This is one of those life-changing solutions that, once you hear about it, makes you go, “Well, duh?” And yes, it’s incredibly obvious, but so many of us avoid doing it because we want to avoid work, because work sucks! Deep work can actually help you work less, which is what we’re all about, so let’s get into it.
What is deep work?
Deep work is a concept popularized by a professor named Cal Newport in his book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. It refers to distraction free concentration on a cognitively demanding task. Here are the key elements of deep work:
Intense focus: Engaging in tasks with your full attention without any interruptions or distractions.
Cognitive demand: The task in question should be complex and challenging, pushing your mental abilities to their limits.
Productivity and efficiency: Producing high-quality work in less time by maintaining that sustained focus.
Skill development: Deep work usually involves activities that improve your skills and abilities, leading to long-term professional growth.
Benefits of deep work
Increased productivity: Eliminating distractions and creating intense focus helps you accomplish more in less time. Obvi.
Higher quality work: Deep work mode also allows for greater creativity and problem-solving, giving you better outcomes.
Skill mastery: One of the biggest components and motivations of employing deep work is that you’re regularly and intensely practicing your craft, developing expertise and mastering complex skills.
Satisfaction and fulfillment: Deep work has been shown to produce a sense of accomplishment and fulfillment, because participants are making meaningful progress on important tasks and building their long-term skills.
How To Do Deep Work: 11 Strategies
Here are the basic steps of implementing focused and productive work, plus a few tips for getting the most of your deep work routine.
1. Schedule your deep work session
Set specific times during the day dedicated for deep work. Treat these sessions as non-negotiable appointments. It’s best to schedule during the hours that you are operating at your highest cognitive power. If you’re unfamiliar, the Ultradian Performance Rhythm is a cycle that repeats throughout our day, giving us peaks and dips of mental energy–find yours and schedule deep focus work at the peaks.
2. Create a distraction-free environment
Find a quiet place to work, turn off your notifications, optimize your workspace for productivity, and minimize potential interruptions (put a sign on the door, let your family/colleagues know you’ll be out of touch).
3. Set clear goals
Define what you want to accomplish while you perform deep work. Break bigger tasks down into manageable chunks, and focus on one thing at a time.
4. Use time blocks
Work in focused time blocks (a good span is typically 60-90 minutes), broken up with short breaks and shallow work sessions to increase sustainability.
5. Establish a deep work routine
Develop a consistent routine for your deep work hours. Consistency helps strengthen the message to your brain that it’s time to lock in. Starting at the same time each day or performing a pre-work ritual can help with this.
6. Prioritize tasks
Lay out your most important and cognitively demanding tasks beforehand. You might even focus on one project per week/period to dedicate your deep work time to.
7. Limit/compile shallow work
Reducing time spent on less demanding tasks, like emails or useless meetings, can avoid fragmenting your focus and help you have deeper work sessions.
However, there is shallow work that can’t be neglected, so task batching can help you keep up with those routine necessities without wasting time on them throughout the day.
8. Track your progress
Keep a record of your deep work sessions so you can reflect and determine what worked well and what struggles you might be able to overcome. It can also be motivating to see how much you’ve already accomplished.
9. Practice mindfulness and meditation
What a boring piece of advice, I know. But practicing mindfulness can improve your ability to actually sit, concentrate, and stay present during your deep work, leading to more productivity.
10. Communicate boundaries
The biggest enemy to deep work is Other People. Let your colleagues and family know when you’ll be in a deep work session (or say “I’ll be really busy” because that sounds less embarrassing out loud) to minimize interruptions.
11. Ritual development
The way you structure your deep work routine can determine its effectiveness. A starting ritual can help you clock into deep work quicker. This might be brewing coffee, reviewing goals, or tossing on your work playlist.
Using specific tools or environments can help to center you in for that particular task. For example, I use an electric typewriter for drafting and journaling instead of a computer. This helps me to compartmentalize what I’m supposed to be doing at that moment.
It’s also helpful to establish clear endings to work sessions. This could be by changing location, clocking out, resetting your desk, or performing an end of day routine.
Working on something at exactly the same time for each session can also train your brain that it’s time to focus.
Does deep work make you more productive?
Evidence suggests deep work does make most participants more productive. It also makes you happier! Companies like Basecamp and Google are among those who have adopted policies that allow for uninterrupted work time, leading to enhanced productivity and creativity (Duhigg, 2016).
Deep Work For Students
Deep work principles are beneficial for students in much of the same ways that they’re beneficial for professionals. Increased focus and productivity, better learning, time management efficiency, and long-term skill development are all likely results of a student participating in deep work sessions. Let’s look at a few tips for students.
Deep Work Tips For Students
Create a distraction-free environment to perform deep work
Find (or create) a quiet place to study where you won’t be interrupted. When I was in college, my quiet places included the highest floor in the library, a particular corner in the biology building behind the crawfish tank, and a patch of grass that just really called to me.
Turn off your notifications and put your phone away for the duration of your deep work session.
Schedule dedicated study time
Intending to study isn’t quite the same as planning to study. Block out specific times in your day to dedicate to deep study sessions, preferably at exactly the same time each day. Track these with a planner or app.
Break tasks into smaller chunks
Dice up your large assignments into smaller tasks, then focus on one at a time to maintain deep concentration.
Take regular breaks
Breaks are essential, and they can help you to maintain momentum and longevity in your study sessions. You might try something like the Pomodoro Technique to avoid burnout and maintain focus longer term.
Deep Work Examples
Let’s look at a few different industries for what a deep work task might look like in actuality.
Novel Writing: Writing a complex novel or series with intricate plots and characters requires a fairly deep amount of concentration to stay consistent, allow room for creativity, and actually finish the novel.
Software Development: Writing and debugging code, especially for complex software applications, algorithms, or systems, necessitates deep work to solve problems and create unique solutions.
Marketing Planning: Developing long-term strategies and detailed content plans involves analyzing market trends, competitors, and the target demographic, which requires long stretches of focused effort.
Family Law Practice: Drafting complicated forms, running discovery on your client, fact-checking your opposition, and keeping on top of the relevant legislation requires deep focus and long hours of concentration.
Learning Spanish: Mastering a new language involves focused practice, study, and consistency. Scheduling regular deep focus sessions is practically a requirement for learning a new language as an adult.
Reading The Wheel of Time: I mean, I won’t promise implementing deep work sessions will actually get you all the way through it, but you certainly can’t do it without them.
Weaknesses in “Deep Work” Conceptually
As with all principles, there are situations where it does not apply. Deep work? More like it Don’t Work. [pause for laughter] Thank you.
While the concept of deep work has been overall accepted by most reasonable people and proven to be beneficial in the majority of cases, here are situations where it might not be ideal.
1. Lack of flexibility
Not all tasks or professions are suited for deep work sessions.
Things like creative projects, customer service roles, or anything that involves collaboration require interruptions and interactions.
If you try to perform deep work in these situations, you’ll just piss everyone off.
There are also differences in individuals (obvi). We all have different productivity rhythms, and some people genuinely do work better in short bursts of time or other styles that require flexibility.
2. Overemphasis on isolation
Many workplaces value teamwork and collaboration above all else. Deep work by nature is isolating.
This can conflict with the need for regular communication and teamwork.
That lack of interaction can also prevent creativity and innovation. People bounce ideas off of each other. One brain is remarkable less powerful when generating new concepts or workshopping a premise.
3. Practicality challenges
Not every workplace will be conducive to deep work. This could be because of distractions, open office layouts, the expectation of immediate responses, and other cultural elements unique to each place.
Depending on your position, you may have a manager who thinks deep work is so uncool and they want you available at all times. Some people simply believe employees should be constantly visible and available.
4. Shallow work neglect
Why is Shallow Work crying? What did you do now?
Tasks like responding to emails and messages, updating your schedule, and routine communications are usually considered “shallow work.” Shallow work is something that does need to be done, but you don’t have to be fully plugged in and focused to succeed.
Neglecting shallow work will only cause an accumulation of little chores that will eventually disrupt your productivity.
Approaching the concept of deep work in a more balanced way, integrating deep and shallow work, can be more sustainable.
5. Exclusivity
And of course, there are cases with less accessibility than others. The practice of deep work is more achievable for individuals in particular professions or with more control over their own schedule. It’s just not feasible for those in high-interaction roles like customer service.
The ability to block out those long sections of time for deep work sessions isn’t something available to everyone, especially people with demanding lives, in and out of work.
Key Takeaways
Deep work is the practice of scheduling focused work sessions for more complex tasks. It can increase productivity, raise the quality of your work, help you master skills, and provide fulfillment.
You can implement deep work by scheduling sessions in a distraction-free environment, setting clear goals and routines, using time blocking, prioritizing tasks to focus on, limiting or compiling your shallow work, tracking progress, practicing mindfulness, and communicating to your colleagues and family that you will be busy.
Deep work is proven to make you more productive and satisfied at work, and it can be equally helpful for students.
Weaknesses of deep work include a lack of flexibility, social isolation, practicality challenges for certain individuals, neglecting smaller but necessary tasks, and being straight-up inaccessible for many roles.
That said, deep work is widely recognized as a helpful tool for increasing creativity, efficiency, and work satisfaction.
What’s your personal deep work philosophy? Let me know in the comments below!
Up next, learn how sleeping like a hostage can boost your productivity.
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