Rule 1: Work Deeply

• Deep Work Depth Philosophies
  • [Monastic Philosophy of Deep Work]
  • [Bimodal Philosophy of Deep Work]
  • [Rhythmic Philosophy of Deep Work]
  • [Journalistic Philosophy of Deep Work]

"You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it"
— & Roy Baumeister

Your will is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it's instead like a muscle that tires

• Ritualize

  Rituals minimize the friction in the transition to depth

• Where you work and for how long

• How you'll work once you start to work

• How you'll support your work

  Waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan. In fact, perhaps the single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration
  — Mason Currey

  • & Charles Darwin had a strict structure for his working life during the period when he was perfecting On the Origin of Species. He would ride promptly at 7 am to take a short walk. He would eat breakfast alone and retire to his study from 8 until 9:30. The next hour was dedicated to reading his letters from the day before, after which he would return to his study from 10:30 until Noon. After this session, he would mull over challenging ideas while walking a prescribed route on his property. He would walk until satisfied with his thinking, then declare his work day done". (p. 118)

• Make Grand Gestures

  • By leveraging a radical change to your normal environment, coupled perhaps with a significant investment of effort or money, all dedicated toward supporting a deep work task, you increase the perceived importance of the task.
  • These gestures push your deep goal to a level of mental priority that helps unlock the needed mental resources. Sometimes to go deep, you must first go big.

  Examples

  • & Bill Gates' "Think Weeks" at his cabin in the middle of nowhere.

  • & J.K. Rowling checking into the Balmoral Hotel for $5,000 a night to finish The Deathly Hallows

  • Peter Shankman buying a round-trip ticket to Tokyo in business class to write a book.

    The Trip was $4,000 and it was worth every penny

• Don't Work Alone

  • Expose yourself to ideas in hubs on a regular basis, but maintain a spoke in which to work deeply on what you encounter.
  • Guidelines
  • the theory of serendipitous creativity
  • Building 20 at MIT
  • 20210261234 - The Whiteboard Effect
  • Execute Like a Business

• Be Lazy

  Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as Vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets...it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.

  — Tim Kreider

  At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning

  • Reason #1: Downtime aids insights
  • Reason #2: Downtime helps recharge the energy needed to work deeply

Rule 2: Embrace Boredom

The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained

• Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don't simultaneously wean you mind from a dependence on distraction.

  • You'll struggle to achieve the deepest level so concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom.

  People who multitask all the time can't filter out irrelevancy. They can't manage a working memory. They're chronically distracted - they're pretty much mental wrecks. — Clifford Nass

  When asked whether the chronically distracted recognize this rewiring of the brain:

  Unfortunately, people developed habits of mind that make it impossible for them to be laser focused. (how can { The Shallows - What the Internet is doing to our brains help to mitigate the consequences of this finding?)

  Once you brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction, it's hard to shake that addiction even when you want to concentrate.

  • If every moment of potential boredom in you life - say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives - is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where it's not ready for deep work - even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.

• Strategy: Schedule Internet blocks and offline blocks

  Schedule in advance when you'll use the internet, and then avoid it altogether outside of the these times.

  • The constant switching from low-stimuli/high-value activities to high-stimuli/low-value activities that teach your mind to never tolerate an absence of novelty.
  • Constant switching can be understood as weakening the mental muscles responsible for organizing the many sources vying for your attention.
  • 1. Jobs that requires a lot of time online can still use this strategy
  • 2. Regardless of how you schedule your Internet blocks, you must keep the time outside these blocks absolutely free from Internet Use.
  • 3. Scheduling Internet use at home as well as at work can further improve your concentration training

• Work like & Teddy Roosevelt

  • Roosevelt would begin his scheduling by considering the 8 hours from eight a.m. to four thirty p.m. He would then remove the time spent in recitation and classes , this athletic training, and lunch. The fragments left were then considered time dedicated exclusively to studying.

  The amount of time he spent at his desk was comparatively small, but his concentration was so intense, and his reading so rapid, that he could afford more time off than most.

  • Edmund Morris, biographer

  • 202108012131 - Roosevelt Dash

• Meditate Productively

  Productive meditation: take a period in which you're occupied physically but not mentally - walking, jogging, driving, showering - and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem

  • Resists distraction, forcing you to push your focus deeper and deeper on a single problem
  • Suggestion 1: Be wary of distractions and looping
  • Suggestion 2: Structure your deep thinking
  • A side effect of memory training is an improvement in your general ability to concentrate.

Rule 3: Quit Social Media

• Main point: Network tools fragment our time and reduce or ability to concentrate

  • { The Shallows - What the Internet is doing to our brains

• Second point: The impotence (helplessness) with which knowledge workers currently discuss the problem of network tools and attention

  • Accept your current distracted state as inevitable

• Alternative: These tools are not inherently evil, and that some of them might be quite vital to your success and happiness

  • at the same time also accepting that the threshold for allowing a site to regularly access your time and attention should be much more stringent
  • conclusion: most people should be using fewer such tools
  • There is a middle ground in this debate, and if you're interested in developing a deep work habit, you must fight to get there

• 202108012122 - The Any Benefit approach to tool selection

  The notion that identifying some benefit is sufficient to invest money, time, and attention

  • You're justified in using a network tool if you can identify any possible benefit to its use, or anything you might possibly miss out on if you don't use it.
  • Identifies any potential positive impact as justification for using a tool
  • ignores the negatives that come along with the tools in question
  • Network tools are not exceptional; they're tools, no different from a blacksmith's hammer or an artists's brush, used by skilled laborers to do their jobs better

• [The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection]

  Tools are ultimately aids to the larger goal of one's craft

  • Identify the core factors that determind success and happiness in your personal and professional life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts
  • Requires that these positive impacts affect factors at the core of what's important to you and that they outweigh the negatives.

• Apply 202108012141 - The Law of the Vital Few (80/20) to your internet habits

  In many settings, 80 percent of a given effect is due to just 20 percent of the possible causes

  • 010 My Brain/& Malcom Gladwell, Michael Lewis, George Packer don't use twitter

    • They don't feel like the service offers them nearly enough advantages to offset its negatives in their particular circumstances

      It's amazing how overly accessible people are — Michael Lewis

  • Process

  • Example (how can this process be improved using the strategies found in { Atomic Habits

  • If you service low-impact activities, you're taking away time you could be spending on higher-impact activities

  Take care in deciding which tools you allow to claim your own limited time and attention

  How can I replicate this practice as an exercise for personal objectives?

• Quit Social Media

  By dropping off these services without notice, you can test the reality of your status as a content producer.

  For most people and most services, the news might be sobering - no one outside your closest friends and family will likely even notice you've signed off.

  Stop using social media for 30 days, cold turkey

  • After 30 days of this self-imposed network isolation, ask yourself the following two questions about each of the services you temporarily quit:

    1. Would the last thirty days have been notable better if I had been able to use this service?
    2. Did people care that I wasn't using this service?
    • If your answer is "no" to both questions: Quit the service permanently.
    • If your answer was a clear "yes," then return to using the service.

  These services, if used without limit, can be particularly devastating to your quest to work deeper.

  Part of what makes social media insidious is that the companies that profit from your attention have succeed with a masterful marketing coup: convincing our culture that if you don't use their products, you might miss out.

  • Social media's rapid ascent has replaced this timeless capitalist exchange with a shallow collective alternative: I'll pay attention to what you have to say if you pay attention to what I say - regardless of its value.
    • The implicit agreement motivating this behavior is that in return for receiving attention from your friends and followers, you'll return the favor by lavishing attention on them.
    • You "like" my status update and I'll "like" yours
  • These services are just products, developed by private companies, funded lavishly, marketed carefully, and designed ultimately to capture then sell your personal information and attention to advertisers.

• Don't use the internet to entertain yourself

  (the typical man) persists in looking upon those hours from 10 to 6 as 'the day,' to which the ten hours preceding them and the 6 hours following them are nothing but a prologue and epilogue

  — & Arnold Bennett { How to Live on 24 hours a day

  • You both should and can make deliberate use of your time outside of work
  • Put more thought into your leisure time

  You say that full energy given to those sixteen hours will lessen the value of the business eight? Not so. On the contrary, it will assuredly increase the value of the business eight. One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm and a leg. All they want is change - not rest, except to sleep.

  • if you give your mind something meaningful to do through all your waking hours, you'll end the day more fulfilled, and begin to the next one more relaxed
  • Eliminate the addictive pull of entertainment sites on your time and attention, give your brain a quality alternative.

[[Deep Work]

Very few people work even 8 hours a day. You're lucky if you get a few good hours in between all the meetings, interruptions, web surfing, office politics, and personal business that permeate the typical workday Fewer official working hours help squeeze the fat out of the typical workweek. Once everyone has less time to get their stuff done, they respect that time even more. People become stingy with their time and that's a good thing. They don't waste it on things that just don't matter. When you have fewer hours you usually spend them more wisely

— Jason Fried, Basecamp co-founder

If you not only eliminate shallow work, but also replace this recovered time with m ore of the deep alternative, not only will the business continue to function; it can become more successful.

• We should see the goal of Draining the Shallows as taming shallow work's footprint in your schedule, not eliminating it.

  • The implication deep work as a limited resource is that once you're hit your deep work limit in a given day, you'll experience diminishing rewards if you try to cram in more.
    • The typical workday is 8 hours - the most adept deep worker cannot spend more than 4 hours in a state of true depth.
  • treat shallow work with suspicion. You must keep it confined to a point where it don't impede your ability to take full advantage of the deeper efforts that ultimately determine your impact.

• Schedule every minute of your day

  At the beginning of each workday, turn to a new page of lined paper in a notebook you dedicate to this purpose. Down the left-hand side of the page, mark every other line with an hour of the day, covering the full set of hours you typically work.

  Divide the hours of your workday into blocks. Minimum length is 30 minutes (one line on your page). Batch similar things into more generic task blocks

  Give every minute of your workday a job

  • Strategies

• Quantify the depth of every activity

  How long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task?

  • If our hypothetical college graduate requires many months of training to replicate a task, then this indicates that the task leverages hard-won expertise
  • A task that our hypothetical college graduate can pick up quickly is one that does not leverage expertise, and therefore it can be understood as shallow

• Ask your boss for a shallow work budget (counterpoint: Conform to Influence

  What percentage of my time should be spent on shallow work?

  • If you work for someone else this strategy provides cover when you turn down an obligation or restructure a project to minimize shallowness.
  • You can justify the move because it's necessary for you to hit your prescribed target mix of work types
  • By giving your boss a clear economic reality that will lead to the natural conclusion that you need to say no to some things and to streamline others -
  • If you work for yourself, this exercise will force you to confront the reality of how little time in your "busy" schedule you're actually producing value
  • By picking and sticking with the shallow-to-deep ratio, you can replace this guilt-driven unconditional acceptance with the more healthy habit of tryi g to get the most out of the time you put aside for shallow work - therefore still exposing yourself to many opportunities - but keeping these efforts constrained to a small enough fraction of your time and attention and to enable the deep work that ultimately drives your business forward.
  • Cause for concern

• Finish your work by 5:30

  A meta-habit that's simple to adopt but broad in its impact

  • Fix-schedule productivity, fix the firm goal of not working past a certain time, then work backward to find productivity strategies that allow me to satisfy this declaration.
  • One of the main techniques for respecting an hour limit was to set drastic quotes on the major sources of shallow endeavors
  • Ruthlessly cap the shallow while protecting deep efforts
  • Be clear in refusal of obligation and ambiguous in explanation of the refusal
    • This strategy frees up out time without diminishing the amount of new value we generate.
    • The reduction in shallow frees up more energy for the deep alternative
    • The limits to our time necessitate more careful thinking about our organizational habits
  • Become Hard to Reach