Deep work is dying, and we need to revive it
Examining Deep Work in the Corporate World
Deep work is important because it can help us develop difficult skills, create innovative ideas, produce high-quality content, and reach new insights. But the increased shift to a digital environment is causing deep work to die in some corporate environments. Unless we make an active effort to engage in deep work, we may stunt or stymie our intellectual, innovative, and creative development. What is Deep Work?
“Deep Work” is a new name for the old idea of dedicating chunks of time in which you focus, without interruption, on an intellectually demanding task.
I’d found Deep Work to be necessary and beneficial in school, but not so much in the workplace. This matters because college-educated people may find Deep Work rewarding, so it can be helpful to recognize when Deep Work is not explicitly valued, and to intentionally find time and space to make it happen.
It’s important to revive Deep Work because by employing Deep Work we can use our brains to their fullest potential, generate great ideas, learn complex tasks, and grow.
It’s important to be aware that Deep Work in the workplace is dying. It’s being killed by a culture of “multi-tasking” (which deserves its own post), and by a culture that often seems to reward the wrong behaviors.
Only if we are aware can we try to revive it.
What is Deep Work, and why is it important?
Professor Cal Newport made a name for himself, and coined the phrase “Deep Work” in 2016. The book, true to its title, centers around the idea that “deep work” – focused, concentrated effort on one specific task with no task-switching – is critical to the development of new ideas, ground-breaking theories, and greater productivity.
“Deep Work” drew on some of the same ideas from Newport’s earlier books, including many of the “work smarter, not longer” strategies from “How to Be a Straight-A Student.”1 No emailing when you were trying to focus. No texting. No social media. No chatting with your friends.
The essence of the Deep Work philosophy is to dedicate large blocks of time – up to several hours – to uninterrupted focus on a single task. That gives your brain time to get used to the task it’s performing (instead of being continually interrupted), and generate focused insights.It’s often simply not possible to learn difficult, complex tasks, or generate new, groundbreaking insights if you’re highly distracted at the same time. Imagine trying to learn a new song on the piano while someone is throwing tennis balls at your back. Or trying to solve a complex math problem while also talking to a friend about the news. Your brain wouldn’t be able to handle both tasks (and do them well) simultaneously. Similarly, you’re not working at your best when your brain is distracted trying to write a complex memo AND answer three different Slack message threads.
Deep Work is often not valued in the corporate world
Given my relative success with deep work at college, I tried to apply it in the corporate world. But one of my bosses in management consulting basically banned me from deep work.
My boss told me, in essence, that I should continually interrupt myself by checking my email. The exact opposite of the Deep Work philosophy.
He nicely told me that leaving an email unanswered for two hours was far too long.
I’m glad he told me that’s what the company expected, because in high school and college, it was perfectly fine not to answer an email for two hours – often because you were doing something productive. For example, classes themselves were almost two hours long, and you sure weren’t supposed to be emailing in class.
In the work world, I had assumed that I shouldn’t answer the email until I could reply with something useful – so I’d devoted myself to working on the slide deck which my boss wanted to see. He later nicely told me that he’d been worried I wasn’t working because I hadn’t responded to his email right away with a message such as “Thanks; I’ll work on it.”
That should be easy enough.
Except that if you’re constantly monitoring your email, it’s impossible to implement the deep work practices espoused by Newport.
So although the concept of Deep Work is valid, most people are often encouraged to frequently interrupt themselves. This is so especially if they’re junior employees. As Newport now recognizes, Deep Work principles are difficult for people to apply – not because of lack of motivation or discipline, but because of structural difficulties in the work environment.
Newport’s updated view on Deep Work
Newport now suggests that the lack of deep work and culture of pseudo-productivity may be contributing to the deep sense of burnout that people feel. In a recent podcast with Andrew Hubermann from Stanford, Newport notes that people are spending more and more time “talking about work, and not actually doing the work.” They are expected to be productive, responsive, and collaborative. In the digital world of remote work, responsiveness and collaboration means responding to emails, to Slack messages, and to other digital communication quickly. But if being collaborative and responsive means constantly checking a variety of digital interrupters, being “responsive” becomes the enemy of being productive.3
Constant low-value communication is inefficient, saps time and energy, destroys focus, and reduces productivity.
Many employees don’t have the flexibility to shut off all communication, and focus on producing the report, analysis, business strategy, or other deliverable that they were employed to produce.
“The absurdity of the situation is creating this burnout,” says Newport. “The situation” he refers to is having “highly trained brains” (educated, smart people) spending so much of their time in a state of distraction, checking email and Slack messages.
But, he says, an individual person can’t do much about it.4
So what do we do?
I don’t claim to have “the answer” – please post your thoughts in the comments below! But I do have some ideas for potential change within the workplace. And if you can’t change your workplace, maybe you can carve out time for yourself (perhaps on weekends) to do Deep Work so that you don’t lose the skill of being able to focus on complex tasks.
For certain professions, such as engineers, it may be much easier to create blocks of ‘deep work’ time during work than for people in client-facing roles.
Ideas for potential change
Some ideas for potential change include:
If you can’t find time for deep work at work, carve out some time (if possible) for deep work for yourself.
Maintain an active list of “top priorities” and carve out chunks of time to work on them. You may confirm these priorities with your boss to ensure that the things you think are priorities actually are.
Plan your entire week in advance (even if your planned schedule will change, thinking about it in advance can help you be mindful of how you spend your time).
Block specific time on your calendar to send emails, check social media, etc, if you have this flexibility.
If you work at a small company or with a small team, try talking to your boss about strategies for implementing a scheduled block of time each week for ‘deep work’. The team can convene afterwards and then check in with each other. (If you’re the CEO of a company, consider starting something like this!)
Summary
Although Deep Work was probably highly encouraged for many of us in school, corporate environments have shifted to implicitly discourage deep work.
As a result, Deep Work is dying.
It’s up to us to try to revive it, because Deep Work can still be valuable. Employees may be able to make a dedicated effort to be able to pursue deep work, and bosses may be able to encourage this effort.
1(I say “work smarter, not longer” instead of “work smarter, not harder” because the deep, focused work that Newport describes actually is hard, but it’s done in shorter bursts as opposed to long periods of pseudo-productivity.)
2There were classes on which I spent 20, 25, or 30 hours per week. I know because I logged my hours in a spreadsheet.
3(https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3283951)
4 Newport characterizes the situation as a “sub-optimal Nash Equilibrium state”, in which no single employee has an incentive to change the way he ‘plays the game’ of the workplace. If a single person tries to change the culture of their workplace, we won’t succeed.