In an ideal world—one in which the true value of deep work is accepted and celebrated—we’d all have access to something like the Eudaimonia Machine. Perhaps not David Dewane’s exact design, but, more generally speaking, a work environment (and culture) designed to help us extract as much value as possible from our brains. Unfortunately, this vision is far from our current reality. We instead find ourselves in distracting open offices where inboxes cannot be neglected and meetings are incessant—a setting where colleagues would rather you respond quickly to their latest e-mail than produce the best possible results. As a reader of this book, in other words, you’re a disciple of depth in a shallow world.
This rule—the first of four such rules in Part 2 of this book—is designed to reduce this conflict. You might not have access to your own Eudaimonia Machine, but the strategies that follow will help you simulate its effects in your otherwise distracted professional life. They’ll show you how to transform deep work from an aspiration into a regular and significant part of your daily schedule. (Rules #2 through #4 will then help you get the most out of this deep work habit by presenting, among other things, strategies for training your concentration ability and fighting back encroaching distractions.)
Before proceeding to these strategies, however, I want to first address a question that might be nagging you: Why do we need such involved interventions? Put another way, once you accept that deep work is valuable, isn’t it enough to just start doing more of it? Do we really need something as complicated as the Eudaimonia Machine (or its equivalent) for something as simple as remembering to concentrate more often?
Unfortunately, when it comes to replacing distraction with focus, matters are not so simple. To understand why this is true let’s take a closer look at one of the main obstacles to going deep: the urge to turn your attention toward something more superficial. Most people recognize that this urge can complicate efforts to concentrate on hard things, but most underestimate its regularity and strength.
Consider a 2012 study, led by psychologists Wilhelm Hofmann and Roy Baumeister, that outfitted 205 adults with beepers that activated at randomly selected times (this is the experience sampling method discussed in Part 1). When the beeper sounded, the subject was asked to pause for a moment to reflect on desires that he or she was currently feeling or had felt in the last thirty minutes, and then answer a set of questions about these desires. After a week, the researchers had gathered more than 7,500 samples. Here’s the short version of what they found: People fight desires all day long. As Baumeister summarized in his subsequent book, Willpower (co-authored with the science writer John Tierney): “Desire turned out to be the norm, not the exception.”
The five most common desires these subjects fought include, not surprisingly, eating, sleeping, and sex. But the top five list also included desires for “taking a break from [hard] work… checking e-mail and social networking sites, surfing the web, listening to music, or watching television.” The lure of the Internet and television proved especially strong: The subjects succeeded in resisting these particularly addictive distractions only around half the time.
These results are bad news for this rule’s goal of helping you cultivate a deep work habit. They tell us that you can expect to be bombarded with the desire to do anything but work deeply throughout the day, and if you’re like the German subjects from the Hofmann and Baumeister study, these competing desires will often win out. You might respond at this point that you will succeed where these subjects failed because you understand the importance of depth and will therefore be more rigorous in your will to remain concentrated. This is a noble sentiment, but the decades of research that preceded this study underscore its futility. A now voluminous line of inquiry, initiated in a series of pioneering papers also written by Roy Baumeister, has established the following important (and at the time, unexpected) truth about willpower: You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.
Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it’s instead like a muscle that tires. This is why the subjects in the Hofmann and Baumeister study had such a hard time fighting desires—over time these distractions drained their finite pool of willpower until they could no longer resist. The same will happen to you, regardless of your intentions—unless, that is, you’re smart about your habits.
This brings me to the motivating idea behind the strategies that follow: The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration. If you suddenly decide, for example, in the middle of a distracted afternoon spent Web browsing, to switch your attention to a cognitively demanding task, you’ll draw heavily from your finite willpower to wrest your attention away from the online shininess. Such attempts will therefore frequently fail. On the other hand, if you deployed smart routines and rituals—perhaps a set time and quiet location used for your deep tasks each afternoon—you’d require much less willpower to start and keep going. In the long run, you’d therefore succeed with these deep efforts far more often.
With this in mind, the six strategies that follow can be understood as an arsenal of routines and rituals designed with the science of limited willpower in mind to maximize the amount of deep work you consistently accomplish in your schedule. Among other things, they’ll ask you to commit to a particular pattern for scheduling this work and develop rituals to sharpen your concentration before starting each session. Some of these strategies will deploy simple heuristics to hijack your brain’s motivation center while others are designed to recharge your willpower reserves at the fastest possible rate.
You could just try to make deep work a priority. But supporting this decision with the strategies that follow—or strategies of your own devising that are motivated by the same principles—will significantly increase the probability that you succeed in making deep work a crucial part of your professional life.
Decide on Your Depth Philosophy
The famed computer scientist Donald Knuth cares about deep work. As he explains on his website: “What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.” A doctoral candidate named Brian Chappell, who is a father with a full-time job, also values deep work, as it’s the only way he can make progress on his dissertation given his limited time. Chappell told me that his first encounter with the idea of deep work was “an emotional moment.”
I mention these examples because although Knuth and Chappell agree on the importance of depth, they disagree on their philosophies for integrating this depth into their work lives. As I’ll detail in the next section, Knuth deploys a form of monasticism that prioritizes deep work by trying to eliminate or minimize all other types of work. Chappell, by contrast, deploys a rhythmic strategy in which he works for the same hours (five to seven thirty a.m.) every weekday morning, without exception, before beginning a workday punctuated by standard distractions. Both approaches work, but not universally. Knuth’s approach might make sense for someone whose primary professional obligation is to think big thoughts, but if Chappell adopted a similar rejection of all things shallow, he’d likely lose his job.
You need your own philosophy for integrating deep work into your professional life. (As argued in this rule’s introduction, attempting to schedule deep work in an ad hoc fashion is not an effective way to manage your limited willpower.) But this example highlights a general warning about this selection: You must be careful to choose a philosophy that fits your specific circumstances, as a mismatch here can derail your deep work habit before it has a chance to solidify. This strategy will help you avoid this fate by presenting four different depth philosophies that I’ve seen work exceptionally well in practice. The goal is to convince you that there are many different ways to integrate deep work into your schedule, and it’s therefore worth taking the time to find an approach that makes sense for you.
The Monastic Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling