Netflix’s documentary, Inside Bill’s Brain, shows how Bill Gates twice a year goes into isolation in a forest cabin for a week to read and think without distraction. It was at one of these “Think Weeks” back in 1995 that Gates came up with his famous memo The Internet Tidal Wave.
He’s always been like this. In the book The Innovators, author Walter Isaacson described Gates’ proclivity to deep work as the trait that differentiated him from Allen. Allen would balance many ideas and passions but Gates was a serial obsessor. While he was designing software with BASIC language for the Altair computer for eight weeks straight, Gates would collapse into sleep on his keyboard in the middle of writing code only to pick up where he left up when waking up.
In the book Deep Work, Cal Newport argues that regular deep work is a superpower in the 21st century.
In a knowledge economy, three groups gain an advantage:
- Those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines
- Those who are the best at what they can do
- Those with access to capital
As machines automate more and more tasks, the winners of the day are those who can learn new, complex skills quickly and perform consistently at a high level. And the Internet and technology have made the talent pool universally accessible. A high-skilled worker for knowledge work can increasingly work from anywhere.
This creates a power law of who benefits in a knowledge economy.
In a seminal 1981 paper, the economist Sherwin Rosen worked out the mathematics behind these “winner-take-all” markets. One of his key insights was to explicitly model talent—labeled, innocuously, with the variable q in his formulas—as a factor with “imperfect substitution,” which Rosen explains as follows: “Hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance.” In other words, talent is not a commodity you can buy in bulk and combine to reach the needed levels: There’s a premium to being the best. Therefore, if you’re in a marketplace where the consumer has access to all performers, and everyone’s q value is clear, the consumer will choose the very best. Even if the talent advantage of the best is small compared to the next rung down on the skill ladder, the superstars still win the bulk of the market.
The thing about deep work is that the deliberate practice of a skill cannot coexist with distraction. Deliberate practice requires uninterrupted attention which is difficult in a distracted, interconnected world that advocates “open offices”. Newport doesn’t like open offices.
Just how much time were employees of Atlantic Media spending moving around information instead of focusing on the specialized tasks they were hired to perform? Determined to answer this question, [Tom] Cochran gathered company-wide statistics on e-mails sent per day and the average number of words per e-mail. He then combined these numbers with the employees’ average typing speed, reading speed, and salary. The result: He discovered that Atlantic Media was spending well over a million dollars a year to pay people to process e-mails, with every message sent or received tapping the company for around ninety-five cents of labor costs. “A ‘free and frictionless’ method of communication,” Cochran summarized, “had soft costs equivalent to procuring a small company Learjet.”
Newport writes how previous CEO of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, banned employees from working at home after checking the server logs for the virtual private network that the employees use to log in to company servers:
Mayer was upset because the employees working from home didn’t sign in enough throughout the day. She was, in some sense, punishing her employees for not spending more time checking e-mail (one of the primary reasons to log in to the servers).
If you’re not visibly busy,she signaled,I’ll assume you’re not productive.
Newport describes this issue as a “metric black hole” because it’s difficult for organizations to figure this stuff out. It’s a hidden opportunity cost. As French economist Thomas Piketty has said, “it’s objectively difficult to measure individual contribution to a firm’s output.” But the stuff that cannot be measured is sometimes the most important.
How to practice deep work
Recognize that your energy level ebbs and flows.
You can only go into deep work for a fixed amount of hours per day.
In Ericsson’s seminal 1993 paper, titled “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” he dedicates a section to reviewing what the research literature reveals about an individual’s capacity for cognitively demanding work. Ericsson notes that for a novice, somewhere around an hour a day of intense concentration seems to be a limit, while for experts this number can expand to as many as four hours-but rarely more.
Like muscles, a high cognitive workload requires restoration.
If you keep interrupting your evening to check and respond to e-mail, or put aside a few hours after dinner to catch up on an approaching deadline, you’re robbing your directed attention centers of the uninterrupted rest they need for restoration.
Work less.
Richard Feynman has said:
To do real good physics work, you do need absolute solid lengths of time… it needs a lot of concentration… if you have a job administrating anything, you don’t have the time. So I have invented another myth for myself: that I’m irresponsible. I’m actively irresponsible. I tell everyone I don’t do anything. If anyone asks me to on a committee for admissions,
no,I tell them: I’m irresponsible.
It’s when a bunch of little tedious tasks get added mindlessly to a to-do list that you lose track of what creates value without bringing cumulative effect in what you put your energy into.
Rapid e-mails, instant messaging, meetings on meetings, and social media posturing all give you a comfortable feeling of being busy. That’s because it entertains you from putting in any effort to produce the best things you are capable of creating, which, according to Newport, forces you to confront the possibility that your best is not (yet) that good. Being artificially busy is an easy way out but what it does is make you work harder and longer. As Warren Buffett has said, “You’ve got to keep control of your time, and you can’t unless you say no. You can’t let people set your agenda in life.”
Newport tells a story about Jason Fried, co-founder of Basecamp. Jason found that shortening the company’s workweek from five to four—Monday through Thursday—made no difference in the amount of work the employees accomplished during the week. So they made the change permanent.
As Fried explains:
Very few people work even 8 hours a day. You’re lucky if you get a few good hours in between all the meetings, interruptions, web surfing, office politics, and personal business that permeate the typical workday.
Fewer official working hours help squeeze the fat out of the typical workweek. Once everyone has less time to get their stuff done, they respect that time even more. People become stingy with their time and that’s a good thing. They don’t waste it on things that just don’t matter. When you have fewer hours you usually spend them more wisely.
Stop multitasking.
The key is to get yourself into a state where you are forced to make hard choices all the time. If your mind is all over the place, you can’t get into deep work.
So we have scales that allow us to divide up people into people who multitask all the time and people who rarely do, and the differences are remarkable. People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand… they’re pretty much mental wrecks.
Two things are important to avoid getting into multi-tasking mode: schedule your time and cut out distractions.
Flip your mindset.
I propose an alternative to the Internet Sabbath. Instead of scheduling the occasional break from distraction so you can focus, you should instead schedule the occasional break from focus to give in to distraction.
This sounds exhausting, but as Cal argues, there are benefits to one’s well-being by thinking this way.
The idle mind is the devil’s workshop’… When you lose focus, your mind tends to focus on what could be wrong with your life instead of what’s right.
The non-intuitive fact is that jobs are easier to enjoy than free time, provided that you love what you do. Jobs have goals, feedback rules, and challenges that free time does not—stuff that encourages you to become involved, concentrate, and get into the zone. In The Inner Game, author Timothy Gallwey refers to this as your flow state, where you’re free of inhibitions. Because free time is unstructured, it requires greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.
If you give your mind something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you’ll end the day more fulfilled, and begin the next one more relaxed, than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in semiconscious and unstructured Web surfing.
People fight desires all day long. It’s when the mind is kept busy that such desires are put to rest. This means embracing boredom and disallowing your mind to give in to shallow desires when you are off work.
Deep work isn’t something you embrace the two to three hours a day when you are concentrating. Training the mind to go deep at the right time takes practice and requires thinking about downtime not as a time waste but as a productivity tool.
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, like the “mental wrecks” in [Clifford] Nass’s research, it’s not ready for deep work-even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.