Notes from Cal Newport's Deep Work

Some time ago, I had two people recommend Cal Newport's Deep Work to me in the space of one week. In fact, one of the two people assumed I had already read it. This was enough for me to put it on my reading list, and I got to it this past summer.

One of the delightful surprises early in the book is that Newport is a Computer Science Professor at Georgetown. Knowing nothing about him nor the book before getting into it, this was fun to come across. Although I haven't met him, I am happy that he's been able to find success in both technical research work and mass-market work like Deep Work. That said, I find myself wishing that Deep Work was written with more academic convention, including specific references at the points they are needed. Instead, references are given as notes in an appendix, but I don't know what that gains. By contrast, I am currently reading Edward Castronova's Life is a Game, which is very accessible but does not shy away from being specific about its citations. (More on that book another time.)

The premise of the book is that real value comes from deep work, the kind of work that requires focused attention and time to make progress. Newport pulls in a foundation from performance psychology to support this, pointing to Ericsson's deliberate practice as critical scholarship in that area. Deep work requires expertise and insight that is idiosyncratic and cannot be automated nor replaced. Newport acknowledges the value and role of shallow work as well, but he recommends establishing a shallow work budget so that it does not eat into deep work time. He recommends 30-50% as a reasonable budget, especially since the research indicates one cannot get more than four or so deep hours in a workday.

Newport cites Hoffman and Baumeister's Willpower, which reports on their finding that people have a finite amount of willpower that is depleted as they fight desires throughout the day. They point to routines and rituals as methods of sustaining or automatizing willpower in the face of desire. This section of the book has stuck in my mind, and I find myself ruminating on willpower as a diminishing resource in my family life, my work life, and as a game designer. 

I am intrigued by Newport's discussion of David Dewane's architectural conception of an office space that maximizes deep work potential, which he calls the Eudaimonia Machine. Details can be found once you search for those terms. The idea is that the space is a progression of depth, including intentional movement through inspirational spaces, from communal toward individual. I am not surprised at its monastic qualities, but I do not know if Dewane has discussed this connection or not.

Newport bookends his own work days with startup and shutdown routines. The last few work days, I have tried his startup routine: blocking out the day's hours, populating regions from my task list, updating the schedule to deal with unexpected twists in the day, and annotating blocks where deep work has happened. So far, so good. I've been doing informal estimations like this for years, and so my days have worked out pretty much as intended. Doing this deliberately has made me consider prioritization more explicitly than I would otherwise. 

What I have not done, and what I have never done well, is have a shutdown routine. Newport's involves a final email check, managing the task list, making rough plans for the next few days, and then stepping away until the next day. Deep Work gives me a name for a problem I am sure we all regularly face: the Zeigarnik effect. This states that incomplete tasks dominate our attention. They sure do. Even in the few days I've been trying the startup routine, I have had more than one case where I "check my email" only to find messages that then impose a drain on my attention. (I need to take my own medicine here. I regularly tell my students never to check email, only to process it.) This leads to my most significant Achilles Heel: a unified inbox. I decided decades ago to manage one inbox for all my messages so that I could always find what I needed. The problem is that personal and business messages both end up in the same place. When I'm looking for an update on a Kickstarter board game, I don't want to find a request to serve on a committee. The other side of the coin, though, is that if I'm looking for information about that board game and one of my students has problem that I can mentor them through in two or three sentences, I don't mind helping them out. Unfortunately, there's no way to eat this cake and have it too. It is an experiment I wouldn't mind running, but changes in provider interfaces would mean there is no going back.

Several concepts in the book had me reflecting on the weirdness of higher education, particularly public higher education. (Newport is surprisingly mum about the problems of academia, something that must have taken great restraint.) One such concept is the Principle of Least Resistance: "In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors to the bottom line, we tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment." The bottom line at a state university is so far removed from faculty's daily activity that it is rarely discussed. Newport also has a lot to say about the dangers of "network tools," which seems to mean any electronic communication medium but is especially focused at social media. Here, he describes the Any-Benefit Approach to Network Tool Selection, which argues for using any network tool if it will provide any benefit at all, regardless of cost. This is another trap where academia is particularly prone to capture and for similar reasons. 

Regarding network tools, it is an oversight when he lumps blogging in with the likes of Facebook and Twitter. He treats blogging as if it is to build an audience, but there are many of us who do it for ourselves. Someone told me years ago, and I have found it to be true, that doing writing work in public encourages quality and clarity that could otherwise be illusory. (Indeed, it took me a few minutes to get that very sentence how I wanted it.)

Newport mentions Covey's The 4 Disciplines of Execution, a book that addresses how execution is harder that strategizing. The titular disciplines are: focus on the wildly important; act on lead measures; keep a compelling scoreboard; create a cadence of accountability. ("Lead measures" are in contrast to "lag measures." An example of the latter is customer satisfaction, while of the former, free samples given out. You control the lead measures directly and the lag measures follow.) It is no surprise that these align with agile software development practices, but I should keep this in mind should I end up in conversation with someone from the College of Business and we're looking for common ground.

The author's "Law of the Vital Few" is his spin on the 80/20 Rule or the Pareto Principle. His advice regarding it is surprisingly practical: if you are working toward a goal, and you're not in the effective 20%, then you should consider choosing a different goal. There's a business orientation here that may be valuable, but as with the discussion of network tools and blogging, it is also dangerously reductionist. It may just be my strange position as an academic, but it seems to me that one ought to consider one's intrinsic motivation, satisfaction, and sense of purpose in addition to measuring external factors. Some of my best academic works have zero or few citations and won't move the needle on any discussions, but I am a better person for having written them.

The last nugget I would like to share is Newport's heuristic for distinguishing between deep and shallow work. It surprised me that this came so late in the book. Yet, he presents it as a self-test, and I struggled to find the right answers, so there must be a wisdom to his placement. His heuristic (spoiler ahead) is, "How long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task?" Knowing that experts can only maintain about four hours a day of deep work, this heuristic can be useful in scheduling to ensure enough deep work gets done.

These are my notes and not a review, but everyone I've talked to about the book has asked, "Is it worth reading?" I think that if one is looking for tips on improving personal efficiency, then it is worth it. The book is breezy, and this comes with the necessary caveat that complex ideas are treated superficially: one has to recognize that to really understand, say, willpower as a diminishing resource, one would need to take a deeper dive into it. Newport's motivating principle is true: that deep work is necessary and valuable, and that one can learn to do it better. I think it would be worthwhile to combine a reading of Deep Work with something to remind ourselves that joy will never be found in the pursuit of success.