Cal Newport's Blog, page 46

Robin Cook’s (Literal) Deep Work

Cook’s Colloquium

While I was at MIT, I lived for two years on Beacon Hill. One of my neighbors, I discovered, was the medical thriller writer, Robin Cook (to put things in perspective: I lived in a 500 square foot apartment while he lived in a six-floor, 1833 townhouse).

I didn’t run into Cook, however, until he agreed to give a speech at the Beacon Hill Civic Association. Eager to hear more about the life and times of this mega-bestselling author, I marked my calendar and attended the talk.

Cook didn’t disappoint. But there was one anecdote, in particular, that caught my attention.

Going Deep

Soon after finishing his general surgery residency, Cook was drafted into the Navy, where he ended up stationed as a ship’s doctor on the USS Kamehameha.

The Kamehameha, it turns out, is a nuclear ballistic missile submarine, which means that Cook spent much of his tour underwater, with little to do while the sub made its slow circuits. It was here, in his cramped office, that he began writing his first novel, The Year of the Intern — engaging in what I think we can agree to be some of the (literally) deepest ever sessions of deep work.

After his stint on the Kamehameha, Cook continued seeking out settings conducive to depth. He managed, through a fortuitous connections to Jacques Cousteau (a story for another time), to become involved in the Navy’s SEALAB program, where he had occasion to live for weeks, as an aquanaut, in an undersea habitat.

Each stretch in the habitat required up to 13 days in a decompression chamber after surfacing. It was here that Cook saw another, perhaps even more extreme, possibility for deep work. As he recounted at the Civic Association, he had a typewriter brought into the chamber, so that once him and his cremates were locked inside, he could pound away, making progress on his book.

This deep work training soon served Cook well. In the mid-1970’s, Cook was undergoing a second medical residency, this one in Ophthalmology at Harvard. In a period of six weeks during this residency, he worked deeply every night on a thriller he eventually titled Coma.

Once published, this book became a massive bestseller. One of the first things he purchased with the money was his historic townhouse in Beacon Hill (at the time he was renting an apartment there). The skill, in other words, that made Robin Cook my impressive neighbor was his well-practiced ability to go deep.

Deep Habits: Use Index Cards to Accelerate Important Projects

The Difficulty of Deep Projects

For the sake of discussion, let’s define a deep project to be a pursuit that leverages your expertise to generate a large amount of new value. These projects require deep work to complete, are rarely urgent and often self-initiated (e.g., no one is demanding their immediate completion), and have the potential to significantly transform or advance your professional life.

Examples of deep projects include writing a highly original book, creating an irresistible piece of software, or introducing a new academic theory.

The problem with deep projects is that they’re complicated and really hard. Almost any other activity will seem more appealing in the moment — so they keep getting pushed aside as something that you’ll “get to soon.”

Recently, I’ve been experimenting with a habit that seems to help with this challenge.

I call it, the depth deck…

The Depth Deck

The idea behind the depth deck is simple. Identify one or two deep projects that are important to your professional life.

For each project, identify one or two concrete next steps that:

require deep work;
are self-contained in the sense that they have a single focus and a clear criteria for when they’re completed.

You can vary the sizes of these steps. Perhaps some require only an hour or two of deep work, while others might require 10 to 15 hours. (If you think more time is needed, than you should probably break it down into smaller pieces.)

You can also vary between decidable and undecidable tasks. (I try to keep half my next steps decidable and half undecidable). If you select an undecidable task, however, you should integrate a time limit into your completion criteria (e.g., solve this proof or spend 15 deep hours on it: whichever comes first), as, by definition, you cannot force such efforts.

Next, record each next step on its own blank index card. Under its description — and this is important — write the date that you started it. Take this small stack of index cards, fasten them with a binder clip, and keep them with your work stuff at all times. (See the image above.)

This is your depth deck.

Now, going forward, whenever you put aside time for working on important, but non-urgent projects, focus your attention on one of the small number of steps in the deck. When you finish one of these steps, record on the card the date you finished it, add it to a completed pile, and create a new card to replace it.

Why it Works

There are three reasons why this simple habit helps counteract the difficulty of deep projects mentioned earlier.

The first reason is clarity. As mentioned, deep projects are complicated and hard, so it’s easy for them to morph into an ambiguous, overwhelming mess. This is not a state that will generate much productivity. The depth deck cuts through this murkiness and produces a small number of concrete next step that can become the target for all your ambition-driven energy.
The second reason is priority. The idea that should reduce your obligations to clear next steps is standard productivity practice. By pulling out a small number of next steps that affect projects of real significance, however, and then keeping them with you at all times in their own special deck, helps you maintain a sense of high priority for these high value pursuits, even as the rest of your time saturates in shallower minutia.
The third reason is accountability.  Because you record the date in which you started on each next step, and you keep the depth deck with you, you’ll be constantly confronted with evidence about how much time you’re letting pass without taking action on something important to you. The fact that these next steps are relatively small plays an important role here. If, for example, on January 1, you added a card that said, “write a novel,” and three weeks go by without you doing much about it, this isn’t so distressing: a novel is a really big project that takes a long time. Three weeks is just a drop in the bucket for this project’s duration. On the other hand, if you have a small next step in your depth deck that reads, “write a back story on your five main characters,” and you let three weeks go by, you’ll be confronted with the reality that you couldn’t even scratch together a handful of hours for your project in the last 21 days! This is more embarrassing. Avoiding such internal embarrassment will spur your mind into action.
(A bonus benefit of this strategy is the pile of completed cards it generates. Periodically browsing these cards can provide inspiration — e.g., transform your self-image into someone who does get deep work done — as well as important knowledge — e.g., if you notice tasks of a certain type take a long time to complete, you might better schedule time for them.)

To summarize, the depth deck is a relatively minor hack. There are many others like it that might help you advance in the battle to consistently work deeply on important things. The bigger point here, therefore, is the recognition that to master the art of deep work you need to continually muster every advantage available.

Christopher Nolan Doesn’t Use E-mail (and Why This Matters to You)

The Disconnected Director

Ben Casnocha recently sent me a Hollywood Reporter interview with the director Christopher Nolan. About halfway through the transcript, the journalist asks Nolan if it’s true that he doesn’t have an e-mail address.

“It is true,” Nolan responds.

He then elaborates:

Well, I’ve never used email because I don’t find it would help me with anything I’m doing. I just couldn’t be bothered about it.

What interests me about Nolan’s answer is not the details of his technology choices (his ability to avoid e-mail is specific to his incredibly esoteric job), but instead the thought process he applied in making them.

It would be easy to list dozens of benefits that Nolan would reap if he used e-mail. But his decision process is not focused on whether the technology can offer any benefit.

He’s clearly instead mono-focused on the impact of the technology on the thing he’s trying to do better than anyone else in the world: direct successful movies.

For this goal, e-mail is largely irrelevant — so Nolan doesn’t bother. This diligent discarding of anything not substantially connected to his major professional goals, we can conjecture, goes a long way toward explaining his success.

Each year, Silicon Valley investors are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into companies whose sole purpose is to try to  capture our attention long enough to sell ads. Given this onslaught of shiny digital addictiveness, we could all probably use a dose of Nolan’s sang froid response to such entreaties: if you’re not helping me become world class, then get the hell out of my way.

(Photo by Conmunity)

Deep Habits: Read a (Real) Book Slowly

A Call to Read

Maura Kelly begins her 2012 manifesto in The Atlantic with a Pollan-esque exhortation:

Read books. As often as you can. Mostly classics.

Kelly is just one voice in the growing Slow Reading movement (c.f.., here and here). The motivating idea behind this movement is simple: it’s good for the soul and the mind to regularly read — without distraction or interruption — hard books.

There was a time when intellectual engagement necessarily included long hours reading old-fashioned paper tomes. But in an age when a digital attention economy is ascendant, it’s now possible to satisfy this curiosity without ever consuming more than a couple hundred highly digested and simplified words at a time.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this new form of lightweight information consumption — the problem is the behaviors it tends to replace.

Reading a hard book, we must remember, is an experience that returns many rewards not generated by a pithy blog post (ahem) or online magazine.

These rewards of slow reading include (but are not limited to) the following:

It helps you sharpen your ability to work through complicated ideas.
It trains your ability to resist distraction.
It adds new layers of sophistication to your understanding of others and the world we inhabit.
It builds your comfort with ambiguity and respect for disciplined expertise  — both useful traits in an increasingly polarized and unjustifiably self-confident culture.

These are all worthy goals by themselves. (And the first two, in particular, are immensely useful in cultivating a deep work habit.)

For these reasons, consider this simple resolution for your New Year: commit to regularly spending a non-trivial amount of time reading a book that strains your comprehension.

(Photo by Smilla4)

Thinking is Uncomfortable but Exciting

Thoughts on Thinking

“Thinking [is] a very special type of psychic activity, very uncomfortable, but also very exciting…”

This quote comes from the influential twentieth century classicist, Eric Havelock. It’s taken from a book in which Havelock argues that the invention of writing in the ancient world was a prerequisite for the activity we now call “thinking” (he’s talking here about thought in its most rigorous form in which we embrace abstraction and attempt to understand truths beyond specific concrete encounters with the world).

What strikes me is that Havelock describes demanding cognition as both uncomfortable and exciting.

These two adjectives sum up well the sometimes complicated experience of deep work. This activity is not fun in the sense that it can cause mental strain and discomfort, but at the same time, the rewards it produces are richer than anything that the addictive digital bazaars of the attention economy can offer.

I don’t have a specific suggestion to offer here. This is just a meditation to keep in mind as we enter a season of New Year’s resolutions and begin to ask, as we do most Januarys, how we should define a working life well lived…

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The quote comes from pages 283 – 284 in the 2009 Harvard University Press edition of Havelock’s influential Preface to Plato. It was first brought to my attention by James Gleick’s ambitious 2011 book, The Information.

 

 

Deep Habits: Three Tips for Taming Undecidable Tasks

Deciding the Undecidable

In a recent blog post I introduced the notion of undecidable tasks — a particularly important type of work that’s not well covered by standard productivity advice.

These tasks are crucial to my job as an academic — as they are to many creative fields — so I devote a lot of attention to understanding how best to tackle them.

Today I want to share three tips along these lines that have worked well for me…

Work on Undecidable Tasks Both During and Outside Work Hours. This type of task often requires a moment of inspiration where the pieces of a new approach suddenly click together. It’s useful, therefore, to not only dedicate regular workday deep work sessions toward their completion, but to also return to them, even if briefly, in unconventional settings more conducive to serendipity, such as while driving or walking the dog. I’ve found both types of thinking are necessary. A lot of intellectual progress can be made in structured sessions at the office while sometimes a hike in the woods is then needed to make use of this progress.
Pursue (Exactly) Two Undecidable Tasks at a Time. Through hundreds of hours of experimentation I’ve found that having two undecidable tasks primed (see below) at a time is optimal. Two is better than one as it allows you to switch your focus if you get stuck (or fed up) with one task. But two is still small enough that your mind can keep the various pieces properly sorted and available for serendipitous reconfiguration.
Undecidable Tasks Require a Decidable Priming. It’s not sufficient to have only a vague understanding of an undecidable task before you dive into solving it. You must first “prime” the problem by working out precisely: (a) what a solution would look like; (b) why standard or simple approaches fail; and (c) a sense of what type of approaches are promising and are worth exploring. This type of priming is a decidable task — something you can schedule and consistently complete in a fixed amount of time — and is something you must do before diving deeper on interesting problems. A non-primed undecidable task is merely a whiff of inspiration — not yet worthy of your limited time and attention.

The above tips have helped my work with the undecidable (i.e., my proof rate is higher when I structure my thinking in this manner). But simple heuristics  are just scratching the surface of the fascinating — and under-discussed — intersection between undecidability and productivity.

Better understanding this type of work is something I plan to pursue in the New Year.

My New Project, Part 2

Asa Frederick Newport. Born December 10, 2014. Another future Study Hacker…

Deep Habits: Never Plan to “Get Some Work Done”

A Useful Metaphor

In the first chapter of The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt introduces the metaphor of the rider and the elephant. When trying to conceptualize his own weakness in the face of his best intentions, he explains:

I [am] a rider on the back of an elephant. I’m holding the reins in my hands, and by pulling one way or the other I can tell the elephant to turn, to stop, or to go. I can direct things, but only when the elephant doesn’t have desires of his own. When the elephant really wants to do something, I’m no match for him.

Ever since I first read these words, they stuck with me as useful for understanding the working world in particular. The whole edifice that we now call “productivity advice” distills, I realized, to instructions for cajoling the elephant. If you’re not firm, it’ll do what it wants to do.

It’s against this backdrop that I present the following truism about this metaphorical quadruped: if you’re not exceptionally clear about where you want it to go, it will wander.

I noticed this earlier in the week. Some uncertainty in my post-semester schedule  left me with an unplanned afternoon at my office. As so many knowledge workers do, I resolved simply “to get some work done.”

Three hours later, I was aghast.

I had spent this period in a state of fierce busyness: many e-mails were answered (yet the issues they concerned never quite got fully resolved), logistics were painstakingly worked out, and I must have made a half-dozen trips to the printer for some unknown reason.

But when I considered the most vital things on my radar — the projects on which almost everything important in my near future career rests — nothing of consequence was accomplished.

People sometimes chide me when I admit my habit of carefully planning every hour of my day (and every day of my week). They think I’m hopelessly rigid and unable to flow with the dynamics of a creative workday.

But it took only one afternoon free from structure to reaffirm what I know to be true. The elephant of your working mind has no interest in bringing you to where you need to go. It will always default to the watering hole of shallow busyness if not reined with confidence.

On Undecidable Tasks (Or, How Alan Turing Can Help You Earn a Promotion)

The Decision Problem

In 1928, the mathematician David Hilbert posed a challenge he called the Entscheidungsproblem (which translates to  “decision problem”).

Roughly speaking, the problem asks whether their exists an effective procedure (what we would today call an “algorithm”) that can take as input a set of axioms and a mathematical statement, and then decide whether or not the statement can be proved using those axioms and standard logic rules.

Hilbert thought such a procedure probably existed.

Eight years later, in 1936, a twenty-four year old doctoral student named Alan Turing proved Hilbert wrong with a monumental (and surprisingly readable) paper titled, On Computatble Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.

In this paper, Turing proved that there exists problems that cannot be solved systematically (i.e., with an algorithm). He then argued that if you could solve Hilbert’s decision problem, you could use this powerful proof machine to solve one of these unsolvable problems: a contradiction!

Though Turing was working before computers, his framework and results formed the foundation of theoretical computer science (my field), as they can be used to explore what can and cannot be solved by computers.

Over time, theoreticians enumerated many problems that cannot be solved using a fixed series of steps. These came to be known as undecidable problems, while those that can be solved mechanistically were called decidable.

The history of theoretical computer science is interesting in its own right, especially given Hollywood’s recent interest in Turing.

But in this post, I want to argue a less expected connection: Turing’s conception of decidable and undecidable problems turns out to provide a useful metaphor for understanding how to increase your value in the knowledge work economy…

Two Types of Tasks

Let’s begin by briefly turning our attention from Turing to something more mundane: tasks in a knowledge work setting.

The standard definition of a task for a knowledge worker is a clear objective that can be divided into a series of concrete next actions. The productivity guru David Allen, who introduced the “next action” terminology, emphasized in Getting Things Done  that if you properly break down your tasks into concrete next actions, your day can function like a factory worker “cranking widgets” as you seamlessly shift from one action to the next.

There are parallels between this definition of a task and Turing’s notion of a decidable problem. In both cases, a clear procedure can be systematically applied to the challenge until it’s solved.

But these decidable tasks are not the only type common in knowledge work.

Another type of task are those that have a clear objective but cannot be divided into a clear series of concrete next actions.

For example:

A theoretician trying to solve a proof.
An creative director trying to come up with a new ad campaign.
A novelist trying to write an award-winning book.
A CEO trying to turn around falling revenues.
An entrepreneur trying to come up with a new business idea.

All these examples defy systematic deconstruction into a series of concrete next actions. There’s no clear procedure for consistently accomplishing these goals. They don’t reduce, in other words, to widget cranking.

There are parallels between these types of tasks and Turing’s notion of undecidability. As with Turing’s undecidable problems, any given instance an undecidable task might be solvable, there’s just no systematic approach that’s guaranteed to always work.

On The Value of Undecidability

I argue that the ability to consistently complete undecidable tasks is increasingly valuable in our information economy.

Because these solutions cannot be systematized, this skill cannot be automated or easily outsourced.

Similarly, if you can complete undecidable tasks, you cannot be replaced by a 22-year old willing to work twice your hours at half your pay — as it’s not simply raw effort that matters.

(By contrast, if your day is composed entirely of decidable tasks you’re vulnerable to any of these above dangers.)

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that undecidable tasks are often really hard to complete. Because there’s no easy way to divide them into concrete actions you have to instead throw brain power, experience, creative intuition, and persistence at them, and then hope a solution emerges from some indescribable cognitive alchemy.

You may have guessed where I’m heading with this analysis.

What type of effort supports such difficult cognitive challenges? Deep work.

In other words, understanding the decidable/undecidable task split provides yet another argument for the value of deep work — as it’s only in the cultivation and consistent application of serious concentration that you can expect to succeed where Turing’s machines fail.

Deep Habits: Spend Three Months On Important Projects

A Productive King

In 2013, during a period of only three months, Stephen King published two full-length novels: Joyland and Doctor Sleep. This is unusually productive, even for a writer whose published fifty-five novels in his career (and sold over 350 million copies along the way).

Perhaps to celebrate this pinnacle of systematic wordsmithing, the Barnes & Noble book blog published a list of twenty tips extracted from King’s 2000 professional memoir, On Writing.

Nestled half way through this list was a piece of advice that caught my attention:

“The first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season.”

This tip resonates with my experience well beyond just book writing. Things worth doing take time, but if they take too much time your intensity might begin to wane to unproductive levels.

A period of three months seems just about right to hit that sweet spot where you’re accumulating enough deep work to produce something remarkable, but not so much time that your attention begins to diffuse.

(You might be wondering, of course, whether this advice conflicts with my veneration of the multi-year, Steve Martin-style diligent pursuit of becoming too good to be ignored. The expository difference here is that King is talking about a specific project, such as finishing a draft of a book manuscript, whereas my above-mentioned veneration refers to the honing of a craft over many different projects, like Martin’s quest to revolutionize comedy.)

To conclude, there’s nothing magic about three months — some important projects take more time and others take less. But the sentiment driving this advice is crucial.

Focus on things that take enough time to matter, but don’t let their importance dilute your obsessive drive to get something done.