Deep work - Book review

 

 

Following a recommendation from Tomer Cohen (He wrote in Hebrew), I finally got to listen to Cal Newport's "Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World", and my reaction to it is  quite ambivalent.

The book starts with a very tempting, yet quite weak proposition of value: Deep work is valuable, and its value increases with the proliferation of knowledge work in today's world. On the other hand, increasing connectivity and interruptions makes this particular skill rarer, so it can make you stand out in your profession and earn more. It then moves on to claim that deep work will also make you happier. Basically - it's a panacea to all of the modern world's ailments. And, like the lovely book "Calling Bullshit:The art of skepticism in a data driven world" has reminded us - great claims requires great deal of evidence. Not only that this book does not provide that sort of evidence, it goes on to actually show a counter-example, acknowledging that deep work is not the only way to wealth, and dismissing it with a statement along the lines of "even though there are other ways to wealth, it does not mean that deep work isn't a way to put you ahead of everyone else (perhaps except the CEO that provided the counter-example, but for most of us it's not an option)". Convinced? Neither was I.

But, before I go on rambling about deep work, it might be worth it to define the term. The definition used in the book is: "Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free
concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate". long story short - deep work is hard, valuable mental work.

Anyway, while the evidence fall short of the grand claims, the book actually tells a compelling story, and if we accept some of the assumptions made hastily - its conclusions are inevitable. For instance, one reason that deep work should make one happier goes as follows: Quote the work in Winifred Gallagher's RAPT to base that people happiness has more to do with what they focus on than with what objectively happens to them, state (assume) that deep work is focusing on more meaningful activity than the shallow trudge of interrupts, conclude that since one spends more time focused on meaningful events, they will feel a greater sense of meaning in life, or quote Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's "Flow", assume that deep work is more prone to lead a person to the sweet spot between challenge and success to greatly increase one's chances of experiencing flow, and since being in a state of flow is known to increase happiness, so does deep work.
As you might have noticed, the assumptions are quite plausible. good enough to be motivating. One issue it sidesteps completely is the question "are there paths other than deep work that are as likely to generate comparable levels of happiness or value? How do we identify we are on such a path or that we might benefit more from one?"

The rest of the book is about tips to incorporate deep work in our day to day. Most advice here is at least convincing, and the author takes sufficient time to base some of the claims - shutting down interruptions and educating your environment can work in most contexts, focus is a skill that needs constant training and is prone to deterioration, actually resting and not doing any work after the work day is a way to increase productivity, and so on. My unease on this part has more to do with the totality of the approaches described in the book. Commitment to deep work is subjugating one's entire being: The default is being in a state of deep work, pausing only for as brief periods as necessary. A lot of it feels like what you might expect in a time-management book, only that the focus is not about "not wasting time", but rather about constantly training your deep working skill. I got tired only from trying to grok the message.

This fatalistic approach is a bit much, but it helps to emphasize that deep work is demanding, even if I believe that it can be done in a less extreme way it is still useful to learn the purists approach, where it is the clearest. It also helps to see various examples of building a schedule for deep work. It can be getting up early to spend a couple of hours in full focus before the day starts for other people who will create interference, it can be planning work so that we divide our calendar time between weeks of solitary focus and those of interruption heavy busy-work. Then there's the part where I felt I was being cheated - after explaining at length how deep work is something that takes time to start (research I think I recall from other places states that it takes about 15 minutes to enter "the zone") and that 4 half-hours of deep work are not as effective as 2 straight hours of it, the author goes to describe the "journalistic" approach which is based on the assumption that people trained in deep work can skip this time and just dive into deep work immediately whenever they have a spare 10 minutes or more. It really felt as a way to say "I'm doing deep work" while ditching aside all of the principles mentioned in the book before. It was also an unpleasant surprise to hear that this is the author's main mode of work - Preaching for deep work and claiming to be quite adept at it, then redefining it as "I do deep work when I decide to do it and have free time from my other distractions" sure does feel like hypocrisy.


That being said, I still took some insights with me.

First of all, I'm still debating with myself about the actual value of deep work in my context - much of my day is about helping others, jumping for a short period and dropping a question that might set things on a better path, mentoring others to do the actual work themselves. Sure, some of the work is done by me, and I find great joy in being able to still contribute directly, but my added value there is not always significant - I might do things faster or a bit better than the less experienced people in my team, but in the time it takes me to do one unit of work myself, I can probably help three team mates to do better work and complete 3 units of work that will be 80% as good as if I would have done it. So, where do I see more value? If I'd try to frame this in deep-work lingo, I'd borrow some of Kahneman's Thinking fast and slow and claim that by practicing, I managed to move some of the skills that require deep work and concentration to the more automatic parts of my mind and now I provide value by doing deep work in a shallow fashion - using those automatic skills to improve my environment. This means that my skill is based on deep work, and even if I believe that most of the value I provide is collaborative and interruption heavy (collaboration can, in rare cases, be deep work in itself, but the book usually treats it as solitary work), I should still invest some time in deep work to expand the base I'm building upon and to make sure I'm still connected to the work.

It also serves as reminder - not everything I do is equally important, and there are some things such as e-mail or instant messaging that can be pushed aside instead of sapping my attention.
Another thing that intrigues me is the claim that we are addicted to interruptions - I'm definitely going to try some of the tactics to train my mind to be more focused, such as defining breaks from concentration (perhaps using pomodoro) and learn to stick to them - no breaks until the buzzer. 

I think that the most fitting analogy to this book would be an olympic runner sharing tips on how to become a better runner. This athlete will surely recognize that the amount of effort needed to get to their level is ridiculous, but even when they will try to dial down the effort, they cannot unsee what they know - What you eat, how you sleep, how balanced are your core muscles, all of this has an impact on your running. Getting advice from someone like that will create the impression that there is nothing more important in life, which is true for very specific cases.
This is why I probably won't invest the effort to become a professional deep-worker who's managed by the hunt for deep work, it might be relevant for highly competitive fields such as academia or writing, but I suspect the reward is much smaller in software development where good employees are rather hard to find. A focused deep worker might be a lot better than me, but the difficulty of measuring productivity and the fact that most places require the sort of work that my skills are more than enough for - it will be like purchasing a Ferrari to stand in traffic. It *can* get to silly speed, but you would do just the same with a car tenth of that price. I need and want to be good at my work, trying to be the best of the best is not worth the effort. Instead, I'll treat it the same way I treat my bicycle. It's fun, it builds some sort of muscle, and I gain a lot from this as a hobby.