In DEEP WORK, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite. Dividing this book into two parts, he first makes the case that in almost any profession, cultivating a deep work ethic will produce massive benefits. He then presents a rigorous training regimen, presented as a series of four “rules,” for transforming your mind and habits to support this skill. We dive into both during our interview.
Big Ideas
3 Advantages of Deep Work:
- Myelination:
- We must focus on one thing because that’s the only way to isolate the circuit to trigger enough myelination. We need to hit a threshold.
- Examples – Athletes, musicians, artists know this instinctively. They work on their craft to the exclusion of all else for long periods of time.
- Eliminate Attention Residue
- Every time we switch a task, we have attention residue left from the previous task.
- The more intense the residue of previous task the poorer the performance on the next task
- Working in a state of semi distraction is devastating to your performance
- When we eliminate attention residue by working on a single important task for long periods of uninterrupted time, we get more and higher quality work done per hour invested.
- Most people do “Gist Checks” and they are deadly to our productivity.
- Even a 5 second glance is enough to set you back for hours.
- Every time we switch a task, we have attention residue left from the previous task.
- We become what we focus on
- Who you are, what you do and what you accomplish in life is a sum of what you focus your attention on
- If we constantly allow ourselves to be distracted, we end up feeling stressed and busy all the time
- If we focus on deep work, we get to live rich, deep, meaningful lives
- Who you are, what you do and what you accomplish in life is a sum of what you focus your attention on
Speaker 1: In this episode of two thousand books the two key mindsets to have when building a start up that is 10x faster, better or cheaper than your competition. Well hello, hello my ambitious friends and welcome to Two Thousand Books where we bring you the most important actionable ideas from the world’s greatest books for ambitious entrepreneurs. Books in the field of entrepreneurship, marketing skills, productivity management leadership strategies, self help and much more and I’m your host Manny Wire.
By the way you don’t need to take any notes for this interview because I’ve got all the books summaries and action guides organized in one place for you just head on over to twothousandbooks.com/extra and there you will find the summary and action guide of this and all the other books featured on our podcast and they’re all free. So head on over to twothousandbooks.com/extra and get your notes and action guide.
Today we have Salem Ismail. Salem has started and or operated seven start-ups and his last company was sold to Google. Salem ran Yahoo’s in-house incubator and currently serves as executive director at Singularity University. Today we’re talking about his outstanding book Exponential Organizations. Why new organizations are ten times better, faster and cheaper than yours and what to do about it. Salem welcome to the show.
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: Great so we’re talking about deep work today. What is deep work? Like how did you…what happened, what brought you to this journey, what brought you to write deep work?
Speaker 2: Well deep work is a specific type of work activity among all the different types of work activities you can do and the way I define it is that it’s when you’re focusing without distraction on a cognitively demanding task and my claim is that this particular type of work is like a killer app in the knowledge economy. It’s incredibly powerful and valuable. So I’m trying to spread the word that this tier one skill if you learn how to do this and do a lot of this you can have huge acceleration in your career.
Speaker 1: Absolutely it’s so important in today’s day and age given where we are with the distraction of so much distraction that’s all around us. So really important idea now let’s talk about why…I just started the discussion but why is deep work really required in today’s economy and today’s…or it was always required but why has it become so urgent now what’s going on.
Speaker 2: I think it’s important to point out that this is a change that if you if you go back one hundred years ago right. Deep work was actually valuable only for a very small fraction of the economy. There’s a very small number of people maybe some scientists and professional thinkers and writers for which deep work actually helped their career but for the vast majority of people in the worldwide economy who are doing mainly manual or rote job the ability to perform Deep work didn’t matter.
So a big argument I’m making is that’s shifted and as we’ve moved increasingly towards a knowledge economy deep work is becoming much more universally valuable. So that basically for almost any non entry level knowledge worker. If you are really good at focusing intensely on work and you’re really good about protecting and scheduling that time, it will make you better at your job you will do better.
So but you’re right I have to support that claim, that’s a claim but and we have to argue why it’s true and there are a couple reasons I’ll give you one right now. If you can perform deep work you’re able to actually learn complicated things quickly. In fact to learn complicated things quickly almost by definition if you look at the psychology or neuroscience of it almost by definition you have to be in a state of deep work.
So those who are very good at deep work can pick up complex new skills and idea quickly which we see and hear consensus among economists these days that increasingly competitive knowledge economy, the ability to keep up with ever changing complex ideas and systems is becoming crucial. So deep work is the tool you need to actually accomplish that goal.
Speaker 1: Right and one of the things you talk about which I believe is one of the keys reasons why you need to engage in deep work is the idea that myelination. The fact that we need myelination in order to act in order to actually be able to learn fast, in order to do things fast rather than spread ourselves thin and not be able to get any myelination done can you explain the whole idea of myelination hard all works out?
Speaker 2: Yeah this is an interesting event in neuroscience that we now actually know what’s happening at the level of neurons when you’re trying to learn a new complicated task and so what’s actually happening is when you when you’re doing deep work on a new task you’re focusing very intensely on the new activity in the absence of other types of distractions. What’s happening in your brain is that the neural circuit relevant to this new skill or idea is able to fire repeatedly in near isolation because you’re focusing on it really intensely and you have no distractions as there’s not a lot of noise. So you’re firing this circuit cleanly again and again.
Now what actually happens in the brain is this triggers a certain type of cell began laying a sheath of a protein material called myelin around a neuron cell body and this is essentially an insulator. So as myelin sheets get laid around the cells body of the circuits it’s like they’re adding insulation which then allows those circuits to fire faster and more easily going forward.
So that’s actually the neuronal equivalent of what it means to learn something so we know from just the way the cells in the brains actually work that if you’re not focusing on something very intensely without distraction. You’re not going to get the myelin sheets laid down and you’re not going to learn it.
So if you’re kind of trying to learn something but you’re also checking Facebook and you jump to your inbox every fifteen minutes and you give it another five or ten minutes at the level of the neuron’s you’re really not going to be able to master this task very quickly which puts you at a big disadvantage. Or flip it the other way; if you’re one of the few who does deep work and can pick up these skills quickly you’re at a huge advantage in the current knowledge economy.
Speaker 1: So if you are distracted and if you’re doing multitasking and you’re checking Facebook and Twitter and all those things while you’re trying to do meaningful work you’re never getting to the threshold that’s required to activate this process is that right.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah that’s absolutely right and you know who knows this already of course is athletes, musicians, chess players, fields where people have a lot of in-body knowledge about how you pick up new skills and improve. So you’re never going to see you know a top athlete in training or a top top player top musician sort of playing their violin while also looking at their phone out of the corner of their eye because they know they’re not going to get better.
We don’t yet have such in-body of knowledge in the world of knowledge work we’re not as good at understanding practice and improvement but the same principles apply and again the point I’m going to keep hammering is that it’s a big opportunity. You know so it’s like being a professional basketball player before people figured out about you know jump shots and how to do conditioning right.
You have these huge advantages if you’re the only one doing it. I think that’s what’s going on here with knowledge work. If you’re one of the few to leverage the skill of deep work it’s just going to give you this big competitive advantage over everyone else who’s not yet so familiar with the importance of it.
Speaker 1: Got it so this is this is really great because it clarifies why we need to get into deep work. Another thing that really stuck out to me was the idea that there is something called attention residue and that kind of challenges us that kind of pulls us back. Would you talk to us about that?
Speaker 2: I think this is a key point so we have the first advantage of deep work is it helps you learn things quicker. The second advantage of deep work is that it helps you produce more output and the output you produce is going to be of higher quality. And a key reason for this is a very important effect known as attention residue.
Now what attention residue tells us is that if you’re focusing on a particular target and then you switch your attention to another target. There is a residue left in your brain from that original target that you were looking at and that residue can take ten twenty five to thirty minutes to clear out of your head. While that residue is present you are performing at a cognitively reduced capacity.
So you’re just not able to fire on all mental cylinders, you still have a residue from the original target sort of going gunking up the works taking some of your attention making a little bit harder to focus. So when you’re in a state of attention residue you’re just not producing your best work and you’re producing stuff at a much lower rate of productivity.
So if you’re in a state of deep work by contrast remember that one of the core attributes of deep work is that you work for a long time without distraction. But what that means is you don’t switch your attention to something else and back again when you’re in a deep work session so you allow all of this residue to clear out and once it’s able to clear out you’re able to get more work done and at a higher level quality per our actually invested.
Now I think is really important in part because we’ve had this evolution in the way knowledge workers think about productivity. Back in the late one 1990s people were doing actual multitasking. So they would have you know an inbox window open, at the same time as something else and they would be talking on the phone that was like the late ninety’s. Then we had research come along among other things the late Clifford Nass at Stanford did all these studies and said we can’t, multitasking is a myth we’re not able to do it. It just makes you worse at everything.
So really I think in the last decade people have moved away from multitasking. People say I don’t multitask I don’t keep my inbox open while I’m working, I don’t keep my web browser open I don’t try to talk on the phone or work at the same time but what people are doing instead is what I call a bunch of just checks. So they’re mainly working on the primary tasks let’s say they’re trying to write something hard or program something.
They’re mainly working on the task but every ten or fifteen minutes they do a quick just check. Let me just see if something came in important my e-mail inbox okay nothing I need to deal with let me come back. Well I’m a little bit bored let me just check Facebook real quick to see if there’s something interesting there and then let me come back.
And it feels like this should be fine because you’re not multitasking you’re just taking a glance at other things every once in a while but attention residue theory tells us it is disasterous for your productivity because each just check you do to an inbox or Facebook or browser tab gives you a fresh slabbering of attention residue.
And so what happens is the way that a lot of knowledge workers are working today where you’re mainly doing one thing but doing just checks every ten or fifteen minutes keeps them in a constant state of reduce cognitive capacity which means they’re not producing their smartest thoughts and they’re producing a fraction of their possible output.
So if you instead really do deep work long periods of time with zero just checks, zero distractions where you’re really focusing hard it can seem almost like a superpower at first. You just produce stuff at such a faster rate and at such higher quality that it can even baffle people.
I don’t understand how you do this, where are you finding the time to get it done? So I think this is one of the more exciting advantages of keep work. It’s like you’re taking some sort of neurotropic drug does making you into a super concentrator but really all you’re doing is removing the handicap that’s affected most of your peers.
Speaker 1: And I can vouch for what you just said because what happened today was I worked with (inaudible 00:11:35) timer so thirty minutes off and then I take a five minute break and then back to thirty minutes. Thirty minutes on and then a five minute break and again in thirty minutes on.
However in those five minutes I happened to check my Facebook status on which there was a heated political discussion going on right now and I got involved in that and that totally, totally, totally screwed up the next one hour of my productive work. Because I kept on going back to that, how dare that person say that? How come that person said that and that was attention residue really killing everything I had.
Speaker 2: Yeah I think people are very familiar with it an e-mail in boxes or actually like a mechanism that’s designed to create the maximum attention residue in the shortest amount of time because when you look at an e-mail inbox you’re almost certainly going to see something that requires your attention but you can’t really give your attention to at the moment.
You’re going to see a thing from your boss or a colleague and you know you’re going to have to respond to him a little bit later that day but you don’t really have time to do it at the moment. And that’s killer that’s as bad as being in a heated political discussion because we all have this experience of writing e-mails in our head and so this is very familiar where you’re walking you’re in the shower and you find yourself like writing a response to an email completely mundane right but our mind when it knows like I have to communicate with this person I have to reply to him it’s fixated.
What am I going to say, even if it’s boring, what am I going to say, how I’m going to say it? And it just really Gunks up the work. So in boxes I think in particular are killer for attention residue because a five seconds glance is all you need to see five core messages that you know you have to respond and that just hijacks your brain for such a long time.
Speaker 1: So true. Let’s talk about probably the mental thinking behind why deep work is really important. Which is the idea that what we focus…like what we put our attention to is what we really become. I think that’s what you also argue in the book so tell us a little bit more about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah so we’re we’ve just been through sort of economic advantages of deep work that learn things quickly and you just produced much better stuff in a much faster rate but you know when I was doing research on the topic I came across what you were just talking about there, which is I think more a philosophical advantage of deep work.
Which is that when you know the working life around deep work, which is what I’m advocating and to be clear I’m advocating a relatively radical change. I’m not talking about be a little bit less distracted just don’t check your email first thing in the morning I’m talking about a pretty radical change in your working life where deep work is your core activity and you spend hours at it every day you practice it you take it very seriously.
In addition to the economic benefits of this deep work lifestyle there’s these philosophical benefits in that if your day is filled with a lot of deep work the day will be more meaningful the day will feel more satisfying people whose careers are built around deep work like their work a lot better and what you just mentioned is kind of a big reason behind it is that our mind sort of constructs its understanding of its world based on what you pay attention to.
And so if you’re constantly paying attention to a lot of small things and trivial things and minutia and what’s on Twitter and Facebook and email and cost of communication the sense of the world your mind creates is that it’s very frenetic and it’s very stressful and there’s all these social mind traps that you’re triggering that’s making people upset and that you just see your life as a stressful and busy.
I mean think about anyone you know if you say now hey how you doing they say oh busy because their mind has constructed this understanding of their world like it’s frenetic, it’s busy it’s stressful.
If you spend a lot of your time just focused on a small number of things that are valuable you’re creating things that are really valuable instead the understanding of the world that your mind creates is like well the world is one in which you know I apply my skills to create things that are valuable and which craftsmanship matters and which I’m proud of what I do and this type of craft focused output focused less frenetic type world is an image of the world that’s a lot more fulfilling and meaningful of a lot less stressful.
So you talk to a deep worker they might be incredibly productive incredibly effective but if you say how are you they’re unlikely to say busy. You know they’ll say I’m doing pretty well. You know. Yeah let me tell you something I’ve been working on that I’m pretty proud of.
It’s just like a different type of worldview and you know I talked about people don’t realize that the sort of low base level of anxiety that is self-imposed when you spend your life constantly jumping back and forth between things and I like to tell the story that when I was doing the first month of promotion around this book.
It was a month that drew me back from my normal very carefully calibrated deep work lifestyle it drew me back into a lifestyle where I was doing a lot more communication and a lot more being on the Internet and jumping around just because there’s a lot of frenetic activity that surrounds a book launch and I felt that almost immediately my background level of anxiety jumped up five levels and to me I noticed that immediately because it’s usually not there but it really got me thinking.
I think for a lot of people a lot of knowledge workers in particular that background level of anxiety has just taken as, well this is just normal. This is just what it feels like to sort of be sort of alive in a world at work and we don’t even realize that it’s self-imposed. So this is sort of the big philosophical advantage of deep work is that it makes your life feel more meaningful. It makes your background anxiety lower it makes you more satisfied with life and I think that’s as important as the economic benefits.
Speaker 1: Absolutely and just to talk about how as entrepreneurs this becomes such a mess because we have so many things coming in and going out on a daily basis and the more you get into this addiction to do more than say this is really important, this is really key and this is what I must focus on and I can let other things go and I can still be extremely productive and become who I intend to become.
Speaker 2: Yeah I mean no one ever changed the world by having a fast email response time. The stuff that matters is where you have skills that you’re applying at your highest level. That’s the stuff that moves the needle that’s the stuff that makes an impact. The other stuff is stuff that’s necessary but it’s to be seen with a little bit of scepticism.
How can I minimize the impact of sort of shallow logistical work, arbitrary communication how can I minimize the impact so that I have as much energy and time as possible for the deep stuff that actually moves the needle.
Speaker 1: Great right now let’s really talk about how to implement deep work because we’ve been talking about why it’s important why it’s really beneficial to people but how can entrepreneurs, these ambitious entrepreneurs really put the pedal to the metal and get this working in their lives.
Speaker 2: Yeah well I think there’s three big ideas if you want to become a deep worker a I’ll mention the three ideas at a high level that we can dive in as seems useful but the really the three big ideas around how people can make deep work a priority is you know the first idea is that deep work is an ability that has to be trained. And this kind of key that you can’t just assume that you know how to focus really intensely, it’s just a matter of doing it. It’s instead something you have to train or you won’t be good at it.
The second big idea is that deep work is an ability that must be supported. So again you’re unlikely to just stumble across some time during your week if you’re a busy entrepreneur and say have nothing to do and I’m in the mood to concentrate. That’s not going to happen so you actually have to go out of your way on how you approach your work and schedule your work and manage your time to make sure that deep work has a place of priority.
And then the final idea is that deep work is an ability that has to be fought for. So it actually goes contrary to a lot of trends right now in the world of work and in society generally. So to make people work a priority you’re going to be pushing back on some trends out there like the importance of connectivity, the importance of social media, the importance of being busy. Really pushing back on some pretty powerful trends out there in our culture of work and in society as a large, you have to be ready for it and have some ideas for how you’re going to navigate that successfully.
So you have to deal with all three of those ideas if you’re going to successfully transition into a deep work type lifestyle.
Speaker 1: And the first thing you said was training it isn’t right?
Speaker 2: That’s right training it.
Speaker 1: And how do you train it?
Speaker 2: Yes it’s good point there’s two types of training that are relevant. So again the underlying motivation here is that people often get this wrong. They think about deep work as a habit like flossing, something they know how to do they just need to try to do it more often. Like yeah I’m too distracted I should probably put aside more time to focus. But the reality is that deep work is absolutely a trained skill like playing the guitar and it’s something that if you haven’t practiced systematically you shouldn’t expect to do it well and I think the reason this point is important is that if you get this wrong it’s easy to get frustrated early on.
So a lot of people will say yeah I should try to focus more maybe set aside some time I’m just going to concentrate and it doesn’t go well. Its uncomfortable their mind is rebelling they can’t really concentrate that hard because they haven’t practiced it yet and they feel frustrated and they come away with the conclusion. Well maybe I’m just not a deep work person and then they go back to what they were doing before.
So when you understand like no no you have to train it first, those type of experiences are not so frustrating because you say well of course I’m not that great at it I haven’t really done a lot of training but I also have confidence that I could get better if I put in the time.
So the two types of training that matters is the first type is that you need to detox your brain from an addiction to novel stimuli and this is often missed but if your brain has been trained that at the slightest hint of boredom it’s going to get a novel stimuli delivered to a web browser or your phone. I’m a little bit bored bam let me see my email let me see Facebook and Twitter let me see something this new, novel and interesting.
If you’ve trained your brain to expect this at all times it’s not going to be able to work deeply when it comes time to work deeply it just won’t be able to tolerate the lack of novel stimuli when you’re actually concentrating on the same thing for a long amount of time. So you actually have to detoxify your brain from that addiction if you’re going to succeed at deep work.
And so I like to use the phrase you need to embrace boredom but essentially every single day you need to spend a lot of time where maybe your brain wants some novel stimuli and you just say no and there’s simple things you can do but at home for example say this is the hour in which I’m going to go on the Internet and do Internet stuff all the other hours I’m not.
And if I’m watching a show and there’s a commercial then I’m just going to be bored during the commercial or if I’m reading a book and I’m a little bit bored then I’m just going to be bored I’m not going and check my phone or if I’m in line at the bank I’m just going to be in line at the bank and I guess I’ll just have to look around and think about things and I’m not going to pull out my phone.
The second type of training is you actually can push your brain to concentrate deeper and deeper and here any sort of skilled activity that gives you immediate feedback about your effectiveness helps. So it could be like playing poker or bridge athletic endeavors that really require you to focus and understand where all the players are on the field in order to do it well that’s a great way to train it.
There’s various you know computer games, books anything that pushes your brain to have to focus really intensely and if it doesn’t you get negative feedback. It’s like doing cognitive calisthenics so that’s going to deepen your level of depth.
So you have to do two things you have to wean yourself off of an addiction to distraction and embrace boredom and then two you have to go out of your way to push yourself in the scenarios that pushes your brain forces you to concentrate and gives you clear feedback so that you maintain that concentration. You’re increasing your capacity to be un-distracted while also increasing your capacity to focus really intensely during those periods.
Speaker 1: So it’s like the letter which is it’s almost like gratification or might I say it’s like the flow experience that’s how we get it, like that’s kind of the defining characteristic of fow where we’re forcing ourselves, we’re pushing our comfort zone but at the same time we’re getting feedback whether we’re doing it well or not.
Speaker 2: Really the relevant science here would be deliberate practice. So if you study the science of deliberate practice which is the best framework we have right now for understanding how people become elite level of performance is we know that they do something called deliberate practice which is where you’re pushing yourself past your comfort level while getting very specific feedback about okay you’re doing the right thing here you’re not doing the right thing there. That’s how people get good at things that are hard and so any type of game or activity that allows you to do deliberate practice on something cognitive is like doing pull ups for your brain.
Speaker 1: That’s right and the second thing you were saying?
Speaker 2: So deep work is an ability that you have to support.
Speaker 1: Supports and how to support it?
Speakerr 2: Now there’s several things that can matter. I think routines and rituals play a big role. So it can take a lot of willpower to wrench your attention away from interesting things and say now I’m just going to focus really intensely on something for a long amount of time. So if you can have for example some sort of ritual that you always do before you start deep working that can really help make that transition much easier.
So I talked for example in my book about how Charles Darwin when he did his thinking every day on the Origin of Species the ideas behind the Origins of Species he had a particular path that he would walk through the grounds of his estate in England and that helped him switch into the mindset of okay now I’m going to think deeply he didn’t have to wrench his attention away just arbitrarily he knew this walk is connected to deep work.
Routines is about how do you actually schedule deep work into your life as a professional and I think an important point here is that there’s different ways, different philosophies of how you can schedule deep work and it really depends on your personality and it depends on the type of job you have.
So you know one successful philosophy for scheduling deep work is what I call the bimodal philosophy and this is where you occasionally put aside a large amount of time one, two, three days where you do nothing but deep work. No email, no social media, no distraction during those periods but then outside of those periods you’re just doing your sort of normal work. More shallow knowledge, not a lot of intense thinking.
This is popular for some people, Bill Gates still does this with his THINK weeks a couple times a year he puts aside a whole week where he does nothing but think deeply. I talk in the book about a professor named Adam Grant who’s also an author they were give and take more recently the originals. Yeah he does this for his academic work. He will put aside one, two to three days and treat it like a vacation. So there’s our office notification on his email, you know I’m not around he can’t answer emails, he’s unreachable during those periods incredibly deep. But then outside of those periods he’s very accessible.
So that’s one approach but another philosophy for example is that people find it’s much more effective to do I call the rhythmic philosophy where its just a set time, the same days, the same time, every week that you do your deep work. Maybe Monday and Friday mornings from eight to eleven you always do deep work every week without exception and for some people that’s way more effective. Or every day you do it for the first hour and a half of the day you do deep work and so for other people that’s more successful.
And the bigger point there is that you want to find a concrete philosophy so you understand this is how I schedule deep work you don’t leave it up to chance you don’t leave it at the whim but keep in mind that the type of routine you use to get deep work into your schedule can differ from what other people are doing. Really you need to match a scheduling philosophy to the specifics of your personality in your particular job demands.
Speaker 1: Right, right and so it’s different for all of us, all of us in different domains, different entrepreneurs, different needs and different challenges. We’re going to have to structure it differently but we’ve got to find something that works for us rather than leave it to chance.
Speaker 2: That’s right you have to have a routine built around your deep work so it’s not left to chance and you want to have a rituals surrounding the actual sessions so that you’re minimizing the energy required to slip into that mindset.
Speaker 1: Yeah because you can’t depend on willpower to do any of these things for you.
Speaker 2: Yeah then it’s going to be a crapshoot, you know hey some days you’re in a good mood you had a good lunch. You know you didn’t have anything that taxing happened this morning so you’re successful at it. Another day It’s the opposite. You know and you’re not going to get anything done.
So routines and rituals are at the core of really you know making deep work a core part of your professional life as opposed to just an activity you occasionally do.
Speaker 1: That’s great. Now the third thing you said was we have to fight for it what do you mean by that?
Speaker 2: We recognize that the trends of business right now and the trends and society as a whole are often quite antagonistic towards deep work. So you look at the Facebook’s new office, they’re building the world’s largest open office. Thousands of people in one massive room that that is incredibly harmful from the perspective of I want to do deep work. The rise of office instant messaging, so now that it’s not just we want you to check your email pretty frequently but instead as soon as that slack chat room goes bold you better get in there and start responding incredibly antagonistic to the ability to deep work.
The rise of constant connectivity, the rise of using business as your main metric that you can show that you’re productive and useful to the company. Answering email chains right away always being the first to respond to something. Responding late at night that trend is terrible for deep work.
The rise of meeting cultures where let’s have meetings, meetings, meetings like the first thing you want to do is have a meeting let’s just have a meeting that’s the way to do it, where peoples whole days are just meetings. All of these things which are really big right now in the world of work make it hard to do deep work.
So if you’re trying to embrace a deep work lifestyle you’re going to be swimming upstream. And it’s important to recognize that. That this is not going to be easy necessarily and to really think what strategies am I going to use to try to make this transformation whether you are self employed or you work in a large organization, what type of strategies can you use to help you push upstream without being too disruptive or without coming across as someone who was being you know egotistical or difficult.
You have to think about these things and there are some ideas that work really well here but you have to think about these things if you just dive into it you’re going to realize without expecting all this pushback you’re probably going to be surprised or overwhelmed by it.
Speaker 1: Yeah It’s a constant challenge for us entrepreneurs because there’s noise coming from the customer and there is noise coming from some of the vendor and there is so much stuff that’s constantly grabbing or constantly seeking our attention that we feel almost this urge to just say let’s do this right now, let’s answer that email, let’s answer that Facebook message or let’s answer the vendor who is screaming at us or whatever it is. It’s really easy to fall into their trap. So how do we fight it, what do we need to do to fight this?
Speaker 2: Right well there’s one big idea that I found to be useful and that’s where you ask yourself what’s the ratio of deep work hours to non deep work hours that I ideally want to hit in the typical week? Now if you’re self-employed or an entrepreneur you just have this conversation with yourself if you’re employed if you have a boss or supervisor you ask the question of them. Here’s what deep work is, here’s what shallow work is both are important for my job and my role and my skill level.
What’s the ratio of this deep work so that the hours from producing a lot of value and using my skills are getting better to shallow work which is you know what I’m doing the logistics of overhead that are necessary to run the organization. What’s the ratio I want hit? And then you measure and come back and discuss.
So you measure for a while then if you’re self-employed you have this conversation with yourself if you’re not you have this conversation with your supervisor or you come back and say wait a second the goal we had was let’s say it should be 50-50 and yet I got maybe four hours of deep work this whole the whole week, it was all meetings and email it’s like a five percent to ninety five percent deep to shallow work ratio. Either we have to really seriously rethink my role in this organization, the value of my skills, the value of my time or something has to change.
We have to start making changes and it’s an ongoing dialogue and process and what it allows you to do is in a positive way over time is start making the type of shifts necessary to your habits or to the company culture that allows and respects deep work as much as the other stuff. And there’s…you know people are often surprised about how much of the work culture or societal pressures that feel unavoidable how much of them are arbitrary and how easily they can be changed or curtailed once there’s actually an open conversation.
And this is something you know I’ve talked about it before, I’ve talked about it in the book but there is this research by was Leslie Pearl out who is studying constant connectivity at the Boston Consulting Group and he found that when the team started having these honest weekly meetings where they were discussing this stuff and discussing the pressures and their effectiveness of the deep work is that some of the company culture that was seen to be immutable in particular the company culture that said you have to answer any email within an hour at any time at night or day that this turned out to be arbitrary but no one had ever said that this is important for the company.
No one ever sat down and said this is what it means to be successful she discovered that it actually arose out of this sort of self reinforcing feedback loop and it had no connection to value and once they actually started discussing this as a team they very quickly came to the conclusion that this doesn’t matter at all and we should not have any expectation of like Email answering outside of this time and if it’s really whatever vital we can call. They were able to change the culture dramatically sort of overnight because they were actually talking about things.
So having the goal and then measuring and discussing the results. I think leads to an evolution in your personal habits an organizational culture that can give deep work a place of priority but it takes discussion and it takes clarity.
Speaker 1: It’s great so clarifying the goal will get us really started on the journey in some ways.
Speaker 2: Yeah I mean if you hired someone and they’re highly skilled and they tell you I’m getting five hours out of fifty a week really doing deep work It’s embarrassing, like this is crazy like why am I paying one hundred fifty thousand dollars a year for a top notch developer or manager if I just have them answering e-mails like a network router.
And they’re not using their skills at all what a waste of money and it’s embarrassing and it really needs to change and say this is stupid we got change something. I can’t have one hundred fifty thousand dollar your skilled laborer spending their whole day in meetings and so when you have the stark numbers laid out it really does lead to changes.
Yeah so this is great Cal because what we’ve really gone through what deep work is, why it’s important and how we can really incorporate it in our lives. Now I want to close with the story you talked about Teddy Roosevelt because somehow people might get this feeling that deep work is really good if you just want to excel or one thing in life, if you just want to be Einstein and you want to discover the theory of relativity then it works. But maybe you want to like do other things and you enjoy life maybe doesn’t work but Teddy Roosevelt’s story tells us a different… like it paints a different picture right.
Speaker 2: Yeah it does paint a picture, so Teddy Roosevelt was famous for his ability to work deeply that he could get this blistering intensity of concentration turned on and when he could turn it on and allowed him to produce a massive amount of high quality work for a really relatively limited amount of hours actually spent so he’s a great example of deep work being like a superpower.
It’s how for example he was able to get good grades at Harvard even though he confined his studying to a very small number of hours per day because he could do his studying with such intensity that in one hour he could get done what the typical semi distracted on undergrad might spend three-four hours to do.
When he was in law school at Columbia while also involved in political life after Harvard, he wrote what ended up being an incredibly influential book on naval strategy. It was about the naval war of 1812 and he really got into all of the original documents and figured out the armaments and strategy was a very influential book he wrote this on the side while having a sort of a very busy life as well as a law student and politician and member of social society.
He could do it because of his deep workability, when he worked on the book he could turn on this skill and just produce incredibly high quality in an incredibly small amount of time. So he’s a great example because he underscores what you just said deep work is no longer a sort of affectation of a very small number of people who all they do is think for a living.
Deep work is not a skill that’s just relevant to philosophers and professors a novelist. In the knowledge work economy it really is the killer app and to emphasise I’m not the only one saying it that phrase deep work is the killer app of the knowledge economy is not mine actually that phrase comes from the economist in an article from their January issue where they were surveying ideas about deep work including my book among some others.
That was actually the economist phrase that it’s clear when you look at this research that it’s true that deep work is the killer app of the knowledge economy. So if you have a non entry level knowledge job, if you’re doing something more than just administrative work, if you’re doing something more than just moving messages around. If you make deep work a priority in your life if you train it like you would train any other tier one skill.
If you go out of your way and fight to make it at the center of your working life you are just going to produce much more than your peers, you’re going to produce at a much higher quality, you’re going to pick up new skills and ideas very quickly. It’s like a superpower and your working life is going to seem more meaningful satisfying.
So I really can’t think of a single other activity that you can do right now in our current economy that has so many powerful benefits, so that’s why I’m so excited about this idea and this conclusion that any way you look at it a deep life is a good life.
Speaker 1: Yes deep life is a good life and that’s why to all my fellow ambitious entrepreneurs out there I want to say you’ve got to read this book, you’ve got to learn from Cal what he’s talking about. There are so much so much great stuff in there Cal how can people get hold of what your teaching and anything else that you’re…
Speaker 2: Well on my website Callnewport.com I have a blog where I’ve been writing about these ideas for years you can you can learn a lot there, you can sort of test out the ideas. I’ll tell you I’m otherwise relatively hard to contact. I’ve never had a social media account on purpose because though there’s some value in that the value of been able to do undistracted deep work is much more important to me.
I also don’t have a general purpose e-mail address you can use that is something that anyone can use and I guarantee to answer so I am kind of hard to reach But let that be a demonstration on you know the deep work.
It turns out that even if you’ve never had a Facebook account or a Twitter account and you’re hard to reach you can still be professionally successful. You can still have friends you can still know what’s going on in the world you can still sell books. So let my hard to reach-ness be a case study of a deep life actually is feasible. Even in today’s connected world.
Speaker 1: This is great thank you very much Cal.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: By the way a lot of you have asked me as to be able to absorb seven books a week? Well I do read a lot but a lot of my learning happens as a result of listening to audio books while I’m working out, driving, running, doing errands all sorts of things. So it is a great way to use my extra time and if you want to use your extra time by listening to a great audio book for free head on over to twothousandbooks.com/free and sign up for an article subscription the first book is free and you can cancel anytime. So twothousandbooks.com/free.