Core Idea: Deep Work

00:00:00.000 | So let's get on to the meat of our business today, which is our

00:00:09.700 | next core idea segment. And I thought I would tackle the topic

00:00:16.180 | for which I am probably best known, which is deep work. So

00:00:23.120 | I'm known for deep work because of the book I published in 2016

00:00:27.960 | of that same name. This was a book that had a bit of a quiet

00:00:33.800 | launch. It was a Wall Street Journal bestseller for a week

00:00:38.600 | or so. And that was just off of the strength of my email list

00:00:41.880 | audience at that time, and it sort of went under the radar.

00:00:44.840 | And then a year or so later, something just started to

00:00:48.120 | happen, people kept buying it, and they started buying it at a

00:00:51.600 | higher rate than they did before. And it's a book that

00:00:53.960 | never actually had a week in which it was gangbusters. It

00:00:56.960 | never had a week in which it was number two on the charts on

00:01:02.640 | Amazon. It never had a Mark Manson or James Clear moment.

00:01:05.320 | But this book has quietly moved into almost 40 languages now,

00:01:10.440 | you can get this book in a lot of places. There is a Mongolian

00:01:14.000 | version of this book. We have a book being sold as a French,

00:01:18.880 | French speaking Africa version of the book. It's a lot of

00:01:23.560 | places. It's also quietly sold in English more than a million

00:01:26.520 | units. So just it's out there. It's had an impact, but never,

00:01:30.000 | never loudly. It's a little background, little background.

00:01:34.240 | So let's talk about the book. Let's talk about it. Three

00:01:37.400 | things. Three things to cover here. Number one, what is it?

00:01:41.560 | Number two, why is it important? Number three, how do you do it

00:01:48.560 | better? Those are the three key points we're gonna talk about

00:01:51.720 | the books. Number one, what is deep work? It is an activity.

00:01:55.800 | People often explode or expand this definition to cover all

00:01:59.520 | sorts of different things, entire lifestyles, whole value

00:02:02.520 | judgment systems about what work is important, what's not. Deep

00:02:05.460 | work is none of those things. It is a humble description for a

00:02:08.800 | very specific activity. It is when you are focusing without

00:02:12.600 | distraction on a cognitively demanding task. If you're doing

00:02:17.440 | that activity, you're doing deep work. Now let's unfold those two

00:02:21.200 | parts. The easy part of that is cognitively demanding. So you're

00:02:25.200 | working on something hard and you're thinking hard about it.

00:02:27.520 | There's a hard thing and you're thinking hard about it. That's

00:02:30.720 | the easy part of the definition. The more demanding part of the

00:02:33.840 | definition is that you're doing this without distraction. Now

00:02:38.280 | what I mean by that more technically is that you are

00:02:40.040 | doing this cognitively demanding work in the absence of context

00:02:45.120 | shifts. A context shift is when you turn the focus of your

00:02:48.840 | attention from one cognitive context to another for a session

00:02:53.000 | to count as deep work. You cannot be doing those switches.

00:02:57.360 | So if you're working on something non cognitively

00:03:00.280 | demanding, let's say you're you're trying to format properly

00:03:03.240 | a chart in PowerPoint. That's not cognitively demanding.

00:03:06.720 | That's not deep work. Let's say you are doing something

00:03:09.920 | cognitively demanding, you are trying to write a strategy memo.

00:03:13.800 | It's, it's hard, you got to think about this, like, what are

00:03:17.640 | we trying to say here, I have to say this just right. But let's

00:03:19.680 | say while you're writing the strategy memo, every five to

00:03:23.000 | six minutes, you quick check your email inbox, you glance at

00:03:27.360 | your phone to see what's going on. That session also does not

00:03:30.680 | count as deep work because you are doing these context shifts,

00:03:33.600 | which significantly degrades your cognitive effectiveness. So

00:03:37.320 | if you can avoid the shifts, you're working on something

00:03:38.760 | hard, you are doing deep work. Otherwise, you're either doing

00:03:44.240 | shallow work, which is work that's not cognitively

00:03:46.440 | demanding, or you're doing pseudo deep work, which is you're

00:03:48.560 | working on something hard, but you keep switching context. So

00:03:51.640 | you are at a fraction of your capability of producing clean

00:03:55.880 | thought. So that's all deep work is a particular type of

00:03:58.920 | activity, among many types of activities you might do during

00:04:03.840 | typical workday. Number two, why is it important? Well, I first

00:04:10.000 | want to make make clear that there's not a moral hierarchy

00:04:14.560 | here, there is not an argument that the only type of work that

00:04:17.280 | matters is deep work. We know in almost any professional context,

00:04:21.960 | there's lots of other types of efforts that are critical for

00:04:25.160 | those efforts. Right? If you are not properly invoicing your

00:04:29.480 | clients, which is not a deep activity, but if you are not

00:04:32.560 | properly invoicing your clients, you're going to get no money and

00:04:35.560 | your business is going to go out of business. A couple years ago,

00:04:38.400 | I was to give another example, the Director of Graduate Studies

00:04:42.120 | for the Computer Science Department here at Georgetown

00:04:44.080 | and something we had to do each spring as part of that role is

00:04:47.960 | build a budget that talked about for every doctoral student we

00:04:52.080 | have. Where is the money coming from for the tuition for the

00:04:56.200 | research assistantship for the TA ship for the health insurance,

00:04:59.240 | we had to work out this budget. And there's nothing about that

00:05:01.960 | this that was deep, it wasn't cognitively demanding, it was

00:05:04.160 | just a huge pain. Because as you can imagine, it's complicated to

00:05:06.760 | untangle this is coming from a grant. And this is coming from a

00:05:09.120 | fellowship. And this is coming from a from the department

00:05:12.440 | funds. But you know what, critically important work

00:05:15.480 | without it, the students don't get paid. And they can't do what

00:05:19.680 | they're trying to do. So deep work is not from a moral

00:05:23.640 | standpoint, the only work that matters. But in many

00:05:28.160 | professional contexts, and this was the core concept for my book

00:05:31.400 | deep work, it is the deep efforts that move the needle.

00:05:36.640 | Ultimately, the activity that produces the value that allows

00:05:41.720 | you to keep doing what you're doing that allows you to get

00:05:45.120 | promoted and what you're doing that allows your company to grow

00:05:47.920 | or be more successful. Typically, these core activities

00:05:50.880 | are going to have a foundation of deep work. So it's what moves

00:05:55.640 | the needle. This is particularly clear in knowledge work work

00:05:59.760 | where you're sitting at a computer screen all day. No one's

00:06:03.120 | going to pay your company for how quickly you answer emails,

00:06:06.320 | no one's going to pay your company because you are really

00:06:08.680 | rocking zoom meeting after zoom meeting, no one's going to pay

00:06:11.200 | you or give money to your company because you're jumping

00:06:13.120 | on calls, no one's going to pay you or your company, because

00:06:15.760 | you're shooting around PowerPoint decks with rapid

00:06:19.040 | speed, what are they going to pay your company for in a

00:06:21.480 | knowledge work context, adding value to information, this is

00:06:24.720 | almost always a effort of deep work, skilled thought on

00:06:27.720 | something, if it was not skilled thought or difficult, it would

00:06:30.040 | be easily replicatable and his value would plummet. You run the

00:06:34.920 | ad agency, there's a lot of stuff you have to do to keep the

00:06:37.080 | lights on, but it's coming up with the really good ad

00:06:38.960 | campaigns that gets you paid. You run the tech company,

00:06:41.920 | there's a lot you have to do to make sure that the code is

00:06:44.960 | released properly and marketed. But if you're not writing

00:06:47.240 | fantastic code, it gives you a good stable product, you're out

00:06:51.440 | of business. There's a lot that goes into marketing books. But

00:06:54.560 | if you're not writing fantastic book, it doesn't matter how much

00:06:56.880 | of that you're doing. So in knowledge work, shallow efforts

00:07:01.680 | keep the lights on deep work moves the needle, it's

00:07:03.800 | important that the core of what creates value. In other types of

00:07:08.040 | industries, this is even more clear. If you're an athlete,

00:07:11.280 | all about the deep efforts, the deep training and the deep

00:07:15.120 | performance training is a matter of deep work, focused

00:07:19.320 | incredibly intensely on what you're trying to do. Performing

00:07:22.360 | you're on the court, you're on the field, incredibly deep,

00:07:26.120 | focused effort, no distraction. So deep work is clearly what

00:07:30.000 | moves the needle there. See this in art, you see this in the

00:07:33.120 | skilled crafts, if I'm a elite woodworker, ultimately, what

00:07:37.600 | matters more than anything else in my producing beautifully made

00:07:40.760 | very well constructed artifacts. So deep work is often what moves

00:07:43.600 | the needle, not the only effort that matters, but it's what

00:07:45.520 | often moves the needle. The issue we got into, this was the

00:07:50.880 | premise of the book deep work, the issue we have gotten into

00:07:54.160 | more recently is that we forgot that. We began to think about

00:07:58.560 | all work being work, it's all equal, either you're doing stuff

00:08:01.920 | or you're not. And if you're doing stuff and working hard,

00:08:04.000 | that's good. And if you're not doing stuff and working hard,

00:08:06.040 | that's bad. We stopped differentiating between deep

00:08:08.840 | work and shallow work. And why was this a problem? Because we

00:08:11.560 | had developments in the digital world. Tools like low friction

00:08:16.160 | communication channels, email, slack, we got highly distracting

00:08:19.800 | entertainment like YouTube and social media pulling out our

00:08:23.280 | attention from the phones, we got zoom and PowerPoint slides

00:08:26.040 | and jumping on calls and our work got more ambiguous, it

00:08:28.320 | became less clear exactly what it is that we do. And in this

00:08:31.840 | context, we fell into this mode where increasingly you could go

00:08:34.640 | through most of your day never actually concentrating hard

00:08:37.080 | without distraction. Most of your day is now on calls in

00:08:40.720 | emails on zoom, changing those proverbial fonts and trying to

00:08:44.680 | get that chart to work in your PowerPoint slides. And we all

00:08:47.680 | patted ourselves on the back and said, Look how busy we are.

00:08:50.440 | We're crushing it, we're getting after it. But we forgot that we

00:08:54.720 | weren't doing the actual underlying core deep work

00:08:56.880 | activities that was going to allow this company to keep

00:08:59.000 | existing in the first place is gonna allow you to continue to

00:09:01.480 | keep your job in the first place. We were on the deck of

00:09:05.320 | the Titanic, sending Instagram pictures of our deck chair

00:09:09.560 | arrangements, not even realizing that the ship underneath us was

00:09:12.320 | sinking. And so the core argument in the book is that is

00:09:16.880 | a problem. But it's also an opportunity. Because what we

00:09:22.840 | have is a situation where there's really important thing

00:09:25.200 | is becoming more scarce. So guess what, if you are one of

00:09:27.440 | the few people to prioritize it, if you're one of the few

00:09:30.640 | organizations to prioritize it, you are going to get a

00:09:33.320 | disproportionate competitive advantage. If you prioritize

00:09:38.040 | depth in an increasingly shallow world, there is large reward

00:09:43.160 | that you are going to get. So we could see it as a negative, we

00:09:48.440 | are forgetting about deep work as we drown in the shallow or

00:09:51.080 | you can see as a positive, everyone else is doing that. But

00:09:54.800 | I don't. And I'm getting wildly and disproportionately rewarded

00:09:58.880 | for that. Because you know, the old saying, you don't have to be

00:10:03.320 | faster than a bear. When you run into that grizzly in the park,

00:10:06.720 | you just have to be faster than the person who's there with you.

00:10:09.000 | There will get him first. So that's why deep work is

00:10:13.120 | important. So what we need is to make sure that it's something

00:10:15.200 | that we prioritize. And it has a good presence, an intentional

00:10:20.680 | presence in our working life. Right. So the third idea here is

00:10:26.280 | how do we do that? How do we do deep work better? Well, that's

00:10:30.840 | most of my book. I have a keynote I've been giving for a

00:10:35.040 | long time where I spend 30 minutes going through examples

00:10:38.240 | about this. It's an endlessly rich topics. Let me just give

00:10:40.640 | you a sampling of some ideas here about what matters. If you

00:10:44.120 | want to take advantage of this reality that deep work is

00:10:46.040 | valuable, but becoming more scarce. One just defining it is

00:10:49.200 | critical. The fact that we have terminology is at the core of

00:10:53.000 | any change. Just knowing deep work is different than shallow

00:10:56.840 | work allows you to actually say, Oh, I see what we're trying to

00:10:59.680 | do here. Otherwise, the only knob you have to turn is work

00:11:03.480 | harder or not. Stay up later, be on your phone more. As soon as

00:11:08.760 | the plane lands, whip it out, do those emails. If you don't know

00:11:11.360 | what it is you're trying to do better, you're not going to

00:11:13.440 | actually do the right things better. So defining this key to

00:11:17.440 | you need to measure it and you need to have goals. One of the

00:11:20.400 | most important ideas from that book, I believe was the deep to

00:11:23.560 | shallow work ratio. The concept is you figure out for your

00:11:28.640 | particular position. What is the ideal ratio of deep work hours

00:11:33.760 | to non deep work hours in a standard work week? This will

00:11:40.320 | differ depending on your job. But you should know what the

00:11:43.640 | right answer is. And if you work for someone else, you should

00:11:46.120 | have this conversation with the person you work for, with your

00:11:49.360 | supervisor. Here's what deep work is, here's what shallow

00:11:52.120 | work is both is important, we have to get the invoices out the

00:11:55.040 | door. But if I'm not producing good ad copy, we're not going to

00:11:57.840 | get any more money. What is the ratio in my job that I should do

00:12:00.840 | that will best serve this company and you get a number and

00:12:04.000 | then you measure and if you already time block plan, you can

00:12:07.480 | just look straight on your time block plan for the week and see

00:12:09.920 | all the blocks that you've marked off as deep work blocks.

00:12:11.960 | It's easy to actually get these numbers, but you measure and you

00:12:14.880 | say, Hey, here's how we're doing. You and I talked about

00:12:18.520 | this and said it should be 5050. Guess what I got two hours of

00:12:21.480 | deep work in last week. Remember, it does not count as

00:12:24.760 | deep work if it is not hard. And if it's not with zero

00:12:28.880 | distraction. Now you're confronting a clear number. We

00:12:34.120 | decided 5050 would best serve this company. We're nowhere near

00:12:36.800 | 5050. We either have to say, you know what, Cal, I don't want you

00:12:42.080 | to do any deep work. Which is crazy, because again, that's

00:12:45.840 | what creates the value or you say we're gonna have to make

00:12:47.360 | some changes. And then you get changes to the company culture.

00:12:49.960 | Then you get more flexibility, your workload changes, it is a

00:12:53.680 | driver for change that comes from a place of positivity. If

00:12:56.000 | you work for yourself to do the same exercise, here's the ratio,

00:12:58.960 | I'm going to hold myself to it. If I'm not hitting it, something

00:13:01.360 | has to change. Schedule your deep work time is another big

00:13:06.560 | one that's very important. Do not wait for the instinct to hit

00:13:10.360 | you. You know, I'm just in the mood to do some deep work and

00:13:13.640 | have nothing to do. That's never going to happen. If that

00:13:17.840 | happens, you're not working hard enough. That's not something

00:13:21.520 | that's going to arise naturally. So you need to get it on your

00:13:23.840 | calendar one way or the other and treat it like you would any

00:13:26.400 | other meeting or appointment. That's time that is protected.

00:13:28.680 | That's time that you cannot overschedule. Have a philosophy

00:13:31.440 | for how you do this. Maybe it's the same time on the same days

00:13:33.840 | every week. Maybe instead when you do your weekly plan is more

00:13:37.640 | bespoke. Here's where I'm going to fit it in this week. Maybe

00:13:40.240 | you take one day a week where you do just deep work and the

00:13:42.400 | other days you don't. However you want to do it, but have a

00:13:44.320 | philosophy, schedule it, protect it, and if possible, have

00:13:47.560 | rituals surrounding these actual sessions that really helps your

00:13:50.840 | mind slip into the deep work mode. I do the same walk, I go

00:13:54.120 | to the same secondary office space, I make the very same cup

00:13:57.400 | of coffee in the same cup, have a ritual. So your brain knows,

00:14:01.600 | oh, it's time to do deep work. Finally, you have to train this

00:14:06.040 | ability concentration is hard. If you look at your phone and

00:14:10.560 | every single piece of downtime you have, you are out of

00:14:13.480 | cognitive shape. You're a cognitive slob. And if you give

00:14:19.400 | yourself a two hour window and say, let's go do some deep work.

00:14:22.280 | That's like taking the guy who is in terrible shape. You'd be

00:14:26.160 | like, look, man, we're gonna run some stadiums. It's not going to

00:14:29.120 | go well. You are going to be distracted. It's going to be

00:14:32.480 | difficult. You are going to literally be sweating. You're

00:14:34.800 | like, this is terrible. And that's because you haven't

00:14:36.880 | trained. So don't give up if it's hard. That just means you

00:14:39.240 | haven't been you haven't been on your virtual Peloton yet long

00:14:43.480 | enough to get those virtual lungs back in shape here. All

00:14:46.440 | right, so you have to train, which means you have to spend

00:14:50.360 | time free from distractions on a regular basis, read books,

00:14:53.960 | because that forces your mind to concentrate, do productive

00:14:56.800 | meditation, where you try to work on a professional problem,

00:14:59.200 | just in your head as you walk that is fantastic training.

00:15:02.440 | Board games, any type of strategy game where you have to

00:15:07.600 | think hard about it, do all these type of things.

00:15:10.040 | complicated hobbies that require real focus and skill, be it

00:15:13.680 | manual or physical, you have to get your mind in shape. If

00:15:16.240 | you're going to succeed at deep work, it's not enough just to

00:15:18.040 | say I'm going to do it. You got trained for it.

00:15:20.640 | Alright, so those are the main three ideas about deep work,

00:15:24.160 | what it is, why it's important, and how to get better at it. And

00:15:30.600 | I'm going to add a coda here that I think is also critically

00:15:33.840 | important, which is, once you are doing these things, you have

00:15:37.920 | to work the word deep into your everyday conversation as a

00:15:42.600 | prefix and adjective absolutely as much as possible. That's how

00:15:46.520 | people know you're awesome. And people are going to think you're

00:15:49.520 | really cool if you do it. And that's my final piece of

00:15:52.680 | advice. You need to walk in and be like, Hey, guys, deep Monday,

00:15:55.640 | am I right? Yeah, it's gonna get some deep coffee break over

00:15:59.520 | there. No, you're doing a little deep urination or good work

00:16:01.560 | with that you come back, we'll deep it up, stay deep. Let's

00:16:04.840 | deep on deep on over to the deep conference room, man, we're gonna

00:16:08.160 | go deep on these type of things. This is going to make you sound

00:16:10.240 | awesome. And people are going to love you. Jesse here will will

00:16:14.000 | attest every time I see him. We fist bump and say, people

00:16:21.160 | people. You can attest to that. You see each other in the

00:16:24.800 | street, people people, let it explode. If you're going to do

00:16:29.440 | all this work, you got to let people know. And I'll make you

00:16:33.400 | it trust me, I know from personal experience, people love

00:16:35.640 | it when you use the word deep all the time, and they think

00:16:37.560 | you're awesome. So let's throw that in there. Alright guys,

00:16:40.320 | that's it core idea. Work deeply, people meeple.

00:16:44.640 | [music]

00:16:46.480 | [music]

00:16:47.480 | (upbeat music)

00:16:50.060 | [Music]

Core Idea: Deep Work

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