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Comment by flir | Hacker News Reader

I dunno, I can see it both ways. The front-loaded email style or eschewing social media certainly make life easier for others. But on the other hand, many of his examples of Monastic deep workers (Einstein, Darwin) absolutely relied on those around them to function. I think mentioning the book in this context is valid; the book has very little to say about the consequences of deep work behaviours on others, and that might be a failing.

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> But on the other hand, many of his examples of Monastic deep workers (Einstein, Darwin) absolutely relied on those around them to function.

Every one of us relies on those around us to function. Walking into a grocery store and buying food that’s ready to eat just scratches the surface of this reliance.

Humans are fundamentally a cooperative species, which has enabled collective outcomes that would be impossible if we reduced our reliance on others.

This becomes a problem when people are treated poorly in the process. Slavery is the obvious extreme, and various kinds of discrimination and power plays are some of the bad behaviors that emerge from this social reliance.

But reliance is not in itself a problem. It’s at the core of being human.

I would reiterate that the existence of bad behavior that enables focus for one person at the expense of others with no fair exchange of value is not an intrinsic consequence of the ideas in Deep Work.

Cal also writes about reverse office hours. The idea is that instead of holding a 1 hour meeting where every person only has a small contribution to make (in the realm of 5 minutes or less), they don't attend that meeting but rather the person with the objective that needs input from several different players is tasked with going to the different players when it's convenient to the ones you need the small contributions from.

So I don't think Cal is only interested in optimizing his own life and dumping everything EFT style onto others.

Undoubtedly it was easier for Darwin to work 4 deep work hours a day because he didn't have to handle the kids, prepare the food, clean the house and mow the lawn and work in the garden. Based on having read Cal a lot I haven't seen him advocate this selfishness in the modern world.

Was that on his blog, or in the book? Maybe I glazed over. I think it would be interesting to see him write something from the perspective of "optimising other peoples' time" to be honest. Many of the patterns do it implicitly, he's just never considered explicitly how your deep work habits can help others (afaik).

I think the argument's slightly more subtle than that - you don't have to advocate for it, it just naturally happens. Maybe it's viewing executive function as a zero sum game, where if I get some you lose some. I think we've all come up with examples that show that's not universally true, although we haven't proved it doesn't just kinda implicitly happen.

I'm currently in the position of being a carer, and large uninterrupted blocks of time are basically impossible for me right now. It's frustrating for everyone involved. Would the author of the linked piece say that I'm being robbed of my executive function because I'm looking after a sick partner? I think her model might be deepity in the Daniel Dennett sense - sounds good on the surface, but has too many exceptions to be useful. As someone else said, we're all interdependent (today's post about us all being temporarily abled fits in here somewhere). I'm not going anywhere with this, I've just been musing a lot about executive function lately.

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