CityReads│How to Work Deep in a Distracted World?

139

How to Work Deep in a Distracted World?

To work deep and cultivate your skill, is an effort that can transform a knowledge work job from a distracted, draining obligation into something satisfying—a portal to a world full of shining, wondrous things.

Cal Newport, 2016. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Grand Central Publishing.

Source: http://calnewport.com/books/deep-work/

It happens all the time. You start out the day with great intentions to get your paper or report done only to find it’s 3pm and you’ve barely scratched the surface. Every time you sit down to work on something, a ping, ding or dong stops you in your tracks.

Social media and email are our biggest distractors, according to Cal Newport, author of Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. While turning off devices may seem a simple solution, Newport says the problem runs much deeper. Our attraction to digital devices has created a permanent fracturing of our attention, affecting our ability to maintain focus and be present.

Newport defines deep work as the 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. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy.

And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep—spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media and doing shallow work, noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.

Dividing this book into two parts, he first makes the case that in almost any profession, cultivating a deep work ethic will produce massive benefits. He then presents a rigorous training regimen, presented as a series of four “rules,” for transforming your mind and habits to support this skill.

Why work deep?

A neurological argument for work deep: our brains construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to. if you spend enough time in this state, your mind will understand your world as rich in meaning and importance. Such concentration hijacks your attention apparatus, preventing you from noticing the many smaller and less pleasant things that unavoidably and persistently populate our lives.

On the contrary, a workday driven by the shallow, from a neurological perspective, is likely to be a draining and upsetting day, even if most of the shallow things that capture your attention seem harmless or fun.In work (and especially knowledge work), to increase the time you spend in a state of depth is to leverage the complex machinery of the human brain in a way that for several different neurological reasons maximizes the meaning and satisfaction you’ll associate with your working life.

A psychological argument for work deep: The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Csikszentmihalyi calls this mental state flow. Deep work is an activity well suited to generate a flow state. To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction.

Jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed. People were happier at work and less happy relaxing than they suspected. Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.

A philosophical argument for work deep: Your work is craft, and if you hone your ability and apply it with respect and care, then like the skilled wheelwright you can generate meaning in the daily efforts of your professional life. Deep work is key to extracting meaning from your profession.

How to Work Deep?

The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.  If you deployed smart routines and rituals—perhaps a set time and quiet location used for your deep tasks each afternoon—you’d require much less willpower to start and keep going. In the long run, you’d therefore succeed with these deep efforts far more often.

You need your own philosophy for integrating deep work into your professional life. Here are four different depth philosophies.

1. Monastic philosophy: This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations. Practitioners of the monastic philosophy tend to have a well-defined and highly valued professional goal that they’re pursuing, and the bulk of their professional success comes from doing this one thing exceptionally well.

2. Bimodal philosophy: This philosophy asks that you divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else. During the deep time, the bimodal worker will act monastically—seeking intense and uninterrupted concentration. During the shallow time, such focus is not prioritized. This division of time between deep and open can happen on multiple scales. The bimodal philosophy believes that deep work can produce extreme productivity, but only if the subject dedicates enough time to such endeavors to reach maximum cognitive intensity—the state in which real breakthroughs occur.

3. Rhythmic philosophy: This philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit. The goal, in other words, is to generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you’re going to go deep. The rhythmic philosophy provides an interesting contrast to the bimodal philosophy. It perhaps fails to achieve the most intense levels of deep thinking sought in the daylong concentration sessions favored by the bimodalist. The trade-off, however, is that this approach works better with the reality of human nature. By supporting deep work with rock-solid routines that make sure a little bit gets done on a regular basis, the rhythmic scheduler will often log a larger total number of deep hours per year.

4. Journalistic philosophy: you fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule. This approach is not for the deep work novice. But if you’re confident in the value of what you’re trying to produce, and practiced in the skill of going deep, it can be a surprisingly robust way to squeeze out large amounts of depth from an otherwise demanding schedule.

How to stay focused?

The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained. Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction. Much in the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, you’ll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom.

Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction, it’s hard to shake the addiction even when you want to concentrate. To put this more concretely: If every moment of potential boredom in your life—say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives—is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the “mental wrecks”, it’s not ready for deep work—even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.

Once you’re wired for distraction, you crave it. Motivated by this reality, this strategy is designed to help you rewire your brain to a configuration better suited to staying on task.

Instead of scheduling the occasional break from distraction so you can focus, you should instead schedule the occasional break from focus to give in to distraction. Schedule in advance when you’ll use the Internet, and then avoid it altogether outside these times.

The use of a distracting service does not, by itself, reduce your brain’s ability to focus. It’s instead the constant switching from low stimuli/high-value activities to highstimuli/low-value activities, at the slightest hint of boredom or cognitive challenge, that teaches your mind to never tolerate an absence of novelty. This constant switching can be understood analogously as weakening the mental muscles responsible for organizing the many sources vying for your attention. By segregating Internet use (and therefore segregating distractions) you’re minimizing the number of times you give in to distraction, and by doing so you let these attention-selecting muscles strengthen.

To embrace deep work in your own career, and to direct it toward cultivating your skill, is an effort that can transform a knowledge work job from a distracted, draining obligation into something satisfying—a portal to a world full of shining, wondrous things.

Related CityReads

（Click the title or enter our WeChat menu and reply number ）

CityReads ∣Notes On Cities

"CityReads", a subscription account on WeChat, 

posts our notes on city reads weekly. 

Please follow us by searching "CityReads"  

Or long press the QR code  above