The Premise of Deep Work (article & review of Cal Newport’s Deep Work)
On my Christmas list, recommended by an ultra-productive friend who is an ABC Journalist and Podcast producer in the final throes of a PHD, was a book I’ve found to be the most immediately beneficial of all on my recent reading list – Deep Work by Cal Newport.
Newport sets the stage that in the modern service economy, our greatest value is attributed to our highest quality intellectual output, which requires a very high degree of focus to produce. He cites numerous leaders in their fields, super-knowledge workers (authors, philosophers, business people, academics) who have reverted to total isolation to optimise focus and productivity – the stereotype of the author’s cabin in the woods. He goes on to contend that many of today’s knowledge workers face a curious dichotomy, that the typical workplace and it’s embedded social structures, provide a huge source of distraction and dysfunction to this optimal focus, essentially undermining the value of the most potentially productive people.
As a counter balance to this challenge, he proposes a range of solutions to increase knowledge-based productivity (which many of today’s leadership roles involve, if not depend on), including setting aside diarised zones of deep work, cutting oneself off from all distraction to focus on optimal intellectual output. This means no phone, social media, instant messenger, team interaction etc. Impossible you say? Not so he contends, provided the organisation and recognise the increased benefit of the output, numerous tactics allow for this space to be created. I’ll not elaborate further on his recommendations here as I really do recommend the book as an informative quick read, however I can vouch that over the past few months I’ve adopted as many of the recommendations as I can, and have found a huge uplift in my own output.
Appreciating that this mode is not universally applicable in many workplaces, including my own where it must be a part of my work rather than the whole – but it’s interesting to me how often my most productive phases, certainly around content creation, strategy and innovation for 4iGroup come from these ‘deep work zones’ when I can schedule and keep to them.
I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts on this, and whether you have found any comparable or contrasting results from your own experiments with your most productive way of working – and how you can apply this to your teams and the broader organisational context.
As always thanks for reading, feel free to get in touch with any questions, observations or to enquirer how we can work with you to enhance productivity in your organisation.
Tim
