Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

"One of the arguments that he wants to make, I think, is that there’s a certain kind of work that isn’t well suited to the canonical approach of Getting Things Done , which is to divide everything into little units and then do them, in the manner of ‘cranking widgets’, as David Allen puts it. I think reflecting on things, just being able to think about things in an open-ended way, is increasingly essential for many of us in the jobs that we do. Deep Work is partly about how to safeguard that kind of time in your schedule, because the risk of a certain application of the Getting Things Done method is that you just do 8,000 tiny things in a row, but never get to fall into a state of deep reflection. One of the things that I think Newport is very strong on is what he calls ‘fixed schedule productivity’, which is this idea of approaching your work by first figuring out how much time you’re going to devote to it, then making your choices about what to work on based on that pre-decided container of time. So, you might decide you’re going to work from 9am to 5:30pm, with an hour for lunch, and do what you can—instead of having a list of things you’re going to get through, which for all sorts of reasons is probably just going to grow longer and keep you working until 11pm. Blocking off time first is a mechanism that then obliges you to make choices about how to use your finite time instead of killing yourself to get everything done. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . He has a whole methodology that involves drawing little blocks on a calendar: I’m going to assign the first three hours to this important project; then I’ll spend two hours on email. It’s very simple, in a way—but so much bad time management is premised, instead, on the idea that however much you want to get done, there’ll be some method that’s so efficient you’ll be able to do absolutely all of it. Another good thing about this book is that he’s quite realistic about people’s different lifestyles and situations. Deep work could involve anything from shutting down your communication with the outside world for six months to work on an incredibly hard scientific proof, to safeguarding a handful of individual hours within a high-stress schedule. He’s not implying that everyone is able to go and live in a hut on top of a mountain. But I do think it’s an important piece of the puzzle, working out how to ring-fence some time for deep work. One important point is to understand how little time it actually has to be. If you can get three hours in a day where you’ve got the energy and lack of interruptions to focus on whatever’s your number one priority, and do that consistently, you’re going to make much more progress than spending your days dreaming of a time when you can give it eight hours. One thing he definitely does deal with, and where I’ve taken inspiration from him, is pushing back against this idea that a plan for the day needs to be a straitjacket, and if you don’t keep to it you’ve failed. This system of ‘time blocking’—drawing boxes on your calendar and so on—is explicitly one that’s intended to adapt during the day. Your plans change, someone interrupts you in some unavoidable way… OK, next time you get a free moment, you just draw a new set of boxes for what remains of the day. I think you could apply that to failures of motivation, too. You could say, well, look, OK, it’s Monday at 9am but deep work is just not happening. Fine, go and do something else and put that deep work in another part of the schedule instead. That said, you’ve reminded me of another thing he talks about, which I think is very true, which is that a lot of the motivational issues that we encounter—especially as writers—are the result of distorted expectations about what hard creative work should feel like. He has this lovely idea that writer’s block is just the feeling of writing: if the writing feels hard, maybe that’s because writing is hard, and draws from parts of you that are uncomfortable to access. Maybe I’m putting words in his mouth, but perhaps there shouldn’t be an expectation that something like this will feel delightful. Wasn’t it Muriel Spark who compared writing to taking dictation from God? Well, okay, great. But I don’t know anyone in my own life for whom that’s true. Instead it’s a matter of trying to remember to say to myself, ‘oh, yes, this feels uncomfortable, because it is hard, and that’s ok.’ You can feel like you don’t want to do something, and keep doing it. Don’t turn it into a war with yourself—‘I’m going to power through even though I feel like shit!’ It’s a matter of not being dictated to by your emotions and also not going to war with your emotions."