202108012206 - Rule 1_Work Deeply

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

• Deep Work Depth Philosophies

• 202108012152 - Bimodal Philosophy of Deep Work

• 202108012154 - Rhythmic Philosophy of Deep Work

• 202108012150 - Monastic Philosophy of Deep Work

• 202108012157 - Journalistic Philosophy of Deep Work

• Ritualize

  Rituals minimize the friction in the transition to depth

  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) 202107301424 - Shutdown Ritual

  • Where you work and for how long
  • How you'll work once you start to work
  • How you'll support your work

• 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

1. Distraction remains a destroyer of depth. Separate your pursuit of serendipitous encounters from your effort to think deeply and build on these inspirations.
2. When it is reasonable to leverage The Whiteboard Effect, do so. By working side by side with someone on a problem, you can push each other toward deeper levels of depth, and therefore, toward the generation of more valuable output as compared to working alone.

the theory of serendipitous creativity

> When you allow people to bump into each other, smart collaboratinos and new ideas emerge

Building 20 at MIT

- In MIT lore, it's generally believed that this haphazard combination of different disciplines, thrown together in a large reconfigurable building led to chance encounters and a sprit of inventiveness that generated breakthroughs at a fast pace, innovating topics as diverse as Chomsky grammars, Loran navigational radars, and video games, all within the same productive postwar decades.
- The building that replaced Building 20 - the Stata Center - offered soundproofed offices connected to large common areas, yielding hub-and-spoke architecture of innovation in which both serendipitous encounters and isolated deep think were supported.
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

    To actively try to work through these decisions will lead to a worse outcome than loading up the relevant information and then moving on to something else while letting the subconscious layers of your mind mull things over.

    • 202108012201 - Unconscious Thought Theory
      • For decisions that require the application of strict rules, the conscious mind must be involved
      • For decisions that involve large amounts of information and multiple vague, and perhaps even conflicting, constraints, your unconscious mind is well suited to tackle the issue.
      • The conscious mind is like a home computer on which you can run carefully written programs that return correct answers to limited problems
      • The unconscious mind is like Google's vast data centers in which statistical algorithms sift through unstructured information, teasing out surprising useful solutions to difficult questions.
      • Providing your conscious mind time to rest enables your unconscious mind to take a shift sorting through your most complex professional challenges

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

    • Attention Restoration Theory (ART): spending time in nature can improve your ability to concentrate (Rachael Kaplan, Stephen Kaplan).
      • based on the concept of attention fatigue
      • You can restore your ability to direct y our attention if you give this activity a rest. Walking in nature (or any activity with "inherently fascinating stimuli) provides such a mental respite
    • To concentrate requires directed attention. This resource is finite: if you exhaust it, you'll struggle to concentrate. (Kaplan, berman, Jonides. 2008.)
      • Walking on busy streets vs walking in nature requires more attention.

    Only the confidence that you're done with work until the net day can convince your brain to downshift to the level where it can begin to recharge for the next day to follow.

  • Reason #3: The work that evening downtime replaces is usually not that important

    - Your capacity for deep work in a given day is limited.
    - any type of work you try to "fit in" later in the day or beyond working hours will not be done in the same manner as effective deep work.
    - To succeed with this strategy (Deep Work), you must first accept the commitment that once your workday shuts down, you cannot allow even the smallest incursion of professional concerns into your field of attention.

  202107301424 - Shutdown Ritual

  1. You have a plan you trust for the completion of open or incomplete tasks.

  2. It's captured in a place where it will be revisited when the time is right.

     - When you're done, have a set phrase you say that indicates completion ("shut down complete")
     - Provides a cue to your mind that it's safe to release work-related thoughts for the rest of the day.
     202107251848 - Zeigarnik effect people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks

• Consider it done:

  • make a plan for how to later complete an incomplete task.

  Committing to a specific plan for a goal may therefore not only facilitate attainment of the goal by may also free cognitive resources for other pursuits

  When you work hard, work hard. When you're done, be done.

ref: 202107191134 - Rules of Deep Work