Guide to Deep Work
doist.com
doist.com
You book 50 minute video sessions and are paired with a random other person who wants to get work done. You start by saying what you intend to work on, and you finish by saying what you accomplished. That's it, other discussion is strongly discouraged.
I work from home and have nearly unlimited leeway over my time. This is not such a great thing, with unlimited freedom I tend to wander or do nothing. This service has helped to provide a human expectation and environment conducive to work. It's free and the days I schedule sessions are distinctly more productive than the days I do not.
----
Before I sent this comment, I went deeper into the website beyond the home page and 30s video. It is just that:
>Research in psychology and behavioral science shows that regular human connection reduces the likelihood that a worker will procrastinate or become distracted.
>In our most recent internal survey, 95.5% of users reported a significant increase in productivity, and reduced procrastination.
It looks like it's not a site that will magically boost your productivity (which isn't really what it claims). You have to want to be productive, and the site helps facilitate that desire.
Maybe something like everyone schedules Slack video calls once a day with a random team member. Or a quick Flask app to output a schedule for the day.
Deep work involves situated thinking -- thinking while doing, making use of feedback.
OTOH, the structured approach biases towards separating the two closely knit parts into "planning" and "action" -- so much so that in our organizations the two are done by different people/teams!
Drucker said that a decision has been made only when it's clear what the actions are. Correspondingly, deep work is required to the extent that the analysis can't be front loaded in that manner.
See, I think you have that backwards - the problem is management attention. When management is giving you their full attention and micromanaging, meaningful work becomes impossible.
The most important part is that it opens up discussion to the team. Everyone is able to read, comment, and offer up improvements or get clarity on questions they have. After a few rounds a feedback and revision — usually 2-3 days — a decision is made and the engineer goes off to break out a few tickets and start the work.
It’s async, collaborative, efficient, visible, and just a generally pleasurable process as both an individual and teammate.
I'm not surprised this conclusion was reached so quickly. I find it a bit dysfunctional that working from home has become the go-to solution for distraction-filled workplaces.
How about we make work more like home instead? Companies will see the value of a beautiful, effective workplace in the form of increased productivity. Tech parks should offer restaurants, a gym with a sauna, a shower, pods for taking naps. Expecting the employee to keep a distraction-free home office seems strangely feudal, unless you really need the tax deduction.
Heck, add a few video game systems, a keg, and a pool table and require 16 hour office days. Why not? You're already doing it anyway. How about a play room for the kids with babysitting services? At that point, why even have a home?
Factors involved in why these offices are preferred include:
1) Low cost. Yes, yes, I know, productivity loss from battery-farmed knowledge workers as compared to free-range knowledge workers is arguably much greater. But that's not quantifiable. An accountant can point to cost savings of open-plan offices as a number in a spreadsheet and show how it directly impacts the bottom line.
2) Adaptability. It's much easier to move people around and reconfigure office space for different uses if you do not commit to building walls (even cubicle walls). This is especially true if an org is being "right-sized", but is also true of e.g., startups. An actual office may be prohibitive given the pittance in A-round funding you got, but if you can cram your guys into a corner of WeWork you can make the numbers work.
3) Increased workforce visibility. This means a couple of things: a) open plan is a cheap, easy-to-implement panopticon, allowing management to keep tabs on you at all times -- every time you go to the loo, everyone in the office will see you leave and come back. b) Visibility means availability -- specifically, availability to be interrupted at any time for any reason. Do not underestimate the importance of visibility. Microsoft had a company culture that strongly favored giving offices to individual programmers, until in the 90s the management consultant Jim McCarthy said "Beware of a guy in a room, and I mean that literally." He thought developers should NOT have private space of their own as it made them less accountable.
There's so much less busywork generated when there are less people around.
I'll never work in an office again, unless I have to.
And once you have an uninterrupted time block, it's important to ignore potential interruptions. I find this extremely difficult.
What are some good strategies if they don't?
For me though, it's fairly straightforward:
- Decide what I need to work on, and try to visualize the end result as clearly as possible
- Put phone on DND
- Turn off email clients
- Close browser tabs not related to work
- Put on noise-canceling headphones with some music that has no lyrics (e.g. electronic, synthwave, etc.)
Then I work.
I can stay in "the zone" for many hours using this method, and tend to accomplish my best work. Furthermore, I can do it uninterrupted, except for the occasional 5-minute restroom break.
What we need is a messaging service that can only do preset phrases that comprise 99% of the distractions: Impromptu Meeting. Catering. Potential Hire. Change of plans. Emergency.
You would only have a few messages you can send a week, too, so you can't spam it with nonsense.
This is a non-negotiable term for me when I interview.
Another thing I noticed about myself: I have "moods". Sometimes I feel like dicking around (like right now!), and in those situations I don't even try to get into Deep Work because it takes a lot of energy to do so. But a few hours later my mood will shift, and when that happens I need to be able to catch that window of opportunity and get myself in the zone quickly. From there, it's off to the races.
I've found that most work arrangements can't accommodate this type of arbitrary work habit. Which is why I'm currently employed at a very small firm where everyone is remote, and I have a super awesome manager who trusts everyone fully.
What kind? HN, normal news, politics?
An example is a background where a TV series runs that I watched 9 times already, let's say Babylon 5. The work computer has an attention accident (maybe just slow or whatever). My attention lifts from work, and B5 catches it before it goes off who knows where. Since B5 is not interactive and since I've seen it 9 times already it easily releases the attention so that it can go back to work.
I wrote more here: https://medium.com/@MartinCracauer/on-attention-focus-and-au...
Come to think of it, there have been previous campaigns to get people to reduce their screen time, but "Deep Work" seems to be the most successful yet. Perhaps because it focuses on what you stand to gain (long periods of uninterrupted focus) rather than what you stand to lose (dopamine hits from your smartphone). I think Deep Work succeeded because it doesn't just say "X is bad for you," it says "X is holding you back from being a better version of yourself," and therefore allows you to daydream about being super productive.
However, there was arguably less of a disconnect between "deep work" and "work" before electronics, compared to default "work" today.
Why not just say you need to focus?
It's an asymptotic, unattainable state to strive for. You can be sure that if anyone is (humble) bragging about attaining it that they have not.
I don't. It's a description of the work they're doing, not themselves. There's a bit more to it. In the book of the same name (Deep Work), he talks about how the kind of work you can do when you can get away from the distractions creates value beyond the same amount of time spread around those distractions.
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" (Cal Newport)
focus: "to concentrate attention or effort" (Merriam-Webster)
Do you feel like they are self important because they were turning you away or declining invitations so they could focus, or because they are essentially describing their work as having high value?
Generally, at work this is ok as I enjoy what I do. However, I study for a degree part time, which is in 'Computing and IT' - the same field as my work, BUT it's so out of date, and the content is so boring I just can't do it, until last minute when I have to.
I genuinely think if I had studied this course, before working in tech I may have changed my mind. It's mind numbingly boring. Even if they just taught the content in a better way, something like A Cloud Guru where you have videos, guides to follow along etc. but all I get is books. It's awful.
(While we're on the topic of it, I should be studying... getting back to it now, promise!)
I did eventually manage to get into the habit of doing more consistent gradual work throughout the year, and that's the only advice I could give. The habit of devoting that hour or two per day became the norm and I no longer had to struggle to force myself to study (or fail to).
Just find it so hard to concentrate on it, almost wish I hadn't started it but don't want to give up on it now. Will have to try and get into a habit like you, good luck with it!
A) Do less shallow work.
B) Do shallow work more effectively. Or schedule it more effectively.
-------
How possible is option A? Well, what is Shallow Work and why does it matter. Some examples of Shallow Work off the top of my head:
1) Phone-Interviewing people to work for your employer.
2) Looking at Sentry and Dead Mans Snitch and seeing if any of the exceptions reported from your backend this week are actually real problems that should be investigated.
3) Editing the notes you took at a meeting so that you can send them out to attendees.
4) Writing a response to a well-structured question which a junior engineer emailed you about a task which you delegated to them.
5) Creating and sending out a doodle poll to pick a restaurant to eat at before contra dance.
6) Scheduling a time to talk to your father who lives 5 time zones away.
7) Filling in a PDF listing your bank accounts to report to the US Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network by April 15th.
Each of these is backed by a responsibility -- either you're being paid to maintain a system or relationship for your employer or you are doing something to keep your social life running. You can dial back that responsibility, but that does have consequences. If nobody organizes pizza night, then you don't see your friends in real life and you end up scrolling through facebook out of a vague sense of loneliness.
So there is a certain amount of Shallow Work that needs to get done if you have certain goals or want to avoid particular sadnesses.
--------
How possible is option B? How possible is it to do Shallow Work so that it interferes less with Deep Work?
For #1, you can push phone interviews to the beginning or end of the day...when the currently-employed will find it easier to get time to interview.
For #2, you can establish a team habit to triage your Sentry and Dead Mans Snitch dashboards to Inbox Zero, that way you only need to glance at them and you don't need to load anything into your working memory.
For #3... actually I'm not sure what is a good way to be more effective at this. Any tips?
For #4... also not sure.
For #5, you can establish a default restaurant and go there every time.
For #6, you can have a default time every week.
For #7, there's nothing to be done. It is annoying and Adobe Acrobat is the worst.
--------
What techniques do you use to be skilled at Shallow Work or to at least get it out of the way of Deep Work?
So if shallow work is your weak spot where you'd like some improvements, then all the classics like David Allen's Getting Things Done or perhaps Covey's 7 Habits of highly effective people would be relevant.
Guilty of that. I've seen friends who are young (14-15) and they talk about work smart not hard, 80/20 and deliberate practice to break through the plateu. Can't tell if I should find it kinda funny or just sad. Business books do ruin social life and makes you very critical of yourself