So let's get on to the meat of our business today, which is our next core idea segment. And I thought I would tackle the topic for which I am probably best known, which is deep work. So I'm known for deep work because of the book I published in 2016 of that same name.

This was a book that had a bit of a quiet launch. It was a Wall Street Journal bestseller for a week or so. And that was just off of the strength of my email list audience at that time, and it sort of went under the radar. And then a year or so later, something just started to happen, people kept buying it, and they started buying it at a higher rate than they did before.

And it's a book that never actually had a week in which it was gangbusters. It never had a week in which it was number two on the charts on Amazon. It never had a Mark Manson or James Clear moment. But this book has quietly moved into almost 40 languages now, you can get this book in a lot of places.

There is a Mongolian version of this book. We have a book being sold as a French, French speaking Africa version of the book. It's a lot of places. It's also quietly sold in English more than a million units. So just it's out there. It's had an impact, but never, never loudly.

It's a little background, little background. So let's talk about the book. Let's talk about it. Three things. Three things to cover here. Number one, what is it? Number two, why is it important? Number three, how do you do it better? Those are the three key points we're gonna talk about the books.

Number one, what is deep work? It is an activity. People often explode or expand this definition to cover all sorts of different things, entire lifestyles, whole value judgment systems about what work is important, what's not. Deep work is none of those things. It is a humble description for a very specific activity.

It is when you are focusing without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. If you're doing that activity, you're doing deep work. Now let's unfold those two parts. The easy part of that is cognitively demanding. So you're working on something hard and you're thinking hard about it. There's a hard thing and you're thinking hard about it.

That's the easy part of the definition. The more demanding part of the definition is that you're doing this without distraction. Now what I mean by that more technically is that you are doing this cognitively demanding work in the absence of context shifts. A context shift is when you turn the focus of your attention from one cognitive context to another for a session to count as deep work.

You cannot be doing those switches. So if you're working on something non cognitively demanding, let's say you're you're trying to format properly a chart in PowerPoint. That's not cognitively demanding. That's not deep work. Let's say you are doing something cognitively demanding, you are trying to write a strategy memo.

It's, it's hard, you got to think about this, like, what are we trying to say here, I have to say this just right. But let's say while you're writing the strategy memo, every five to six minutes, you quick check your email inbox, you glance at your phone to see what's going on.

That session also does not count as deep work because you are doing these context shifts, which significantly degrades your cognitive effectiveness. So if you can avoid the shifts, you're working on something hard, you are doing deep work. Otherwise, you're either doing shallow work, which is work that's not cognitively demanding, or you're doing pseudo deep work, which is you're working on something hard, but you keep switching context.

So you are at a fraction of your capability of producing clean thought. So that's all deep work is a particular type of activity, among many types of activities you might do during typical workday. Number two, why is it important? Well, I first want to make make clear that there's not a moral hierarchy here, there is not an argument that the only type of work that matters is deep work.

We know in almost any professional context, there's lots of other types of efforts that are critical for those efforts. Right? If you are not properly invoicing your clients, which is not a deep activity, but if you are not properly invoicing your clients, you're going to get no money and your business is going to go out of business.

A couple years ago, I was to give another example, the Director of Graduate Studies for the Computer Science Department here at Georgetown and something we had to do each spring as part of that role is build a budget that talked about for every doctoral student we have. Where is the money coming from for the tuition for the research assistantship for the TA ship for the health insurance, we had to work out this budget.

And there's nothing about that this that was deep, it wasn't cognitively demanding, it was just a huge pain. Because as you can imagine, it's complicated to untangle this is coming from a grant. And this is coming from a fellowship. And this is coming from a from the department funds.

But you know what, critically important work without it, the students don't get paid. And they can't do what they're trying to do. So deep work is not from a moral standpoint, the only work that matters. But in many professional contexts, and this was the core concept for my book deep work, it is the deep efforts that move the needle.

Ultimately, the activity that produces the value that allows you to keep doing what you're doing that allows you to get promoted and what you're doing that allows your company to grow or be more successful. Typically, these core activities are going to have a foundation of deep work. So it's what moves the needle.

This is particularly clear in knowledge work work where you're sitting at a computer screen all day. No one's going to pay your company for how quickly you answer emails, no one's going to pay your company because you are really rocking zoom meeting after zoom meeting, no one's going to pay you or give money to your company because you're jumping on calls, no one's going to pay you or your company, because you're shooting around PowerPoint decks with rapid speed, what are they going to pay your company for in a knowledge work context, adding value to information, this is almost always a effort of deep work, skilled thought on something, if it was not skilled thought or difficult, it would be easily replicatable and his value would plummet.

You run the ad agency, there's a lot of stuff you have to do to keep the lights on, but it's coming up with the really good ad campaigns that gets you paid. You run the tech company, there's a lot you have to do to make sure that the code is released properly and marketed.

But if you're not writing fantastic code, it gives you a good stable product, you're out of business. There's a lot that goes into marketing books. But if you're not writing fantastic book, it doesn't matter how much of that you're doing. So in knowledge work, shallow efforts keep the lights on deep work moves the needle, it's important that the core of what creates value.

In other types of industries, this is even more clear. If you're an athlete, all about the deep efforts, the deep training and the deep performance training is a matter of deep work, focused incredibly intensely on what you're trying to do. Performing you're on the court, you're on the field, incredibly deep, focused effort, no distraction.

So deep work is clearly what moves the needle there. See this in art, you see this in the skilled crafts, if I'm a elite woodworker, ultimately, what matters more than anything else in my producing beautifully made very well constructed artifacts. So deep work is often what moves the needle, not the only effort that matters, but it's what often moves the needle.

The issue we got into, this was the premise of the book deep work, the issue we have gotten into more recently is that we forgot that. We began to think about all work being work, it's all equal, either you're doing stuff or you're not. And if you're doing stuff and working hard, that's good.

And if you're not doing stuff and working hard, that's bad. We stopped differentiating between deep work and shallow work. And why was this a problem? Because we had developments in the digital world. Tools like low friction communication channels, email, slack, we got highly distracting entertainment like YouTube and social media pulling out our attention from the phones, we got zoom and PowerPoint slides and jumping on calls and our work got more ambiguous, it became less clear exactly what it is that we do.

And in this context, we fell into this mode where increasingly you could go through most of your day never actually concentrating hard without distraction. Most of your day is now on calls in emails on zoom, changing those proverbial fonts and trying to get that chart to work in your PowerPoint slides.

And we all patted ourselves on the back and said, Look how busy we are. We're crushing it, we're getting after it. But we forgot that we weren't doing the actual underlying core deep work activities that was going to allow this company to keep existing in the first place is gonna allow you to continue to keep your job in the first place.

We were on the deck of the Titanic, sending Instagram pictures of our deck chair arrangements, not even realizing that the ship underneath us was sinking. And so the core argument in the book is that is a problem. But it's also an opportunity. Because what we have is a situation where there's really important thing is becoming more scarce.

So guess what, if you are one of the few people to prioritize it, if you're one of the few organizations to prioritize it, you are going to get a disproportionate competitive advantage. If you prioritize depth in an increasingly shallow world, there is large reward that you are going to get.

So we could see it as a negative, we are forgetting about deep work as we drown in the shallow or you can see as a positive, everyone else is doing that. But I don't. And I'm getting wildly and disproportionately rewarded for that. Because you know, the old saying, you don't have to be faster than a bear.

When you run into that grizzly in the park, you just have to be faster than the person who's there with you. There will get him first. So that's why deep work is important. So what we need is to make sure that it's something that we prioritize. And it has a good presence, an intentional presence in our working life.

Right. So the third idea here is how do we do that? How do we do deep work better? Well, that's most of my book. I have a keynote I've been giving for a long time where I spend 30 minutes going through examples about this. It's an endlessly rich topics.

Let me just give you a sampling of some ideas here about what matters. If you want to take advantage of this reality that deep work is valuable, but becoming more scarce. One just defining it is critical. The fact that we have terminology is at the core of any change.

Just knowing deep work is different than shallow work allows you to actually say, Oh, I see what we're trying to do here. Otherwise, the only knob you have to turn is work harder or not. Stay up later, be on your phone more. As soon as the plane lands, whip it out, do those emails.

If you don't know what it is you're trying to do better, you're not going to actually do the right things better. So defining this key to you need to measure it and you need to have goals. One of the most important ideas from that book, I believe was the deep to shallow work ratio.

The concept is you figure out for your particular position. What is the ideal ratio of deep work hours to non deep work hours in a standard work week? This will differ depending on your job. But you should know what the right answer is. And if you work for someone else, you should have this conversation with the person you work for, with your supervisor.

Here's what deep work is, here's what shallow work is both is important, we have to get the invoices out the door. But if I'm not producing good ad copy, we're not going to get any more money. What is the ratio in my job that I should do that will best serve this company and you get a number and then you measure and if you already time block plan, you can just look straight on your time block plan for the week and see all the blocks that you've marked off as deep work blocks.

It's easy to actually get these numbers, but you measure and you say, Hey, here's how we're doing. You and I talked about this and said it should be 5050. Guess what I got two hours of deep work in last week. Remember, it does not count as deep work if it is not hard.

And if it's not with zero distraction. Now you're confronting a clear number. We decided 5050 would best serve this company. We're nowhere near 5050. We either have to say, you know what, Cal, I don't want you to do any deep work. Which is crazy, because again, that's what creates the value or you say we're gonna have to make some changes.

And then you get changes to the company culture. Then you get more flexibility, your workload changes, it is a driver for change that comes from a place of positivity. If you work for yourself to do the same exercise, here's the ratio, I'm going to hold myself to it. If I'm not hitting it, something has to change.

Schedule your deep work time is another big one that's very important. Do not wait for the instinct to hit you. You know, I'm just in the mood to do some deep work and have nothing to do. That's never going to happen. If that happens, you're not working hard enough.

That's not something that's going to arise naturally. So you need to get it on your calendar one way or the other and treat it like you would any other meeting or appointment. That's time that is protected. That's time that you cannot overschedule. Have a philosophy for how you do this.

Maybe it's the same time on the same days every week. Maybe instead when you do your weekly plan is more bespoke. Here's where I'm going to fit it in this week. Maybe you take one day a week where you do just deep work and the other days you don't.

However you want to do it, but have a philosophy, schedule it, protect it, and if possible, have rituals surrounding these actual sessions that really helps your mind slip into the deep work mode. I do the same walk, I go to the same secondary office space, I make the very same cup of coffee in the same cup, have a ritual.

So your brain knows, oh, it's time to do deep work. Finally, you have to train this ability concentration is hard. If you look at your phone and every single piece of downtime you have, you are out of cognitive shape. You're a cognitive slob. And if you give yourself a two hour window and say, let's go do some deep work.

That's like taking the guy who is in terrible shape. You'd be like, look, man, we're gonna run some stadiums. It's not going to go well. You are going to be distracted. It's going to be difficult. You are going to literally be sweating. You're like, this is terrible. And that's because you haven't trained.

So don't give up if it's hard. That just means you haven't been you haven't been on your virtual Peloton yet long enough to get those virtual lungs back in shape here. All right, so you have to train, which means you have to spend time free from distractions on a regular basis, read books, because that forces your mind to concentrate, do productive meditation, where you try to work on a professional problem, just in your head as you walk that is fantastic training.

Board games, any type of strategy game where you have to think hard about it, do all these type of things. complicated hobbies that require real focus and skill, be it manual or physical, you have to get your mind in shape. If you're going to succeed at deep work, it's not enough just to say I'm going to do it.

You got trained for it. Alright, so those are the main three ideas about deep work, what it is, why it's important, and how to get better at it. And I'm going to add a coda here that I think is also critically important, which is, once you are doing these things, you have to work the word deep into your everyday conversation as a prefix and adjective absolutely as much as possible.

That's how people know you're awesome. And people are going to think you're really cool if you do it. And that's my final piece of advice. You need to walk in and be like, Hey, guys, deep Monday, am I right? Yeah, it's gonna get some deep coffee break over there.

No, you're doing a little deep urination or good work with that you come back, we'll deep it up, stay deep. Let's deep on deep on over to the deep conference room, man, we're gonna go deep on these type of things. This is going to make you sound awesome. And people are going to love you.

Jesse here will will attest every time I see him. We fist bump and say, people people. You can attest to that. You see each other in the street, people people, let it explode. If you're going to do all this work, you got to let people know. And I'll make you it trust me, I know from personal experience, people love it when you use the word deep all the time, and they think you're awesome.

So let's throw that in there. Alright guys, that's it core idea. Work deeply, people meeple. (upbeat music)