Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

so this was the question i want to talk about today how do people produce things that matter there's of course many different valid answers to this question but i'm going to focus on one answer in particular that i think is being overlooked at the moment in general by our economy and because of that it gives a potential competitive advantage or opportunity for the small number of people and smaller organizations to get out in front of it so the answer i'm going to give you today comes mainly from this book i published last year called deep work i'm hoping that you'll find some of these lessons relevant to you individually in your sort of prefer personal professional lives but also as chief learning officers hopefully you're picking up some ideas here that might have organization-wide impact so here's a good place to start this house up here was built by this gentleman down there that's actually a picture of him in a room in this house you probably don't recognize them but that's actually the late great early 20th century psychologist and thinker carl jung jung and this is a house he built on the shore of the upper lake of lake zurich right outside of the small town of bollingen switzerland the first thing he built on the house was the stone tower right over here so he took to calling this in his diary in his letters off in the bollingen tower that's what he referred to this house now if you want to put this in the geographic space you should think about where this is as roughly speaking the countryside outside of the city of zurich so the city of zurich is where carl jung actually lived and did most of his work we know from his diary that he was quite busy in his life in the city of zurich he had a bustling clinical practice we know he was often seen patients until late in the night the office was actually in his apartments there so he had people in his apartment until late at night running these clinical practices he was also a member of sigmund freud's circle so this was zurich in the early 20th century the sort of heyday of freud so he was plugged into that intellectual scene so we knew at the time that he was doing lecturing we knew he was doing writing and we knew he was plugged into that coffeehouse culture that was going on in zurich at the time so we have this guy who lives a busy life in the city of zurich and then he builds this house in the countryside outside the city so we look at this through modern eyes and we think okay i know what this is this is a vacation home i mean this guy works hard he deserves a chance to kick back and take a break you know a lake house he can go and do whatever the early 20th century swiss equivalent of water skiing is just probably politely sipping coffee so he built this house but what i want to argue what i want to argue is that if we put the construction of bollingen tower into contacts it becomes clear that almost certainly jung did not build this to get away from work we know this in part because of the timing the period in which he built bollingen tower was the same period in which jung decided that he was going to make a break from sigmund freud that he was actually going to argue that some of freud's ideas were wrong and that he had some alternatives that he wanted to offer that is a really dangerous thing to do in early 20th century switzerland sigmund freud in his circle did not take kindly to be told that they were wrong jung knew that once he started to make this break that they were going to come after him and that he had to bring his intellectual a game if he was going to survive actually making a break in his work from what sigmund freud was doing so this was not a good time for him to be thinking about how can i spend more time away from work how can i take more vacations the second reason we know he probably didn't build this house to get away from work is what he did when he was actually there so we know how jung spent his time at ballingen tower because he would do these diary entries these diary entries so this was a typical day for jung at bolligen tower up by seven for breakfast two hours of uninterrupted writing he would meditate which was really unusual for an early 20th century european but he had actually gone on a trip to the british colony of india earlier in the century he had seen meditation rooms and actually had come back and built a meditation room on bollingen tower so he could do meditation then he would take these long walks in the woods to try to clarify his thoughts and be very clear about what he was going to write the next day no running water no electricity so there's not much to do at night except for light the fire and go to bed so this is not a vacation schedule right i mean if this is what you're doing on vacation you were very bad at vacationing this is instead the schedule of someone who was coming out of the city to the quiet of the countryside that tried to produce the very best thoughts that he was capable of so let's get a little bit more specific what is the exact activity that i think carl jung was trying to optimize at bollingen tower i would say it's the following this is a term i came up with so it's not a term he would recognize but i think the definition would be something that he was very familiar with so deep work is professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capacities to their limit so it's when you're you're locked in on something no distraction for a long period of time not even the slightest glance and you're thinking really hard trying to make progress on whatever this cognitive task that you're trying to do bollingen tower was i argue essentially a deep work optimization machine he built it not to get away from work but to do his work better he built it to take this activity and help him do this activity not only more consistently but at higher levels of intensity so he could survive his break from sigmund freud and he could survive his move towards having a more lasting legacy in the world of ideas and by all accounts yoon was successful at this his break was successful his ideas on personality types his ideas on the collective unconscious went on to have huge influence huge influence throughout the 20th century so his bid to build this deep work optimization machine was a successful one it's a successful gamble so of course the question is why are we talking about an early 20th century thinker what's that relevance to us today in the 21st century beyond just giving us a definition of deep work the reason i tell his story is i think it underscores a shift that has happened in our economy that we're not talking about them we're not talking about enough at least and here's the shift in the time of carl jung he was one of a very small number of people for whom the ability to do deep work mattered for their professional life there's this small group of professional thinkers some scientists some theologians perhaps a small group of professional thinkers in the economy for whom the ability to concentrate intensely really mattered for what they were doing what i want to argue is that it's changed as we go into the early 21st century i want to argue today the ability to do deep work is relevant to a large fraction a large fraction of our current economy in particular i want to focus in on the group that's most relevant to this audience which is the knowledge sector this growing powerful sector of our economy the knowledge economy sector and i want to argue that for almost every knowledge worker the ability to perform deep work matters the more you do it the better you are at it the more success you can have in your career the more satisfaction you can have in your career so that's a huge shift from an almost irrelevant skill to an incredibly relevant skill that's a big claim i need to back up that claim so i'm going to give you two reasons my two big reasons why i think deep work is now relevant to most knowledge workers here's the first one deep work helps you learn complicated things this person knows all about this this is anders erickson andrus erickson the psychologist who is known as the father of deliberate practice theory deliberate practice is basically science's best answer to the question of how do human beings master complicated things be it a complicated physical task like trying to surf if i can eat by those sharks or a cognitive task i'm trying to master algebra i'm trying to master a programming language i'm trying to master a new business strategy right whatever it is if it's if it's complicated and you want to master it deliberate practice is our best understanding of how people reach these expert level skills on complicated things the theory itself is quite simple it says if you want to get better at something you have to practice it but not just any type of practice you have to do practice activities that are designed to push you past where you're comfortable the stretch you passed where you're comfortable and therefore ultimately create growth to improve the weak sponsor you're stretching yourself in a little bit better you stretch yourself in a very specific area you get a little bit better that's how people master complicated things that's deliberate practice theory now just as an aside you may have been hearing recently if you follow these type of things that there's been a sort of growing chorus of attacks on deliberate practice and because i know anders and i'm a big fan of this theory i i feel like just taking a quick aside to let you know that these attacks are not things you really need to worry about none of them are actually attacking the fundamental premise of deliberate practice theory what happened with deliberate practice theory was actually kind of a tragic thing for deliberate practice theory was malcolm gladwell wrote about it he wrote about it in the book outliers social scientists don't like malcolm gladwell because they think he i guess is not rigorous enough with how he talks about social science or his books aren't boring enough or whatever it is they don't like him so when he wrote this book outliers that talked a lot about deliberate practice playing a big role in success it really started a whole cottage industry of people writing malcolm gladwell was wrong papers which is an easy way to get cited in that world but just what i want to emphasize is what those papers are mainly attacking are sort of straw man arguments related to deliberate practice not the underlying theory so they're attacking the straw man argument that practice is all that matters and natural ability doesn't matter no one in that field seriously believes that what they believe is that to reach your full potential in something you have to do deliberate practice to get to that your top level also people are attacking the 10 000 hour rule this famous rule that you need 10 000 hours of deliberate practice to become an expert honors will tell you if you read his original paper 10 000 hours was presented as an average he observed people in a lot of different fields counted up how much deliberate practice they required to get the expert level 10 000 was the average the variance is huge his point there was just simply it often takes a lot of deliberate practice if you want to get really really good all right so those type of things are under attack but not the fundamental premise that if you want to get better you have to do this intense focused deliberate practice activity that stretches you past where you're comfortable why is that relevant to deep work well once we understand what deliberate practice is it becomes obvious that it is a type of deep work deliberate practice fundamentally requires you to sustain intense concentration on what it is you're trying to do in my last book i wrote not this one but the one before i also was talking about deliberate practice i spent some time with a professional guitar player and i hung out with him while he was doing deliberate practice this was a bluegrass guitar player he was trying to learn a new bluegrass lick and i write about in the book the intensity the intensity with which this professional musician would focus on what he was doing he would take the lick he would learn at slow speed and then he would push himself about 10 faster than he was comfortable and to try to hit those notes he was concentrating so hard that he would forget to breathe so he'd be staring staring staring and then he's real ragged gasps right before he was going to pass out from lack of air so it requires intense concentration that's an active deep work so the more comfortable you are with deep work the more comfortable you are falling into a state of intense concentration the easier time you will have mastering complicated things and why is that relevant to knowledge workers well we know in an increasingly competitive knowledge economy the ability to keep up with rapidly changing systems and ideas is crucial or you'll be left behind technology systems business philosophies these things that could be at the foundation of a particular type of business can change seemingly overnight if you can keep up with it if you could quickly master new things new hard things very quickly that's a huge advantage all right here's the second reason why i think deep work is relevant to most knowledge workers it helps you produce more things and higher quality things for the same amount of time this gentleman knows a lot about this you might recognize him if you're a fan of business books this is the wharton professor and business book author adam grant so he wrote give and take he wrote originals he has a new book out with cheryl sandberg plan b or option i think it's plan b or option b one of these two that's adam grant what people don't always know about adam is that in addition to being this sort of best-selling business author he's a serious academic that's not always a given i mean there's a lot of business book authors i mean i know this world and so not to let you in on a secret there's a lot of business book authors that have a business school affiliation who are really not serious academics so you can get a lot of tenuous associations with business schools that's not the case with adam grant he's a serious professor the thing about adam is he's my age he's like one year older than me and he's a full professor at wharton which is the top rank in the us system when he got named the full professor he was the youngest full professor at wharton probably the youngest full professor in wharton's history he won't let me say that he made me take it out of the book because he's very data-driven and he doesn't have the exact data to show that there wasn't maybe a younger full professor sometime in the late 1800s so i now say he's one of the one of the youngest full professors but it's a very impressive thing so how did adam grant become one of the youngest full professors in wharton history well the proximate answer is obvious just go look at a cv right i mean in in research academia in the u.s what matters is peer-reviewed publications research research research that's what matters this guy publishes about a factor of two more high-quality peer-reviewed journal papers per year than most of his peers at elite business schools that's how he became one of the youngest full professors in war in history all right so the real question is how does adam grant publish almost a factor of two more high quality peer-reviewed papers than his peers well i asked him and the answer turns out has a lot to do with deep work so what grant does it's actually pretty interesting he takes his course responsibilities for the whole year and he puts all of the courses into the fall semester so the fall semester is his teaching semester when he's in the teaching semester that's what he does his door is open he's famously accessible as far as his students are concerned we can validate that this works well because he's already won at least once a university-wide teaching distinction okay that leads to the spring and the summer free from course obligation so he has a lot more flexibility with his schedule to work on the research that's at the core of his career during this period what he then does is he'll put aside these periodic stretches of multiple days in which he does nothing but work deeply on a single research problem so he'll fall off the grid for one two three sometimes four days in a row where you can't reach him he's just working on a research problem it's to the point where he told me that his colleagues are often confused we'll say adam i just got an out of office email responder from you and i'm literally looking at you in your office right now i don't understand what this means but adam's point is i don't want there to be any expectation that you can reach me when i'm in one of these deep work modes so it's almost as if he's retreating to his own bollingen tower without actually having to build a large stone building outside of zurich of course the success of his books he probably could right now but but he just it's in his office but psychologically it's bollingen tower he then leaves those modes and he's completely accessible again you know it's back to zurich mode yeah my door is open i'm very accessible if you email him he'll email you right back and then he disappears in the bollinger tower mode again then he comes back out the zurich mode then goes back into bollingen tower mode this is how he works on his research now here's the key point i'd bet a thousand dollars that if you actually followed him around with a stopwatch and counted the total number of hours that he's spending per year in his bollinger tower mode working on research it would not be more hours than his typical peer spends on research at an elite business university adam grant almost certainly is not working more total hours than his peer on this core task business professors work hard unlike him they do it full year remember he takes a whole semester off they work most days on the research he only does it in these stretches i'm sure it about evens out and yet he's producing almost a factor of two more high quality output per year so something about working in the state of unbroken concentration is allowing him to produce much more now why would that be well again we can ask adam and if you ask adam he has a very clear answer his motivation his motivation for adopting this style had to do with the research results of a friend of his sophie leroy another professor psychologist who studied an effect called attention residue this is a crucial crucial effect to understand if you want to understand productivity in the knowledge age attention residue is a very simple effect to replicate in the laboratory here's how you do it you take an undergraduate you sit them down you give them complicated puzzles to work on there's certain types of puzzles you can use in this research where you can measure very clearly what their performance is how long is it taking them to solve the puzzle so you get the undergrad you put them in a lab you start them working on these puzzles you can measure how they're how their performance is doing uh each minute and then you have the researcher come in and tap you on the shoulder and says to the undergrad oh i'm sorry you know we forgot to fill something out on your form can you just come over for a second two minutes just fill out this form put them back to the the hard puzzles they're working on if you do this in the lab what you notice is that their performance on those cognitively demanding tasks plummets once they return to the puzzle from that brief interruption sophie leroy calls this attention residue that shift of context to something else leaves a residue in your brain that remains when you switch back to the primary task and it can take a long time to clear 5 10 15 minutes for this to clear out and you can actually just graph their performance over time they're doing fine doing fine two minute distraction they're down here it takes a while for it to come back up so what adam grant realized is that the way that most of his peers were working and the way that most conscientious knowledge workers work is as follows they basically say i'm working on something hard right now i'm single tasking i don't have multiple windows open i've turned off my notifications i know all about that i'm just single tasking on this one hard thing except every five or ten minutes you do the quick check i'm mainly doing this let me just quick check my inbox okay there's 30 seconds i'm back to this let me quick check my phone okay now i'm back to this let me quick check what's going on out there right and it feels like you're single tasking it feels like you're doing the right thing but if these quick checks are frequent enough what you're doing is leaving yourself in a persistent state of attention residue you never allow this residue time to clear out before you slather some more on before you slaughter some more on and what happens is that you're essentially keeping yourself in a persistent state then of reduced cognitive performance so what adam grant is doing when he goes into bollingen tower mode and works hour after hour after hour with no quick checks no interruptions no distractions is that he allows all the attention residue to clear out and is then able to work at his full cognitive capacity the result is that same number of hours he spends as his peers he's able to get almost twice as much output out of it this is a general trait of deep work the fact that distraction free plays such a prominent role in the definition is for exactly this reason it is the absence of any distraction that allows deep work to push your mind to levels that most people never get to and therefore you're able to produce a higher quantity of work and a higher quality of work for the time you actually spend working on your projects now why is that important to knowledge workers well it should be obvious that an increasingly competitive knowledge economy the ability to produce at an elite level is increasingly necessary especially if you want to replace being automated you want to avoid being outsourced you want to avoid being replaced so deep work is fundamentally important to knowledge work i'm not the only people who thinks this this is the economist back from right after my book came out this was the phrase they used deep work is the killer app of the knowledge economy it's not my phrase but i like it so i'm going to steal it because i think it captures what i'm trying to say here which is that deep work is not about distractions seem kind of bad or we have some nostalgia for our time before it or that maybe it'd be nice to be a little bit more productive what we're talking about here is a killer app something that if you embrace and cultivate is going to give you the sort of adam grant carl jung style huge competitive advantages over other people who don't ever work in states of full cognitive capacity so that's my pitch for deep work now you may if you're like most audiences have a thought right now that's sort of tickling the back of your mind causing a little bit of tension which is this thought that wait a second you're saying that the ability to concentrate for long periods of time is more valuable than it's ever been but we're getting worse at this i think most of us would agree with this premise that we're probably have a harder time sustaining concentration now than we probably ever had in recent history and the people's schedules and attention are probably more fragmented in the small slivers than they've ever been before in recent history we know why this is we don't have to make a long argument about it let's just stipulate i feel like i should probably add a slack window in there somewhere as well but i think we we get the basic idea so we put these two things together and it's almost like a paradox going on but this is key and this is what the hypothesis that i built the whole book on just one idea if you remember anything from this talk you should probably come away with and it's when you put these two observations together we get something powerful so here's the deep work hypothesis the core idea of my work on this topic i just argued that the ability to form deep work is becoming increasingly valuable we all just agreed that it's also becoming increasingly rare at that same moment if you look at that from a policy or macroeconomic level that might be worrisome but if you look at it from an individual or organizational level what i see is huge opportunity this is economics 101 supply and demand you have something that's becoming increasingly in demand at the same time that the supply is going down basic economics tells us that the price of that thing is going to go way way up and so that's what i want to emphasize here these two things together leads us naturally to this conclusion that if you were one of the few individuals in a few organizations to cultivate the skill at least in the the climate and culture we have right now you'll thrive it is a huge competitive advantage something that is probably going to be overvalued by the marketplace right now so that's the that's the that's the pitch i've been going around the country making is to pitch at the foundation of my book of course the hard piece of this is this okay how do you do that if you buy this premise that deep work is this killer app and it's being overpriced how do you actually as an individual organization systematically get better at this not only get better at it but make it a core part of your professional life and your professional routine that's what i want to talk about for the remainder of this talk in fact what i'm going to do is i'm going to go over three big ideas three big ideas that i have observed studying people in organizations that are very good at deep work and have been have been leveraging it to great advantage three ideas about what they do that helps them develop the skill and use it the great advantage okay so i'll give you three big ideas for each idea i'll also give you some concrete strategies that you can use to put that idea into action in your own life or your own organization the first two are going to deal more with the personal context what you could do in your own professional life the third ones would be more relevant to what organizations can do all right here's the first idea deep work is an ability that must be trained all right this gentleman is a great case study of what i mean by that his name is dan keilov he is at the moment a graduate student in australia here's what you need to know about dan when he was in the australian equivalent of what we would call junior high in high school he was a very bad student he got bad grades he struggled at some point during this period he was diagnosed with an attention disorder as part of the explanation for why he was having a hard time so he goes off the university as they would call it down there and he meets of all things the australian memory champion this is a whole world i didn't know about this world until i met dan key law but this is this whole world of they call themselves memory athletes and they do memory competitions which is literally competitions where people compete to do feats of memorization right i don't know if some of you maybe know about this there was a book about it joshua foyer wrote this book moonwalking with einstein about his uh his time with the american memory athletes he actually trained and well i don't want to spoil the book but let's just say he does really well in the end in the american memory championship so it's something that's kind of out there in his like i didn't know a lot about it uh it doesn't exactly sound like riveting sports television but it's something that there's a big community that does they do these feats of memorization a sample event in these competitions shuffle a deck of cards start a timer and see how long it takes you to memorize all 52 cards all right so i mean again not riveting but there's a big community that's interested in this so for whatever reason and i've asked him he doesn't know why dan got really interested in this and so he starts to train to be a memory athlete under the australian memory champion right so it's this whole sort of nerd version of mr miyagi and the karate kid where he's sitting there and learning how to do these memorization things and i don't know why it just really caught his attention he worked really hard at it he became very good dan ended up placing top three in the australian memory championship his specialty was memorizing sequences of abstract shapes so there you go there's a life skill for you why do we care about that what we care about is what happened is academic career bad student starts training to be a memory champion becomes an excellent student he becomes an excellent student at the university level in fact becomes a star student in his class last time i talked to dan he was studying in graduate school to get his phd under the top person in australia for for the particular subject that he's studying right so he went from being a struggling student seeing as sort of a bad student into one of australia's stars who's on his way towards a sort of a bright academic or intellectual career what happened in between was he trained to become a memory athlete so why would training become a memory athlete make you suddenly into a star student it might not be the reason you think we can get some insight into this because there's a group out of washington university in st louis which i have to say right because i hope there's no there's no graduates of the school here in the book it got flipped and said the university of washington which turns out it's a huge no-no the university of washington in washington state really does not like being mixed up with washington university st louis so if there's any huskies in the crowd i've heard you okay we'll fix it i get more letters about that than uh almost anything else so washington university in saint louis nothing to do with the huskies they studied this they studied memory athletes they took a group of american memory athletes they took a control group people that were demographically similar but their main difference were they were sane enough not to compete in these competitions they studied them what's different they found first of all it's not the size of their memory their working memory sizes were the same you can't do the types of feet of memorization the athletes do just using your normal memory anyway so it turned out not to have much of an impact what was different concentration ability the memory athletes were much better at sustaining their concentration than the non-memory athlete peers now why is this well if you ask dan about it he says that makes complete sense because it turns out the way that these memory athletes actually do their feats of memorization is they borrow a technique that goes all the way back to the ancient greeks who call it the memory palace techniques but basically what it is is visual mnemonics they build in their head these very complex visual images in which they embed all of the information that they're trying to memorize right this is a brain hack because it turns out that your visual cortex can remember pictures much better than the frontal lobe can can remember abstract information so you can you can remember a scene from your life the number of bits of information in that scene is huge compared to say the number of just abstract digits you can also memorize so this is how these memory athletes do if they build these visual mnemonics to build a visual mnemonic you have to be able to concentrate well because when you sit there and you're building this picture in your head i did this he showed me how to do it he showed me how to memorize a deck of 52 cards i couldn't actually get through all 52 cards but i can tell you it's very very hard you sit there and you try to hold in your head this picture of a house where you start embedding the elements you need to memorize the sequence of the cards if your attention slips just a little bit while you're doing this you lose the whole mnemonic so when you train to be a memory athlete you end up actually training your ability to concentrate intensely that's the key skill so that's what happened the dan kelov he was very bad at deep work he was so bad that he was even diagnosed with an attention deficit disorder he trained his ability to concentrate came out on the other side very good at concentrating became an elite level deep worker and because of that he became a star student which shouldn't be surprising because remember the two advantages of deep work it helps you learn hard things quickly it helps you produce at elite levels i mean those are the two things you need to succeed in an academic environment so we shouldn't be surprised that that made him suddenly a star student but the core takeaway message from that story is that he was bad he trained he got better deep work the ability to concentrate intensely is a trainable skill it's very key to get that distinction right a lot of people get it wrong a lot of people think about deep work as a habit like flossing their teeth something they know how to do they just need to do more often this leads to issues i mean it's a scene i see time and time again if you think about deep work as something you already know how to do then what happens is you go off and you try it you clear your schedule you have a hard problem and sit down no distraction i'm gonna solve it it's gonna be bollingen tower time and you struggle if it's not something you've been training you struggle it's uncomfortable your mind rebels you don't like it not much gets done and if you think that deep work is just a habit you walk away from a situation like that and conclude i'm not a deep worked person and you move on in your life missing on all the advantage they can bring on the other hand if you recognize that deep work is a skill that must be trained an early unsuccessful experience like that just leads you to believe okay i got a lot of practice to do right i'm gonna stick with this i know i need to i can improve with practice i can get better at concentrating and getting more out of my time so it's key key skill to understand that deep work is a skill that must be trained how do you train it i give you three quick concrete things that seem to work well number one embrace boredom so i don't mean that you need to be bored all the time but what i do mean is that on a regular basis at least a couple times per day you experience boredom by which i mean technically you feel a craving for novel stimuli and you don't satisfy that craving you just stand there bored you're in line you just stay in line without pulling out the phone your friend goes up at dinner to go to the bathroom you just sit there at the table and are bored without giving yourself some stimuli the reason this is important has nothing to do with boredom being good i mean it's not it's boring no one loves it it's not a moral argument you know it's somehow it's just we're uncomfortable that we're always distracted it's actually much more pragmatic what has happened in the era of the smartphone is that for the first time in human history we actually have the capacity to completely eliminate boredom from our life because of the smartphone you can go through your entire day without ever feeling the sense of oh i'm bored i want some novel stimuli you can always deliver that to yourself through a smartphone the reason this is a problem for deep workers is that builds up over time a very strong association it's almost like a pavlovian connection your brain learns boredom stimuli boredom stimuli get a little bit bored i get stimuli and if it's the only thing that's been shown what happens when it comes time to do deep work not good things because deep work by definition is boring in the sense that there's not a lot of novel stimuli you're focused on just one thing and if your brain has this pavlovian connection boredom means stimulate border means stimuli it will not tolerate deep work it will not tolerate a long period of time without lots of different stimuli coming in so a key foundation to succeeding with deep work is to break this pavlovian connection and the best way to do it is just to experience on a regular basis not all the time but on a regular basis boredom where you just remain bored your brain then breaks that connection it rewrites the script and it says okay sometimes when i'm bored i get stimuli sometimes when i'm bored i'm don't get stimuli sometimes i do sometimes i don't that's a much healthier relationship to have with your brain and it means it'll be much more comfortable when it comes time to concentrate intensely on something because it says yeah it's just one of those circumstances where i don't get stimulated that's okay i'm used to it second strategy for train yourself to do deep work it's called productive meditation incredibly effective also incredibly simple you take a professional problem you go for a walk i don't know why it needs to be walking but it does it works better than sitting it works better than running the walking seems to be the optimal activity here while you're walking you try to make progress on this problem just in your head as in mindfulness meditation when you when you see your attention is wandering from the problem it's thinking about some email you need to send or what's coming up next you just notice that and bring it back to the problem wanders again notice that you bring it back to the problem at first this can be very difficult your attention is all over the place pretty quickly however you'll see significant gains it's almost like cognitive pull-ups that's the way that my readers like to think about it something that's really hard to do but gives you results pretty quickly this is that this is that you do this for a month on a regular basis you can substantially increase your brain's comfort with sustaining concentration on a single target the final quick strategy i want to mention here for how you can train your ability to do deep work is the notion of doing some type of interval training pretty straightforward again you get a countdown timer use the one on your phone you say i'm going to work on this particular task deeply okay i'm going to work on this particular task deeply i'm going to start my timer and i'm not going to do any distraction no glances no just checks no inboxes no phones no conversations until the timer gets down to zero if i fail in that and do a quick check somewhere in there i have to stop and reset the timer and consider that to be a failed interval right the psychology here is that if you just tell yourself okay i need to work deeply on this thing all day long your brain is going to say we're going to have to take some breaks anyway so now is as good a time as any and you're going to find yourself doing these checks much more often but if you say no no i'm doing this for 40 minutes and then i can go nuts on my phone if i want 40 minutes that's all it is your brain is a little bit embarrassed like well okay i don't have a strong argument for you that we can't go 40 minutes without looking at the inbox and that that bit of cognitive shaming actually helps you get exposure to working on something without distraction i say interval training because what tends to work well here is you start with a time period you're comfortable at when you notice that you consistently hit those intervals without failing you increase the time period by a little bit and then when you're successfully hitting that new length without failures you increase that time period a little bit it stretches systematically the amount of time your brain is comfortable focusing on one thing without any types of distraction this is actually a technique i developed working with undergraduates with undergraduates especially modern undergraduates those who grew up with smartphones and really don't know life before smartphones or social media the interval length at the very beginning can be kind of shockingly small 15 to 20 minutes and we up it in 10 minute intervals usually once every two weeks so it takes about a semester but after a semester we can get an undergraduate who has incredible difficulty not looking at some sort of stimuli for more than 10 or 15 minutes you can easily after a semester get them comfortably doing two hours at a time sustaining the concentration and that tends to dramatically reduce the amount of time required for them to complete their studying so it's a habit that often sticks this works just as well in the business environment clearly for adults you're starting with a much longer initial interval length but this is a great way to systematically push what you're comfortable with you just get comfortable and exposed to longer and longer periods of time of working without any other sort of distraction so that's big idea number one think about deep work as a skill that must be trained here's big idea two deep work is an ability that must be supported right someone who knew about that was charles darwin this is a picture from charles darwin's estate in england this is a path that darwin had built on his estate to go past what he thought were the most scenic portions it was covered in sand at the time so he used to call it the sand walk the sand walk played a crucial role in darwin successfully completing the origin of species right the origin of species his masterwork took decades of work after that famous voyage on the beagle for him to do the research pull together the thoughts and finally produce the manuscript and he did most of this work at his estate in england the sand walk played a huge role here's how darwin did it at a fixed time every day he kicked off his sort of deep work session for the day by going to the sand walk and doing a set number of circuits in fact the way he counted the circuits is a pretty clever hack he would put rocks on the ground so the number of circuits he wanted to do he'd put that many rocks on the ground at a certain point in the path and then every time he came around that part of the path he would kick one off the path so that way when he came back around and eventually there was no rocks left he knew he had done the right number of circuits so he didn't have to use any of his brain to count he could really harness all of his brain for starting to think about whatever it was he was going to work on that day relevant to the origin species so he would do this hand walk fix number circuits fire up the brain get it going and then he'd go back to his desk or the laboratory depending on what work he was doing that day and continue a long deep work session on the book so what darwin realized is that deep work is very difficult right it's a big ask of the human brain because it's something that expends a lot of energy our brain uses up a lot of energy deep concentration uses even more than normal this is a big ask of your brain to concentrate now as we we know now our brain and evolutionary framework does not like to burn energy if it doesn't have to right i mean this is why it is very difficult to motivate yourself to get up and go to the treadmill at the gym but it's not difficult to motivate yourself to start sprinting if a lion just came into the room your brain sees the line and says okay i get why you want to use the energy the brain sees the gym and it says i don't know what's going on here i think this is very weird why are we going to get on this contraption then so motivation becomes an issue same thing for deep work your brain will be resistant why are we going to burn all this energy i don't see a lion i'm going to put resistance up i'm going to put up some resistance to this darwin recognized that so what he has here these habits he built were all about helping himself overcome that resistance and consistently do deep work there's really two big components to it was the timing the same time every day so he didn't have to think when am i going to do the deep work he just knew same time every day and the ritual i'm going to do the same walk in a fixed number of circuits to help my brain recognize that pattern and slip into deep work mode i don't have to wrench my attention away from what i'm doing and try to force myself in an ad hoc fashion to do deep work right now it's a habit my brain is used to it's a ritual it's used to it helps me slip into deep work much more easily by doing so he was able to consistently do this type of deep cognitive effort and therefore was able to finish his master work darwin almost certainly wouldn't have beaten his competitor to publishing the origin of species if he was just hoping that you know i should try to do some deep work most days i hope i'm in the mood for today i hope i get around to it no no he had these support habits that played a big role this is very common if you study people who are good at deep work they have these support habits that they follow religiously and that's what allows them to much more consistently accomplish deep work and slip into the deepest levels of depth so how do you do this i used to joke this actually used to be a joke of mine in this talk i would say well you know what you could do was build your own sand walk and you know sort of a joke right because who's going to be able to do that i can't use that joke anymore and i blame la because i was out here a little less than a year ago and i was given a talk about this in hollywood it was near hollywood at vine and some theater that was out there and i gave a talk and i talked about this and joked oh you could build your own sandwich then a month later i get an email from one of the waiters who was working the bar in the back of the theater he said you know i was listening to your talk when i was back there in the back of the theater it's very interesting to me and he sent me these photos he had built a sandblock i don't know why this waiter had all this property to build a sand walk it seems like a very la thing i don't know what he was doing on that sand walk but again it's la so i'm i'm pretty sure it probably rhymes with you know green play but he built his own sand walk so okay this is actually now legitimate often you can build your own sand walk if you want if you happen to be like this waiter in la having large property to do this you can go ahead and do that if however you don't actually have that opportunity what you can do is deconstruct the constituent components of what made darwin sand walk so effective and you can replicate those components in almost any work scenario so the first component is some sort of scheduling philosophy some sort of set philosophy of this is when i do my deep work something that prevents you from just leaving it up the chance of i hope i have time for this today i hope i feel like deep work today okay there's different philosophies that work we've seen a lot of them i like to schedule my deep work on my calendar i put it on my calendar and i treat it like any other meeting or appointment so if someone wants to schedule something else in a time that's already put aside for deep work i treat it the same way as if you try to schedule something during a doctor's appointment i say well no i'm busy from whatever it is 9 to 11 but i'm free after that people are used to the the culture the cultural convention surrounding meetings and appointments it's fine like great we'll find another time i found however that i have to go three to four weeks out in scheduling my deep work i have to get out ahead of people who will then ask for time and attention you have to schedule deep work first what was happening before is i'd come up to a week and say i want to schedule my deep work for the week directly ahead of me and the problem would be by that point i had already fragmented the schedule too much said yes to this yesterday yes to this and all these sort of appointments and calls and meetings and coffees were spread out enough there was no long unbroken chunks so i realized i have to schedule it before people start asking for my time it doesn't reduce the number of things i do it just leads to a more natural batching of them leads naturally to a more uh bat schedule of depth than a lot of meetings steps and a lot of meetings the people on the other end don't even know that's going on they're used to the cultural convention of sometimes you're busy sometimes you're not other philosophies work i know a lot of ceos especially have small startups now that are real big on this notion of the monk mode morning they start every day with deep work their employers and clients know that they become accessible starting at 11. it's a very easy rule for people to learn and they're able to consistently do their deep work some people like adam grant or carl jung do the whole bollingen tower thing where they're like look i'm accessible unless i'm not and you just sort of learn yeah occasionally this guy falls off the grid when he's doing his deep work you work around it bill gates does the same thing with the think weeks he does twice a year at his cabin so there's different ways to do this what's key is having some sort of philosophy this is when i do deep work the second component we can isolate from darwin sand walk is the notion of having some sort of ritual that immediately precedes your deep work something you do every time before you start thinking deeply that your mind begins to associate with depth and therefore your mind learns oh we've started the ritual let's slip into deep work mode this is the historian david mccollough's writer's cabin until he recently moved back to boston he used all of his writing at his farm on martha's vineyard and he had this small shed built on a corner of his property and all he did in there was right and he had this ritual when i walk from my house to the writer's shed i know i'm slipping into deep work riding mode it was very effective for him that's what that was about that ritual helped him slip into a deep work mode there's many different ways to replicate these type of rituals darwin walked a certain number of laps that turns out to be pretty common among people who do deep work in corporate settings a lot of large corporate campuses have trails so i know people who will do a set number of circuits on one of those trails before they do deep work i also know people that will just physically transform their workspace when it's time to do deep work they'll clean the desk they'll shut the door they'll turn off the lights except for the bright desk lamps on the desk it just tells their mind okay now we're entering deep work details don't matter consistency matters it's a ritual you do every time it helps your brain more consistently fall into the deep work mode you have these type of sand walk style habits you will accomplish a lot more deep work a lot more consistently than if you do it in a more ad hoc fashion or try to leave it up the chance the final big idea i want to mention is the idea that deep work must be managed this picture emphasizes why i think that should be true that's mark zuckerberg that's the architect frank gehry they're looking at frank gehry's massive new facebook headquarters that he designed for him they're all smiling they think this is a great idea if i was in this picture i would be the guy in the back with my arms crossed and a scale on my face because at the core of this huge new headquarters is one of the world's largest open office spaces over a thousand engineers and other types of staff at facebook are in this cavernous airplane hangar type room where the ability to actually sustain unbroken concentration on what you're doing is almost impossible it's like a deep work destruction machine it's basically what frank gehry built for mark zuckerberg i point this out however because it underscores something that we have to accept which is in this current cultural moment many of the biggest trends especially in knowledge work are actively hostile to deep work the trend for open offices very popular in the knowledge work the things are starting to shift now but very popular actively hostile the ability to form deport this emphasis again and again on connectivity as being the core thing for an organization to survive so we get at first it was constant email then it was constant email that could be delivered on your phone then it was okay that's not fast enough let's get slack and other instant messenger tools to make sure that we have this constant hive mind chatter going on huge in knowledge work right now actively hostile to the ability to perform deep work so many of the biggest trends knowledge work push back against the ability to deep work we have to accept that if we're going to succeed in any effort to cultivate more of a deep work effort because it means if you as an individual organization are going to try to prioritize deep work this is an uphill battle and it's something that you are going to have to specifically and explicitly manage for it's got to be something done with great intention because you're really pushing back against a lot of otherwise strong cultural forces so here's one strategy in particular that after my book came out a lot of readers reported back was working really well right and i'll i'll present this strategy from the perspective of an individual employee but this is something that can be uh top down as well something that can be instigated from the top down simple strategy it works as follows if you work for someone else you go to your boss you go to your supervisor you say here's what deep work is here's what shallow work is shallow work being anything that's not deep work both are important right deep work is what's going to sort of move the needle it's going to develop the new value the new idea ultimately produce the things that we we sell or makes money but shallow work is necessary to keep the you know the trains on time right we need the shallow work there's got to be some coordination there's got to be logistics you need things for me i need things from you we also have to do the communications the means to powerpoint both are important my question for you boss or supervisor is what should my ratio be in a given week what is the ideal ratio of deep work to shallow work hours in a typical work week that i should be aiming for to optimize the amount of value i produce for our organization the answer will be different depending on what type of role we're talking about here but it's something that you can pretty easily come up with some sort of reasonable answer so you have this conversation and then you go and you measure and you come back a few weeks later okay here's what's happening am i falling way short if i'm falling way short what can we do what can we change so that i can more effectively hit this target that we agreed together was going to produce the most value for our organization i've had people report back to me saying i was convinced that the culture of connectivity and distraction in my organization was 100 entrenched it would never change they have this conversation three weeks later massive changes to the culture a lot of these cultures that are actively hostile deep work are more arbitrary and much less strongly rooted than we think and once you start actually discussing them in a positive way right this focuses on producing more value not complaining about things you don't like and in a quantitative way we have a number that we're trying to hit you would be surprised by how quickly you can have these emergent massive changes to organizational culture that leads to much more value being produced there's other strategies like this but i put this up here as an example of what i mean when i say if you want deep work to play a big role in a modern knowledge work organization it's something that you have to be incredibly intentional about you've got to talk about you're going to have to measure you're going to have to have a directed way of making changes so let me summarize that we can we can take a couple questions my pitch to you at the beginning this talk was that deep work is the killer app of the knowledge economy it's not just about being a little bit less effective it's not just about being a little bit less distracted it's about being massively more productive being massively more effective i then argue that if you want to cultivate the skill here's three big ideas that matter you have to recognize something that needs to be trained and do that training you have to recognize that deep work is a big ask of your brain so you better have some really well thought through habits to help support your deep work sessions and three you have to recognize that this is a kind of a countercultural move right now the focus on deep work if you want to do that you're going to have to be very intentional about how you integrate it into your organizations so i started this talk by asking how do people produce things that matter the answer i'm trying to convince you of is that deep work is one way to do that so i've hopefully convinced you that that that's true or if i haven't convinced you that's true i've hopefully convinced you that something that's at least worth thinking deeply about thank you

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Id: rrIYNRuX6GM

Length: 53min 31sec (3211 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 12 2020