Deep Work#

Cal Newport's, Deep Work is the foundational skill upon which I base my productivity program. It's the simple practice of committing extended periods focused on one task, producing higher quality and intellectually more profound work.

• Myelin workout
• Embracing boredom
• Attention residue and context switching
• Routines
• Shut-down

Much like the muscles in our body, training our brain yields improvements to the areas we target. Concentration is the essential skill we can acquire to become highly effective individuals. Possessing stable concentration means ignoring the distracting thoughts and stimuli fighting for our attention. Concentration is one of the core skills monks train through their meditative practice by consistently bringing their attention back to an object of meditation.

Because meditation works in relieving the brain of suffering, there's no reason why we can't apply these methods to work. When beginning a meditative and 'deep work' practice, you may only be able to achieve concentration for brief moments before getting distracted. You succeed not by remaining concentrated but by becoming aware and bringing your attention back to the object. An awareness of this is all that is required.

In meditation, the object can be the rising and falling of the stomach, while in our work, the object is a state of flow. Flow is a heightened state of concentration that humans can only acquire when under highly demanding circumstances or fully present and engaged in the task. Deep work attempts to maximize time in this flow state.

Just like muscles in the gym, the more we perform repetitions of concentration, the larger and more effective it becomes. Each time you enter the gym, your body should be capable of performing 1-3% better. If this is unattainable, your lifestyle is not optimal for growth and recovery. We can apply this same 1-3% rule towards our time in deep work, each new day attempting to push our concentration further. If we can't find the energy to increase by 1% daily, life may be less conducive to productivity than we believed. You want to go into each day feeling like you can bring your best self to the table and more.

The brain optimizes itself for what we use it. If we stop using our brains, then our brains will stop working. Like muscles, our concentration powers fade unless we consistently give it stimulus.

Newport theorizes that boredom has the same physiological effect as other forms of abstinence, such as fasting. While fasting produces various instinctual reactions that prime us for survival, boredom primes us to explore novel ideas.

In today's society, these novel experiences often take the form of scrolling through social media, playing games, or watching television. This creates a negative feedback loop that forces us to seek out increasingly novel experiences. Understanding the human limbic system is necessary to know how media companies take advantage of one of our most basic human features/bugs.

Media companies purposefully evoke heightened emotional states such as fear, anxiety or empathy due to the limbic resonance they produce. The greater the resonance, the more we become engaged and addicted to the content. It just so happens that video content engages this part of our brain far higher than images.

Without the ability to remain bored for long periods, we lose our ability to seek out novel experiences that give us long-term satisfaction. Most people are in a perpetual search for their next dopamine hit, incapable of taking a moment to think and plan.

So how do we break free from the chains of modern society? It requires a habitual awareness and discipline that you can train over time. Once we have control over this part of our brain, we can direct our energy where we want.

I think the best way to gain this awareness is by experimenting with periods of intense dopamine restriction. It explains why you have better control over appetite and cravings after abstaining from food for extended periods. Humans lose context very quickly (a blessing and curse), and I believe this is one of the most potent tools to reset our awareness.

Context switching and attention residue are the most destructive forces against productivity in the post-industrial world. Newport believes this is why productivity has barely risen in the last 30 years despite the dramatic increase in computational power.

Attention residue can be best understood when visualizing a working day. The average person is in a constant state of shallow work, reacting to every notification and urge presented to them. The individual may be able to get short bursts of concentrated work done, but during so, they still have the residue of whatever activity they were doing. The biggest culprits of these attention-breaking activities are emails, notifications, media (YouTube, Reddit, Facebook), and messages.

This is why turning off notifications from social media and text is so important; it gives us back the time we need to explore the possibilities within our work. It allows us to seek out novel experiences that require attention to uncover. Shallow work is best at the end of the day. It allows you to batch mundane and repetitive tasks, such as micromanagement, cooking, emails, and organizing.

Once you can remain in periods of deep work, routines are an essential step in unlocking new efficiency gains. Newport states there are four types of routines one can adopt:

Monastic: Maximise deep work efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations

Bimodal: Divide your time between clearly defined stretches of deep pursuits and normal life

Rhythmic: The easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform it into a habit

Journalistic: Opportunistically schedule deep work sessions wherever they fit in your timetable.

The most effective yet least practical routine is the monastic way of living. This approach centers your life around deep work, stripping away anything that doesn't align with that goal. For the average person to benefit from this, it is best done opportunistically.

I believe each approach should be considered daily before selecting the most suitable for your circumstance.

Shutting down at the end of the day is a crucial step for sustaining efforts of deep and effective thinking. Have you been so tired you had to read a sentence twice to understand it? An exhausted brain cannot generate tangential ideas. Learning new skills and generating innovative ideas are only possible when we are well-rested and have inner peace.

We can all look back at the high school/university experiences we had with less than optimal sleep. A fatigued brain is much more likely to overlook small details, and this is why sleep deprivation is often compared to alcohol intoxication.

Clearly defined shutdown periods are critical if deep work efforts are to be sustained. Newport finishes all deep work by 5 pm each day so he can tend to his family and related obligations.

Shutting down doesn't mean watching YouTube, going on Facebook, or watching television at the end of the day. Your brain requires deep rest if it is to recover from the punishment you dealt to it. Mindless activities such as YouTube, TV, and social media are stimulating your brain much more than you’d expect. Rejuvenating activities may include sleep, meditation, reading, connecting with loved ones, and performing hobbies that bring joy. Watching television and movies do have their place, but these activities should be strongly considered last.