Can Intense Collaborative Work Be Considered Deep?

00:00:04.720 | Alright, let's fit in one last deep work question here. This

00:00:07.960 | one comes from Brandon.

00:00:09.120 | Brandon says can intense collaborative work be

00:00:13.680 | considered deep?

00:00:16.880 | Deep work has two elements. Cognitively demanding, so you're

00:00:21.680 | actually pushing your mental ability. So it's requiring real

00:00:25.560 | thought and it's done in a state without distraction. So you're

00:00:27.960 | not context shifting from the context of the work to other

00:00:30.560 | things. This could be with people. This could be on your

00:00:34.560 | own. I talk about this in my book, Deep Work, but it's often

00:00:38.760 | overlooked by people who will say, I don't do deep work

00:00:41.640 | because I'm in a collaborative field. But nothing about that

00:00:45.360 | definition has anything to do with being alone. I think we we

00:00:49.920 | get caught up on that idea because we have a notion of deep

00:00:52.800 | work as Neil Stevenson, you know, in his basement alone in

00:00:56.840 | his house writing the Quicksilver trilogy with a quill.

00:00:59.760 | And yes, that is deep work. But also deep work is a collection

00:01:03.320 | of physicists at Bell Labs at a whiteboard that they're sharing

00:01:05.920 | trying to figure out how to make the transistor work. That's

00:01:08.760 | awful deep work. Deep work is also the mission control in

00:01:12.280 | Houston during Apollo 13 trying to figure out how to make the

00:01:15.520 | air filters from the command module work in the lunar module.

00:01:20.560 | You're focusing really intensely on something cognitively

00:01:23.040 | demanding, you're not switching context. I even go so far as

00:01:26.480 | talking about in deep work, what I call the whiteboard effect,

00:01:28.960 | which says if you're working on something deep with someone

00:01:31.120 | else, you often can obtain higher levels of intensity than

00:01:36.560 | if you were just working on your own, because having another

00:01:38.840 | person they're staring at the same problem on a shared board

00:01:42.240 | raises the social cost of your attention wandering. Because

00:01:47.120 | then you're gonna have to say, hold on, hold on, back up, what

00:01:50.560 | were you just talking about there, you're pushing each other

00:01:53.280 | to go deeper. So actually, some of the deepest work comes in

00:01:55.840 | group settings. Brandon also asked about what if you're in

00:02:00.000 | like doing a therapy session, so this is he's a psychotherapist

00:02:03.120 | or teaching. That's all deep to kindly demanding, you're not

00:02:06.960 | switching context, the number of people in a room doesn't really