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Deep Work
Deep work is a cognitive state in which you are giving full attention to the thing you’re doing. You’re concentrating hard on it, and you’re not allowing your attention to wander. This is a cognitive state that produces really good work. If your goal is to add value to information using your brain, which is the primary activity of knowledge work, deep work is the most effective cognitive state to do this. It’s sustainable. The quality of what you produce is very high, and the rate at which you produce things is high.
I want to contrast that with another cognitive state, which is much more common. A state that the researcher Linda Stone calls continuous partial attention. And this is where maybe you’re primarily focusing on one thing, but you’re also every few minutes checking a Slack channel. You jump over to email every now and then. You need to see what’s happening on the baseball game, on your MLB app, and then you’re back to what you’re doing. So everything is getting some but not all of your attention.
If you could look inside your skull while you’re in a state of continuous partial attention, what you see is a train wreck. Your brain is trying to jump back and forth between multiple different cognitive contexts. All of these cognitive contexts are flaring up, but before you can lock into them, you switch to something else. Your brain is exhausted. It is unable to actually summon its full capacity on any one problem. You get little done. It feels bad, and you burn out well before the day is over.
Deliberate Practice
So one of the other problems of avoiding deep work states and spending more time in continuous partial attention is that it makes it very hard to get good at things. So if you want to get good at a new skill or a new software package or a new strategy, the things that are really important for advancing in most knowledge work jobs, you’re going to have to participate in an activity known as deliberate practice. It’s a term coined by the late performance psychologist Anders Ericsson. It’s our best understanding for how people get good at hard things. To actually get better, you have to focus on it hard so that you can push yourself just past where you’re already comfortable in a controlled way, and it’s in that stretch that you get better.
To be able to push yourself past where you’re comfortable requires full focus, and that’s a deep work state. So if in your daily work you are uncomfortable with deep work cognitive states or your schedule or work habits make those states impossible to achieve, you’ve just significantly reduced your ability to get better at hard things. And if you’ve reduced your ability to get better at hard things, you’ve reduced your ability to advance in your career. So my big argument is that when it comes to producing value with your brain, you need to make sure you have deep work sessions regularly and well protected because that’s the cognitive state where real things get done.
Three Strategies
So how then as an individual do you make and protect more time for these deep work cognitive states? One simple idea is just to make sure that you have some sort of coherent and consistent scheduling strategy for how you put deep work on your calendar. Don’t leave this up to chance. Don’t just wait to be in the mood to do deep work and hope that you have nothing else to do. Instead say here’s when and how I do deep work. It could be first thing in the morning, and I have that on my calendar, I do deep work. Or it could be Fridays. I don’t go into the office on Fridays, and I don’t do any meetings before three, and that’s when I do my deep work. Having a consistent and coherent scheduling philosophy ensures that that time actually happens.
Now this doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re by yourself. I call this the whiteboard effect because when I was training at MIT, we had all these whiteboards and we would gather around them. Because if your attention wanders, there’s going to be a social cost to that. You’re going to have to say, hold on. Repeat what you just said. I was thinking about something else. So, actually, sometimes working with other people allows you to get into an even more intense deep work state than working by yourself.
Now another piece of advice is how do you get your boss on board with this? Because your boss might say, I don’t know if I like these deep work sessions because I can’t get access to you during these sessions. Well, there’s another simple strategy called the deep-to-shallow work ratio. And you sit down with your boss and you say, okay. Here’s what deep work is. It’s a particular cognitive state. It’s very important for X, Y, and Z I do. And nail down a number. What ratio of my hours in a standard work week should be dedicated to deep work cognitive states versus non-deep work cognitive states?
Now your boss has to actually think about this. Well, should be two-thirds deep, one third shallow. Should be two-thirds non-deep, one-third deep, whatever, but you get a number. Take a couple weeks and measure. Like, actually record all the time you spend in a deep-work cognitive state. Go back to your boss and say, here’s the ratio I’m actually achieving. This is smaller than the ratio we said, so what should we do about this? Bosses are on your side problem-solving once they have a positive metric that they’re pursuing. So get quantitative about this. What ratio should I hit? Where am I? What are we going to do to close this gap? You might be surprised by the innovations that occur once you have a specific number you’re trying to hit and you’re trying to hit it for a positive reason.