202107280959 - Rule 4_Drain the shallows

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

  • If your schedule is disrupted

    • ...you should take a few minutes to create a revised schedule for the time that remains in the day.

    • On some days, you might rewrite your schedule 5-6 times. Your goal is not to stick to a given schedule at all costs; it's instead to maintain a thoughtful say in what you're doing with your time going forward — even if these decisions are reworked again and again as the day unfolds.

    • Not sure how long an activity will take?

      • Block off the expected time, then follow with an additional block that has a split purpose.

      • Deploy many task blocks throughout your day (counterpoint: 202108012140 - Parkinson's Law

      • Make them longer than required to handle the tasks you plain in the morning

      • Having regularly occurring blocks of time to address surprises keeps things running smoothly

    • Cause for abandonment of schedule

      • If I stumble onto an important insight, then this is a perfectly valid reason to ignore the rest of my schedule for the day.
      • Stick with the insight until it loses steam, then rebuild the schedule with the time that remains

      What makes sense for me to do with the time that remains?

      • It's the habit of asking that returns results, not your unyielding fidelity to the answer.

    You must overcome the distrust of structure if you want to approach your true potential as someone who creates things that matter (conflict: 202108012157 - Journalistic Philosophy of Deep Work

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: 202108012040 - 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 trying 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

    • What should my ratio be?

      as much shallow work as is needed for you to promptly do whatever we need from you at the moment.

      • In this case, thank the boss for the feedback, and then promptly start planning how you can transition into a new position that values depth

• 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

    • Tip 1: Make people who send you email do more work

      Sender filter: Asking corespondents to filer themselves before attempting to contact

      • Example

        If you have an offer, opportunity, or introduction that might make my life more interesting, email me at interesting@calnewports.com. For the reasons stated above, I'll only respond to those proposals that are a food match for my schedule and interests

      • The inbox is now a collection of opportunities

      • Most people easily accept the idea that you have a right to control your own incoming communication

    • Tip 2: Do more work when you send or reply to emails

      • In response to incoming emails: What is the project represented by this message, and what is the most efficient process for bringing this project to a successful conclusion?
      • The process-centric approach to Email

        • In crafting responses

          1. I start by identifying the project implied by the message
          2. Immediately Close the loop (& David Allen with respect to the project at hand.
             1. When a project is initiated by an email that you send/receive, it squats in your mental landscape - becoming something that's "on your plate" in the sense that it has been brought to your attention and eventually needs to be addressed.
             2. Add to your task list and calendar any relevant commitments on your part; bring the other party up to speed

          • Example

            • Receive: It was great to meet you last week. I'd love to follow up on some of those issues we discusses. Do you want to grab coffee?

            Response: I'd Love to grab coffee. Let's meet at the Starbucks on campus. Below I listed two day next week when I'm free. For each day, I listed three times. If any of those day and time combinations work for you, let me know. I'll consider your reply confirmation for the meeting. If none of those day and time combinations work, give me a call at the number below and we'll hash out a time that works. Looking forward to it.

        • The extra two to three minutes you spend at this point in the response will save you many more minutes reading and responding to unnecessary extra messages later

    • Tip 3: Don't respond

      • Professional email sorting: Do not reply to an email message if any of the following applies
        1. it's ambiguous or otherwise makes it hard for you to generate a reasonable response
        2. It's not a question or proposal that interests you
        3. Nothing really good would happen if you did respond and nothing really bad would happen if you didn't

      Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don't you'll never find time for the life-changing big things

    • Send fewer emails and ignore those that aren't easy to process