Routines: deep work 🦾🧠

Escape to work at your mountain hideaway ⛰

This is for high-level focus when you have a singular, usually large, task that you're working on, and the time to dedicate to it. This style of Deep Work aims to eliminate the chances of anything distracting you so you can focus all your efforts on your work.

Donald Knuth, a former professor of Computer Science at Standford provides one example. He has no email, can be reached only by mail which he may respond to, once a quarter. He was quoted in the book, Deep Work as saying,

"I have been a happy man, ever since January 1st, 1990 when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975. It seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on the top of things, but not for me. My role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying…”

Two Modes

This weaves the monastic style of deep work into daily life. The two modes are Deep Work & Everything else. You can choose the duration and frequency but the important thing is to make it clear to anyone you’re interacting with when you will be available & when you’re unavailable to the outside world to become laser-focused, cutting out everything else, when in Deep Work mode.

This routine can be implemented by dedicating one day a week to deep work and up to several weeks or months switching between the two modes.

Don’t Break the Chain

This routine dedicates a time-block every day to performing Deep Work. You'll want to schedule when they’ll happen each day ahead of time. Every decision we make using up a portion of our mental gas tank leading to decision fatigue. Scheduling in advance when you’ll be working primes the brain and allows you to deploy that mental firepower into your work. It also helps to engage the power that humans are creatures of habit. Our brains like predictability, it uses up fewer resources and minimizes uncertainty.

Jerry Seinfield gave this routine as advice to comedians, he said to write a joke every day, and make an X on the calendar each day that you do. He said you’ll enjoy watching that chain grow & recommended to never break the chain.

Life happens, things come up, it won’t be the end of the world if you have to miss a day, just never miss two.

Creating amongst Chaos

For this routine, you squeeze in your work whenever you can, and is great to use for unpredictable schedules or days. Cal Newport, in his book Deep Work, stated that this is the most difficult Deep Work routine to employ & takes experience to develop the ability to dive deep at a moment’s notice.

While this may be the case, you can utilize it for getting in some Active Retrieval practice with flash-cards or self-quizzing next time you have some moments to create some neural links during what may be a hectic day.

Execute a Grand Gesture

Sometimes we all can use a little boost or have an important project that we’re having difficulty with. For these moments, you can attempt a hail mary as described by Cal Newport author of Deep Work,

“By leveraging a radical change to your normal environment, coupled perhaps with a significant investment of effort or money, all dedicated toward supporting a deep work task, you increase the perceived importance of the task.”

This routine combines the monastic routine with some level of investment that helps raise the stakes. For example, book a nice hotel or Airbnb in nature, the change in scenery creates novelty while the investment provides an incentive for extra focus & space to finish your work. If all else fails, you hopefully at least were recharged from the change of scenery.

Life Happens, Plan for it.

Days can be unpredictable, things come up, that’s the beauty of serendipity, but can also be the source of stress if shallow tasks or interruptions keep happening while trying to accomplish more significant work. The key is not to try and eliminate these, but to plan for when you’ll accomplish them. Buffer blocks are the antidote to handling all of the necessary daily tasks that we need to do.

One 30 minute buffer block may be enough per day, or maybe an hour block twice a day. Regardless, the advantage happens when you group the more shallow unproductive work together, increasing your efficiency in handling those tasks.

Refill the gas tank

Don’t let the other Deep Work routines give the impression that you must always be “working”. That’s not what they are at all, but ways of structuring your time with intention. Resting and recharging is just as important. While working your brain is in the focused mode, and by focusing on your tasks you’re instructing your brain on what neurons to build.

Moving into states of rest transfers the brain into diffused mode. Here the subconscious brain keeps working in the background developing connections with all of our previous knowledge. These are underpinnings of the ‘ah-ha moments. It’s why ideas come in the shower or the moment when you stop trying to remember something, it comes to you.

It’s all about balance. When you’re trying to accomplish Deep Work put all your efforts into focusing on your task, and when your resting, be preset, breathe, and relax. When you return to your work you’ll have more focus and energy.

Buffer blocks can come in several flavors. Quick ones for 5 to 15 mins, after a work sprint, where you do something enjoyable, get up, move around, go outside, or exercise quickly, but probably stay off of your phone as that has been shown to not provide the same amount of rest. They can also be longer, up to 3 hours, where you pursue something that provides joy.