229. Deep Work

When you think of "being productive," you probably imagine some variation of rise-and-grind. But Cal Newport's theory of Deep Work suggests, if we want to maximize productivity, maybe we should try to cultivate some room for quiet, uninterrupted thinking.

- Links for the Curious -

[kapoioBCS]

As a researcher in mathematics, these 2-4 hours of complete focus is what I ultimate strive for every day, but almost never can get even 1 hour of uninterrupted thinking 😢

[ferulebezel]

An anecdote I saw in a magazine ad:

A reporter is walking through a hallway towards a business owners office for an interview and passes an open door and sees a guy with his feet on his desk, hands behind his head, staring into space. When he sees the owner he tells him of this and the owner replies that that man saved him $largesum money and that was the position he was in when he did it.

This was followed by further ad copy about how we're such a smart company that we value smart employees and don't have superficial management, blah, blah, blah.

[Infantry]

I'm still thinking about this weeks later, it hits on some of the deepest chords of my frustrations with work. Thanks again for your excellent work!

[scotthalland]

You just gave me a name for the thing I've been trying to describe about recent negative changes at my workplace.

[ngoriyasjil]

This is one reason why I enjoy homework. The focus is really something else, once you get started.

[enzoniaf]

This is very true, especially as someone with ADHD, and is something I had to learn myself the hard way. It wasn't until I had to regulate shifting attention between emails and other tasks that it properly showed itself. The expectation of always being responsive to emails is still something I struggle with, as well as getting pulled out of a focused state by even someone interrupting to say hello. I am like a shark - if you stop me swimming, I die.

[johnhershberg]

For me there's an element missing from these discussions. Why should we strive for maximum efficiency in these situations?

You hear lots of talk of the 4-hour (on average) productivity window. And as a software developer I can tell you it's 100% true. But there's more to it than that. It's also true that if I'm working on a project that I care deeply about, a personal project, or if it's my own startup company that I have a stake in, those 4 hours seem inadequate. I can suddenly put in 4 hours in my 9-to-5 and another 3-4 hours in my startup. And the reason is incentive. If my startup succeeds I could be doing my own thing. Maybe even getting rich? Who knows.

But we understand this when it comes to other things. Like if I told you I wanna be in the Olympics. You would think it's odd if I only trained for 4 hours a day, or until I'm tired. We understand that to perform at olympics-level you need to put in the time. Likewise with Chess masters. They put in ungodly amount of hours.

It's not like once you pass that 4-hours mark you become completely useless. You just do less efficient work and you do it more slowly and you make many more mistakes. In production those mistakes can add up quickly. Like in video-game crunch time. If you're "crunching" for however many months, eventually all you do is mistakes and you waste your 4 good hours fixing yesterday's mistakes.

So then this discussion turns into companies maybe reorienting how they do things to let people use up those 4 hours best. But is that what we want? I don't want corporations sitting there thinking how to best extract value from me. There's an issue here of motivation too. If the motivation is not there, say if you work for some faceless corp, then all the tricks in the book about leaving someone alone for 4 hours, or whatever, are just not gonna work. Nor should we want them to. I'm ok with wasting company dime on answering emails. It's a bloated corporation with a tall hierarchy that exists to waste. Let me waste my time, and put my energy into something *I* deem useful.

[Fiddling_while_Rome_burns]

Interesting you make this post as we are halfway through the world's largest 4 day week experiment, with preliminary results showing people can do as much work in 4 days as they can in 5 with a slight refocussing of priorities

[Xob_Driesestig]

Some people seem to be better at it than others, so if you have autism you might be able to ask your doctor for a deep work prescription.

[_Aarius_]

I'm lucky that my job as a software engineer is in a company where I can spend as much time as I need 'unproductively' thinking whole I try to solve a problem, and rarely get distracted by colleagues

Unfortunately, no other job I've had was like that

[GeorgMayer]

In the companies I have worked for it would have been very easy to get these 1 or 2 hours, but just not at the time when one wants them. I guess most people feel mentally fresh in the morning, but also that is when work starts and everbody feels excited and driven to exchange what they experienced, thought and dreamed of, also that is when all planning meetings etc. are held. The later parts of the afternoon on the other hand are very often quiet. But then the mental capacities (at least mine) are mostly used up and one only works through the usual pile of necessitities that the morning stacked up.
With home office this got a bit better, as the interactions in the morning are not that intense usually, but still - as you say - most people would stamp one as a-social who is hiding from the all-devouring screen in order to think of something useful.

[frazkintsukuroi]

"The ease with which email can be sent drastically overshadows its value being read" ... Hit the nail on the head right there.

And even if you try to increase the value, corporate culture still makes it fall flat. I have heard literally my entire life that my emails are too big, contain to much "details". But those details are in there, because I know that a singular yes/no answer isn't actually going to help them solve their specific challenge. But rather than taking a few minutes to actually read and reflect, they drop by for yet another game of " questions I already answered".

All of this feels lazy: instead of using their own cognitive abilities, they are effectively asking me to do it for them. It's frustrating because I am someone who prefers to minimize the number of "hops" needed to get to the right answer to minimize the amount of overhead and "fuzz" I introduce in my communication, because less hops means less interruptions for literally everyone involved. But as you already acknowledged, most people don't seem to care, or see the value in it: as long as it doesn't hurt them clearly and immediately, they always opt for the path of least resistance.

[CompilerHack]

well there's always the DND status and 'Focus rooms' right? /s

[Joviex]

Sounds great. Let me know when there are a bunch of jobs willing to pay me a living wage for my thinking.

[bthomson]

Business triage! At least life and death are not at stake (although it sometimes seems that way!)

[PetersonSilva]

Interesting video, but I thought I might contribute by bringing politics into the discussion. After all, the idea that "least resistance" explains why the modern workplace is like this is very, very shallow.

Like, there is one organizational project that gets implemented because it's the easiest people could think ok, ok - but if it's bad, why did people not go do something else? If they took long to notice it, why aren't they doing something about it now? Is "least resistance" natural / psychological, as this author seems to imply by your presentation, or socially constructed, the thing you get when resistance is actively thwarted? Maybe it has something to do with those most affected having the least power to do anything about it? Maybe technology is not neutral in that regard (e.g. centralised proprietary platforms are not adaptable to specific contexts)? Maybe bosses/owners don't want people to daydream and have time to use however they want because they are scared people will not be applying their energies for their aims? Because while statistically it will lead to better results they won't be sure they aren't being "robbed" of working time in their specific case (i.e. it's a risk most entrepreneurs are not willing to take)?

Yes it's hard to put a dollar sign on these things, but our measuring the worth of activities in profit margins is part of the problem. Many of the things you mentioned - people being pressured into responding right away so as to not look careless for being unresponsive, etc. - are the results of contingent market pressures, not human nature; it might not be an autocratic imposition but it's still the outcome of capitalist domination. So in summary there's a lot here that's just about exercising and assessing control over workers, which is a political matter more than one of productivity, kind of like neoliberal policies that don't lead to economic growth but sure disrupt people's lives and popular organisations enough to divide and conquer the working class (and so this seems to be their whole point at the end of the day).

So anyway, I just mean that a lot of this video reads as if workplace bullshit is something we're helplessly doing to ourselves as horizontal cooperatives of autonomous beings who agreed to work together for common aims! Hierarchy and the broader social environment that shapes even what such a thing as a "workplace" is (e.g. before the industrial revolution home/work division was barely there in most places; why must we go back to offices since the pandemic proved working remotely works well for so many people?) kind of disappears into the background. I understand though that these questions might have been largely absent from the original work whose argument you were tyring to summarise, so this is probably a criticism of the author not of you :)