These changes are all positive for your quest to make deep work central to your working life. On the one hand, they don’t ask you to abandon your core shallow obligations—a move that would cause problems and resentment—as you’re still spending a lot of time on such efforts. On the other hand, they do force you to place a hard limit on the amount of less urgent obligations you allow to slip insidiously into your schedule. This limit frees up space for significant amounts of deep effort on a consistent basis.
The reason why these decisions should start with a conversation with your boss is that this agreement establishes implicit support from your workplace. If you work for someone else, this strategy provides cover when you turn down an obligation or restructure a project to minimize shallowness. You can justify the move because it’s necessary for you to hit your prescribed target mix of work types. As I discussed in Chapter 2, part of the reason shallow work persists in large quantities in knowledge work is that we rarely see the total impact of such efforts on our schedules. We instead tend to evaluate these behaviors one by one in the moment—a perspective from which each task can seem quite reasonable and convenient. The tools from earlier in this rule, however, allow you to make this impact explicit. You can now confidently say to your boss, “This is the exact percentage of my time spent last week on shallow work,” and force him or her to give explicit approval for that ratio. Faced with these numbers, and the economic reality they clarify (it’s incredibly wasteful, for example, to pay a highly trained professional to send e-mail messages and attend meetings for thirty hours a week), a boss will be led to the natural conclusion that you need to say no to some things and to streamline others—even if this makes life less convenient for the boss, or for you, or for your coworkers. Because, of course, in the end, a business’s goal is to generate value, not to make sure its employees’ lives are as easy as possible.
If you work for yourself, this exercise will force you to confront the reality of how little time in your “busy” schedule you’re actually producing value. These hard numbers will provide you the confidence needed to start scaling back on the shallow activities that are sapping your time. Without these numbers, it’s difficult for an entrepreneur to say no to any opportunity that might generate some positive return. “I have to be on Twitter!,” “I have to maintain an active Facebook presence!,” “I have to tweak the widgets on my blog!,” you tell yourself, because when considered in isolation, to say no to any one of these activities seems like you’re being lazy. By instead picking and sticking with a shallow-to-deep ratio, you can replace this guilt-driven unconditional acceptance with the more healthy habit of trying to get the most out of the time you put aside for shallow work (therefore still exposing yourself to many opportunities), but keeping these efforts constrained to a small enough fraction of your time and attention to enable the deep work that ultimately drives your business forward.
Of course, there’s always the possibility that when you ask this question the answer is stark. No boss will explicitly answer, “One hundred percent of your time should be shallow!” (unless you’re entry level, at which point you need to delay this exercise until you’ve built enough skills to add deep efforts to your official work responsibilities), but a boss might reply, in so many words, “as much shallow work as is needed for you to promptly do whatever we need from you at the moment.” In this case, the answer is still useful, as it tells you that this isn’t a job that supports deep work, and a job that doesn’t support deep work is not a job that can help you succeed in our current information economy. You should, in this case, thank the boss for the feedback, and then promptly start planning how you can transition into a new position that values depth.
Finish Your Work by Five Thirty
In the seven days preceding my first writing these words, I participated in sixty-five different e-mail conversations. Among these sixty-five conversations, I sent exactly five e-mails after five thirty p.m. The immediate story told by these statistics is that, with few exceptions, I don’t send e-mails after five thirty. But given how intertwined e-mail has become with work in general, there’s a more surprising reality hinted by this behavior: I don’t work after five thirty p.m.
I call this commitment fixed-schedule productivity, as I fix the firm goal of not working past a certain time, then work backward to find productivity strategies that allow me to satisfy this declaration. I’ve practiced fixed-schedule productivity happily for more than half a decade now, and it’s been crucial to my efforts to build a productive professional life centered on deep work. In the pages ahead, I will try to convince you to adopt this strategy as well.
Let me start my pitch for fixed-schedule productivity by first noting that, according to conventional wisdom, in the academic world I inhabit this tactic should fail. Professors—especially junior professors—are notorious for adopting grueling schedules that extend into the night and through weekends. Consider, for example, a blog post published by a young computer science professor whom I’ll call “Tom.” In this post, which Tom wrote in the winter of 2014, he replicates his schedule for a recent day in which he spent twelve hours at his office. This schedule includes five different meetings and three hours of “administrative” tasks, which he describes as “tending to bushels of e-mails, filling out bureaucratic forms, organizing meeting notes, planning future meetings.” By his estimation, he spent only one and a half out of the twelve total hours sitting in his office tackling “real” work, which he defines as efforts that make progress toward a “research deliverable.” It’s no wonder that Tom feels coerced into working well beyond the standard workday. “I’ve already accepted the reality that I’ll be working on weekends,” he concludes in another post. “Very few junior faculty can avoid such a fate.”
And yet, I have. Even though I don’t work at night and rarely work on weekends, between arriving at Georgetown in the fall of 2011 and beginning work on this chapter in the fall of 2014, I’ve published somewhere around twenty peer-reviewed articles. I also won two competitive grants, published one (nonacademic) book, and have almost finished writing another (which you’re reading at the moment). All while avoiding the grueling schedules deemed necessary by the Toms of the world.
What explains this paradox? We can find a compelling answer in a widely disseminated article published in 2013 by an academic further along in her career, and far more accomplished than I: Radhika Nagpal, the Fred Kavli Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University. Nagpal opens the article by claiming that much of the stress suffered by tenure-track professors is self-imposed. “Scary myths and scary data abound about life as a tenure-track faculty at an ‘R1’ [research-focused] university,” she begins, before continuing to explain how she finally decided to disregard the conventional wisdom and instead “deliberately… do specific things to preserve my happiness.” This deliberate effort led Nagpal to enjoy her pre-tenure time “tremendously.”