? Analyzing Example #1: To properly edit an academic paper requires that you understand the nuances of the work (so you can make sure it’s being described precisely) and the nuances of the broader literature (so you can make sure it’s being cited properly). These requirements require cutting-edge knowledge of an academic field—a task that in the age of specialization takes years of diligent study at the graduate level and beyond. When it comes to this example, the answer to our question would therefore be quite large, perhaps on the scale of fifty to seventy-five months.
? Analyzing Example #2: The second example doesn’t fare so well by this analysis. To create a PowerPoint presentation that describes your quarterly sales requires three things: first, knowledge of how to make a PowerPoint presentation; second, an understanding of the standard format of these quarterly performance presentations within your organization; and third, an understanding of what sales metrics your organization tracks and how to convert them into the right graphs. The hypothetical college graduate imagined by our question, we can assume, would already know how to use PowerPoint, and learning the standard format for your organization’s presentations shouldn’t require more than a week. The real question, therefore, is how long it takes a bright college graduate to understand the metrics you track, where to find the results, and how to clean those up and translate them into graphs and charts that are appropriate for a slide presentation. This isn’t a trivial task, but for a bright college grad it wouldn’t require more than an additional month or so of training—so we can use two months as our conservative answer.
? Analyzing Example #3: Meetings can be tricky to analyze. They can seem tedious at times but they’re often also presented as playing a key role in your organization’s most important activities. The method presented here helps cut through this veneer. How long would it take to train a bright recent college graduate to take your place in a planning meeting? He or she would have to understand the project well enough to know its milestones and the skills of its participants. Our hypothetical grad might also need some insight into the interpersonal dynamics and the reality of how such projects are executed at the organization. At this point, you might wonder if this college grad would also need a deep expertise in the topic tackled by the project. For a planning meeting—probably not. Such meetings rarely dive into substantive content and tend to feature a lot of small talk and posturing in which participants try to make it seem like they’re committing to a lot without actually having to commit. Give a bright recent graduate three months to learn the ropes and he or she could take your place without issue in such a gabfest. So we’ll use three months as our answer.
This question is meant as a thought experiment (I’m not going to ask you to actually hire a recent college graduate to take over tasks that score low). But the answers it provides will help you objectively quantify the shallowness or depth of various activities. If our hypothetical college graduate requires many months of training to replicate a task, then this indicates that the task leverages hard-won expertise. As argued earlier, tasks that leverage your expertise tend to be deep tasks and they can therefore provide a double benefit: They return more value per time spent, and they stretch your abilities, leading to improvement. On the other hand, a task that our hypothetical college graduate can pick up quickly is one that does not leverage expertise, and therefore it can be understood as shallow.
What should you do with this strategy? Once you know where your activities fall on the deep-to-shallow scale, bias your time toward the former. When we reconsider our case studies, for example, we see that the first task is something that you would want to prioritize as a good use of time, while the second and third are activities of a type that should be minimized—they might feel productive, but their return on (time) investment is measly.
Of course, how one biases away from shallow and toward depth is not always obvious—even after you know how to accurately label your commitments. This brings us to the strategies that follow, which will provide specific guidance on how to accomplish this tricky goal.
Ask Your Boss for a Shallow Work Budget
Here’s an important question that’s rarely asked: What percentage of my time should be spent on shallow work? This strategy suggests that you ask it. If you have a boss, in other words, have a conversation about this question. (You’ll probably have to first define for him or her what “shallow” and “deep” work means.) If you work for yourself, ask yourself this question. In both cases, settle on a specific answer. Then—and this is the important part—try to stick to this budget. (The strategies that precede and follow this one will help you achieve this goal.)
For most people in most non-entry-level knowledge work jobs, the answer to the question will be somewhere in the 30 to 50 percent range (there’s a psychological distaste surrounding the idea of spending the majority of your time on unskilled tasks, so 50 percent is a natural upper limit, while at the same time most bosses will begin to worry that if this percentage gets too much lower than 30 percent you’ll be reduced to a knowledge work hermit who thinks big thoughts but never responds to e-mails).
Obeying this budget will likely require changes to your behavior. You’ll almost certainly end up forced into saying no to projects that seem infused with shallowness while also more aggressively reducing the amount of shallowness in your existing projects. This budget might lead you to drop the need for a weekly status meeting in preference for results-driven reporting (“let me know when you’ve made significant progress; then we’ll talk”). It might also lead you to start spending more mornings in communication isolation or decide it’s not as important as you once thought to respond quickly and in detail to every cc’d e-mail that crosses your inbox.