Why You Need to Do Deep Work: Are You Truly Productive, or Just Fooling Yourself?

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A lot of people think busy = productive, but this is where deep work makes all the difference.

Imagine a regular workday. You sit down at nine and, out of habit, check your inbox first. (Here’s how to fix that.) A colleague in another office wants some documents scanned and emailed over. It isn’t your job, but it seems urgent, so you do it. Twenty minutes gone.

You open your real work, can’t quite focus, and go to make a coffee. Back at your desk you finally get into the groove. Forty minutes later you’re bored and check your email again, just in case. Two new messages: a customer asking how his file is coming along (great, until you checked your email), and the same colleague saying the scans didn’t come through. You answer both and scan everything a second time. By then another email has come in.

It’s now 11 AM. You have been ‘working’ for two hours, but less than half of that went on the work you are actually paid for. The rest of the day goes the same way.

In other words, your work was superficial. You did not create much value, and you did not become better at your job. You became a little better at using the copy machine, writing emails and making coffee.

This is not ‘deep work’. You might tell yourself that you worked hard today, but in truth you were not very productive. Doing real work has a positive impact on your company’s results; the number of emails you send does not.

Deep Work versus Shallow Work

In today’s high tech world, a lot of the work we do is pretty shallow, and doesn’t require much concentration to be effective.

This shallow work entails tasks that aren’t cognitively demanding, and are mostly of a logistical nature (think sending email or scanning files).

At the same time, being connected to the Internet gives us a constant source of distraction and novelty, and hurts our ability to do long streaks of concentrated, cognitively demanding work, or deep work.

Although shallow work has to be done in every workplace, making it your main occupation won’t be very helpful in advancing your career. Since almost everybody can do it, it’s not a very rare commodity. Simply put: you don’t become CEO by sending the most emails or scanning the most documents.

Deep work, on the other hand, is so valuable because of its very nature. Not many people, especially in today’s distracted world, are able to perform this kind of work. Hence, it is a rare commodity. If you’re able to do a lot of it, you’ll become an extremely valuable asset. Because of this, the ability to perform deep work is often handsomely rewarded.

Playing with your smartphone is not a rare, valuable skill. It doesn’t earn you $100,000 a year.

The terms, and most of what follows, come from Cal Newport’s book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (2016). Newport’s four rules are to work deeply, embrace boredom, quit social media and drain the shallows. This guide is how to put them into practice.

Another Example of Deep Work versus Shallow Work

Let’s give another example of shallow work versus deep work.

Imagine that your job entails making Excel graphs and entering data into spreadsheets, and using spreadsheets to calculate stuff.

To an extent, this is a skill that has to be learned and has some value. But at a certain level, you can automate all this stuff with a macro (a sort of program within a spreadsheet), basically making your job redundant.

This makes it shallow work.

If a computer can do it in your place, why even hire you?

What is not shallow work however, is interpreting and analyzing the output data that the spreadsheet provides (especially if it’s complicated stuff you’re dealing with) and then using this data to make certain decisions that affect the business.

This can be a cognitively demanding task that requires human input and higher levels of thinking. It is not something anybody can do and it requires deep focus.

Checking email and being on the phone every fifteen minutes severely hinders your ability to do this type of work well.

In an age where everybody is constantly seeking novelty and distraction, being able to do deep work without getting distracted is an immensely valuable skill.

If you want to earn money and become good at something that’s valuable, you have to cultivate your ability to do deep work.

Some Tasks That Do Require Deep Work

• Writing a PhD dissertation
• Writing a novel
• Creating a business plan

All the above require at least an above-average level of intellectual effort, and more importantly, intense focus. Because they are so difficult, the temptation to seek distractions and procrastinate is very high. They are not easy to replicate, and not everyone can perform these tasks.

That being said, that which constitutes deep work can vary from person to person.

For a five-year-old who’s just begun to learn the alphabet, reading a newspaper is extremely hard and requires intense focus. For an adult, reading the paper is a pretty shallow task.

So deep work can be relative too.

Be Honest with Yourself About Deep Work

It’s easy to fool yourself, but not if you consciously think about what you’re doing at the moment. Are you doing something that requires deep thought and mental effort, or are you just keeping yourself busy with menial tasks? Be honest.

So, to put this into practice, I’m going to give you a simple assignment to complete this week.

During your workday, try to be very conscious of how you spend your time. Don’t try to change your habits yet. Simply measure the time you spend doing deep work, and the time you spend doing shallow work.

More specifically, measure these three things:

• How much time are you spending, in total, doing real, deep work during the day? Is this work that requires intense concentration and intellectual effort?
• What is the longest streak of uninterrupted deep work that you performed during your workday? Can you do focused, concentrated work for three hours on end, or is it hard for you to get to thirty minutes without doing something shallow?
• How many times you perform shallow tasks per day: checking email, using the copy machine, making coffee, calling someone on the telephone, or entering numbers into Excel sheets.

Do this for a week and two things happen.

• You become aware of how little time you actually spend doing meaningful work and how much time you waste on shallow tasks, such as checking email every half hour (if not more).
• You start to do more deep work and fewer shallow tasks. Once you are aware of the fact that you’re wasting your time, you’re more likely to say: I shouldn’t be doing this. This is a technique that is often used with dieters too: they have to write down what they eat during the day, so they don’t fool themselves and underestimate how much they are eating.

How much time have you wasted on meaningless tasks? Be honest. Only once you are aware of how much time you are wasting is it possible to do something about it, and turn yourself into a valuable (well-paid!) commodity.

Tracking your time is the start. The four strategies below are how you increase the amount of deep work you do.

Strategy 1: Cultivate Deep Work Habits

As the guides to building good habits and getting rid of bad habits, you can only create true change in your life if you create routines.

If you want to be able to do something consistently, you have to build the brain circuits that allow you to perform tasks without the need for willpower and without active intervention. You should basically program yourself like a computer.

You do this by using a cue, a behavior and a reward. (check out the links above for the details).

So, for example, if you have to study for an exam (arguably deep work), you make it a habit to get up, eat your breakfast, and immediately start studying after that.

During exam periods it is easy to wake up, eat breakfast… and proceed to watch YouTube for ‘a few minutes’. And you know how it goes. A few minutes becomes a few hours. In the meantime, no deep work has been done.

But making studying the first thing you do into a consistent habit makes it so much easier to do it effortlessly.

In this case, the cue is ‘breakfast eaten’. The behavior is ‘studying’. The reward can be anything, but preferably make it something that can’t lead to time wasted. An excellent reward would be a workout. It’s good for you AND leaves you feeling great.

If that’s not your thing, rewarding yourself with a few cookies will do just fine as well. Pick your poison.

On a side note, a few episodes of a TV series make a poor reward. Nobody can work out all day, but it is very possible to watch another episode, and another, and ‘just one more’.

Strategy 2: Act as If You’re a Business

If you want to be productive, you have to take an example of organizations that make productivity their main focus: businesses. In business, getting stuff done is the most important thing. Businesses that aren’t productive are weeded out of the marketplace. Employees that aren’t productive get fired.

To improve their productivity and make more money, businesses implement strategies and well-thought-out plans. One such set of strategies is 4DX, from the book The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey and Jim Huling, which Newport applies to deep work.

• The first Discipline of Execution is that you have to focus on the wildly important. People often like to spread their attention over a multitude of tasks, and pretend that this is the way to get a lot done. But the reality is that the more you try to do, the less you’ll actually accomplish. Not all goals are equally important. Choose a few ambitious goals and use deep work to accomplish them.
• The second Discipline of Execution is to act on the lead measures. This is a concept that requires some explanation. As the saying often credited to management writer Peter Drucker goes: ‘what gets measured gets managed’. Words well-spoken, but it’s important that you measure the right things, the things you can immediately act on. The number of customers you have is what determines success, but you have no direct control over this. This is what is called a ‘lag measure’. What you do have control over, is the measures you take to increase your customers, for example increasing your marketing budget, or simply making a higher quality product. These are lead measures, and if you improve them, your lag measure (the number of customers) will most likely improve too. In this case, the time spent in deep work should be your lead measure. All the rest will follow.
• The third Discipline of Execution: keep a compelling scoreboard. The measuring exercise above already covers this one. If you keep track of the amount of deep work you perform, you’ll be more likely to want to increase your performance.
• The fourth Discipline of Execution is to create a cadence of accountability. Businesses have meetings and keep track of everyone’s performance. This creates peer pressure and feedback about how you’re doing. If you don’t perform, others will hold you accountable.

Having reliable stats on your time spent in deep work will prevent you from fooling yourself. It will also provide a desire to improve. It’s like working out, you want to increase the amount of weight you can lift and decrease the amount of time you need to run 5K. If you don’t keep score, it’s hard to see if you’re improving, and you won’t get any better.

If you’re working by yourself (like when you’re studying), there is no peer pressure, but you can still create accountability by doing weekly reviews of your own performance. The most important part is that you do this regularly (hence, the term ‘cadence of accountability’).

Managing your life as if it were a business can be a great way to become better at what you do. Just don’t start asking consultancy fees when your partner asks you what to wear.

Strategy 3: Train Your Mind to Enjoy Boredom

Let’s be real. Deep work is boring work. It’s not exciting and it doesn’t provide the quick hits of novelty that YouTube cat videos, video games and social media updates give you. In food terms, shallow work is ice cream, cookies and candy, whereas deep work is nothing but boiled, unsalted potatoes. Extremely bland and boring.

Like healthy food, deep work cannot be enjoyed at its fullest if you’re still on junk food all the time, and it is only by getting rid of your sugar addiction that you’ll truly learn to appreciate deep work for what it is.

But that’s hard. At this moment, it’s very likely that you’ve trained your mind to become distracted. Being able to do deep work doesn’t come overnight. It is a learned skill, and it has to be trained.

Constant attention switching takes a toll. A 2009 Stanford study found that heavy media multitaskers were worse at filtering out irrelevant information than people who multitask less.

If you want to reverse this, it’s key that you change your outlook on how you work and live.

For starters, you have to completely change your point of view. Instead of taking breaks from distraction, you have to start taking breaks from focus. Instead of being chronically distracted, you have to become chronically focused. You have to force yourself to focus the majority of the day, and make distractions only a fraction of this.

Shallow work is candy and cookies. Tasty and addictive, but ultimately not very good for you.

To illustrate this point, let’s take the so-called internet-free day. At one point, some people are going to acknowledge that they’re spending too much time behind a screen. And they decide they’re going to reduce that time. One day of the week, they go completely cold turkey and don’t use internet, computers or anything else that involves a screen.

In itself, it’s not a bad idea. But I’d argue that this is still not the right approach to tackle distraction addiction.

This is why: imagine if you wanted to lose weight. Which would be the best diet?

A. Six days of the week you can eat pizza and ice cream and fast food, on Saturday you eat fish, vegetables and fruit. So six cheat days and one day of healthy eating.

B. Six days of the week, you can only eat fish, fruit and vegetables and other whole foods. Saturday is cheat day, anything goes.

Anyone with some common sense would know that diet A, while probably being a tiny bit healthier than your previous one, would still not be very effective in getting rid of your excess pounds.

Diet B is by far the way to go.

Embrace deep work by learning to love potatoes.

So why should we have the same attitude towards screen time? Sure, you can argue that Facebook doesn’t clog your arteries like fried foods do.

Yet constant distraction and multitasking make it harder to focus, and one day off a week is unlikely to undo that, just as dieting one day a week won’t do much for your health. Distraction should be the exception, not the rule.

So, instead of giving yourself carte blanche to distract yourself whenever you feel like it, set limited time slots in advance during which you’re allowed to use the internet. Write them down. Don’t just go ‘okay, I’m just going to check the internet for five minutes’. Set your time slots beforehand and keep ’em limited. FocusMe can hold that line for you: a Weekly Schedule blocks the sites you choose outside your slots, on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iPhone.

If your job requires a lot of email and internet use, this method still works; you’ll just have to set a few more time slots. But outside of these allocated time slots, there can absolutely be no internet use.

Strategy 4: Get off Facebook Completely

The final strategy is probably the most invasive one. It’s the one most people are going to be unwilling to implement, but it might be the most effective one, by far.

You have to quit social media. Completely.

The first reason, as stated in the previous strategy, is that these social networks promote constant distraction and multitasking, and this derails your brain and your ability to focus.

But people like to be on social media, because it allows us to be ‘social’, right? And that’s not a bad thing at all! Right…?

Let’s pick those arguments apart.

First of all, why are people on Facebook? What is so important about it that makes it necessary for you to have a presence there?

The most common reasons people are present there are usually one of the following:

• You get to keep in touch with people you know or used to know, like your friends from college
• It’s entertaining and you’re able to share funny pictures and interesting articles (like this one)
• You’re in a few Facebook groups that are really useful (for example a group on procrastination or personal finance) or groups about your favorite band

These are, by themselves, good reasons to make use of the platform. Are they very good or very important reasons? Not really. They’re what I would call minor benefits.

But like anything, you have to weigh the pros versus the cons, the costs versus the benefits. In other words, you have to do a little economics.

What Do You Get, and What Do You Have to Pay for It in Return?

For most, the most important benefit would be the ‘keeping in touch with friends’. But let’s take a closer look at that idea.

A lot of people have hundreds or even thousands of Facebook friends. It can be stated with some confidence that most of these people are not central elements of your social life.

Most of them are (probably) not the ones you hang out with every weekend. They’re not the ones you invite to your wedding, and they’re not the ones you talk to when you’re having a rough time.

They’re the people that you’ve only met once in your life. They’re the ones you haven’t seen in years. What if these people were to suddenly disappear from your friends list?

Let’s be honest. You’d probably not even notice.

What about the other ones, the ones that do matter?

Well, you’ve got their phone numbers and you probably know where they live. You don’t need Facebook to keep in touch with these people.

Just a reminder: we were able to have fulfilling social lives long before Facebook came along. There’s no reason that should be any different today.

Those are the potential benefits of social media. Now the costs.

As you may know, Facebook and other social media are platforms that are specifically engineered to keep your attention.

The cost of social media is distraction: the more of your attention it takes, the harder it is to stay on one task. This, in turn, costs you the ability to perform deep work, and the inability to do deep work will hurt your career.

Besides that, I’d argue that social media can hurt your ‘real’ social life. When you’re on a date, or hanging out in a bar with a few friends, chances are you’re all staring at your screen a significant amount of the time, instead of talking to one another. It makes it harder for you to be ‘in the moment’ and to experience life as it is.

Why You Should Quit Social Media (At Least for 30 Days)

My point is this: the minor benefits you derive from using platforms like Facebook, X or Reddit do not compensate for the massive drawbacks that they have.

To make another food analogy: the highly palatable taste of ice cream and junk food doesn’t make up for what eating them every day does to your health.

But I get it. You’re probably not very keen on completely giving up social media.

So I suggest doing a little experiment first; it is Newport’s own. For the next thirty days, stop using all of your social media accounts. But here’s the catch: don’t deactivate them and don’t let anyone know you stopped using them.

After thirty days, ask yourself the following questions:

• Did my quality of life suffer significantly because I didn’t use Facebook?
• Did anyone even notice or care that I wasn’t present?

If the answer to both questions is no, you might want to consider getting off social media permanently. It’s even very likely that you’ve noticed real benefits, such as being less distracted, being able to think clearly, and being able to do deep work with ease.

One Last Thing

In this overly distracted world, being able to perform deep, focused, intellectual work is rare. It’s hard and requires serious effort. It’s boring and it doesn’t light up your brain’s reward centers.

But it’s extremely valuable and meaningful. It stands out in the crowd and comes with immense rewards, real rewards. It’s truly life-changing.

That’s why you have to try doing more of it, and reinvent yourself and your lifestyle in the process.

Don’t try to do all four strategies at once; that is a recipe for disaster (remember the first discipline of execution). Pick one, turn it into a habit, then add the next.

Work deep, work deeper, and work deep with a vengeance.

Have a great workday,

Jon

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First published May 2019

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