Cal Newport's Blog, page 40

Talk to Your Boss About Deep Work

A Deep Case Study

Tom works in marketing for a venture-backed tech start-up in Silicon Valley. After reading Deep Work, he realized that prioritizing uninterrupted concentration would help him excel in his job, which centers on cognitively demanding research and writing.

But he despaired that regular deep work was impossible given his company’s culture.

As he explained:

Our company uses email and Slack as our primary means of communication. I get so many emails and chat messages every day, and there’s this unspoken expectation in my department that if someone emails/messages you, you should respond almost immediately, even if you were in the middle of something. If you didn’t respond quick enough people would assume that you were slacking off (this expectation was especially strong with instant messages).

Communication environments of this type are increasingly common in knowledge work (and near ubiquitous in tech). And they can be quite distressing.

As Tom admitted, he really didn’t get much “actual work done,” as his days were filled with “putting out fires” and “reacting to other people’s needs.”

Fortunately, however, all hope was not lost…

The Deep Discussion Strategy

I suggest in my book that employees interested in depth should discuss the topic with their boss. In more detail, during this respectful conversation you should try to accomplish the following:

Explain the concepts of deep and shallow work, noting, of course, that both are important.
Ask what ratio of deep to shallow work hours you should be aiming for in your job.
Then promise to measure and report back regularly. (Most bosses will be interested to gain these extra data points.)

With some trepidation, Tom decided to give this strategy a try. Here’s his report:

I explained to [my boss] the concept of deep and shallow work.  I asked her about her expectations: how much time does she expect me to spend each day researching/writing, and how much time does she expect me to spend communicating through email and chat?

Her reaction?

As soon as I brought it up, it was immediately obvious that if she said she wanted me to spend large portions of my time communicating rather than doing my work, it would have been ridiculous. The only reason this had become a problem in the first place is that we’d never been deliberate about setting expectations.

Tom and his boss quickly settled on a plan in which Tom would have a 1.5 to 2 hour chunk of uninterrupted deep work time in the morning and in the afternoon.

Outside of those chunks he would be answer emails and instant messages promptly.

After talking with his manager, Tom then explained the plan to the team members with whom he communicated most frequently. It took them about a week to adjust to his deep work schedule, and now it doesn’t come up.

As Tom concludes:

It’s been three months now and nothing broke. Checking email and slack less didn’t result in any catastrophic issues. In fact, it’s helped me improve the quality of my work and my ability to focus, and my brain doesn’t feel fried at the end of the day from multi-tasking/switching contexts all day long.

This deep work discussion strategy is simple but it really does work. Many draining work cultures are more flexible than employees expect (see also: Leslie Perlow’s research on the Boston Consulting Group).

Put another way, just because your office seem hostile to deep work today doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t support it tomorrow…if you bring it up.

Just ask Tom. But not between 9 to 11 or 2 to 4, because he’ll be too busy creating valuable things to answer.

(Photo by Kai Hendry)

Write Longer Emails

The Switching Cost

I want to close my recent series of posts on email with a practical observation that’s often missed:

The main productivity cost of email is not the time you spend reading and replying to messages, but instead the abrupt context shift caused when you switch your attention from the task at hand to the cognitive cacophony of an inbox.

As I write about in Deep Work (see also: this excerpt), when you shift your attention from one target to another, the first target leaves behind an attention residue that can linger for at least 10 to 20 minutes reducing your cognitive capacity.

(One oft-cited study found the impact of these shifts on your mental ability to be comparable to being stoned.)

The neural damage, in other words, is caused during the first moments of firing up your inbox. Whether you then go on to spend just a couple of minutes or a half hour wrangling your message doesn’t much change this impact.

The Power of Process

The obvious conclusion to this observation is that you should batch your email checking to a small number of sessions per day; i.e., the now famous, “I check my email twice a day, at 10 and 2” aspiration.

But there’s a more subtle and often more effective conclusion lurking here as well. As I argue in Rule #4 of Deep Work: write longer emails.

In more detail, I promote a technique called process-centric email. It works as follows:

When sending or replying to an email, identify the goal this emerging email thread is trying to achieve. For example, perhaps its goal is to synchronize a plan for an upcoming meeting with a collaborator or to agree on a time to grab coffee.
Next, come up with a process that gets you and your correspondent to this goal while minimizing the number of back and forth messages required.
Explain this process in the email so that you and your recipient are on the same page.

For example, assume a friend sends you a note that reads:

Do you want to grab coffee sometime soon?

Resist the urge to reply: “okay, what works for you?”

Sure, that message would be quick to write, but it does not outline a clear process that minimizes back and forth messages. Indeed, it is likely consigning you to a long, attention zapping thread.

Here, by contrast, is a process-centric reply:

Sounds great. I propose we meet at the Starbucks on campus. Below I have listed four dates and times over the next two weeks. If any of these work for you, let me know and I will consider your reply confirmation that the meeting is set. If none of these times work, then call me or text me on my cell () during one of my upcoming office hours (Tue/Thur from 12:30 to 1:30), when I’m sure to be around, and we’ll find something that works.

We can first agree that the process-centric reply will take more time to write. If you respond to all relevant messages in this manner, the minutes required to clean your inbox will definitely increase.

But this doesn’t matter.

What you’re minimizing with process-centric emailing is not the time you spend in your inbox, but the number of times you have to open it.

Put another way: if you respond in this manner, your occasional inbox visits might take more time, but in-between these sessions, you’ll be left blissfully and productively free of the necessity to continually check back in to keep non-process centric threads proceeding at a socially acceptable pace.

I’ll admit that I sometimes struggle with this technique because the urge to get out of the inbox fast is so powerful. But I’m always happy when I persevere.

(Image by Bryan Alexander)

Schedule Meeting Margins

Margin Matters

Sometimes it’s the simplest productivity hacks that end up returning the greatest benefits over time. Here’s one such strategy I’ve been toying with recently:

The Meeting Margin Method

Assume you have to schedule a meeting that lasts X minutes. Instead of blocking off X minutes on your calendar, block off (1.5)*X minutes.

For example, if you agree to attend a 30 minute meeting starting at 2:00 pm, try to block out 2:00 to 2:45 on your calendar. Similarly, if it was a 60 minute meeting, try to block out 2:00 to 3:30. And so on.

The key is that you’re not extending the time of the meeting itself. That is, you still attend the meeting for the originally proposed time. The extra 50% on your calendar is a meeting margin protected for your own personal use.

In particular, the margin can be used for the following purposes:

To process the meeting: clarify any new obligations that were discussed and make sure they’re in your system. Perhaps execute some of the smaller tasks right away. The goal here is to close all open loops related to the meeting so that it releases its hold on your mental energy moving forward in the day.
To catch up on anything missed while in the meeting: check your inboxes to handle anything urgent (if you’re in the type of job were such urgent communication is common and cannot be ignored). The goal here is to eliminate the need for you to rudely and uncomfortably split your attention during the meeting itself by constantly checking your inbox. If you know you have time right after to check in, you can confidently concentrate while in the meeting.
To make progress on real work: if the margin is large enough, make progress on things you know need to get done. The goal here is to stave off that feeling that everyone but you has control over your time and attention.
To take a break: take a breather to allow attention residue to fade and your mental energy to recharge (c.f., Tony Schwartz). The goal here is to reduce the cortisol-spiking sense of urgency created by tightly packed calendars.

There are few experiences more stressful than a day in which your schedule is so fractured with appointments to talk about work that you have no time to act on the results of all this discussion — leading, instead, to the awful sense of a growing stack of obligations, all being juggled in your head, that you have no idea how to define or handle.

The meeting margin can help.

It’s a simple strategy, and, importantly, can be implemented covertly; that is, no one needs to know that you’re adding these extra margins as you fill in your calendar.

But it systematically injects enough breathing room into you schedule to ensure that even if your job heavily depends on discussions about work you’ll maintain your ability to actually get real work done.

(Photo by Long Road Photography)

To Make Email Easier We Must Make it Harder

Two Tales of Empty Inboxes

I have a friend who runs an investor-backed online education company. He recently made an interesting change to his email setup. When you send a message to his normal address, you now get back an autoresponder that reads (in part):

“I appreciate you reaching out. I’m currently in hermit-mode creating as much value as I can for all of our stakeholders and having fun seeing if I can eliminate email from my life…Of course, if this is important, we’re here to help! Just email  and we’ll use our evolving email-free strategy to communicate.”

This extra step of re-sending your message to the assistant should add, at most, 10 extra seconds to the process of emailing this individual. Rationally speaking, therefore, it should have minimal impact on the number of messages that make it to my friend.

But this is not what happened.

As he reported to me recently, this additional step has “massively” reduced the amount of communication he receives.

Earlier this week, a reader wrote me with a similar tale. A computer programmer by trade, he setup a custom system that responds to incoming emails with a web form in which the sender can describe his or her purpose and needs in a series of text boxes.

Again, the extra effort of re-entering this information is minimal.

But the effect was significant.

His incoming message count reduced by a factor of 40. (He measured.)

The Danger of Zero

These stories caught my attention because they underscore a point I’ve seen gain traction recently: one of the core contributors to email’s nastiest impacts is its zero marginal cost.

Put another way, once we all made the necessary efforts to get setup with this technology, the cost of sending a message to someone became effectively zero.

This is important because we know from a variety of different disciplines that when friction in a system minimizes below a certain threshold, unpredictable and non-linear dynamics often follow.

I’m increasingly convinced that a similar effect is at play with email. Look at my above two examples: when even a small amount of extra friction was injected into the picture, email overwhelm essentially vanished.

The natural follow-up question to ask is how such friction could be added in a more general way. For example:

A good friend of mine (who is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist) recently quipped to me that if he could charge people a small amount to send him messages, his life would likely significantly improve.
Under the assumption that micro-payments are too complicated to engineer, consider instead a system that replies to any incoming message with a url and the note: “one hour from now this web site will list an address you can use to contact me”.
Or, consider a system where a potential correspondent emails a triage address with the high-level purpose of their communication in the subject line, and either you or an assistant eventually responds with the appropriate channel to which to send the full message (if any).

I’m just brainstorming, but the general point is that almost any addition of friction to our digital communication systems might generate massive benefits — so tweaks of this type are worth considering.

(Though a necessary precondition would be overcoming our misguided obsession with “convenience” above all else.)

Bottom Line

It’s easy to lament that the “email problem” is intractable. But these stories give me hope, as they indicate that perhaps communication overload is not necessarily fundamental in a society with digital networks, but is potentially instead just a side effect of the particular and somewhat arbitrary way in which the tools we currently use are configured.

(Image by Bryan Alexander)

Alexander Hamilton’s Deep Work Habits

A Deep Revolution

I’m a little over 300 pages into Ron Chernow’s excellent biography of Alexander Hamilton (I also highly recommend his biographies of Washington and Rockefeller).

Hamilton, of course, knew how to get things done.

“His collected papers are so stupefying in length that it is hard to believe that one man created them in fewer than five decades,” writes Chernow.

But this productivity reached an apex during the period when Hamilton, along with Madison, and to a much lesser extent, John Jay, collaborated to write and publish the Federalist Papers.

During one particularly frenzied two-month stretch, Hamilton “churned out” twenty-one of these now immortal essays.

How did he do it?

“Hamilton developed ingenious ways to wring words from himself,” Chernow explains, before excerpting the following passage from a letter written by Hamilton’s friend, William Sullivan (available online):

“[W]hen [Hamilton] had a serious object to accomplish, his practice was to reflect on it previous. And when he had gone through this labor, he retired to sleep, without regard to the hour of the night, and, having slept six or seven hours, he rose and having taken strong coffee, seated himself at his table, where he would remain six, seven, or eight hours.”

As Chernow then reveals, Hamilton’s productivity also leveraged a “fair degree of repetition” (think: depth rituals) and a method in which he would “walk the floor as he formed sentences in his head” (think: productive meditation).

Hamilton was many things. To this list, however, I think we can confidently add: master deep worker.

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A quick note for fellow deliberate practice fans: the father of this concept, Anders Ericsson, just published a new book on the topic called Peak. I’m excited to dive into this book, but in the meantime, I wanted to bring it to your attention.

Is Email Sinking the U.S. Economy?

A Productive Mystery

Reading the Washington Post this weekend, Robert Samuelson’s column caught my attention. It was titled, “Solving the productivity mystery,” and it focused on a trend that both concerns and puzzles economists: productivity has stopped growing.

This statement requires some unpacking.

In economics, productivity, roughly defined, measures the ratio of output to inputs. The more valuable output you can produce for the same input costs, the better your productivity.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics expends a lot of effort to carefully measure this metric over many different industries in our country as it tends to be a strong indicator of practical things that people care about, like wage increases.

Back to the Samuelson column…

From 1995 to 2005, labor productivity increased by an average of 2.5% a year. As Samuelson pointed out, this translates to wage increases of roughly 25% over that period. This is good.
From 2010 to 2015, however, the average increase has only been 0.3% a year. If this persists through 2020, it will translate to a “puny” 3% wage increase over the decade. This is not good.

The puzzle, as mentioned above, is understanding why productivity is slowing.

There are no shortage of hypotheses. Samuelson reviews several in his column, including Robert Gordon’s claim that serious innovation is fading (c.f., Gordon’s big deal new book), and Samuelson’s own theory concerning the inefficiency of duplicating sales efforts online and in physical stores.

An Intriguing Angle

I’m not an economist, so it’s with trepidation that I throw one more potential contributing factor into the mix: email.

Hear me out.

The period between 2010 to 2015 is when smartphone use transitioned from popular to ubiquitous (I bought my first smartphone in 2012), and with this transition new expectations about constant connectivity migrated from the social sphere to the workplace.

Not surprisingly, many in the knowledge sector (and beyond) talk about the last five years as a tipping point where their annoyance with their various inboxes metastasized to deep, soul crushing resentment.

With this rise of constant connectivity — as I’ve documented in detail — a drop in cognitive ability is absolutely unavoidable.

This would be okay if our ability to think clearly and efficiently didn’t matter for the bottom line. But it does!

The main capital expenditure in the powerful knowledge sector of our economy is human brains: by reducing their ability to effectively produce valuable output, wouldn’t we expect a slow down in labor productivity?

(It’s here that many connectivity apologists began to talk about the soft opportunities and advantages of increased information and connection. But labor metrics are harsh. An active presence on social media or rapid email response times often do not measurably lead to more production of unambiguously rare and valuable output.)

Some modest support for this thesis shows up if you look hard enough (and embrace sufficient selection bias):

 The March productivity numbers, for example, show that the “business” category (which includes knowledge work) has a notably smaller increase in productivity than the various manufacturing industries measured.
Tier one knowledge companies like Google are increasingly having to rely on “sprints,” in which a development team drops off the grid, and works night and day to hit a self-imposed deadline. I suspect — though can’t claim with confidence — that these sprints became necessary because without permission to disconnect from the message whirlwind, the average developer is too riddled with distraction to produce good code anywhere near cognitive capacity.

I don’t want to fall into an econometric rabbit hole here, so let’s treat Samuelson’s column mainly as a prompt to return to a pertinent issue: Just because constant connectivity has become the standard approach to work doesn’t mean that it’s good.

The time has come, in other words, to step back from this inbox-driven world we’ve created and ask with clarity and humility: does this make any sense?

On Using Inspiring Locations to Inspire Deeper Work

A Rite of Spring

The return of spring marks the return of one of my favorite deep work strategies: the concentration circuit.

This strategy helps you make progress on a cognitively demanding task by having you work in a rotating series of locations that are: (1) not your normal office; (2) novel and/or aesthetically arresting.

As I’ve written before, concentration circuits are like deep work jet fuel:

they get you away from your normal energy-draining office routines,
they give your mind the sustained freedom from context switches needed to dive deep into a single problem, and
they leverage visual and environmental novelty to help shake loose new insights.

At the same time, they provide a reminder that elite-level knowledge work is about creating things with your brain — not just shuffling messages and writing PowerPoints — and that this activity, when isolated and supported, is massively rewarding.

Most important: they’re also a lot of fun.

A Recent Circuit

Anyway, two weeks ago I found myself down near the Capitol to tape an appearance on the Federalist Radio Hour. At the time, I was working on a tricky result.

I decided I would take advantage of the early spring weather to build an epic, Washington D.C.-themed concentration circuit.

Here are some of the locations I visited that morning…

I pride myself in finding the most secluded possible benches in otherwise crowded places. The above bench, where I started my day, was tucked into quiet corner not far from the Capitol building.

To shake things up, I then spent some time in a simulated jungle within the National Botanical Garden’s massive greenhouse. This certainly met the “novelty” requirement.

(A little known but important fact: the Botanical Garden has the nicest public bathrooms in D.C. — marble counters, and fresh orchids at every sink.)

I then retreated to the basement of the National Gallery to type up some of my notes. I like working in their cafe which is at the end of the mind-bending Multiverse installation shown above.

Finally, I ended my deep work session at one my favorite secret locations. Nestled in a quiet corner beyond the elevators on the third floor of the Native American History museum is a pair of comfortable leather chairs arranged by a wall of floor to ceiling windows.

Final Thoughts

Knowledge work doesn’t have to devolve into a soul-draining slurry of email and meetings. Creating things with your brain can be incredibly satisfying —  but sometimes a dramatic change of scenery is needed to remind yourself of this reality.

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A note to my UK readers: a UK audiobook version of Deep Work is now available for pre-order. You can also hear a clip here. 

(Capitol photo by Ed Schipul; Multiverse photo by NCinDC)

 

From Productivity to Workflow Engineering

The Ford Transformation

The craftsmen hand-building cars at the Ford Motor Company’s Piquette Avenue assembly plant in the first decade of the 20th century were, among other things, impressively productive at their tasks.

Two or three workers would gather around each partially-assembled car, taking parts, checking their fit, adjusting them on a metal lathe as needed, then checking the fit again, and so on. To watch them work would be to watch experts practiced in their movements and efficient in their tool use.

But as we now know, this productivity was irrelevant, as their approach to the work as a whole was sub-optimal.

By the second decade of the twentieth century, Henry Ford perfected his assembly line model and combined it with a commitment to producing interchangeable parts.

This new workflow was less natural, required significant capital investment, and introduced many new logistical headaches: but it also unleashed a level of value production that the old method of car construction could never match — no matter how skilled or efficient its practitioners.

Beyond Productivity

This story illustrates a division that I think will come to occupy an increasingly important role in the knowledge economy: the difference between productivity and workflow engineering.

To understand this difference, let’s begin with a key definition.

A workflow describes describes a general means or approach by which a professional goal is pursued.

(For example, in the Ford case study, in the early years of the company the primary workflow for car construction centered on a dedicated team hand-adjusting and assembling the relevant parts of a specific car.)

Productivity focuses on executing a given workflow more efficiently.

Workflow engineering, by contrast, focuses on optimizing the general means through which the relevant goal is pursued. It is defined by a willingness to make radical and inconvenient changes if the ends justify the means.

For example…

A team of computer programmers making their intra-company communication more efficient by adopting real time tools like Slack, and perhaps even integrating the tools into their code editors so they can reply to missives without switching applications, is an example of standard productivity thinking.

Realizing that programmers produce much better code if you minimize cognitive context switches, and therefore eliminate their email and Slack accounts altogether to ensure deeper work, is an example of workflow engineering.
Similarly, to draw from an earlier case study, media entrepreneur Pat Flynn hiring a high-priced executive assistant to help him answer reader email more efficiently is an example of standard productivity thinking.

Fellow media entrepreneur Brett McKay instead simply removing his email address from his web site and replacing it with a PO Box address is an example of workflow engineering.

The goal with workflow engineering is not to maximize convenience or to minimize cost and disruption. It is instead to start from a blank slate and ask: “if my goal is X, what is the absolutely most effective way to get there?”

This, in turn, requires a willingness to consider major, annoying, complicated changes if you have evidence that they’ll end up helping you ship a hell of a lot more metaphorical cars.

Workflow engineering is a concept I’m still toying with, but I think it has the potential to capture well the differences in my thinking regarding the future of work as compared to how most experts tend to talk about getting more things done.

Stay tuned…

The Case Against Email Strengthens

A Modest Proposal

Last month, I wrote an intentionally provocative article for the Harvard Business Review’s website. It was titled, “A Modest Proposal: Eliminate Email.”

The article starts by conceding that email, as a technology, is not intrinsically bad. The weed that’s currently strangling knowledge work is instead the workflow enabled and prodded by the presence of this tool.

As I expanded:

Accompanying the rise of this technology was a new, unstructured workflow in which all tasks — be it a small request from HR or collaboration on a key strategy — are now handled in the same manner: you dive in and start sending quick messages which arrive in a single undifferentiated inbox at their recipients. These tasks unfold in an ad hoc manner with informal messages sent back and forth on demand as needed to push things forward.

This workflow, I argued, leads inevitably to a state where constant email checking, during work hours and beyond, become necessary to keep the wheels of progress turning. And this state, in turn, is transforming knowledge workers into exhausted human network routers who are producing at a fraction of their cognitive capacity.

I concluded:

Given the tangled relationship between email and our current approach to work, however, it’s also clear that [a transformation to a better workflow] is almost certainly going to require a radical first step: to eliminate email.

Revealing Responses

What’s interesting to me about this discussion is less the details of my argument, but instead readers’ reactions.

The following quote from a commenter summarizes well a standard response:

I agree with the article about the evils of email. However, to attempt to outlaw email now is like trying to bolt the barn door after the horse has bolted – it’s just not gonna work.

Implicit in this observation is the belief that knowledge work depends on a large amount of digital communication. Indeed, for many, it’s hard to even conceive a concept of their “work” which doesn’t center on an inbox.

But then I read this article, which summarizes a recent research study conducted by the fabulous Gloria Mark (whom I recently met during an NPR taping), Stephen Voida, and Armand Cordello.

The study took 13 employees at a government research facility, each working for a different team, including both managers and non-managers, and asked them to quit email for a full week.

Spoiler: nothing bad happened.

Indeed, not only did they avoid bad outcomes, the employees felt happier, achieved more deep work states, experienced less stress, and moved a lot more.

This study is important because it underscores a point that was once obvious but has become less so recently: there is a difference between your work and communicating about your work.

You can make drastic changes to the latter without impeding the former.

Put another way, just because we’re used to spending most of our day communicating about our work, doesn’t mean that all this communication is really that vital.

The employees in the above experiment not only still accomplished their work without constant messaging, but actually did the work better and enjoyed it more.

This is just one study and a small sample at that. But even still, it builds my confidence that perhaps my Harvard Business Review proposal is less modest than I at first thought, and is instead one that’s growing inevitably toward a status of unavoidable.

(Photo by Amanda Tetrault)

Seneca on Social Media

Seneca on the Myth of Free

In Letter 42 of his Epistulae morales ad Lucilium, Seneca touches on the hidden costs of seemingly “free” pursuits. In doing so, he offers to his correspondent — Lucilius, the procurator of Sicily — a warning that resonates strongly today:

Our stupidity may be clearly proved by the fact that we hold that “buying” refers only to the objects for which we pay cash, and we regard as free gifts the things for which we spend our very selves.

These we should refuse to buy, if we were compelled to give in payment for them our houses or some attractive and profitable estate; but we are eager to attain them at the cost of anxiety, of danger, and of lost honour, personal freedom, and time; so true it is that each man regards nothing as cheaper than himself.

(– From Letter 42, Paragraph 7 of the Richard Gummere translation)

Over a billion people currently use Facebook — many at the cost of anxiety, lost honor, personal freedom, and certainly time. If asked why, however, many would reply, “why not?”

The service is free, conventional wisdom tells us, so no matter how minor the benefits (which tend to orbit around a generalized fear of missing out), they’re still more substantial than the cost.

But as Seneca points out, this assessment is misguided because it ignores the human toll of social media.

Unless we find value in our personhood, our attention autonomy, and our potential for real connection and creation, we’ll continue to be pushed around by media companies who convince us to throw this all away for trinkets.

(For a concrete alternative to this state of affairs, see Rule #3 from Deep Work, which details an approach to tool selection which forces you to consider the role of a new digital service in the full picture of a life well-lived before it can claim your time and attention.)

Until then, it seems, as Seneca warned Lucilius: each man truly does regard nothing as cheaper than himself.

(Hat tip: Steve A. / photo source)