How to Start Doing Deep Work
Updated: Dec 9, 2022
Why do deep work?
This idea of deep work comes from Cal Newport. In his book, he defines deep work as professional activity performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit. The effect of deep work creates new value, improves your skill, and is hard to replicate.
Versus shallow work, which is non-cognitively demanding, doesn't create new value in the world, performed while distracted, and is easy to replicate. Some examples of this could be checking your email, making phone calls for arrangements, responding to chats, status update meetings. You want to try your best to minimize shallow work and do them during times of least concentration/state of flow.
Deep work helps you learn difficult things quickly and create to the best of your ability. To achieve great things and learn hard things quickly you must focus intensely without distraction to work smarter and not harder/longer. You can train your concentration muscles to create the focus you need for deep work.
In this article, we’ll call this time for deep work “bunker time” as a visualization to compare deep work to being in a bunker which is a reinforced underground shelter (typically for military use). The following are the steps you can take to train your focus for deep work:
Set up a ritual for bunker time
Create your bunker environment
Close with a shutdown ritual
Have quality rest
Set up a ritual for bunker time
Choose your deep work philosophy:
There are different deep work philosophies that can be used for deep work:
Monastic – Eliminate or radically minimize distractions and shallow obligations.
Bimodal – Clearly defined stretches (days/weeks/months) for deep work. Then go back to spending time on what you neglected.
Rhythmic – Create a routine of 3-4 hours every day for deep work to make it a habit that occurs at consistent times.
Journalistic – Fit in deep work wherever you can going between deep and shallow throughout the day. Probably not for the deep work novice, but may be needed depending on your circumstances (e.g., having a baby).
I’ll be working more towards the Rhythmic philosophy. Though looking at this I think I’ve gone through times of Bimodal and Journalistic, but I think Rhythmic sounds like it’ll work more naturally with the reality of human nature.
Make deep work a habit and build rituals/routines:
Where is your bunker? Identify your location for depth and distinguish it from other places.
How long will you be in your bunker? Schedule it into your day. Typically, the best time is in the morning.
Set a specific time frame between 3-4 hours. Set a time to create a deadline for yourself to train your focus and to automatically start being more productive. As it goes with Parkinson's Law, we take the allotted time that we're given to do a task.
Allow enough time to get into the flow state, which is the feeling of being in the zone. It is said that the flow state makes you happier than having free time.
What do you have to support the time you have in your? This could be starting with coffee, having food/snacks to maintain your energy throughout your time in the bunker, scheduling short breaks, cleaning your work space.
How will time be spent in the bunker? Execute like a business – the following ideas come from the book The 4 Disciplines of Execution.
Focus on the wildly important - Have a clear vision on what you want to focus on during deep work time.
Have a small number of really clear critical goals that you will pursue on deep work hours. These should return tangible and substantial benefits to generate a steadier stream of enthusiasm. Less is more.
Act on lead measures - measure your success with 2 types of metrics (lag and lead measures) A lag measure tells you if you’ve achieved the goal, while a lead measure tells you if you’re likely to achieve the goal.
Lag measures ultimate goal you're trying to reach (e.g., number of papers written, profit, quality, etc.)
Lead measures new behaviors that will drive/lead to success on lag measures (e.g., diet and exercise with lag measure of weight loss, or time spent studying with lag measure of learning a language)
Keep a compelling scoreboard - People play differently when they're keeping score.
You can have a calendar where you note hours spent in deep work. Circle the days where you produce tangible results (i.e. solve a key problem)
You can keep note of all variables during deep work. Then you can change variables to see how it effects your work (e.g., fasted vs eating before hand, etc.)
E.g., Coffee, fasted, no music, started around 7:30 am. Hour 1 –500 words Hour 2 – 600 words Hour 3 – 400 words Hour 4 – 600 words
Create a cadence of accountability - Get into a habit of a weekly review where you plan for the workweek ahead.
Create your bunker environment
Have a distraction free bunker to create sniper-like concentration. The main event in your bunker is concentrated work and deliberate practice. Constant task switching lessens our capacity to focus. Whereas deliberate focused work leads to reinforcement of neural pathways.
Some tips to help remove distractions and improve focus:
Headphones (Bose QuietComfort 35) – This makes indicates to others that you’re in the zone, and can also help cancel out outside noises/distractions.
Make all notifications silent, so that nothing pops up on screen to take you out of your flow state.
Put your phone out of sight.
Checking your phone makes you VERY unproductive and work twice as longer and harder. When you get distracted you have to re-shift your mind back on task, and you may have to re-read info to try to get back into what you’re working on.
· Treat email as a to-do and schedule it in your calendar twice per day (recommended times are late morning and late evening). Only check urgent messages, if needed, throughout deep work time.
· Schedule internet time and avoid it outside of those times. Restricting your usage at home improves your concentration training.
Don't let the internet overtake/become central to your leisure time. When the internet becomes central to your leisure time, it weakens your mind's general ability to resist distraction which makes deep work difficult later when you really want to concentrate.
Close with a shutdown ritual
Have a shutdown ritual to fully end your process. Having a ritual helps you reset at the end of the day to help future you get started tomorrow and be refreshed for the next day.
A ritual could look like:
Note what you completed during this time
Close out of work/clear tech things to neutral
Write down any ideas for task list
Review tasks and adjust if needed
Send last message
Check calendar
Plan tomorrow
Affirmation to close it “you’re now done so that you can enjoy and rest for the day”
Have quality rest
We can be fully focused for only about 4 hours a day. After that, our ability to focus intensely decreases. Long stretches of intense concentration should be balanced with quality rest. Allow yourself to be lazy. Be done with work until the next day to let your brain recharge.
Rest is very important – be equally ruthless in protecting your rest as you are with your deep work, but also use your downtime wisely to enhance your deep work efforts. Mastering the skill of rest can transform our life and make you more productive.
Why downtime is so important:
New insights - As your conscious mind rests, the unconscious mind takes over and provides valuable insights or creative ideas and consolidates memories.
Recharge - Rest fills up the energy needed to work deeply. You restore your ability to direct your attention by giving this activity a rest.
Evening work is usually not important - Work that you fit into downtime isn't normally high value activities that really advance your career, but rather low value shallow tasks executed at a slow, low-energy pace.
Ways to master rest:
Quality downtime isn't mindless web browsing or watching Netflix. Don't default to whatever captures your attention at the moment, but instead dedicate some advance thinking to how you want to spend your free time. To be more intentional with tech you could try adopting digital minimalism or doing a digital detox.
Examples of good ways to rest:
Journal
Read
Exercise in nature
Meditate
How to get better at deep work?
Quit social media - notifications hurt your ability to focus and stay focused. Not all bad, but it's a bad habit
Practice saying No - be selective when deciding what opportunities to go after. Failing to say no, you're saying yes by default. (essentialism by greg mckeown)
Meditate - 10 min of medication in the morning will greatly increase your ability to focus throughout the day
Adjust it to your own life - there's no one size fits all model . Once you find it, you'll become unstoppable.
Deep Work checklist:
Also, a quick TLDR, here's a checklist for integrating deep work.
o Choose your deep work philosophy.
o Identify your bunker location.
o Schedule bunker time into your day.
o Prep your bunker with your support.
o Have clear critical goals for bunker time.
o Keep a scoreboard of work completed.
o Create a distraction-free bunker (headphones, turn off notifications).
o Schedule time for shallow tasks and internet/free time.
o Create a shutdown ritual.
o Be intentional with rest (Journal, read, exercise, meditate)
Disclaimer: I have not read the book, but I have watched the following videos to gather this information.
Check out the following video for a little 4-Hour Timer/Follow along for deep work!
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