Cal Newport

Always ready to launch. Thanks for having me on.

Cal Newport

I’ll start by laying the sort of foundations of the intense focus and deep work. Just to define it.

Deep work is the activity in which you’re giving something intense focus for a long period of time. It’s getting your full attention. You’re thinking about as hard as you can for a long period of time with no distraction. No glances at this. No breaks for that.

Cal Newport

Well, your excitement is well justified and essentially, the premise of my book and this is not my phrase, it’s actually a phrase that came from The Economist talking about the book is that Deep Work is like the killer app of the knowledge economy. This type of effort, where you’re able to give something unbroken, intense focus is incredibly valuable and becoming only more valuable at exactly the same time that as we know, people are actually becoming worse at it.

When I think about deep work and intense focus, I think about it as this great opportunity. If you cultivate the skill and it does require cultivation and if you prioritize this skill, which requires quite a commitment, there’s this huge order of magnitude benefits you stand to reap both in terms of business productivity but also in terms of just meaning and satisfaction and enjoyment in your professional life.

So, I’m as excited as you guys are about this concept because I think it’s one of these activities that if mastered, can really be transformative.

Cal Newport

There are two things that seem to be almost always necessary to succeed with an intense focus and deep work session.

1. Have some notion of scheduling system or routine.

Deep work and intense focus is difficult. It uses a lot of cognitive energy so it’s something that is very hard to just spontaneously fall into and just aside, “Yehey! I don’t have a lot to do. I’m in the mood to focus really hard.” That doesn’t happen very often.

People who succeed with deep work and intense focus tend to have some sort of scheduling or routine, which might be, I do deep work at the same time on the same days or it might be a scheduling discipline like every Sunday, I block out on my calendar when my deep work is happening or it could be more extreme like the people that used this by model philosophy of putting aside many days at a time and just falling off the grid. Then, they are coming back, and being connected again, then, many days at aside being off the grid.

Whatever it is, having some sort of scheduling system or routine seems to be the key.

2. Couple your system or routine with some sort of ritual surrounding how you actually approach the work, where you go, your rules when you do the work, what happens during your working session, which are not allowed to do, how long you work. It’s just like the structure and ritual around the Deep Work

Those two things combined are the necessary recipe if you’re going to succeed at doing a lot of deep work and intense focus in your life.

Cal Newport

Yes. Location helps because it essentially allows your mind to initiate this sort of transformation routine into intense focus and deep work mode in sort of autopilot.

So if you know that when I go to this location or I do this to my office or I go for this walk, this means I think deeply. Eventually, you can slip into your intense focus and deep work mode for free just by going to that location or initiate that ritual.

On the other hand, if you’re just in an auto trail location, at an arbitrary time, just say, “You know what? I’m going to try to wrench my attention away from what I’m doing right now and force it to focus.” That’s actually going to expend a lot of willpower. As we know, your willpower reserves really fluctuate throughout the day and through the week and so, that’s going to be a much more risky gamble and one that’s not going to pay off quite often.

Cal Newport

All of those things come up often. I profiled several people on the book who had their intense focus and deep work rituals down to the point where it wasn’t just where they went, how long they’re going to work, what they’re going to drink, what they’re going to eat. However, at the exact times, they were going to fill up their second cup of coffee when they were going to take a break to go to the bathroom even.

Some of these people had it so regimented that from the outside, this is crazy but on the other hand, they we’re accomplishing a massive amount of stuff because it seems to be a law of true concentration and intense focus. The more you can take off of your mind’s plate, just automate, fix, it’s just there supporting you, and you don’t have to worry about it, the more energy you have to actually focus on the task which means, you can actually get to deeper levels of concentration and it’s really worth emphasizing.

Cal Newport

It’s not a little bit more productivity. It’s more like orders of magnitude for productivity and it’s almost like a super power. That those who have really hone this ability to give intense focus, it’s almost like a super power how much they’re able to produce per say, unit of time they actually spend working.

Cal Newport

Yeah. I think there’s an important distinction here that supports what he wrote in that book and then also like Greg McKeown in Essentialism. They both touched on this point of trying to identify the most important things to work on and give intense focus.

From my perspective, an important way to think about this is to recognize that there are really two types of work tasks.

1. Deep work tasks

They are tasks that really do require your full attention and intense focus. They push your skills to your limit. It’s when you’re sitting down to write a chapter of the new book and to produce the best possible writing. It’s just pushing your mind to its limit.

2. Shallow work.

These are tasks that do not really require your full attention and intense focus. They don’t require you to apply hard one skills. They’re easy to replicate like answering emails, do social media, tweaking your WordPress configuration. These are the types of things that don’t need your full attention but are still necessary.

The reality is that shallow work in a job is what prevents you from getting fired in some sense while deep work, is the type of effort that gets you promoted. In the entrepreneurial context, shallow work efforts are the types that maybe prevent you from going bankrupt next month but, intense focus and deep work efforts are the types that double your revenue a few months down the line.

I think the selection question is also clarified through the length of deep work and intense focus because what it tells you is it’s only these deep work efforts, the efforts that require your intense concentration that are really going to push you forward or push your business forward and that they’re different. It’s a different class effort than shallow work efforts.

Shallow work has to be done but I try to help people foster this mindset where it’s where they crave the deep work and intense focus. If they’re not getting a lot of that done, they feel more and more people in knowledge economy are doing essentially 100% shallow work and considering themselves successful. They say, “I’m busy all the time. I’m always doing things. Shouldn’t this count?” So, this is sort of a secondary benefit of this terminology. It helps you understand that there are some efforts that push your mind to its limit and produce the most value you’re capable of producing and then there’s the easy to replicate stuff. They’re not the same thing.

Cal Newport

I think one thing that is important is to measure and I think one of the most important metrics you can start with is your deep to shallow work ratio. It’s a pretty simple idea. You track your time throughout the period of a week, you count how many real working hours are actually spent in a state of deep work, giving something unbroken, intense focus for an hour or more at the time, your intense concentration and how many hours for everything else and then, look at the ratio of those two.

I think this is really informative because it gives you an actual number to not only observe but to use manage. It allows you to say things such as, “For my current positioning goals, my deepest shallow work ratio should be X.” You can go and measure it and if you’re falling short, you can let that concrete number help push you to make concrete changes to how you push your work and how you run your work days.

Cal Newport

Anyone who’s looking to thrive or to get ahead or create things of value should have an answer to those two questions. What’s my target deepest shallow work ratio and how close am I to hitting that right now?

Cal Newport

I think this is an emerging area of study that requires intense focus and certainly, something that people are increasingly recognizing as being important in the world of professional productivity and that’s this notion that we’re not computer processors. You can’t just think about, “Okay, I have a bunch of task and I’m a processor. My only decision is to sequence them and then I just execute them one after another.” And to instead recognize that we have rhythms.

High energy here, low energy here. This type of the month I have higher energy. This part of the day I have higher energy. This part of the week versus this part of week I have higher energy and that this notion that work should be uniform at all points between 9 to 5, 5 days a week, 4 weeks a month that you should be executing the same way, doing same amount of work, at the same level, at the same pace. Increasingly recognize just like your note that doesn’t make sense.

I think you’re onto something really important. Tony Schwartz has done some interesting work on getting intense focus. Douglas Rushkoff’s book Present Shock, has a really interesting treatment of this as well and is something that I hear more and more that we should not be so homogeneous in our work, so the rhythms and energies. It’s okay.

I got to tell you, I do this in my own life all the time and I can get away with intense focus pretty easily because I’m a professor. So, I don’t have boss. I have a lot of flexibility and what that means for me is that I have huge swings, seasonal, monthly, and weekly. Really hard and then I’m ramped down for a while taking days off and then, really hard and then this month is lighter, this month is really intense. It’s all over the place. I’ve had a lot of success with intense focus. I think you’re hitting on something important.

Cal Newport

That’s what I call Depth Pacing and it’s pretty common. What’s important to recognize about what that actually means is that if you’re trying to tackle something that’s incredibly cognitive and intense focus demanding, you’re trying to learn something really hard to produce something of really high value at the very limit.

Cal Newport

Things that are at the very limit of your skills, they’re too difficult to instigate a flow state. Flow states are nice but flow states are something you hit usually where you’re applying a skill you’ve already honed in way that you are comfortable.

Cal Newport

Yes. The other analogy is in music. If you’ve mastered a difficult guitar songs or guitar play when you’re performing, you can fall into the flow state because you’re applying this hard one skill at a very high level. It can feel effortless. You get lost in it but the process of learning that song is really frustrating because you have to keep pushing yourself past where you’re comfortable in order to learn the new things and you’re not going to fall into a flow state.

In fact, it’s going to be uncomfortable as often sort of deliberate practice or learning things deliberately is and that’s where having this depth pacing helps, where you go, “20 minutes as hard as I can at this thing that’s very uncomfortable and difficult. I’m pushing my fingers a little bit faster than they’re able to go right now in this slick,” and then you back off for 5 – 10 minutes, then back into it 20 minutes.

That’s important in those scenarios because it’s so hard, you can’t sustain it but what’s also important to recognize is when you’re doing this type of depth pacing, this breaks are of a certain type.

Now, let me turn my attention to like email or social media or completely change my cognitive context because then, it’s going to be really hard to actually get your attention back to the hard thing you’re working on. There’s an effect called Attention Residue which is really important here. It could take up to 20 minutes for the residue of that new thing to clear out and until it clears, you’re at reduced cognitive capacity and at less intense focus.

This breaks that you do like when you’re studying something new or learning a new song or trying to master new skill, it’s more like giving your brain a breather but it’s like, you go for a walk around the block or go get a glass of water but you’re not context shifting. You’re not shifting over to something else and coming back. This type of pacing is really important when you’re doing something that’s deliberate and very difficult. It’s important when you do this types of pacing blocks that you don’t actually completely change your context during your breaks. It’s a really sort of passive type of break where you’re just letting your neurons essentially cool down.

Cal Newport

Yeah. I think weightlifting is a good analogy for this effect. When you actually want to build your muscle, you have to lift something really heavy and strain the muscle and obviously, you have to take breaks. You can’t keep doing the bicep curls for 20 minutes. You have to take a break. However, if you watch people who are doing weightlifting, they don’t in between sets go off and get some work done, and watch TV for a little bit.

You see that they’re in the zone still. They’re keeping their mind inside their work out. They’re keeping their attention in that area. They have to really keep attention in what they’re doing. So I think it’s similar when you’re trying to do a really deliberate type of deep work. The intensity now is focusing on weight lifting. Then you back off the intensity but your head is still on the game.

You’re still, “Okay, I’m in weightlifting mode. I’m in the gym. This is where my focus is.”

Cal Newport

Part of that has to do with this effect I mentioned briefly before called Attention Residue which essentially tells us that when you switch your attention from one target to another, the original target leaves a residue in your mind that can take a while to clear out. Until it clears out, it’ll reduce your cognitive capacity but to talk it a little bit more informally, those thoughts just kind of stick around and gunk the works up.

Even a quick change in attention can generate this residue and that’s why it’s really important that in a deep work session, there is no distraction.

The amount of time you spend the distraction is irrelevant because even a 10 second glance at an inbox can create a massive amount of attention residue.

You see an email there. It’s from your boss. You know you have to answer it. You know you don’t have time to answer it now and you immediately turn your attention back to the hard thing you’re trying to focus on. That email and your mind and what I’m going to say and what you think it is and how I’m going to write my response is going to be there for 20 – 30 minutes eating up cognitive capacity, preventing you from achieving true depth. So, it takes a while to get started. If you even glance to the source of distraction, you essentially go back to square one and it’s going to take a long time to clear that residue out. That’s why it’s difficult.

In terms of helping to get around it, there’s a short term things you can do which is these scheduling systems and rituals. This is when I do my deep work, for the first 5 minute of deep work, I do this. I take a walk before I start. I do this to my life.

You have these rituals in that help your mind know it’s deep work time. That’ll help clear out the attention residue a little bit quicker but also, I do have to emphasize that deep work in generals are very practice skill. People like to think, “I know how to focus. I just need to make more time to do it,” but it’s more complicated than that.

If you haven’t been systemically training your ability to concentrate, the amount of concentration you can generate and the comfort you have being in a state of concentration is going to be pretty small. This is also something that gets better at practice. People that have to do deep thinking and intense focus most of their time professionally, get really good at this. They can fall into it quicker. They can sustain it longer. They can get to deeper levels of intensity. It’s less uncomfortable.

That’s the other thing I want to emphasize is that…

Cal Newport

I think what I was going to say can actually just what where you’re going there because this is a topic I’ve been working on since this book came out which is how do you get these ideas into an actual workplace. What’s the right way to work in a knowledge economy where the main thing you’re doing is producing value with your mind? There’s a lot of different answers to those questions but in your type of situation, what I was going to suggest is that, I’m a huge proponent of synchronous communication.

You can call it office hours or meeting slots but you know in your day and maybe it’s every 2 hours. Here is our synchronous conversation time. We sit down together and we talk and we deal with everything we need to deal with. If in between those synchronous slots things come up, you just have batch them on your end until the next synchronous slot comes up.

You might end up building up a long list of things that you need to ask Luis about, then when you get there, like, “Okay, now let’s just talk about it all in person,” as opposed to asynchronously sort of this sending off as things arise, “Oh, I need to know this,” or “Can you tell me about this?”

There’s some good research that has studied this approach to work with intense focus. What it finds is that at first, it’s hard because you need things and the next slot for discussion is not for a while and it stalls you but what the research also shows is that, pretty quickly, you adapt your work habits so that you learn to get what you need in advance. You learn to plan out what you’re doing a little bit further and then, people end up being way more productive.

This is my relationship advice.

Cal Newport

Yeah. I think this is an important point and it’s actually something that caught me off guard when I was writing the book about this because originally, the first part of the book which makes the case for Deep Work had been outlined to only have this sort of professional arguments.

So, why does deep work help you produce so much more and when into it, it helps you learn complex things quickly. It helps you produce more per unit spent working because of various neurological effects and, that’s what I felt the arguments for deep work was going to be. However, as I was doing the research, I kept coming up with example after example and resource after resource that kept pushing towards another conclusion which was deep work also just feels more meaningful.

So, I ended up diving into that and there is all this different threads of evidence. Some threads coming from neuroscience. Some threads coming from psychology. Some threads coming from philosophy. All of which move together produce the same output, which is this idea that deep work just feels better.

You can go into the science and the philosophy of it but really, what it comes down to it, I think the best way to summarize why this is true is that human being seem to be wired for craftsmanship. We derive great satisfaction out of putting our resources and applying them at their fullest to produce the best possible things for capable of producing. That just feels good to us. It feels right. It touches our soul. It feels meaningful. It feels satisfying, and it’s a completely different experience than this sort of typical fragmented attention busyness which most of us spend our time.

Something I learned in doing this book is that we have sort of a whole cohort of peoples, the whole generations of people who are walking around with these low levels of anxiety because we’re not really wired to be in the state of continuous partial attention that instead of creating something of value, we’re instead putting our attention from this to this and this and it creates this low level anxiety that we even don’t identified anymore as, “I don’t have to feel that way.”

Cal Newport

Yeah, and it turns out that if you can put your attention on one thing, you get the same benefits plus others because you also get benefit of appreciation in having created something and what the Greeks called arête which means putting your talents to their fullest application.

That’s my final pitch for this, is there’s a lot of productivity benefits to spending more time focusing intensely but there’s this huge philosophical argument that if you’re able to craft for yourself a deep life, which is a life where you focus on a small number of things that you do in an incredibly high level and minimize as much as possible non-deep things.

Cal Newport

It could be somewhat drastic. I embrace these principles and accordingly, I’ve never had a social media account. I don’t web surf. I don’t really know how to entertain myself on the internet. I don’t use computers after work hours for the most part.

All this stuff can seem pretty drastic but it creates this great rich life. I focus on a small number of things. I try them really well and that’s very fulfilling and it’s professionally rewarding as well. I’m a big advocate as a deep life really is a good life.

Cal Newport

Thank you. I always love the opportunity to do some impromptu relationship advice. That’s the first one.

Cal Newport

All right. Thanks.