What is deep work and how to cultivate deep attention

Newport calls this kind of work, Deep Work. He also argues that by doing deep work repeatedly, you don’t just feel accomplished but also happier.

In his book, Newport points to the habits of several influential thinkers who consciously cut off all communications for set periods so that they could ‘think deeply’. The psychiatrist Carl Jung would lock himself in a stone house in the countryside outside of his hometown, Zurich. J.K. Rowling famously rented out a suite at the Balmoral Hotel when she was struggling to complete The Deathly Hallows.

This is all great, but what happens when the boss keeps emailing or calling?

Of course, not all of us have the genius (or the deep pockets) of Jung or Rowling. We keep our day jobs and that comes with a regular dose of calls and emails from the boss. So, while we may cut ourselves off from social media or not take calls from friends and family while at work, how do we avoid replying to that email or answering that call from our boss?

Newport acknowledges this problem and suggests that performing deep work requires a drastic change in the way we communicate and the expectations of those around us. This includes our boss.

In an interview to NPR’s podcast Hidden Brain, Newport suggests that this could involve a conversation with your supervisor and articulating what constitutes deep work in your job profile. Acknowledge that both deep and nondeep (or shallow) work are important but also get a sense of what the ratio should be. Based on this, you can set aside a few or several hours of your day when you’re completely incommunicado and focusing on creating work that brings value to the organisation.

Similarly, he gives an example of a client-facing consultancy that, instead of sharing emails of individual POCs, could set up a single email address where the client could direct all their queries. The understanding being that there will be someone monitoring that email and will respond in a certain amount of time.

The point here is that you need not be upper management or a top dog at your firm to be able to practice deep work. You could be a beginner, and this could well be your first job. As long as you are able to set your communication expectations with your supervisor and importantly deliver results, you should be fine. You obviously cannot be spending the time dedicated to deep work playing video games or surfing the internet pointlessly.

So Deep Work is for engineers and accountants, right? Not for us creative types?

It is easy to dismiss deep work as unsuited to creative careers. Newport disagrees. “(The) really creative people… are surprisingly structured in how they approach their day,” he says on the Hidden Brain podcast. “… great creative thinkers approach their time like accountants… they're very structured and systematic about their time and (yet) produce the most unstructured, brilliant, creative insights.”

I didn’t have to go too far to see this hypothesis being proven. One of my peers, an exceptional journalist I admire, divides his day with the cold precision of a school timetable and yet manages to come up with sharp insights into the beat that he covers, reads a ton of heavy books, squeezes in time for a workout, and even sketches and paints.

To me, he’s the living embodiment of the famous Chuck Close quote: Inspiration is for amateurs.

If anything, deep work is best suited to the creative types. Newport himself points out that there are several jobs where deep work isn’t suited. For example, that of a large company’s CEO, who would better serve as a decision-engine for people doing deep work, he says.

How do you retrain your mind to focus?

Now that you’ve run out of excuses to refrain from practising deep work, here are some handy tips on how to actually do it:

1. Stay away from social media

Some of us have the liberty to completely quit social media. Most of us don’t because we need social media for our work. If you are unable to go off social media, try blocking out chunks of time in the day when you don’t access Instagram, Twitter, etc.

2. Don’t reply to emails and calls

Once you’ve set the expectations with your colleagues, boss, clients, and friends, you can go dark every day for a few hours. By all estimates, you cannot practice deep work for more than four hours. Surely, the world will carry on perfectly without you for that duration.

3. Plan out your week

Prioritise the four hours of deep work, of course, but also break down what you plan to achieve in that time. Articulate your things to do in a sharper, more precise manner.

For instance, if you’re preparing a speech, break the process down:

Write the outline

Complete the first draft

Edit and proofread

Re-read

Newport says he blocks out chunks of his day for deep work up to four weeks in advance. Not everyone may have the liberty to do that, but you can certainly start by planning one week in advance.

4. Have an end-of-day ritual

Much has been said about workdays stretching on, especially while we work from home. Cal Newport has a phrase that he says aloud to acknowledge the end of his workday. He sheepishly admits that the phrase he uses is “System shutdown complete.”

Marie Kondo too stresses on the importance of rituals to begin and end your workday: tuning fork to signal the beginning of her day and turning on music to mark the end.

These rituals can have a similar effect to picking up your bag and driving home from the office - they tell your brain that the work for the day (barring an emergency) is done and you can now turn your focus to other aspects of your life.

The idea of deep work is not to make it all work and no play but rather its exact opposite - so you can create a life where inspiration is possible and work-life balance is not a mythical concept.