Rowling’s decision to check into a luxurious hotel suite near Edinburgh Castle is an example of a curious but effective strategy in the world of deep work: the grand gesture. The concept is simple: By leveraging a radical change to your normal environment, coupled perhaps with a significant investment of effort or money, all dedicated toward supporting a deep work task, you increase the perceived importance of the task. This boost in importance reduces your mind’s instinct to procrastinate and delivers an injection of motivation and energy.
Writing a chapter of a Harry Potter novel, for example, is hard work and will require a lot of mental energy—regardless of where you do it. But when paying more than $1,000 a day to write the chapter in a suite of an old hotel down the street from a Hogwarts-style castle, mustering the energy to begin and sustain this work is easier than if you were instead in a distracting home office.
When you study the habits of other well-known deep workers, the grand gesture strategy comes up often. Bill Gates, for example, was famous during his time as Microsoft CEO for taking Think Weeks during which he would leave behind his normal work and family obligations to retreat to a cabin with a stack of papers and books. His goal was to think deeply, without distraction, about the big issues relevant to his company. It was during one of these weeks, for example, that he famously came to the conclusion that the Internet was going to be a major force in the industry. There was nothing physically stopping Gates from thinking deeply in his office in Microsoft’s Seattle headquarters, but the novelty of his weeklong retreat helped him achieve the desired levels of concentration.
The MIT physicist and award-winning novelist Alan Lightman also leverages grand gestures. In his case, he retreats each summer to a “tiny island” in Maine to think deeply and recharge. At least as of 2000, when he described this gesture in an interview, the island not only lacked Internet, but didn’t even have phone service. As he then justified: “It’s really about two and a half months that I’ll feel like I can recover some silence in my life… which is so hard to find.”
Not everyone has the freedom to spend two months in Maine, but many writers, including Dan Pink and Michael Pollan, simulate the experience year-round by building—often at significant expense and effort—writing cabins on their properties. (Pollan, for his part, even wrote a book about his experience building his cabin in the woods behind his former Connecticut home.) These outbuildings aren’t strictly necessary for these writers, who need only a laptop and a flat surface to put it on to ply their trade. But it’s not the amenities of the cabins that generate their value; it’s instead the grand gesture represented in the design and building of the cabin for the sole purpose of enabling better writing.
Not every grand gesture need be so permanent. After the pathologically competitive Bell Labs physicist William Shockley was scooped in the invention of the transistor—as I detail in the next strategy, two members of his team made the breakthrough at a time when Shockley was away working on another project—he locked himself in a hotel room in Chicago, where he had traveled ostensibly to attend a conference. He didn’t emerge from the room until he had ironed out the details for a better design that had been rattling around in his mind. When he finally did leave the room, he airmailed his notes back to Murray Hill, New Jersey, so that a colleague could paste them into his lab notebook and sign them to timestamp the innovation. The junction form of the transistor that Shockley worked out in this burst of depth ended up earning him a share of the Nobel Prize subsequently awarded for the invention.
An even more extreme example of a onetime grand gesture yielding results is a story involving Peter Shankman, an entrepreneur and social media pioneer. As a popular speaker, Shankman spends much of his time flying. He eventually realized that thirty thousand feet was an ideal environment for him to focus. As he explained in a blog post, “Locked in a seat with nothing in front of me, nothing to distract me, nothing to set off my ‘Ooh! Shiny!’ DNA, I have nothing to do but be at one with my thoughts.” It was sometime after this realization that Shankman signed a book contract that gave him only two weeks to finish the entire manuscript. Meeting this deadline would require incredible concentration. To achieve this state, Shankman did something unconventional. He booked a round-trip business-class ticket to Tokyo. He wrote during the whole flight to Japan, drank an espresso in the business class lounge once he arrived in Japan, then turned around and flew back, once again writing the whole way—arriving back in the States only thirty hours after he first left with a completed manuscript now in hand. “The trip cost $4,000 and was worth every penny,” he explained.
In all of these examples, it’s not just the change of environment or seeking of quiet that enables more depth. The dominant force is the psychology of committing so seriously to the task at hand. To put yourself in an exotic location to focus on a writing project, or to take a week off from work just to think, or to lock yourself in a hotel room until you complete an important invention: These gestures push your deep goal to a level of mental priority that helps unlock the needed mental resources. Sometimes to go deep, you must first go big.
Don’t Work Alone
The relationship between deep work and collaboration is tricky. It’s worth taking the time to untangle, however, because properly leveraging collaboration can increase the quality of deep work in your professional life.
It’s helpful to start our discussion of this topic by taking a step back to consider what at first seems to be an unresolvable conflict. In Part 1 of this book I criticized Facebook for the design of its new headquarters. In particular, I noted that the company’s goal to create the world’s largest open office space—a giant room that will reportedly hold twenty-eight hundred workers—represents an absurd attack on concentration. Both intuition and a growing body of research underscore the reality that sharing a workspace with a large number of coworkers is incredibly distracting—creating an environment that thwarts attempts to think seriously. In a 2013 article summarizing recent research on this topic, Bloomberg Businessweek went so far as to call for an end to the “tyranny of the open-plan office.”
And yet, these open office designs are not embraced haphazardly. As Maria Konnikova reports in The New Yorker, when this concept first emerged, its goal was to “facilitate communication and idea flow.” This claim resonated with American businesses looking to embrace an aura of start-up unconventionality. Josh Tyrangiel, the editor of Bloomberg Businessweek, for example, explained the lack of offices in Bloomberg’s headquarters as follows: “Open plan is pretty spectacular; it ensures that everyone is attuned to the broad mission, and… it encourages curiosity between people who work in different disciplines.” Jack Dorsey justified the open layout of the Square headquarters by explaining: “We encourage people to stay out in the open because we believe in serendipity—and people walking by each other teaching new things.”
For the sake of discussion, let’s call this principle—that when you allow people to bump into each other smart collaborations and new ideas emerge—the theory of serendipitous creativity. When Mark Zuckerberg decided to build the world’s largest office, we can reasonably conjecture, this theory helped drive his decision, just as it has driven many of the moves toward open workspaces elsewhere in Silicon Valley and beyond. (Other less-exalted factors, like saving money and increasing supervision, also play a role, but they’re not as sexy and are therefore less emphasized.)