Let’s return to Donald Knuth. He’s famous for many innovations in computer science, including, notably, the development of a rigorous approach to analyzing algorithm performance. Among his peers, however, Knuth also maintains an aura of infamy for his approach to electronic communication. If you visit Knuth’s website at Stanford with the intention of finding his e-mail address, you’ll instead discover the following note:
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.
Knuth goes on to acknowledge that he doesn’t intend to cut himself off completely from the world. He notes that writing his books requires communication with thousands of people and that he wants to be responsive to questions and comments. His solution? He provides an address—a postal mailing address. He says that his administrative assistant will sort through any letters arriving at that address and put aside those that she thinks are relevant. Anything that’s truly urgent she’ll bring to Knuth promptly, and everything else he’ll handle in a big batch, once every three months or so.
Knuth deploys what I call the monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling. This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations. Practitioners of the monastic philosophy tend to have a well-defined and highly valued professional goal that they’re pursuing, and the bulk of their professional success comes from doing this one thing exceptionally well. It’s this clarity that helps them eliminate the thicket of shallow concerns that tend to trip up those whose value proposition in the working world is more varied.
Knuth, for example, explains his professional goal as follows: “I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study.” Trying to pitch Knuth on the intangible returns of building an audience on Twitter, or the unexpected opportunities that might come through a more liberal use of e-mail, will fail, as these behaviors don’t directly aid his goal to exhaustively understand specific corners of computer science and then write about them in an accessible manner.
Another person committed to monastic deep work is the acclaimed science fiction writer Neal Stephenson. If you visit Stephenson’s author website, you’ll notice a lack of e-mail or mailing address. We can gain insight into this omission from a pair of essays that Stephenson posted on his early website (hosted on The Well) back in the early 2000s, and which have been preserved by the Internet Archive. In one such essay, archived in 2003, Stephenson summarizes his communication policy as follows:
Persons who wish to interfere with my concentration are politely requested not to do so, and warned that I don’t answer e-mail… lest [my communication policy’s] key message get lost in the verbiage, I will put it here succinctly: All of my time and attention are spoken for—several times over. Please do not ask for them.
To further justify this policy, Stephenson wrote an essay titled “Why I Am a Bad Correspondent.” At the core of his explanation for his inaccessibility is the following decision:
The productivity equation is a non-linear one, in other words. This accounts for why I am a bad correspondent and why I very rarely accept speaking engagements. If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. But as those chunks get separated and fragmented, my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly.
Stephenson sees two mutually exclusive options: He can write good novels at a regular rate, or he can answer a lot of individual e-mails and attend conferences, and as a result produce lower-quality novels at a slower rate. He chose the former option, and this choice requires him to avoid as much as possible any source of shallow work in his professional life. (This issue is so important to Stephenson that he went on to explore its implications—positive and negative—in his 2008 science fiction epic, Anathem, which considers a world where an intellectual elite live in monastic orders, isolated from the distracted masses and technology, thinking deep thoughts.)
In my experience, the monastic philosophy makes many knowledge workers defensive. The clarity with which its adherents identify their value to the world, I suspect, touches a raw nerve for those whose contribution to the information economy is more complex. Notice, of course, that “more complex” does not mean “lesser.” A high-level manager, for example, might play a vital role in the functioning of a billion-dollar company, even if she cannot point to something discrete, like a completed novel, and say, “This is what I produced this year.” Therefore, the pool of individuals to whom the monastic philosophy applies is limited—and that’s okay. If you’re outside this pool, its radical simplicity shouldn’t evince too much envy. On the other hand, if you’re inside this pool—someone whose contribution to the world is discrete, clear, and individualized*—then you should give this philosophy serious consideration, as it might be the deciding factor between an average career and one that will be remembered.
The Bimodal Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling
This book opened with a story about the revolutionary psychologist and thinker Carl Jung. In the 1920s, at the same time that Jung was attempting to break away from the strictures of his mentor, Sigmund Freud, he began regular retreats to a rustic stone house he built in the woods outside the small town of Bollingen. When there, Jung would lock himself every morning into a minimally appointed room to write without interruption. He would then meditate and walk in the woods to clarify his thinking in preparation for the next day’s writing. These efforts, I argued, were aimed at increasing the intensity of Jung’s deep work to a level that would allow him to succeed in intellectual combat with Freud and his many supporters.