How Deep Work Can Turn You Into a Productive Beast
After battling distraction, I was able to write and publish three books in less than a year.
There is a reality that not many people are aware of.
An alarming truth that business conglomerates and media corporations are battling, right now, for your eyeballs.
They are spending billions every year on research. All intended to find ways to grab your attention, even using our most primitive human impulses.
This worldwide billionaire effort created an enormous distraction problem. Something unheard at any other point in humankind history. We are spending more than six hours per day looking at the same objects: screens.
We cannot keep our focus anymore. The attention spam from people nowadays is less than eight seconds, according to Canadian researchers. Our concentration capacity dropped below the levels of a goldfish.
To put it into perspective, a medieval watchtower guard or a ship iceberg watcher spent less time looking to the horizon than the average Filipino spends looking at computer and phone screens.
As an aspiring writer, I had the same problem. Until I read a book from Cal Newport called Deep Work. You may already know Cal from his other books, like Digital Minimalism. Together with Nassim Taleb, he is one of those few modern authors that always offered useful life insights every time I read them.
In this article, I will tell you how the guidance of this book helped to boost my productivity, and it can help you too.
Choose your targets with the utmost care.
“Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love — is the sum of what you focus on.” — Cal Newport
What you choose to focus your attention on has an immense impact on your attitude. The popular wisdom that vengeance and anger erodes a person from inside is very true. But the same logic can be used in your favor. After a traumatic or disrupting occurrence in life, to shift the focus of attention can reboot an individual and signalize a new beginning.
The lack of focus is also counterproductive. Lack of focus will drive your mind to spotlight what is wrong instead of what is ok with you. So days spent focusing on nothing likely will be draining and upsetting, after a certain point. Even if at the beginning everything looks harmless and fun.
Do not take me wrong, I am not condemning leisure. But not all recreation is the same. Arts, reading, and crafts are some examples where you can relax and still keep focused. They have the additional benefit that after a full day of practice, the sense of self-realization and fulfillment adds enjoyment to the activity.
But one may think “I am already so concentrated at work! Why even my leisure should be focused?”
This is a double-false premise. First is that most jobs nowadays are not fully focused. Especially corporate jobs, which are ridden by distractions. The second falsification is that this premise implies that our brain gets tired of focused activities.
This is not true. Our brains are not like our legs or arms that get weary by effort. In fact, the effort originated by deep work can stimulate your mind to the point that it asks for more. This is a discovery that the game industry uses to make players glue their eyes to the screens, solving tasks and challenges.
Your brain does not want to sleep. It wants to get challenged. With that in mind, I partially abandoned other forms of leisure like television and turned into writing. This was the beginning of my journey which, one year later, turned me into the author of two Amazon best-sellers.
When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done.
With distraction blurring my routine, I had another problem that the reader may identify with: I was frequently staying late at work to not miss deadlines.
I was treating my work as a marathon, where my objectives were achieved by persisting during a large amount of time.
Cal Newport taught me another way to handle the repetitive, noncognitive demanding, logistical-style tasks, which he calls shallow work (in contrast with the brain-power demanding deep work): handle then like a 200meter runner. Explosively fast, stopping only when they are finished, so you can concentrate on what evolves your skills and demands cognitive capacity.
By taking these lessons, I drastically reduced the time spent checking emails or updating indicators. Now I focus on what can really increase my output. As a legendary CEO once taught, the success of a company is the sum of the outputs of the members.
Once you finished your work, create a shutdown ritual. Cal Newport set a phrase that he says out loud (as funny as it sounds) every time he finishes his workday:
Shutdown complete
I adopted one too: Time to go home. After two weeks of practicing this habit, you create a mental cue. A cue that it is time to leave all work-related worries at your desk, go to your home and crack a cold one with the boys, or with your wife, or whoever else you enjoy the company.
Because, as Cal puts: When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done. Your average e-mail response time might suffer some, but you’ll more than make up for this with the sheer volume of truly important work produced during the day by your refreshed ability to dive deeper than your exhausted peers.
How To Differentiate Deep Work From Shallow Work
In entry-jobs, the workload can be nearly entirely made of shallow work, but even for senior positions, something between 30% to 50% of all the tasks will be composed of non-cognitive demanding duties.
There is a common distaste in the idea that the majority of the time a person spends on unskilled tasks. This results in an underestimation of how much shallow work invaded our routine. An easy test to discover if a certain activity is shallow is to ask yourself the following question:
How long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task?
If the answer is measured by months, then your task is shallow work. To ask and answer this question will force you to face the reality of how little time in your busy routine you are actually using your full cognitive power. You will discover how much of your time is used to create value by using acquired skills.
Once you realized, like I did, that you are spending too much time in jobs that you can outsource to a virtual assistant or automate, your routine will change. I stopped spending hours doing posts on social media for my business. I was filtering out social networks that do not add value to our model. I defeated the famous fear of missing out (FOMO) that people feel when they do not join the most recent, and often useless, trends.
Start to say no to shallow activities and automate the repetitive and brainless part of your routine as much as possible. Not only your productivity will be catapulted, but your brain will feel better. Prefer activities that are challenging and help you to acquire or improve your skills. In other words, work on keeping a good shallow-to-deep work ratio.
Last advice: Walk around, cool down.
Most of the lessons that I exposed so far would imply is substituting certain shallow tasks or leisure for focused, skilled activities. But we know that this is not always easy.
There is, however, a low-hanging fruit waiting to be picked. One that can increase your capacity to perform deep work, defeat distraction, and increase your productivity: your commuting time.
Look around you the next time you are on public transport. Chances are that everyone around you will be scrolling down the infinite timelines from Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. Social networks that are by excellence the shallow distractions of our times. Social networks that are damaging our cognitive capacity, as exposed in this article, and exploring our leisure time for their own benefit.
What if you could use this time to put your cellphone back in the pocket and think about possible solutions for your most complex challenges? Or creative ideas that once in a while pop in your mind?
So many great authors had their most brilliant ideas developed while walking in forests or beaches. But the constant shallow distraction of social media is killing future masterpieces.
After taking this advice from reading Deep Work, I started to stroll in the small but beautiful park close to my home. Without headphones, without using my phone — which now I place inside my backpack so I do not grab it by impulse.
During one of those slow walks, I had the idea of writing my third book, which I just published. In another walk in the park, I imagined my first fiction series, about the unexplored theme of the Triple Alliance war in South America.
You have the potential to be a best-seller writer, a great scientist, a breakthrough entrepreneur. All you need is to stop distracting yourself from your future achievements. Time to leave the social media timeline and build your story.
Levi Borba is CEO of expatriateconsultancy.com and a best-selling author. You can check his books here.