The reason knowledge workers are losing their familiarity with deep work is well established: network tools. This is a broad category that captures communication services like e-mail and SMS, social media networks like Twitter and Facebook, and the shiny tangle of infotainment sites like BuzzFeed and Reddit. In aggregate, the rise of these tools, combined with ubiquitous access to them through smartphones and networked office computers, has fragmented most knowledge workers’ attention into slivers. A 2012 McKinsey study found that the average knowledge worker now spends more than 60 percent of the workweek engaged in electronic communication and Internet searching, with close to 30 percent of a worker’s time dedicated to reading and answering e-mail alone.
This state of fragmented attention cannot accommodate deep work, which requires long periods of uninterrupted thinking. At the same time, however, modern knowledge workers are not loafing. In fact, they report that they are as busy as ever. What explains the discrepancy? A lot can be explained by another type of effort, which provides a counterpart to the idea of deep work:
Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.
In an age of network tools, in other words, knowledge workers increasingly replace deep work with the shallow alternative—constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction. Larger efforts that would be well served by deep thinking, such as forming a new business strategy or writing an important grant application, get fragmented into distracted dashes that produce muted quality. To make matters worse for depth, there’s increasing evidence that this shift toward the shallow is not a choice that can be easily reversed. Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work. “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” admitted journalist Nicholas Carr, in an oft-cited 2008 Atlantic article. “[And] I’m not the only one.” Carr expanded this argument into a book, The Shallows, which became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. To write The Shallows, appropriately enough, Carr had to move to a cabin and forcibly disconnect.
The idea that network tools are pushing our work from the deep toward the shallow is not new. The Shallows was just the first in a series of recent books to examine the Internet’s effect on our brains and work habits. These subsequent titles include William Powers’s Hamlet’s BlackBerry, John Freeman’s The Tyranny of E-mail, and Alex Soojung-Kin Pang’s The Distraction Addiction—all of which agree, more or less, that network tools are distracting us from work that requires unbroken concentration, while simultaneously degrading our capacity to remain focused.
Given this existing body of evidence, I will not spend more time in this book trying to establish this point. We can, I hope, stipulate that network tools negatively impact deep work. I’ll also sidestep any grand arguments about the long-term societal consequence of this shift, as such arguments tend to open impassible rifts. On one side of the debate are techno-skeptics like Jaron Lanier and John Freeman, who suspect that many of these tools, at least in their current state, damage society, while on the other side techno-optimists like Clive Thompson argue that they’re changing society, for sure, but in ways that’ll make us better off. Google, for example, might reduce our memory, but we no longer need good memories, as in the moment we can now search for anything we need to know.
I have no stance in this philosophical debate. My interest in this matter instead veers toward a thesis of much more pragmatic and individualized interest: Our work culture’s shift toward the shallow (whether you think it’s philosophically good or bad) is exposing a massive economic and personal opportunity for the few who recognize the potential of resisting this trend and prioritizing depth—an opportunity that, not too long ago, was leveraged by a bored young consultant from Virginia named Jason Benn.
There are many ways to discover that you’re not valuable in our economy. For Jason Benn the lesson was made clear when he realized, not long after taking a job as a financial consultant, that the vast majority of his work responsibilities could be automated by a “kludged together” Excel script.
The firm that hired Benn produced reports for banks involved in complex deals. (“It was about as interesting as it sounds,” Benn joked in one of our interviews.) The report creation process required hours of manual manipulation of data in a series of Excel spreadsheets. When he first arrived, it took Benn up to six hours per report to finish this stage (the most efficient veterans at the firm could complete this task in around half the time). This didn’t sit well with Benn.
“The way it was taught to me, the process seemed clunky and manually intensive,” Benn recalls. He knew that Excel has a feature called macros that allows users to automate common tasks. Benn read articles on the topic and soon put together a new worksheet, wired up with a series of these macros that could take the six-hour process of manual data manipulation and replace it, essentially, with a button click. A report-writing process that originally took him a full workday could now be reduced to less than an hour.
Benn is a smart guy. He graduated from an elite college (the University of Virginia) with a degree in economics, and like many in his situation he had ambitions for his career. It didn’t take him long to realize that these ambitions would be thwarted so long as his main professional skills could be captured in an Excel macro. He decided, therefore, he needed to increase his value to the world. After a period of research, Benn reached a conclusion: He would, he declared to his family, quit his job as a human spreadsheet and become a computer programmer. As is often the case with such grand plans, however, there was a hitch: Jason Benn had no idea how to write code.
As a computer scientist I can confirm an obvious point: Programming computers is hard. Most new developers dedicate a four-year college education to learning the ropes before their first job—and even then, competition for the best spots is fierce. Jason Benn didn’t have this time. After his Excel epiphany, he quit his job at the financial firm and moved home to prepare for his next step. His parents were happy he had a plan, but they weren’t happy about the idea that this return home might be long-term. Benn needed to learn a hard skill, and needed to do so fast.
It’s here that Benn ran into the same problem that holds back many knowledge workers from navigating into more explosive career trajectories. Learning something complex like computer programming requires intense uninterrupted concentration on cognitively demanding concepts—the type of concentration that drove Carl Jung to the woods surrounding Lake Zurich. This task, in other words, is an act of deep work. Most knowledge workers, however, as I argued earlier in this introduction, have lost their ability to perform deep work. Benn was no exception to this trend.