The first one comes from The Alchemist, who asks, "If one is doing deep work and gets distracted, does that transmogrify the work into shallow work?" Alright, well first of all, I appreciate the Calvin and Hobbes reference with transmogrify, from scientific progress goes boink from that collection. Calvin builds the transmogrifier, which can transform you from one creature to another, so there's a good Bill Watterson shout out.

This is a good question, it's a technical question, let's do it quick, but I think it's important. So in the ontology of knowledge-work focus, we have deep work and shallow work and deep work, you know I wrote the book about it, it's where you're focused without distraction on cognitively demanding work and shallow work.

I often just casually define as everything else. So the question is, if you don't meet all of the standards of deep work, is what you're left with shallow work? And actually, if we're going to be technical about this, not really. So let me be a little bit more specific here.

So shallow work is efforts that do not directly move the needle, so it's not the effort that is directly creating the value on which your company or job relies. It's important, if you don't do shallow work, your company can't exist, you can't keep your job. But on the other hand, if all you did was shallow work, your company wouldn't exist and you can't keep your job, right?

So if you're the computer programmer, the actual effort that creates value for your company is code, producing code that becomes a product they can sell. Shallow work, like going to the marketing meetings, etc. You need to do it, you need to understand what's going on, but if all you did was that shallow work, no code got produced, eventually the company goes out of business.

Deep work is a little bit more complicated because instead of just being a what, it's also a how. So deep work, we have to care about the content. So deep work needs to be focused on something that actually moves the needle, it's cognitively demanding, it produces new value, it's the core activities that matter in your professional life.

But the how matters as well. To really qualify as deep work, it has to be executed without distraction, which means you're not context shifting. No quick checking of your email, no quick checking of your phone, all you're doing is focusing on that task. You need the how and the what together for it to count as deep work.

So the way I see this question is what happens if you keep the what, you're focusing on something important, you're writing computer code, but you get rid of the how. So instead of doing that without distraction, you're kind of looking at your phone, you have slack going. Well, really what you end up with there is something that's not deep work and it's not shallow work.

The activity that you're doing is cognitively demanding and important, but the way you're doing it is not up to the full standard of what your mind is capable of. So I don't actually have a term for that. I mean, it essentially throws you into a productivity purgatory. Maybe we could call it pseudo deep work or failed deep work.

And it's not where you want to be. As long as you're working on an activity that's really important, you want to do it in the way that's going to get the most value out of the time you spend, and that is to do it without distraction. So we really should have three things here, shallow work, deep work, and pseudo deep work.

Shallow work is necessary, but not sufficient to be very successful. It's important logistical things, but it's not the stuff that moves the needle. Deep work is it all coming together and you're working on what matters and you're doing it in a way that allows you to do it at a high level.

In between is pseudo deep work. You're working on something important, but not doing it that well. You're context shifting, so your ability to focus is reduced and the quality of what you produce is downgraded. So I guess we need a new word. So let's go with, we'll go with pseudo deep work for now.

So that's a good clarification. Yeah, that's definitely been a complexity that's entered my discussions of deep work is it's the how and the what. And you got to get both of those things for it to really, really to count. So in a way, pseudo might be a little bit too positive of an adjective for it because it's kind of distracted work, right?

Yeah. Like so failed deep work, depreciated deep work. Yeah, something like that. Yeah. Degraded deep work. Yeah. You don't really want to be there. Yeah. Why? But I mean, as long as you're spending the time to work on something important, you probably want to get as much as possible out of that time.

Yeah. I'm with you on that.