This rule asks you to apply these insights to your personal work life. The strategies that follow are designed to help you ruthlessly identify the shallowness in your current schedule, then cull it down to minimum levels—leaving more time for the deep efforts that ultimately matter most.
Before diving into the details of these strategies, however, we should first confront the reality that there’s a limit to this anti-shallow thinking. The value of deep work vastly outweighs the value of shallow, but this doesn’t mean that you must quixotically pursue a schedule in which all of your time is invested in depth. For one thing, a nontrivial amount of shallow work is needed to maintain most knowledge work jobs. You might be able to avoid checking your e-mail every ten minutes, but you won’t likely last long if you never respond to important messages. In this sense, we should see the goal of this rule as taming shallow work’s footprint in your schedule, not eliminating it.
Then there’s the issue of cognitive capacity. Deep work is exhausting because it pushes you toward the limit of your abilities. Performance psychologists have extensively studied how much such efforts can be sustained by an individual in a given day.* In their seminal paper on deliberate practice, Anders Ericsson and his collaborators survey these studies. They note that for someone new to such practice (citing, in particular, a child in the early stages of developing an expert-level skill), an hour a day is a reasonable limit. For those familiar with the rigors of such activities, the limit expands to something like four hours, but rarely more.
The implication is that once you’ve hit your deep work limit in a given day, you’ll experience diminishing rewards if you try to cram in more. Shallow work, therefore, doesn’t become dangerous until after you add enough to begin to crowd out your bounded deep efforts for the day. At first, this caveat might seem optimistic. The typical workday is eight hours. The most adept deep thinker cannot spend more than four of these hours in a state of true depth. It follows that you can safely spend half the day wallowing in the shallows without adverse effect. The danger missed by this analysis is how easily this amount of time can be consumed, especially once you consider the impact of meetings, appointments, calls, and other scheduled events. For many jobs, these time drains can leave you with surprisingly little time left for solo work.
My job as a professor, for example, is traditionally less plagued by such commitments, but even so, they often take large chunks out of my time, especially during the academic year. Turning to a random day in my calendar from the previous semester (I’m writing this during a quiet summer month), for example, I see I had a meeting from eleven to twelve, another from one to two thirty, and a class to teach from three to five. My eight-hour workday in this example is already reduced by four hours. Even if I squeezed all remaining shallow work (e-mails, tasks) into a single half hour, I’d still fall short of the goal of four hours of daily deep work. Put another way, even though we’re not capable of spending a full day in a state of blissful depth, this reality shouldn’t reduce the urgency of reducing shallow work, as the typical knowledge workday is more easily fragmented than many suspect.
To summarize, I’m asking you to treat shallow work with suspicion because its damage is often vastly underestimated and its importance vastly overestimated. This type of work is inevitable, but you must keep it confined to a point where it doesn’t impede your ability to take full advantage of the deeper efforts that ultimately determine your impact. The strategies that follow will help you act on this reality.
Schedule Every Minute of Your Day
If you’re between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four years old and live in Britain, you likely watch more television than you realize. In 2013, the British TV licensing authority surveyed television watchers about their habits. The twenty-five-to thirty-four-year-olds taking the survey estimated that they spend somewhere between fifteen and sixteen hours per week watching TV. This sounds like a lot, but it’s actually a significant underestimate. We know this because when it comes to television-watching habits, we have access to the ground truth. The Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board (the British equivalent of the American Nielsen Company) places meters in a representative sample of households. These meters record, without bias or wishful thinking, exactly how much people actually watch. The twenty-five-to thirty-four-year-olds who thought they watched fifteen hours a week, it turns out, watch more like twenty-eight hours.
This bad estimate of time usage is not unique to British television watching. When you consider different groups self-estimating different behaviors, similar gaps stubbornly remain. In a Wall Street Journal article on the topic, business writer Laura Vanderkam pointed out several more such examples. A survey by the National Sleep Foundation revealed that Americans think they’re sleeping, on average, somewhere around seven hours a night. The American Time Use Survey, which has people actually measure their sleep, corrected this number to 8.6 hours. Another study found that people who claimed to work sixty to sixty-four hours per week were actually averaging more like forty-four hours per week, while those claiming to work more than seventy-five hours were actually working less than fifty-five.
These examples underscore an important point: We spend much of our day on autopilot—not giving much thought to what we’re doing with our time. This is a problem. It’s difficult to prevent the trivial from creeping into every corner of your schedule if you don’t face, without flinching, your current balance between deep and shallow work, and then adopt the habit of pausing before action and asking, “What makes the most sense right now?” The strategy described in the following paragraphs is designed to force you into these behaviors. It’s an idea that might seem extreme at first but will soon prove indispensable in your quest to take full advantage of the value of deep work: Schedule every minute of your day.
Here’s my suggestion: At the beginning of each workday, turn to a new page of lined paper in a notebook you dedicate to this purpose. Down the left-hand side of the page, mark every other line with an hour of the day, covering the full set of hours you typically work. Now comes the important part: Divide the hours of your workday into blocks and assign activities to the blocks. For example, you might block off nine a.m. to eleven a.m. for writing a client’s press release. To do so, actually draw a box that covers the lines corresponding to these hours, then write “press release” inside the box. Not every block need be dedicated to a work task. There might be time blocks for lunch or relaxation breaks. To keep things reasonably clean, the minimum length of a block should be thirty minutes (i.e., one line on your page). This means, for example, that instead of having a unique small box for each small task on your plate for the day—respond to boss’s e-mail, submit reimbursement form, ask Carl about report—you can batch similar things into more generic task blocks. You might find it useful, in this case, to draw a line from a task block to the open right-hand side of the page where you can list out the full set of small tasks you plan to accomplish in that block.
When you’re done scheduling your day, every minute should be part of a block. You have, in effect, given every minute of your workday a job. Now as you go through your day, use this schedule to guide you.