The Importance of Deep Work and the 30-Hour Method for Learning a New Skill

For deep work, you should be able to block a chunk of your day to do important tasks without being interrupted. That's not the same as organizing the day by hours. This blocked chunk can be dynamic to accommodate emergencies, but you must be able to say nobody should interrupt me for the next few hours at some point in your day.

Otherwise how can you engage in something deep? I've been in this situation many times. I can't do any productive work in my office because there's an endless stream of interruptions, emergencies and stupid things going on. That's why I have to resort to doing all significant work at home, where nobody can annoy me.

- Monastic: “This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations.” — isolate yourself for long periods of time without distractions; no shallow work allowed.

- Bimodal: “This philosophy asks that you divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else.” – dedicate a few consecutive days (like weekends, or a Sunday, for example) for deep work only, at least one day a week.

- Rhythmic: “This philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit.” – create a daily habit of three to four hours every day to perform deep work on your project.

- Journalistic: “in which you fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule.” — Not recommended to try out first, since you first need to accustom yourself to deep work.

< https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55dcde36e4b0df55a96ab... >

The other thing, especially mentioned in The Timeless Way of Building, is that you need privacy to reach a state of flow. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re isolated or that no one can interrupt you, but it means nothing in your immediate vicinity is triggering your peripheral vision or any sense of a fight vs flight reflex because someone’s walking around right behind you, etc. Most of that research advocates that individuals should be allowed to customize these aspects of their personal space, like privacy, quiet, lighting, ergonomics..

More generally though, it’s not about what works for you or for me. It’s about what we can empirically learn about states of flow, and on that front it’s utterly beyond dispute that open-plan offices are disastrously bad.

Plus, it’s widely and popularly disputed that open plans are actually cheaper, e.g. even in pop articles like this:

< https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/hr/2016/... >

I’ve also seen sources claiming that an open plan developer is less than 9% cheaper in real estate terms than a private office developer, without any consideration about interruptions, distractions, communicable disease, lower morale, changed vacation or sick time habits, etc.

9% might sound like a lot of savings on a naive glance, but when these employees are costing you $150K of wages and a bunch more in overhead & benefits, you would be hugely sensitive to big, publicly discussed sources of productivity reduction, because it’s immediately obvious, especially to corporate finance, that saving 9% on floor space means nothing if you’re losing 15% of labor ouput from distractions, 5% from increased sickness or vacation habits, 2% from widely reported morale issues, etc.

I think really the issues are much more status driven, seeking to force flow-requiring knowledge work into a commodity, to push down the age and wages of employees.

And part is cosmetic. If you think of a start-up itself as a product, and the investors as the user, and the VCs as the company, then VCs optimize cosmetic attractiveness to create start-ups they can sell for as little substance as possible.

So if grand visions of hoodie-clad developers sipping craft coffee in an exposed brick, glass, ductwork open plan hell will convince the dimwitted actor or retired athlete to invest on visions of the next unicorn, then why would they care about worker productivity?

The whole point is credential and cosmetics to lever up the known-to-be-unrealistic valuation to foster an inflated IPO or acquisition, and it’s not a function of actual economic product of employees.

Then after some unicorns hammer this strategy, everyone else (including big corps trying yo look hip) just start cargo-cult copying it.

My only remaining surprise is at how long this open plan bubble can persist before people realize these companies are not about any type of productivity.

It also swiss-cheese's my schedule, because instead of setting aside dedicated time for pair programming and for information exchanges or meetings, like you would think you should do in a professional workplace, those events are now thrust upon me even when I might be trying to finish some other work or I might have to urgently focus on something else.

The entire premise that continuous real-time audio is somehow synonymous with idea-sharing or collaboration is just insane.

Sincere collaboration is respectful of each individual's time and planned work schedule, as well as individual preferences for quiet, privacy, etc. Sincere collaboration can be asynchronous, textual, visual, or auditory (or a mix), can be remote-friendly, etc.

What you describe as "forced information exchange between people" is appropriate maybe for a trading floor or mission control, but the attempt to stylize a bullpen of software engineers in the same way is disaster, and at best it is superficial collaboration.

I'm not sure what "otherwise" is supposed to mean here. Isn't the whole point of the "space" in the first place to enable the "employee base" to be more productive there than at home or remote?

Maybe that employee base wouldn't need to grow so fast if the existing employees could be more productive by, say, using existing space more effectively.

Lastly, it seems to be something of a cliche how hard and/or expensive it is for startups (especially, as you mention, when growing) to deal with space. I am, however, skeptical that the decision of having open plan offices is based on any kind of rigorous decision making rather than trend-following and following the path of least (initial) resistance.

I think the answer is more plain: shared offices cut cost, and and the resulting immediate an ongoing increase in profit is 'the most important of all benchmarks' for most companies, in fact it's not even a 'benchmark' ... it's 'the point'.

So - essentially, 'private offices' are an 'investment' and an investment has to be clearly and obviously justified, otherwise the default is to go to open office plans.

The vast majority of work simply is not deep work - and yes, even things like 'Marketing' - although most operational marketing people have a 'creative bone' - and brilliant marketers are as useful and brilliant as equivalent Engineer, the actual creative/deep thinking Marketing stuff is usually done in agencies, which are like architecture firms. Similarly I don't doubt creative financial structuring or deal making, 'deep time' is just not as consistent for them as it is for most Engineers.

There is actually rather scarce 'deep work' to be done, and so, as so few companies willingly require people to be 'learning very important new skills' ... offices become less common due to the simple economics of it all.

The best solution (I'm surprised more companies have not implemented this) is to provide both environments and give the employee some guidance in terms of where they choose to work. Most knowledge workers will not benefit from the monastic strategy described in this article but almost all will benefit from a bimodal or rhythmic strategy.

If you already have an open plan office this is as easy as telling the employee he/she can work remotely a few days a week as long as they select a quiet space that's free of distractions (so if they have kids running around at home during the day, maybe better to advise them to go to the library instead).

The manager should provide some guidance in terms of how much time the employee spends remotely vs. "on the floor" with everyone else. Graham's maker vs. manager article is great on this topic,engineers often err a little too far in the direction of isolation, managers err too far in the direction of having everyone in the collaborative environment, the solution is a little dialogue.

With very light guidance and very little additional cost to the business you can improve both productivity and morale this way. Our team functions best very far down the deep work end of the spectrum -- we have one day a week where everyone goes into the office or gets on calls and gets aligned. For the rest of the week communication is mostly async and work is mostly remote.

It should be not one extreme against another.

As much as I personally prefer isolated offices/cubes, the last 4 years in a mostly open office have definitely given me sympathy to the argument for them. I personally have noted a level of collaboration and information sharing that just didn't happen in the more isolated environments. There is something pragmatically useful about having people be able to jump in with their feedback or expertise.

The more isolated people are the more you have to go out of your way to ensure information dissemination and feedback channels are available and utilized. It certainly can work, but I haven't seen it work as well.

Open rooms promote teaching, spontaneous design discussions, etc, that just doesn't happen in the same way over e-mail, chat, stand-up meetings, etc.

There are arguments to go both ways. I used to hate open offices, now I'm sympathetic to them.

A key to making the open office tolerable is that it should not mean no isolation. There are ways to address their concerns. eg, headphones are essential. Obscuring line of site is very helpful. My current situation has me in an area of "open rooms", where rooms with ~11 desks are arraigned in an open office-esque fashion. It's pretty decent. Not super-open, but people can "share space" with the people relevant to them.

What do you propose for developers whose jobs consist primarily of deep focus tasks that require quiet, privacy, and states of flow?

(I would argue this is the majority of developers, but that is beside the point. Even if it's a minority, yet their work output is very important for a given company, it would still seem that embedding them in an open-plan layout they must sit in for the majority of the time would clearly be throwing away more money they could possibly be saved on the real estate. Or you disagree?)

You say, "Not everything is about your personal productivity" but this seems mostly irrelevant, because we're in a section of the possible solution space that focuses on never accounting for developers' personal productivity. Separately, if you're on a team where developers have to invest deep focus into disparate parts of a system or disparate solution approaches (the majority of teams I've ever seen), then it does boil down to the sum of individual productivity for most things.

It’s such a widely and publicly disputed topic that it’s not a question of dismissing “mere research”. Rather it’s more like, “can I get away with not giving this important tool to workers?” and some degree of confirmation bias to avoid looking into it at all, like you say.

[1] http://www.expertadmissions.com/ExpertAdmissionsBlog/tabid/7...

Also in the grand scheme of things, three weeks isn't a lot of time. Granted, I'm not a fast learner!

If those topics are in your wheelhouse there is definitely a ton of high quality original content from the advanced undergraduate level to the research level.

so maybe a lot of the internet is seo ranked shit show...but not all of it.

It's a good idea. I'd like to see this succeed.

Perhaps make an entire "contact" page, I dislike mailto: links. It opens my company's preferred Email client called IBM Notes and it sucks.

Once you have your MVP, please add transitions/animations. The site is too instant so to say, when clicking a button you expect some small delay. Even if you pre-loaded this, it's sort of important.

When you feel like geeking out on something, put the phone on airplane mode and put your IDE fullscreen. Focus should be a single goal 'e.g. rewrite that utility I did years ago in AIR and won't work on linux now because AIR is unsupported and I switched to linux because windows 10 screwed me with its forced updates while I was working' (real case ;)

A related problem I've noticed to this attitude is people's acceptance of it as a "fact of life." I work with a ton of people who recognize that time-in-seat is a meaningless metric, but somebody above them cares about it and they refuse to outrightly act like it's bullshit. I've been told by my manager that my time in the office is important not to him, but to our CEO.

Appeal to the times I've been focused for a time gets me to ignore all of the times I did the same and produced nothing. Not only produced nothing, but consumed nothing, as well. Both have happened. I do not keep a solid journal to say that one happens more than the other. One certainly made me happy, so I can remember it better. But that is the definition of selection bias.

But, if you have evidence that these are more successful than alternatives, I'm game. Where is the evidence? For that matter, what are the alternatives?

(Currently typing with my 4mo old. So... apologies for any typos.)