is the message but our current 
conversation on these topics seems to imply   that the medium is morality either you&amp;#39;re on board 
with the Facebook future or see it as our downfall   as I emphasized in this book&amp;#39;s introduction I 
have no interest in this debate a commitment   to deep work is not a moral stance and it&amp;#39;s not a 
philosophical statement it is instead a pragmatic   recognition that the ability to concentrate is a 
skill that gets valuable things done deep work is   important in other words not because distraction 
is evil but because it enabled Bill Gates to start   a billion dollar industry in less than a semester 
this is also a lesson as it turns out that I&amp;#39;ve   personally relearned again and again in my own 
career I&amp;#39;ve been a depth devotee for more than a   decade but even I am still regularly surprised by 
its power when I was in graduate school the period   when I first encountered and started prioritizing 
this skill I found that deep work allowed me to   write a pair of quality peer-reviewed papers 
each year a respectable rate for a student   while rarely having to work past five on weekdays 
or work it all on weekends a rarity among my peers   as I neared my transition to professorship however 
I began to worry as a student and a postdoc my   time commitments were minimal leaving me most of 
my day to shape as I desired I knew I would lose   this luxury in the next phase of my career and I 
wasn&amp;#39;t confident in my ability to integrate enough   deep work into this more demanding schedule to 
maintain my productivity instead of just stewing   in my anxiety I decided to do something about it 
I created a plan to bolster my deep work muscles   these training efforts were deployed during 
my last two years at MIT while I was a postdoc   starting to look for Professor positions my main 
tactic was to introduce artificial constraints   on my schedule so as to better approximate the 
more limited free time I expected as a professor   in addition to my rule about not working 
at night I started to take extended lunch   breaks in the middle of the day to go for a 
run and then eat lunch back at my apartment   I also signed a deal to write my fourth 
book so good they can&amp;#39;t ignore you during   this period a project of course that soon 
levied its own intense demands on my time   to compensate for these new constraints I refined 
my ability to work deeply among other methods I   began to more carefully block out deep work 
hours and preserve them against incursion   I also developed an ability to carefully work 
through thoughts during the many hours I spent   on foot each week a boon to my productivity 
and became obsessive about finding disconnected   locations conducive to focus during the summer 
for example I would often work Under the Dome   in Barker engineering Library a pleasingly 
cavernous location that becomes too crowded   when class is in session and during the winter 
I sought more obscure locations for some silence   eventually developing a preference for the 
small but well-appointed Lewis music library   at some point I even bought a 50 
high-end gridlined lab notebook to   work on mathematical proofs believing that its 
expense would induce more care in my thinking   I ended up surprised by how well this 
re-commitment to depth ended up working   after I&amp;#39;d taken a job as a computer science 
professor at Georgetown University in the fall   of 2011. my obligations did in fact drastically 
increase but I had been training for this moment   not only did I preserve my research productivity 
it actually improved my previous rate of two   good papers a year which I maintained as an 
unencumbered graduate student leapt to four good   papers a year on average once I became a much more 
encumbered professor impressive as this was to   me however I was soon to learn that I had not yet 
reached the limits of what deep work could produce   this lesson would come during my third year as 
a professor during my third year at Georgetown   which spanned the fall of 2013 through the summer 
of 2014. I turned my attention back to my deep   work habits searching for more opportunities 
to improve a big reason for this recommitment   to depth is the book you&amp;#39;re currently listening 
to most of which was written during this period   writing a 70 000 word book manuscript of course 
placed a sudden new constraint on my already busy   schedule and I wanted to make sure my academic 
productivity didn&amp;#39;t take a corresponding hit   another reason I turned back to 
depth was the looming 10-year process   I had a year or two of Publications left before 
my tenure case was submitted this was the time   in other words to make a statement about my 
abilities especially given that my wife and   I were planning on growing our family with a 
second child in the final year before tenure   the final reason I turned back to depth was 
more personal and admittedly a touch petulant   I had applied and been rejected for 
a well-respected grant that many of   my colleagues were receiving I was upset and 
embarrassed so I decided that instead of just   complaining or wallowing in self-doubt I would 
compensate for losing the grant by increasing   the rate and impressiveness of my Publications 
allowing them to declare on my behalf that I   actually did know what I was doing even if this 
one particular Grant application didn&amp;#39;t go my way   I was already an Adept deep worker but these three 
forces drove me to push this Habit to an extreme   I became ruthless in turning down time-consuming 
commitments and began to work more in isolated   locations outside my office I placed a tally of 
my deep work hours in a prominent position near   my desk and got upset when it failed to grow 
at a fast enough rate perhaps most impactful I   returned to my MIT habit of working on problems in 
my head whenever a good time presented itself be   it walking the dog or commuting whereas earlier I 
tended to increase my deep work only as a deadline   approached this year I was relentless most every 
day of most every week I was pushing my mind to   Grapple with results of consequence regardless 
of whether or not a specific deadline was near   I solved proofs on subway rides and while 
shoveling snow when my son napped on the   weekend I would Pace the yard thinking and when 
stuck in traffic I would methodically work through   problems that were stymying me as this year 
progressed I became a deep work machine and the   result of this transformation caught me off guard 
during the same year that I wrote a book and my   oldest son entered the terrible twos I managed to 
more than double my average academic productivity   publishing nine peer-reviewed papers all the while 
maintaining my prohibition on work in the evenings I&amp;#39;m the first to admit that my year of 
extreme depth was perhaps a bit too extreme   it proved cognitively exhausting and going 
forward I&amp;#39;ll likely moderate this intensity   but this experience reinforces the point 
that opened this conclusion deep work is   way more powerful than most people understand 
it&amp;#39;s a commitment to this skill that allowed   Bill Gates to make the most of an unexpected 
opportunity to create a new industry and that   allowed me to double my academic productivity the 
same year I decided to concurrently write a book   to leave the distracted masses to join the focused 
few I&amp;#39;m arguing is a transformative experience   the Deep life of course is not for everybody 
it requires hard work and drastic changes to   your habits for many there&amp;#39;s a comfort in the 
artificial busyness of Rapid email messaging and   social media posturing while the Deep life demands 
that you leave much of that behind there&amp;#39;s also an   uneasiness that surrounds any effort to produce 
the best things you&amp;#39;re capable of producing   as this forces you to confront the possibility 
that your best is not yet that good it&amp;#39;s safer   to comment on our culture than to step into the 
rooseveltian ring and attempt to wrestle it into   something better but if you&amp;#39;re willing to sidestep 
these Comforts and fears and instead struggle to   deploy your mind to its fullest capacity to create 
things that matter then you&amp;#39;ll discover as others   have before you the depth generates a life rich 
with productivity and meaning in part one I quoted   writer Winifred Gallagher saying I&amp;#39;ll live the 
focused life because it&amp;#39;s the best kind there is   I agree so does Bill Gates and hopefully now 
that you&amp;#39;ve finished this book you agree too

Transcript for:Deep Work by Cal Newport: Key Points and Summary

Transcript for:
Deep Work by Cal Newport: Key Points and Summary