Early in Cal Newport’s new book, Deep Work: Rules For Focused Success In A Distracted World, he meets an architect who dreams of “deep work chambers” – heavily soundproofed boxes, each the size of a small room, permitting “total focus and uninterrupted workflow”. I want one. Alternatively, I’d settle for Mark Twain’s arrangement: a writing shed on a farm, so far from the main house that his family summoned him to meals using a horn. These days, few people need convincing that intense focus is a good thing, constantly threatened by email and social media. The real challenge for anyone writing a book on the matter, lies in answering the plaintive follow-up: “Yes, but how?” You don’t need to hear again about Bill Gates’s regular “think weeks”, spent in rural isolation with only books for company. You want to know how to find time for thinking given your job, your toddlers, your boss, and your baffling yet stubborn failure to achieve Gates’s £55bn net worth.
The first part of Newport’s answer is a financial incentive. Deep work is no “nostalgic affectation” of writers and philosophers, he insists; it’s essential if you’re to master the kind of work that will remain lucrative once robots are doing the rest. Today’s rewards, he notes, don’t go to those who use Facebook, but those who build its code, a task demanding long stretches of focused thought. (Our best brains now make their millions using their focus to damage everyone else’s.) So it’s an error to think you’re too busy with office chores or parenting for deep work. It’s deep work that will let you keep that job and feed those kids.
Newport’s more encouraging second point is that there’s no need to become a monk. This “monastic philosophy of deep work” is the one we associate with great authors or artists, unencumbered by day jobs and/or families. But it’s only one of four approaches he outlines. The others are “bimodal” (taking a few days at a time for deep work), “rhythmic” (a few scheduled hours a day or week) and “journalistic” (seizing moments as they arise).
It’s liberating to stop yearning for monkish conditions you’ll never attain and instead see yourself as a rhythmic or journalistic deep worker. Another switch of perspective: stop taking “breaks from distraction” and instead take “breaks from focus”. Don’t think in terms of shutting off email or Twitter for an hour; make shut-off the default, and make sporadic forays into connectivity. And, yes, he maintains, you can do this even if your job is heavily dependent on the internet. You’ll just have to make your forays more frequent.
What emerges most powerfully is the sense that it’s wrong to think of deep work as one more thing you’ve got to try to cram into your schedule. Truly committing to it, Newport suggests, transforms the rest of your time – so you’ll crank through shallow work faster, be more present in your home life, and eliminate time wasted switching between tasks. Depth, in short, isn’t at odds with a full life – it facilitates it. I’m persuaded. I still want one of those soundproofed chambers, though.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
