On Deep Work - #36
Hello Maiyah (and friends)!
Hope you all are doing well!
On the last email, #35, I talked about the design evolution of the shopping cart to explain how we moved from a Western society that embraced Modernity to one of Post-Modernity. A lot of you really liked it! (Austinites more so than the Angelenos.) You guys thought it was cool, clicked all my links, and sent me emails (e.g. like this video creator / radio producer who harasses people who don’t put their carts back — thanks Adam!)
… however, there was still a bit of you guys that had this reaction:
And I get that. It was out there. So this week I’m going to stay a little more, uhh… “grounded”, as I’m going to talk about a recent philosophy I adopted. Hope this week’s essay will resonate with you all. Enjoy!
Note: It’s a little longer than my usual essays. This topic matters to me.
On Deep Work
1,989 words | 07min 30sec reading time
As Walter Isaacson explained in a 2013 article on the topic for the Harvard Gazette, Gates worked with such intensity for such lengths during this two-month stretch that he would often collapse into sleep on his keyboard in the middle of writing a line of code. He would then sleep for an hour or two, wake up, and pick up right where he left off—an ability that a still-impressed Paul Allen describes as “a prodigious feat of concentration.” In his book The Innovators, Isaacson later summarized Gates’s unique tendency toward depth as follows: “The one trait that differentiated [Gates from Allen] was focus. Allen’s mind would flit between many ideas and passions, but Gates was a serial obsessor.” - Deep Work; On Bill Gates starting Microsoft
“Interesting,” I thought. I finished the audiobook. The image of a guy coding non-stop from dawn till dusk and then more, only taking one hour naps solely because of sleep deprivation, sounds absolutely… thrilling. Hold onto me here.
This is probably the 1000th “blog post” about this 2016 book, so bear with me.
I was driving to an initial consultation with a therapist in Austin, a 2-1/2 hour drive from Dallas. The audiobook, Deep Work by Cal Newport, was sitting in my Audible wish list for quite some time. Amazon a few days earlier shot me an email saying, “Hey, come back to Audible!” So I did.
Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. - Cal Newport, his blog
Cal Newport is a Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Georgetown University. He wrote six books so far about productivity and how technology affects our lives. Good stuff! (Google labels it under “self improvement", which I disagree.)
The book argues at length why deep work is important for a meaningful life, and in the second half, Cal talks about the rules and heuristics you can use to achieve this concentrated state.
Many may be put off: “It’s just some professor dude.” Oh no, no, no, no. Below is an excerpt from his book about using a newly acquired productivity framework. Mind you, the typical professor in his field publishes 2-3 peer-reviewed papers per year, and 4 if they’re hustling hard.
I adopted the goal of publishing five peer-reviewed papers in the 2013–2014 academic year. This was an ambitious goal given that I had published only four papers the previous year (a feat I was proud of). […] It ended up, I must admit, an exhausting year (especially given that I was writing this book at the same time). […] By the summer of 2014, I had nine full papers accepted for publication, more than doubling what I had managed to accomplish in any preceding year.
- excerpt from his book Deep Work
It’s a 10-hour audiobook. On the July 7th trip to the therapist, I did about 5-6 hours. Between Wednesday and Thursday, I finished the book while doing menial tasks like dishes and driving. I implemented some of Cal’s philosophy into practice that following weekend and afterwards. And honestly, it melds really well with my personality. I love it.
For those that may remember, I wrote about my dumb relationship with my phone and how it was an absolute mess: YouTube marathons, Facebook crap, low effort content for the Gram, and a gazillion other apps. Following Cal’s advice of “Quit Social Media”, I have since put my phone on grayscale, deleted all social media apps (i.e. Instagram, Twitter), deleted YouTube and Reddit, and logged out of all social media on my mobile browser. None of my 850+ friends on Facebook noticed I’ve been gone – because they don’t care, and neither would your followers or “friends”.
Quick digression: You may say, me being an aspiring comic and TV comedy writer, that I’d be screwing myself over — “You have to be there for your fans” or “You gotta keep in touch with people”. Okay. If people are interested in my life, they can get this bi-weekly newsletter, like the 30 or so friends that are subscribed to my emails. When the days come that I’m performing or some comedy career break occurs, I’ll detail all that below where I talk about myself. “Okay, but what about keeping up with people, something that is super vital in Hollywood?” You keep up with your connections the old-fashioned way: a contacts book, or as they’re now called, an “Address book”. Originally I thought to use an excel sheet or Evernote, but this sounds rather cold and calculated. In the contact book, you’d write to your future self the date you last met that friend — top priority. If it’s been a while, hit them up for a dinner, coffee, margaritas, mini golf, yoga, or yodeling practice. Write then what you talked about last time, what they’re interested in, hobbies, work, projects, favorite movies, their birthday, whatever really. It makes me feel a lot more human.
Back to Deep Work: All push notifications on my phone are now silent, gone, zip, nada; this includes my email. I now put in my email signature, “I tend to check email 2-3 times per day: <9am, ~12pm, and ~6pm. thanks.” And no, my life hasn’t shattered to pieces because I didn’t check my personal email every 20 minutes. People can wait.
I used to have 21,000+ unread emails in my inbox. After hours of decimating it, I brought this down to zilch. Everything is now properly labeled and categorized. The dozens of newsletters I subscribed to are now gone, including many email lists. (e.g. “Change.org: PROTECT THE WHALES! SIGN THE PETITION!!!”)
Cal also got a dig at time management – for some of us that grew up in this highly connected technological world, our time management skills are shit. Having an Outlook or Google calendar could aid this, but Cal has his own methods: a pen and paper. Every night, he builds out his time-blocked schedule for the next day, and he’ll therefore know exactly what he’ll be doing. The main issue people have (like I did at first) was jotting it out as an idealistic plan of wishful thinking. That’s not the point; it’s a breathable document, meaning it’s okay to erase and move stuff around if you need to. As Cal put it in the book, it’s okay to edit it half a dozen times. It’s about structuring your time so you’re not wondering what to do next. (learn more on his blog)
For me, I like using pencil. At first I used pen, but when I used a pencil, my schedule no longer felt permanent and it made me 10x more liberal with my use of time blocks and day structuring. Below is this past Saturday, July 18th.
He also emails himself a Weekly Planning document that he writes in a simple text editor. As Cal puts it, “The bigger message here, however, is that I always decide in advance what I am going to do with my week. These decisions look different at different times of year, but what matters is that when it comes to my schedule, I’m in charge.” (learn more about this on his blog post).
Below, you can see my first okay-ish attempt at this Weekly Planning practice. Of course, I ended up batching things (e.g. all my hours of startup work was stacked to one full afternoon on Wednesday, rather than spread out over 1-hour per day for 7 days). I printed this out and kept it on my desk, all the while editing it in pencil if needed. And yes, I used a little boat emoji. ⛵⛵⛵
It wasn’t a perfect week as I did throw some caution to my time. However, it was better than what I was doing before, which was not planning – at all. I would say, “Okay, this week, you’re going to get this and that done,” and by the end of the week, I’ve done jack nothin’. With this, I know exactly the flexibility I need to conquer my work.
Before, I might’ve got in 2, maybe 3, hours of meaningful writing work done every other day, and by work, I mean getting things kinda done while being interrupted by emails or texts every 20 minutes. It was quite stupid.
Afterwards, I probably did around 15 hours of writing work done in a concentrated state of mind. Meaning, I’m not counting hours where I get an idea or two and jot it down on a piece of a paper. No, just straight writing. No interruptions. No beeps. No people. Nothing.
“Holy f*ck, I’m getting a lot done,” I recently said out loud to myself. The way I got a lot done was simple: I first got up earlier than everybody else in the house (as of this writing, I’m still with my family due to the pandemic). I used my stopwatch as an alarm (go figure). Don’t look at the phone. Make my way to the family business’ office computer. Turn it on. Brew myself a green tea. Come back to the computer once it’s on. Greyscale the desktop. Open a single tab and make my way to Dropbox Paper or Calmly Writer. Once there, write. If I’m feeling antsy about something and think, “I’ll just Google this small detail right quick,” I catch myself and go, “No. No you’re not.” I disconnect from the internet if I have to. I emerge 2-3 hours later with some work done. I eat some breakfast and go workout. Cal calls this the “Rhythmic Scheduling” philosophy of deep work because it’s a set schedule, everyday, at the same time. According to Cal, he found four such philosophies that cover about 90% of those that perform their work in a focused state of mind. I picked this one as a good starter.
Some might say, “Can’t you put that writing work at the end of the day? Why does it need to be in the morning?” Because for most people that are not adept at doing focused work, such as myself, you have a limited amount of willpower during the day (source). You exhaust this willpower whenever you put effort into activities or move from one thing to another. Once it’s empty, you’re effectiveness diminishes. So when they say, “Do the hard thing first”, there’s a reason. (learn more on Cal’s blog) (Admittedly, this idea has been criticized, so come to your own conclusions.)
In my opinion, unless your willpower muscles are jacked like Elon Musk, keep lifting, keep working.
@elonmusk What's the correct number of hours a week to change the world? -- https://twitter.com/margrethmpossi/status/1067174279912071169
https://twitter.com/margrethmpossi/status/1067174279912071169
@margrethmpossi Varies per person, but about 80 sustained, peaking above 100 at times. Pain level increases exponentially above 80. -- https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1067175527180513280
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1067175527180513280)
One last thing. Cal also notes in the book on the concept of “milestones”. Sure you can set a milestone (e.g. “I’m going to do coverage on 5 scripts this week.”), but have you really calculated how long it takes to make a “breakthrough” (in our example, do good coverage on 1 script)? You can do this by tracking the deep work hours you do and, using this data, extrapolating the number of hours needed to make a breakthrough. This will give you an average “rate” of deep hours per breakthrough. (Again, check his blog post, but his book goes more into depth on this).
Suddenly you’re not measuring by just your milestones, but by your deep work hours too. Putting together the information about the limited willpower and the deep work hour rates and a bunch of other stuff… made me have a breakthrough: “Oh my gosh. My time is extremely important and I must guard it like a Pitbull chained to a tree.” You’re time is a prized possession. If I could squeeze 3 more hours out of the week on a project, I’d find a way to make it work, even if it means saying “No” to pesky trivial things. Go f*cking figure.
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Guys, if you liked what you read above, go get the book. Or the audiobook.
To read more from Cal Newport, go to his blog here.
Paperback and audiobook Amazon links are below. Full disclosure: my Amazon links are through the Amazon Associates program, meaning I make a little bit of money if you purchase through my link. “Don, are you trying to make money off your friends?” Uhhhh… yeah. I have lights to pay. If you’re interesting in reading it and wanna get the book through my link, it would be greatly appreciated. If not, fine by me. Thanks.
buy here for Audible audiobook
News&Video
How Koalas With an S.T.D. Could Help Humanity tl;dr - Humans don’t have a monopoly on sexually transmitted infections. Oysters get herpes, rabbits get syphilis, dolphins get genital warts. But chlamydia — a pared-down, single-celled bacterium that acts like a virus — has been especially successful, infecting everything from frogs to fish to parakeets. You might say chlamydia connects us all. This shared susceptibility has led some scientists to argue that studying, and saving, koalas may be the key to developing a long-lasting cure for humans. “They’re out there, they’ve got chlamydia, and we can give them a vaccine, we can observe what the vaccine does under real conditions,” said Peter Timms, a microbiologist at the University of Sunshine Coast in Queensland.
[2min 45sec]
Silly Sh*t
I’m waiting for this to come out.
I watched Snowpiercer — it’s awesome. I watched Sicario — holy sh*t. I finished the Australian Netflix limited series Stateless — quite good. I’m on season 5 of Sopranos — still great. During my stay here with family, I’ve finished Westworld and Handmaid’s Tale. After Sopranos, it’s Breaking Bad. I won’t watch Game of Thrones.
I am officially arriving back in Los Angeles on July 25th. I’m seeing my therapist tomorrow, Monday, July 20th. That’s right, I’m writing this Sunday night ya yoinks.
I fell in love with New York Magazine’s The Strategist. They have lots of reviews and lists about cool products tested by them. Many of their posts are for a “woke” feminine audience, but I managed to find their 100 notebooks reviewed post really informative. Bought myself a Leuchtturm1917 notebook.
Thanks for reading!
Best,
Don
For my friends… you all got my personal number and email. Feel free to text/call/email me.
_As always, anybody can reach me at my email: [dnrtldg@outlook.com](mailto: dnrtldg@outlook.com). I check it once a week.
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