The Enemies of Deep Work

• Attention Residue: “[W]hen you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task.” (Research by Sophie LeRoy)
• Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: “In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.”
• Business Trends: “Many other ideas are being prioritized as more important than deep work in the business world, including...serendipitous collaboration, rapid communication, and an active presence on social media. It’s bad enough that so many trends are prioritized ahead of deep work, but to add insult to injury, many of these trends actively decrease one’s ability to go deep. Open offices, for example, might create more opportunities for collaboration, but they do so at the cost of ‘massive distraction.'”
• (Some) Technology: “To support deep work often requires the rejection of much of what is new and high-tech.”

Rule #1: Work Deeply

• “The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.”
• “The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.” Execution should be aimed at a small number of “wildly important goals.” (From The 4 Disciplines of Execution)
• “If you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to say ‘no’ to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say ‘yes’ to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else.” -David Brooks
• “[Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.” -David Brooks
• Tips for developing a deep work ritual:
  • “If it’s possible to identify a location used only for depth—for instance, a conference room or quiet library—the positive effect can be even greater.”
  • “Regardless of where you work, be sure to also give yourself a specific time frame to keep the session a discrete challenge and not an open-ended slog.”
  • “Your ritual needs rules and processes to keep your efforts structured. For example, you might institute a ban on any Internet use, or maintain a metric such as words produced per twenty-minute interval to keep your concentration honed.”
  • “Keep in mind that finding a ritual that sticks might require experimentation, so be willing to work at it.”

Rule #2: Embrace Boredom

• “Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction. Much in the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, you’ll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom.”
• “To simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, it’s incredibly valuable.”
• “[Y]our ability to concentrate is only as strong as your commitment to train it.”
• “Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction, [professor Clifford Nass] discovered, it’s hard to shake the addiction even when you want to concentrate. To put this more concretely: If every moment of potential boredom in your life—say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives—is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where...it’s not ready for deep work--even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.”