|
f278bb4
|
To work deeply is a big deal and should not be an activity undertaken lightly. Surrounding such efforts with a complicated (and perhaps, to the outside world, quite strange) ritual accepts this reality--providing your mind with the structure and commitment it needs to slip into the state of focus where you can begin to create things that matter.
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
e06583e
|
When you use craft to leave the virtual world of the screen and instead begin to work in more complex ways with the physical world around you, you're living truer to your primal potential. Craft makes us human, and in doing so, it can provide deep satisfactions that are hard to replicate in other (dare I say) less hands-on activities.
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
6d286b8
|
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 schedu..
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
c76d30e
|
For many, however, it's not just self-control issues that bias them toward the rhythmic philosophy, but also the reality that some jobs don't allow you to disappear for days at a time when the need to go deep arises. (For a lot of bosses, the standard is that you're free to focus as hard as you want... so long as the boss's e-mails are still answered promptly.) This is likely the biggest reason why the rhythmic philosophy is one of the most..
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
b6fdbe7
|
Bill Gates, for example, was famous during his time as Microsoft CEO for taking Think Weeks during which he would leave behind his normal work and family obligations to retreat to a cabin with a stack of papers and books. His goal was to think deeply, without distraction, about the big issues relevant to his company. It was during one of these weeks, for example, that he famously came to the conclusion that the Internet was going to be a ma..
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
62b804e
|
A foundational theme in digital minimalism is that new technology, when used with care and intention, creates a better life than either Luddism or mindless adoption.
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
1339c35
|
The presence of the other party waiting for your next insight--be it someone physically in the same room or collaborating with you virtually--can short-circuit the natural instinct to avoid depth.
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
0a433c4
|
To leave the distracted masses to join the focused few, I'm arguing, is a transformative experience.
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
51a0b32
|
it's not just the change of environment or seeking of quiet that enables more depth. The dominant force is the psychology of committing so seriously to the task at hand. To put yourself in an exotic location to focus on a writing project, or to take a week off from work just to think, or to lock yourself in a hotel room until you complete an important invention: These gestures push your deep goal to a level of mental priority that helps unl..
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
d67048c
|
In MIT lore, it's generally believed that this haphazard combination of different disciplines, thrown together in a large reconfigurable building, led to chance encounters and a spirit of inventiveness that generated breakthroughs at a fast pace, innovating topics as diverse as Chomsky grammars, Loran navigational radars, and video games, all within the same productive postwar decades.
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
cce0173
|
Bell Labs director Mervin Kelly guided the construction of a new home for the lab that would purposefully encourage interaction between its diverse mix of scientists and engineers. Kelly dismissed the standard university-style approach of housing different departments in different buildings, and instead connected the spaces into one contiguous structure joined by long hallways--some so long that when you stood at one end it would appear to ..
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
f92cf70
|
This combination of soundproofed offices connected to large common areas yields a hub-and-spoke architecture of innovation in which both serendipitous encounter and isolated deep thinking are supported.
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
e13d818
|
By focusing intensely on a specific skill, you're forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire, again and again, in isolation. This repetitive use of a specific circuit triggers cells called oligodendrocytes to begin wrapping layers of myelin around the neurons in the circuits--effectively cementing the skill. The reason, therefore, why it's important to focus intensely on the task at hand while avoiding distraction is because this is the ..
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
b5df3a3
|
By contrast, if you're trying to learn a complex new skill (say, SQL database management) in a state of low concentration (perhaps you also have your Facebook feed open), you're firing too many circuits simultaneously and haphazardly to isolate the group of neurons you actually want to strengthen.
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
7ee2ea5
|
The journalist Mason Currey, who spent half a decade cataloging the habits of famous thinkers and writers (and from whom I learned the previous two examples), summarized this tendency toward systematization as follows: There is a popular notion that artists work from inspiration--that there is some strike or bolt or bubbling up of creative mojo from who knows where... but I hope [my work] makes clear that waiting for inspiration to strike i..
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
39f7d07
|
This strategy suggests the following: To make the most out of your deep work sessions, build rituals of the same level of strictness and idiosyncrasy as the important thinkers mentioned previously. There's a good reason for this mimicry. Great minds like Caro and Darwin didn't deploy rituals to be weird; they did so because success in their work depended on their ability to go deep, again and again
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
e2fd1d6
|
Though Grant's productivity depends on many factors, there's one idea in particular that seems central to his method: the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches. Grant performs this batching at multiple levels. Within the year, he stacks his teaching into the fall semester, during which he can turn all of his attention to teaching well and being available to his students. (This method seems to wo..
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
70021fd
|
Grant also batches his attention on a smaller time scale. Within a semester dedicated to research, he alternates between periods where his door is open to students and colleagues, and periods where he isolates himself to focus completely and without distraction on a single research task. (He typically divides the writing of a scholarly paper into three discrete tasks: analyzing the data, writing a full draft, and editing the draft into some..
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
2a46826
|
Leroy introduced an effect she called attention residue. In the introduction to this paper, she noted that other researchers have studied the effect of multitasking--trying to accomplish multiple tasks simultaneously--on performance, but that in the modern knowledge work office, once you got to a high enough level, it was more common to find people working on multiple projects sequentially: "Going from one meeting to the next, starting to w..
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
05931bc
|
When Grant is working for days in isolation on a paper, in other words, he's doing so at a higher level of effectiveness than the standard professor following a more distracted strategy in which the work is repeatedly interrupted by residue-slathering interruptions.
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
bd69e2b
|
you might institute a ban on any Internet use, or maintain a metric such as words produced per twenty-minute interval to keep your concentration honed. Without this structure, you'll have to mentally litigate again and again what you should and should not be doing during these sessions and keep trying to assess whether you're working sufficiently hard. These are unnecessary drains on your willpower reserves.
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
2961ec2
|
Your ritual needs to ensure your brain gets the support it needs to keep operating at a high level of depth. For example, the ritual might specify that you start with a cup of good coffee,
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
232d6ec
|
Rowling's decision to check into a luxurious hotel suite near Edinburgh Castle is an example of a curious but effective strategy in the world of deep work: the grand gesture. The concept is simple: By leveraging a radical change to your normal environment, coupled perhaps with a significant investment of effort or money, all dedicated toward supporting a deep work task, you increase the perceived importance of the task. This boost in import..
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
034e46a
|
I call this approach, in which you fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule, the journalist philosophy. This name is a nod to the fact that journalists, like Walter Isaacson, are trained to shift into a writing mode on a moment's notice, as is required by the deadline-driven nature of their profession.
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
343a003
|
In the final accounting, the journalistic philosophy of deep work scheduling remains difficult to pull off. But if you're confident in the value of what you're trying to produce, and practiced in the skill of going deep (a skill we will continue to develop in the strategies that follow), it can be a surprisingly robust way to squeeze out large amounts of depth from an otherwise demanding schedule.
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
e468478
|
It was sometime after this realization that Shankman signed a book contract that gave him only two weeks to finish the entire manuscript. Meeting this deadline would require incredible concentration. To achieve this state, Shankman did something unconventional. He booked a round-trip business-class ticket to Tokyo. He wrote during the whole flight to Japan, drank an espresso in the business class lounge once he arrived in Japan, then turned..
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
8299ddf
|
But this doesn't matter, as the specifics of the work are irrelevant. The meaning uncovered by such efforts is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in craftsmanship--not the outcomes of their work. Put another way, a wooden wheel is not noble, but its shaping can be. The same applies to knowledge work. You don't need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work.
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
5002918
|
Sertillanges seems to have been ahead of his time, arguing in The Intellectual Life, "Men of genius themselves were great only by bringing all their power to bear on the point on which they had decided to show their full measure." --
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
27fc0a4
|
At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning--no after-dinner e-mail check, no mental replays of conversations, and no scheming about how you'll handle an upcoming challenge; shut down work thinking completely.
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
8e15b5d
|
To understand the role of myelin in improvement, keep in mind that skills, be they intellectual or physical, eventually reduce down to brain circuits. This new science of performance argues that you get better at a skill as you develop more myelin around the relevant neurons, allowing the corresponding circuit to fire more effortlessly and effectively. To be great at something is to be well myelinated.
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
32058c1
|
unconscious thought theory (UTT)--an attempt to understand the different roles conscious and unconscious deliberation play in decision making.
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
56ef0f3
|
It might seem harmless to take a quick glance at your inbox every ten minutes or so. Indeed, many justify this behavior as better than the old practice of leaving an inbox open on the screen at all times (a straw-man habit that few follow anymore). But Leroy teaches us that this is not in fact much of an improvement. That quick check introduces a new target for your attention. Even worse, by seeing messages that you cannot deal with at the ..
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
42ff401
|
Craftsmen like Furrer tackle professional challenges that are simple to define but difficult to execute--a useful imbalance when seeking purpose. Knowledge work exchanges this clarity for ambiguity. It can be hard to define exactly what a given knowledge worker does and how it differs from another: On our worst days, it can seem that all knowledge work boils down to the same exhausting roil of e-mails and PowerPoint,
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
1a57745
|
From Descartes's skepticism came the radical belief that the individual seeking certainty trumped a God or king bestowing truth. The resulting Enlightenment, of course, led to the concept of human rights and freed many from oppression. But as Dreyfus and Kelly emphasize, for all its good in the political arena, in the domain of the metaphysical this thinking stripped the world of the order and sacredness essential to creating meaning. In a ..
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
ce4dcdc
|
Craftsmanship, Dreyfus and Kelly argue in their book's conclusion, provides a key to reopening a sense of sacredness in a responsible manner.
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
c06e34f
|
There's nothing intrinsic about the manual trades when it comes to generating this particular source of meaning. Any pursuit--be it physical or cognitive--that supports high levels of skill can also generate a sense of sacredness.
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
c61d5dc
|
In a seminal 1981 paper, the economist Sherwin Rosen worked out the mathematics behind these "winner-take-all" markets. One of his key insights was to explicitly model talent--labeled, innocuously, with the variable q in his formulas--as a factor with "imperfect substitution," which Rosen explains as follows: "Hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance." In other words, talent is not a commo..
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
5e32ab6
|
It's here that some might respond that their knowledge work job cannot possibly become such a source of meaning because their job's subject is much too mundane. But this is flawed thinking that our consideration of traditional craftsmanship can help correct. In our current culture, we place a lot of emphasis on job description. Our obsession with the advice to "follow your passion" (the subject of my last book), for example, is motivated by..
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
68f46cd
|
The rapid rise of communication and collaboration technologies has transformed many other formerly local markets into a similarly universal bazaar. The small company looking for a computer programmer or public relations consultant now has access to an international marketplace of talent in the same way that the advent of the record store allowed the small-town music fan to bypass local musicians to buy albums from the world's best bands. Th..
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
a27b4cd
|
It follows that 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.
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
4e86fdb
|
The Great Restructuring, unlike the postwar period, is a particularly good time to have access to capital.
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
4b6f2ef
|
Thoreau establishes early in Walden: "The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run."
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
3928567
|
This study, it turns out, is one of many that validate attention restoration theory (ART), which claims that spending time in nature can improve your ability to concentrate.
|
|
|
Cal Newport |
|
3ac1920
|
The Great Restructuring, unlike the postwar period, is a particularly good time to have access to capital. To understand why, first recall that bargaining theory, a key component in standard economic thinking, argues that when money is made through the combination of capital investment and labor, the rewards are returned, roughly speaking, proportional to the input. As digital technology reduces the need for labor in many industries, the pr..
|
|
|
Cal Newport |