Some of the most insightful modern philosophers were in the Navy on submarines.
Those guys really know how to think deeply.
I’m going to describe a fairly typical start to my workday, let me know if any part of
it seems familiar.
I go to my desk, flip on my computer, and notice after it boots that I have an email,
sent late last night, something critical that requires my feedback so another team can move
forward with a project.
I start searching thru some documentation to answer the question, and my Microsoft Teams
icon blinks in the corner of my screen with a message from a coworker, wishing me good
morning and asking if she can go ahead and order the parts I left in the McMaster-Carr
shopping cart.
I type a quick response and go back to my search, just as another email chimes in my
Inbox - it's a company-wide reminder to enroll in the 401K plan by the end of the month.
Nothing urgent - I'll look at it later.
I find the relevant document and, as I wait for it to open, Teams blinks again with a
confirmation from my coworker.
While I’m reading & thinking about how to answer the email, my boss taps me on the shoulder
to confirm that I saw it.
This turns into a quick discussion about how the project is going and what sort of resources
I might need to move forward.
By the time the conversation is finished, I have 3 more emails, 4 more Teams messages,
and I’ve got to start reading the document from the beginning, trying to pick up my train
of thought from where it left off.
Even if we discount the many engineered distractions lurking on our smartphones, many jobs involve
a fair amount of interruption and distraction just as a matter of course - the way most
of us work is intensely collaborative, with many different channels for communication
and synchronization, a structure that demands vigilance, responsiveness, and continuous
prioritization, attention to & weighing of various signals and messages to determine
which can be safely ignored, at least for the moment, and which require immediate action.
If you ask computer scientist and productivity blogger Cal Newport, we don’t bounce from
Slack to stand-up meeting to SMS because it's the best way to ensure the most fruitful application
of labor - quite the opposite.
For Newport, the most important and productive work that happens in an office occurs in a
state of intense, unbroken concentration, that frame of mind you might use to solve
a particularly sticky math problem or wrap your head around a challenging work of art,
the sort of cognitive effort that would be spoiled if something were to distract you.
Newport argues that, rather than leaning harder & harder into the frantic & insistent hive
mind that characterizes modern office jobs, we should find a way to cultivate more of
that state, what he calls “deep work,” because as inconvenient as it might be for
the work culture we’re grown accustomed to, it produces better results, both in terms
of productive output *and* individual satisfaction with one’s work.
He’s collected a wide array of anecdotes about individuals whose adoption of deliberately
slow-paced habits has resulted in profound creative or intellectual output, citing these
cases as evidence of the power we might be leaving untapped with a frenetic hashtag rise-and-grind
approach to productivity.
Take June Huh, a mathematician at Princeton who was recently awarded the prestigious Fields
Medal for his work in combinatorics.
Huh says that he can only manage about three to four hours of focused mental effort a day
- he splits those hours between writing lecture notes, scheduling out his calendar, and solving
problems that have been impenetrable to the world’s most brilliant mathematicians for
more than 40 years.
If you were to drop Huh into a standard 8-to-5 office job, it seems likely his 3-hour timer
would be exhausted rapidly by back-to-back meetings and urgent emails, not to mention
that being mostly useless for 5 hours out of a standard workday would probably single
him out for a stern talking-to by his manager.
For anyone who works like Huh, a few hours of solitary, concentrated effort per day might
have the potential to wrench a field forward by a few decades.
But there’s no real place for that style of labor in a standard workplace, which suggests
we may be leaving an enormous well of Huh-shaped Fields-medal-worthy deep work totally untapped.
Newport also cites a number of psychological studies that seem to support the idea that
deep work might be the most effective way of applying cognitive effort to a given problem.
For example, Sophie Leroy’s research into the phenomenon of attention residue suggests
that switching from one cognitive task to another is never a clean process - some amount
of brainpower appears to lag behind the conscious effort to change contexts, remaining dedicated
to the prior task, and leaving us a little less horsepower to focus on the new one.
That sort of psychology seems to lend itself well to a single block of undistracted time,
not so well to the distraction-rich multitasking environment of a modern office job.
With all these hints at the untapped benefits of focused cognitive labor, you might wonder
why we work the way we do - is there any particular reason we don’t see many companies encouraging
their employees to be unreachable for some part of the day?
Newport suggests that the way we currently structure work is mostly a historical accident
- nobody sat down and said “How should we assign tasks and communicate with each other
to be most productive?
I know!
Let’s bug each other constantly whenever we need anything!”
He posits that the emergence of the hive-mind workplace was a path-of-least-resistance thing
- after all, deliberately developing systems and tools to minimize interruption of focused
work takes time, effort, and a lot of experimentation.
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of feedback loops between individuals
and teams.
For better and worse, email was a useful crutch that kinda got the job done…for a price.
Newport cites IBM’s first foray into email in the 1980’s: the nerds designed an email
server to replace all internal phone calls & handwritten memos, & built it with enough
capacity to handle that volume of information.
Unfortunately, the first day it was active, the system collapsed, because the rate of
internal communication had increased by five times over that initial value.
The hive mind work structure had evolved, and nobody was safe.
Anyone with a huge number next to their Inbox icon can attest that, on average, the ease
with which email can be sent drastically overshadows its value in being read, and if Newport is
to be believed, even that microsecond of stolen attention from an email notification is enough
to interrupt immensely valuable focused work.
He doesn’t think email is the sole problem, it’s just emblematic of the many myopic
shortcomings we find in the workplace when it comes to deep work.
The more general issue here should be familiar to anyone who’s heard of Goodheart’s Law
- the most obvious proxies for useful work have become targets of behavior, leading to
perversely unproductive norms that preclude any sort of deep work.
For example, the speed of a reply is often taken as a proxy for how attentive or on-the-ball
someone is.
There’s an assumption that substantial lag time between messages is the result of some
oversight, or maybe even callous disregard.
The pressure to be responsive incentivizes short, surface-level, off-the-cuff responses,
nothing that would require thinking long and hard about the question or wondering if there
might be a more meaningful & valuable response that can’t be formulated in a short window.
Busyness is another good example - concentrated cognitive effort very rarely looks like a
flurry of bustling activity.
Often it appears as a distinct *lack* of activity, or maybe some aimless task, like doodling
or spinning in a chair.
If you took a snapshot of a standard office, you probably wouldn’t see anyone fiddling
with a Rubix cube, or sitting with their feet kicked up, staring off into space.
Contemplation is mostly invisible and its value can be hard to quantify, so employers
who are worried about employees slacking off may opt to dispel any appearance of idleness,
just in case…as well as any potential of deep work.
For Newport, it’s easy to understand *why* we’ve adopted these sorts of norms, at least
in a historical sense - he calls it the Principle of Least Resistance.
If it’s not *painfully* obvious how a bad policy might affect a company’s bottom line,
if you don’t have a discrete dollar amount of what’s being wasted in comparison to
some other system, companies will default to whatever process requires the least effort
to implement, regardless of how much they might benefit in the long run from trying
different approaches & seeing what works best.
Emails were an rough-and-ready solution to synchronizing efforts across teams that didn’t
require any real foresight or planning to achieve that goal, so…that’s what we all
ended up going with, without any regard for the damage constant email notifications might
be doing to valuable focused work.
Internal chat applications like Slack were attractive because they were a quicker & easier
way to do the same thing…but that just meant we could interrupt each other even more frequently
with even less effort.
Again, none of this was irrational in the moment - we needed a way to do a thing, we
stumbled onto *an* answer, and we implemented it.
But writ large, considering the potential value of deep work, we might have shot ourselves
in the foot by failing to think of something better.
Newport’s observations suggest that, perhaps, if we really wanted to maximize our productivity
and generate the greatest possible advances in fields where an ounce of insight is worth
several tons of busywork, we should try to pry ourselves away from the buzzing hive mind
model and adopt workplace practices that facilitate that state of deep contemplation.
Maybe, instead of simply *expecting* people to be available at the drop of a hat, we could
invest a little more energy in scheduling periods where we’re available for questions,
and more importantly, when we’re not.
Instead of casually CCing everyone tangentially involved with a project to make sure they’re
“in the loop,” maybe we could use email more judiciously, picking and choosing exactly
what sort of messages really need to be in someone’s inbox and which would be less
disruptive as scheduled phone calls, or weekly summaries.
Instead of looking for hustle and grindset in a fast-paced open-plan office, maybe we
should give people a little more space to reflect, daydream, and think carefully about
their work.
And…this probably goes without saying, but maybe we should collect every single server
that’s running some part of Twitter and drop them all into a volcano.
Do you think Newport's theory of deep work rings true?
Are you also considering adding an hour of isolated thinking time to your day?
Please leave a comment below, and let me know what you THUNK.