Finding your Depth Philosophy and Getting to Work
I liked to think of myself as an adroit concentrator, but it wasn't until I brought rigor to how I focus that I started to be able to generate my best work reliably and regularly and with minimal friction.
As the semester here in Arizona becomes increasingly hectic, I have been revisiting Cal Newport's Deep Work to remind myself of some best practices for focus and concentration.
Deep Work is focused uninterrupted, and productive work on any task. It mobilizes as much of your mental energy as possible, reducing distractions to a murmur and enabling your progress to compound. Broadly similar to Deliberate Practice—the scientific method applied to skill development—and flow, that thrillingly elusive balance between challenge and skill, Newport posits Deep Work as a way to help tune out the distractions of contemporary life while training your brain to focus more effectively and powerfully.
For those of us struggling to find depth in our work amidst the noise, I want to share some of the lessons I took from Newport's work, particularly ideas about how to find one's Depth Philosophy and some practices for reducing the friction around getting to work.
What's Your Depth Philosophy?
Your goal should be to find strategies, routines and rituals that get you into a deep, undisturbed focus with less willpower. Central to that quest is understanding your Depth Philosophy, how Deep Work is integrated into your professional life. Four models include:
Monastic
St. Jerome spent a LOT of time in Deep Work
Monastic workers devote long spans of time to a single task, eschewing almost everything else for months. They always have a vacation email response. If you need consecutive, uninterrupted chunks of time (say, if your success comes from doing one thing really well, or if you're in a field where you have a well-defined and highly valuable professional goal), you need to find a way to create this time for months on end. Any separation or fragmentation will result in precipitous drops of productivity.
Bi-Modal
Bi-Modal workers dedicate some clearly defined stretches of time to deep pursuits and leave the rest of their schedules open to "everything else." During Deep Work sessions, a bi-modal worker will behave monastically—maybe without the beer brewing, but still distant and focused. I think of this model as the "artist residency" philosophy. Musicians rehearsing for a project or artists at residencies will set aside weeks to work on a single creative project with verve and intensity. When they emerge, they find balance in their lives another way. I see Bi-Modal work every summer at Avaloch Farm Music Institute, where chamber ensembles and composer/performer collaborations come to remote New Hampshire to work on creative projects for weeks on end. Here’s a set of posts I wrote about this experience and the powerful synergy present in residencies.
Rhythmic
Rhythmic workers realize that disappearing for weeks at a time is not great for most jobs. They rigorously schedule blocks of time in which to work, keeping to them as much as possible. A rhythm of productivity is powerful and compounding.
In music we see this all the time—composers who write music at the same time every day, performers who practice without fail each day, and ensembles who rehearse the most basic of material regularly.
Journalistic
Journalistic workers fit Deep Work wherever they can into their schedule. They can shift into work mode on a moment's notice, a particularly useful skill to have if you work in a deadline-driven profession. Working Journalistically is challenging. Newport notes that "the ability to rapidly switch your mind from shallow to deep mode doesn’t come naturally." He also argues that quick deeps to high productivity requires high confidence, a "conviction.…typically built on a foundation of existing professional accomplishment. “
Most musicians are somewhere between Rhythmic and Journalistic workers on their own, and adopt a bi-modal approach to collaborative projects. They develop their craft with regularly but respond to deadlines with spurts of their best and most focused work. They're flailers and toilers and intermittent bingers.
What next?
Knowing your ideal “Depth Philosophy” around work can help you more meaningfully integrate Deep Work into your practice. But, how can we keep the world from invading while we're working? How can we get better at focusing? Newport gives from great ideas that have been game-changers in my own work and teaching.
Rituals: Not Just for Cults and Pierre Boulez
First, work to ritualize your work. Newport argues that "great artists work like accountants," leveraging strict habits before and during work to avoiding having to wait for inspiration to strike. Your rituals could be when you work, or for how long. They could be where you work—commuting to an office, or shutting the door to a room. They could a signal, like getting dressed a certain way, drinking a coffee, or (for me) getting out my metronome and some chocolate. Your rituals also encompass your best practices while you work, a set of habits that work to compound your effort. Supporting your efforts to go deep with some more rigid structures helps get your mind comfortable enough to generate new ideas. This might be why "highly effective people" have habits.
On a side note, the habits of great artists are alternately fascinating and boring. I recommend Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals: How Artists Work for a window into the rigid work and flexible socialization of famously productive.
Getting dressed for work can be a powerful ritual
Those who know me know that I have a process for almost any productivity challenge. My processes are my rituals, methods I’ve developed to get my mind and body set to learn something new. Likewise, if writing or researching, I am obsessive about my note-taking and outlining, which helps my recall and keeps me focused.
Make Grand Gestures
Even though systematized work is essential, Newport argues that sometimes a big project necessitates a radical change in work environment to engender serious commitment. He notes that “to put yourself in an exotic location to focus on a writing project, or to take a week off from work just to think, or to lock yourself in a hotel room until you complete an important invention: These gestures push your deep goal to a level of mental priority that helps unlock the needed mental resources”
A Grand Gesture is in the eye of the beholder: you do not have to mirror JK Rowling and rent a hotel room until you finish your book. You could set aside an entire weekend to finish a task, or lock yourself in a room until you finish that annual faculty report (I know the feeling), or withhold chocolate until you learn notes (oh cruel world). The key feature is to get something to be your main mental priority.
Don't Work Alone
Not even Tin Tin worked alone all the time.
Even though much deep work for musicians is solitary, properly leveraging collaboration is an essential tool to increase the quality of your work. Newport talks about ways of generating "serendipitous creativity" through a combination of isolation—deliberate practice—and chance encounters with others, opportunities to bounce ideas off another set of ears and receive meaningful feedback. Most musicians know this intuitively. Sometimes that walk to the water fountain is about more than just refilling your water bottle!
Execute Like a Business
First, focus your execution on the most significant goals. Simplicity in outlook—what I call the "themes" of my practice—focuses your energy. Identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your time rather than a large number of small goals. Then, find a way to keep a score card of your work, a physical or digital artifact that displays your progress. The mission is to create a “cadence of accountability” in your work, be it regular team meetings, or a weekly review session to make a plan for the coming week. Jerry Seinfeld says “don't break the chain:” keep at your work each day to get in the habit of working in a focused manner. If you work more effectively in teams, look for ways of modeling that in your solo endeavors.
I'm more effective working in teams. While in school, I developed "acountabilibddies," friends to whom I would tell my more individualized goals. My friends would definitely know if I didn't finish learning that piece or writing that paper, so their awareness kept me on track.
Finally, Newport encourages us to both be lazy and embrace boredom. By injecting forced down time into your schedule, your brain has time to process your work and prepare for the next day. At the same time, during work sessions Newport encourages us to think about taking breaks from focus rather than taking breaks from distractions. Checking Twitter while writing an article doesn't destroy your focus muscles. Instead, Newport argues that 'he constant switching from low-stimuli/high-value activities to high-stimuli/low-value activities, at the slightest hint of boredom or cognitive challenge, that teaches your mind to never tolerate an absence of novelty.” No absence of novelty = no presence of amazing new ideas.
Training your brain to stay on task even when bored is challenging, but the reward is quick and easy access to your mind's unfettered creativity.
Drain the Shallows
I also appreciated Newport's concept of "draining the shallows," the systematic reduction of work that is not your deepest work. What's shallow work? Answering emails that someone else could easily write. Filling out paperwork. Newport argues that we should treat shallow work with suspicion because its damage to our ability to do deep work is often vastly overestimated. Not only does shallow work—everything from deciding on a new model of space heater to filling out annual faculty reports—eat up valuable time, but it also diminishes your ability to work deeply by training your brain to only tackle tiny tasks.
I (try to) use Newport's 3-part strategy to reduce shallow work:
Schedule the entire day. By setting aside blocks of work, you set the stage for insights. 5 hours of free time does not = 5 hours of work.
Quantify the depth of your activities. Ask yourself how long it would take to train someone to do the task at hand, and wonder (aloud if you need to) if the activity leverages your expertise and experience.
Make a shallow reach budget
Tin Tin keeping up with his shallow work (note, he’s not working alone!)
Overall, work to put yourself in a position to say no to projects that are shallow while reducing shallowness in existing projects. While nobody can step away from all tiny tasks indefinitely, we can ask ourselves how little time we're producing value and what activities we could step away from to increase that time. I've tried to start keeping a budget of how long I can set aside for shallow tasks each week, and I try to leave it at that no matter how itchy I feel.
For those who work with me, the influence of Newport's ideas is straightforward to see. His work has helped me blend notions of Deliberate Practice, flow, and time-management in a meaningful and parametric way. Hope it's valuable for you as well and looking forward to hearing from you about your own rituals and Depth Philosophies!