Cal Newport's Blog, page 55

“Write Every Day” is Bad Advice: Hacking the Psychology of Big Projects

A Flawed Axiom

Write every day.

If you’ve ever considered professional writing, you’ve heard this advice. Stephen King recommends it in his instructional memoir, On Writing (he follows a strict diet of 1,000 words a day, six days a week). Anne Lamott proposes something similar in her guide, Bird by Bird (she recommends sitting down to write at roughly the same time every day).

Having published four books myself, here’s my opinion: If you’re not a full time writer (like King and Lamott), this is terrible advice. This strategy will, in fact, reduce the probability that you finish your writing project.

In this post, I want to explain why this is true — as this explanation provides insight into the psychology of accomplishing big projects in any field.

The Planning Brain

Here’s what happens when you resolve to write every day: you soon slip up.

If you’re not a full-time writer, this is essentially unavoidable. An early meeting at work, a back-up on the subway, an afternoon meeting that runs long — any number of common events will render writing impractical on some days.

This slip-up, however, has big consequences.

It provides evidence to your brain that your plan to write every day will not succeed. As I’ve argued before, the human brain is driven, in large part, by its need to assess plans: providing motivation to act on good plans, and reducing motivation (which we experience as procrastination) to act on flawed plans.

The problem for the would-be writer is that the brain does not necessarily distinguish between your vague and abstract goal, to write a novel, and the accompanying specific plan, to write every day, which you’re using to accomplish this goal.

When the specific plan fails, the resulting lack of motivation infects the general goal as well, and your writing project flounders.

Freestyle Writing

In my experience as a writer with a day job, I’ve found it’s crucial to avoid rigid writing schedules. I don’t want to provide my brain any examples of a strategy related to my writing that’s failing.

When I’m working on a book, I instead approach each week as its own scheduling challenge. I work with the reality of my life that week to squeeze in as much writing as I can get away with, in the most practical manner. Sometimes, this might lead to stretches where I write every morning. But there are other periods where I might balance a busy start to the work week with half days of writing at the end, and so on.

The point is that I commit to plans that I know can succeed, and by doing so, I keep my brain’s motivation centers on board with the project.

Misunderstanding Motivation: Knowledge Trumps Productivity

This approach, of course, brings up the question of motivation. Most people who embrace the daily writing strategy do so because they worry their will to do the work will diminish without a fixed system to force progress.

This understanding is flawed.

You can’t force your brain to generate motivation. It will do so only when it believes in both your goal and your plan for accomplishing the goal.

If you find that you’re still failing to get work done, even when you’re more flexible with your scheduling, the problem is not your productivity, it’s instead that your mind is not yet sold that you know how to succeed with your general goal of becoming a writer.

In this case, abandon National Novel Writing Month (which I think trivializes the long process of developing writing craft) and go research how people in your desired genre actually develop successful careers. Your mind requires a reality-based understanding of your goal in addition to achievable short-term plans.

Generalizing to Non-Writing Projects

I recalled this lesson recently in an unrelated part of my life. One of my interests over the past few months has been trying to increase the amount of time I spend engaged in deep work related to my academic research.

In December, I tested a rigid strategy that was, in hindsight, just as doomed to failure as attempting to write every day. I had a particular paper that I wanted to complete in time for a winter deadline. I told myself that the key is to start every weekday with deep work. If I commuted on the subway, I would work in a notebook while traveling. If I drove, I would knock off a batch at home while waiting for rush hour to end.

I believed this rigid schedule would help make deep work an ingrained habit, and the paper would get done with time to spare.

It reality, I crashed and burned.

The first week, I successfully followed my plan two days out of five — failing the other days for the types of unavoidable scheduling reasons I mentioned above, as well as the fact that writing in my notebook on the subway turns out to make me nauseous!

After that week, my brain revoked any vestige of motivation for this effort and my total amount of deep work plummeted.

My solution to this freefall was to take a page from my writing life. I went from rigid to flexible planning. I now approach each week with the flexible goal of squeezing in as much deep work toward my goal as is practically possible.

Some weeks I squeeze in more than others. Every week looks different. But what’s consistent is that I’m racking up deep hours and watching my paper starting to come together.

Because I am confident that I know how to accomplish my goal, and my efforts to do so are succeeding each week, my brain remains a supporter.

Summary

Hard scheduling rules — write every day! work on research for one hour each morning! exercise 10 hours a week! — deployed in isolation will lead to procrastination as soon as you start to violate them, which you almost certainly will do. At this point, the bigger goal the rules support will suffer from this same motivation drop.

To leverage the psychology of your brain, you need to instead choose clear goals that you clearly know how to accomplish, and then approach scheduling with flexibility. Be aggressive, but remain grounded in the reality of your schedule. If your mind thinks you have a good goal and sees your short terms plans are working, it will keep you motivated toward completion.

(Image from AJC1)

Two Books To Keep On Your New Year Radar

Two Recommendations

In general, January is a good month for books about productivity. This January is particularly good as two friends of mine, whose thinking on these topics I really respect, both have books out this week. Coincidentally, both of these friends asked me to write the foreword for their titles — which I was honored to do.

With this in mind, if you’re looking for some smart thinking on productivity (or want to experience some unusually thoughtful and erudite foreword writing), I recommend these new releases:

The 3 Secrets to Effective Time Investment by Elizabeth Grace Saunders

Elizabeth runs a successful consulting business that helps people make more meaningful use of their time. If you’re looking to focus less on the unimportant and more on what really matters, this book offers tested advice for achieving this goal.
The Front Nine by Mike Vardy

Mike is the former editor-in-chief of Lifehack.org — an experience that transformed him into a incisive commentator on what works and what doesn’t in the world of productivity. His new book takes a surprisingly nuanced look at what it (really) takes to get important projects from conception to completion.

Does Luck Matter More Than Skill?

Luck Over Skill?

The most provocative business title I’ve read recently is Frans Johansson’s The Click Moment. In this book, Johansson argues the following:

For activities with clear fixed rules — such as sports, chess, and music — the only way to succeed is to put in more deliberate practice than your peers. Johansson uses Serena Williams as a key example: her dad started her practicing tennis absurdly hard at an absurdly young age.
For activities with rapidly evolving rules – such as business start-ups or book writing — success comes when you change the rules to a new configuration that catches the zeitgeist just right. Johansson uses Stephanie Meyers, author of the Twilight series, as a key example. Meyers, in Johansson’s estimation, is not a good writer. Her first Twilight book reads more like fan fiction than a professionally-scribed genre novel. She had not, in other words, spent much time in a state of deliberate practice. But this didn’t matter. Something about her new take on vampire tales hit the cultural moment just right and earned her extraordinary renown. The lesson, according to Johansson, is that luck plays the central role in success for these activities. If you want to do something remarkable,therefore, you have to keep trying new things — placing, what he calls, purposeful bets — hoping to stumble into an idea that catches on.

Here’s the obvious follow-up question for Study Hacks readers: how do these ideas square with my skill-driven philosophy of building a remarkable life?

Schwarzenegger’s Serendipity

I gained insight into this question from another book I read recently (and found surprisingly engrossing): Arnold Schwarzenegger’s new autobiography, Total Recall.

At a high-level, Schwarzenegger’s story seems to validate Johansson’s serendipity-fueled vision of success. The young bodybuilder’s ascent in movies required several lucky breaks:

being brought to LA — of all possible cities — to train in Joe Weider’s Gold’s Gym;
meeting a writer, Charles Gaines, who was writing about the bodybuilding subculture at the time, and who helped introduce Schwarzenegger to many important players in Hollywood; and
starting to take acting seriously just as the the 1980s action movie trend generated a sudden need for larger than life characters who knew how to film a movie.

There was no way Schwarzenegger could have planned this rise to stardom. Serendipity played a big role.

But does this mean that deliberate practice and the striving to become so good they can’t ignore you is not so important? Schwarzenegger would disagree. Throughout his autobiography, he kept emphasizing that you “have to do the reps” — a reference to the unavoidable importance of putting in the hard work required to do something well.

When you dive deeper into his story, you notice that this dedication to skill-building plays a supporting role behind all of his lucky breaks:

he was brought to LA because he was the most promising bodybuilder of his generation, a status he achieved by starting his serious training at least two years earlier than most elite competitors, and adding a new level of intensity to his workouts;
when he arrived in America, he hustled: starting at least four different businesses (real estate, mail order, seminars and construction), taking night classes, and shadowing Joe Wieder on international business trips. His smarts and ambition is what helped him gain access to Charles Gaines’s circle of influential friends; and
when he began acting, he worked really hard at it. He took classes and trained intensely for small roles throughout the 70s, eventually winning a Golden Globe for “Best Acting Debut in a Motion Picture” for 1976′s Stay Hungry. In other words, Schwarzenegger wasn’t picked out of nowhere to star in 1982′s Conan the Barbarian (his big break). He was, at that point, a world famous bodybuilder who could act and was well-known in Hollywood circles. From this perspective, he was the obvious choice for the role.

The Serendipity Equation

The combination of The Click Moment and Total Recall has helped me developed a more nuanced understanding of how skill and luck interplay in the quest to do something remarkable. Being a math geek, I find that equations help me better capture the relative importance of different factors, and with this in mind, I came up with the following:

= x ,

where is a measure of the rareness and value of your relevant skills, and the value of the serendipitous factors is drawn from something like an exponential distribution.

In this equation, there are two variables.

The first is the potential of the project. The more rare and valuable your skills, generally speaking, the more potential you have for the project to succeed. This is something you control.
The second variable captures serendipity. You cannot predict or control this factor, but you can expect that really big values are really rare (hence the approximation to an exponential distribution).

This equation helps explain examples like Stephanie Meyer. Her project potential was low because she did not have much skill as a writer. But her serendipity factor was huge, swamping her low potential.

At the same time, the equation tells us that Meyer’s example is not a generally replicatable strategy. The huge serendipity factor she enjoyed is rare. You could launch 1000 low potential projects in your lifetime and never encounter anything close.

Objectively, the best strategy for success, given this equation, is to combine a commitment to increase your project potential as much as possible (by sharpening your rare and valuable skills), with a commitment to keep launching a steady stream of such projects and seeing them through to completion, increasing your chances of encountering high (though perhaps not Meyer’s-level) serendipity.

Without serendipity, your skill alone might not create the results you crave. At the same time, however, without a high project potential to multiply, the type of serendipity you can realistically expect to encounter if you try enough things, also won’t generate these results. You need both.

If you believe that something like this equation is true, then this approach of becoming as good as possible while trying many different projects, maximizes your expected success.

Indeed, we can call this the Schwarzenegger Strategy, as it does a good job of describing his path to stardom. Looking back at his story, notice that he tried to maximize the potential in every project he pursued (always “putting in the reps”). But he also pursued a lot of projects, maximizing the chances that he would occasionally complete one with high serendipity. His breaks, as described above, all required both rare and valuable skills, and luck. And each such project was surrounded in his life by other projects in which things did not turn out so well.

Summary: You cannot count on luck or skill to generate remarkable outcomes in isolation. The most consistent path to meaningful accomplishment seems to be a combination of the two. Pick a small number of things and become so good they can’t ignore you. Along the way, however, keep taking your growing skill out for a spin, launching related projects, one after another, carefully studying the outcomes to see if you stumbled into something big.

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For more examples and tactics regarding this idea of launching exploratory projects in the search of breakthroughs, see chapters 13 and 14 of SO GOOD. For more on building rare and valuable skills, see chapter 7.

Getting (Unremarkable) Things Done: The Problem With David Allen’s Universalism

Getting Beyond Getting Things Done

I first read David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) in 2003. I was a junior at Dartmouth and Allen’s ideas resonated at a time when my obligations were starting to overwhelm me. I committed to his system.

After a few years, by which time I was at MIT for graduate school, I found myself frustrated with the whole GTD canon and was ready to abandon it altogether.

My issue was simple: it wasn’t helping me become better.

I was good at full capture and regular review, and, accordingly, was quite organized. This was a good time in my life to ask me to submit a form or tackle a complicated logistical process. You could be confident that I would capture, process, and then accomplish it.

But I was missing the intense and obsessive wrangling with the hard problems of my field — the type of habit that made people in my line of work exceptional. My commitment to GTD had me instead systematically executing tasks, one by one, like an assembly line worker “cranking widgets” (to use a popular Allen aphorism).

I didn’t need to be cranking widgets. I needed to instead be crazily focused.

Allen’s Universalism

Here’s where we find my concern with GTD.  In chapter 1, Allen emphasizes:

“[Y]ou can’t do a project…you can only do an action related to it. Many actions require only a minute or two, in the appropriate context, to move a project forward” (page 19; US paperback).

In chapter 2, he elaborates:

“When enough of the right action steps have been taken, some situation will have been created that matches your initial picture of the outcome closely enough that you can call it ‘done’” (page 38).

In Allen’s world, in other words, everything reduces to clear and easy-to-accomplish next actions. Whether the action is tied to a logistical annoyance (“buy more soap for the guest bathroom”) or tied to your deepest ambitions (“buy notebook to capture book ideas”) doesn’t matter. When you get down to the scale of execution, all actions are created equal.

This is part of what makes GTD so seductive. It tells you that if you organize your lists properly during your review, then you can tackle each day mechanically: mindlessly cranking through next actions like widgets, assured that not only will the little things get done, but also the big important life goals.

At least, that’s the idea. The problem, however, is that this is not the way remarkable things are actually accomplished.

Not All Work is Created Equal

Allen preaches task universalism: when you get down to concrete actions, all work is created equal.

I disagree with this idea.

Creating real value requires deep work, which is a fundamentally different activity than knocking off organizational tasks.

Deep work cannot be reduced to clear next actions. It is, instead, a philosophy that must be cultivated. If you read Robert Greene’s Mastery, for example, you’ll encounter story after story of remarkable people who didn’t carefully organize tasks, but instead marshaled their energy toward the obsessive (and often messy) pursuit of something new.

As a graduate student, I didn’t need better lists of next actions. I needed instead to be training my ability to focus hard on meaningful things for long periods of time — even after it becomes uncomfortable.

It’s here that Allen apologists might try to force these two worlds together. They might suggest, for example, that you could simply have a next action labeled: “spend many hours obsessively doing deep work on problem X.” But such efforts soon reveal their inadequacy.

Deep work is fundamentally different than the shallow (though still important) work of keeping on top of the little things required to function personally and professionally.

At least, this is the compromise I’ve adopted. I embrace GTD for organizing shallow work. It is, as many will attest, devastatingly effective for this purpose. But I think of deep work as something different altogether. A philosophy of life that requires its own strategies.

To Summarize: David Allen’s universalism is seductive, but ultimately flawed. Cranking widgets cannot create results of lasting value. That requires something deeper.

(Photo by tsmall)

This Holiday, Give the Gift of Career Confidence

A Gift that Keeps on Giving

If you’re still searching for holiday gifts, I want to humbly recommend my new book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work you Love.

As most of you know, this book makes the argument that “follow your passion” is bad advice. It then chronicles my (successful) quest to figure out the concrete strategies that work instead (hint: how you work is more important than what work you do).

If you already read the book and enjoyed it, think about your passion-addled friends and relatives who might benefit from hearing this advice.

If you haven’t read it, consider giving yourself the gift of a blueprint for building a remarkable career.

On the fence? Here are some accolades to help persuade you…

The book was selected for several Best of 2012 lists, including: Inc. Magazine’s Best 2012 Books for Entrepreneurs, The Globe and Mail’s Top 10 Business Books of the Year, 800-CEO-READ’s Business Book Awards Shortlist, and Small Business Trend’s Best Business Books of 2012.
My op-ed on the book for the New York Times spent a week as the paper’s #1 most e-mailed article, while my article on the book for the Harvard Business Review blog spent a month on the site’s most read articles list.
The book was endorsed by Seth Godin, Reid Hoffman, Dan Pink, Kevin Kelly and Derek Sivers (see Derek’s 10/10 review of the book).

Want to find out more? You can also read my summary of the book, or read (adapted) excerpts published in Fast Company, The Globe and Mail, and Lifehacker.

If you’re a college student (or thinking of buying the book for a student), read this thoughtful review from the Swarthmore College Daily Gazette.

If you’re interested: you can find the book at Barnes & Noble stores (it should be on the Best of Business display at most locations) and online at bn.com and Amazon.

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Okay, that’s the end of my pitch. We’ll return soon to our regularly scheduled programming. In particular, I’ve been working on an essay about why I think David Allen deters deep work.

Stay tuned…

Einstein’s Rubber Ball

Detecting Deep Work

An interesting nugget from Robert Greene’s new book, Mastery: when Einstein was working on the theory of relativity, he held a rubber ball that he would squeeze when straining his mind to grapple with a particularly hard piece of the theory.

Elsewhere in the book, Greene talks about Einstein’s lifelong commitment to the violin as a tool with which he trained himself to focus. (This might be from Daniel Coyle’s Talent Code; I’m reading both simultaneously and often confuse the two)

These are tantalizing hints supporting my hypothesis that the ability to think deeply and produce real value is something that requires technique and practice. They’re also another reason why I get annoyed when people begin and end a discussion on making an impact with a dumbly simple slogan like “follow your passion!”

 

Some Notes on Deep Working

Diving into Deep Work

Last week I introduced the deep work philosophy — an approach to knowledge work that (in theory) increases the quality and quantity of your output. Since then, I’ve put the philosophy to the test in a mini-experiment. Starting last Saturday, I’ve dedicated roughly 1 hour of my day to deep work on a specific proof that’s been on my queue for a while.

This is a small scale experiment. My goal is to develop a preliminary understanding of how my deep work philosophy translates to practice.

Here are my observations so far…

I was surprised by the amount of output produced in a small amount of time. The image above shows the notes produced so far by my experiment. These notes capture an essentially complete proof for the problem I was tackling.
Deep work definitely induced the deliberate practice of new concepts. To work out the proof notes above I had to re-learn a bunch of geometry that I hadn’t touched since high school. My tendency in these situations is to look for a theorem somewhere that proves exactly what I need, and, failing that, ask someone for the answer. The deep work mindset, however, inspired me to actually go to first principles and prove the properties I needed from scratch. I now know a little more about geometric proofs than I did four days ago.
It helps to explain things out loud. My mind, like most minds, resists the energy demands of concentrating deeply on something complicated. If I explained what I was working on out loud, however, it helped keep me focused.  Yesterday, for example, I gave Max a mini-lecture on the derivatives of trigonometric functions. He responded, naturally, by crying. But I still found it useful.
Clarity is crucial. The problem I was working on this week didn’t come out of nowhere. Over the path month, I dedicated a dozen hours toward learning the main results in the relevant model. Since then I’ve been discussing these ideas with a specialist. By the time I started deep work on this particular result I had confidence that the problem was useful and had a good general strategy for solving it. Without this clarity, mustering the resources for deep work would have been harder. (A couple years ago, I wrote an article for Ramit Sethi’s blog about this idea that “just get started’ is bad advice.)
I need a stronger ritual. I was working at home without much transition into this deep work. I had the feeling that I wasn’t 100% committed to what I was working on, which probably blunted my effectiveness some. I’m working on the details of my ritual.
I assume I’ll get better with practice. There were many moments in this experiment where I felt strain and still persisted (the key to optimal quality and improvement). But I also felt like this strain was of a lightweight variety (at least, as compared to what’s possible in academic theory). With practice, I think I’ll be able to tackle increasingly complex mental puzzles — which inspires me to maintain this practice much like a runner maintains a running habit to build mileage.

Knowledge Workers are Bad at Working (and Here’s What to Do About It…)

An Inconvenient Observation

Knowledge workers are bad at working.

I say this because unlike every other skilled labor class in the history of skilled labor, we lack a culture of systematic improvement.

If you’re a professional chess player, you’ll spend thousands of hours dissecting the games of better players.

If you’re a promising young violin player, you’ll attend programs like Meadowmount’s brutal 7-week crash course, where you’ll learn how to wring every last drop of value from your practicing.

If you’re a veteran knowledge worker, you’ll spend most of your day answering e-mail.

As I’ve argued here in my new book, this represents a huge opportunity for knowledge workers. If you can adopt a culture of systematic improvement, similar to what’s common in other skilled fields, you can potentially accelerate your career far beyond your inbox-dwelling, discomfort-avoiding peers (and cultivate passion for your livelihood in the process).

But how do you adopt this approach in your specific job? This is the most common question I’m asked in response to this idea.

In this post, I want to propose a (tentative) answer…

Deep Work (v.1)

Knowledge workers dedicate too much time to shallow work — tasks that almost anyone, with a minimum of training, could accomplish (e-mail replies, logistical planning, tinkering with social media, and so on). This work is attractive because it’s easy, which makes use feel productive, and it’s rich in personal interaction, which we enjoy (there’s something oddly compelling in responding to a question; even if the topic is unimportant).

But this type of work is ultimately empty. We cannot find real satisfaction in efforts that are easily replicatable, nor can we expect such efforts to be the foundation of a remarkable career.

With this in mind, I argue that we need to spend more time engaged in deep work — cognitively demanding activities that leverage our training to generate rare and valuable results, and that push our abilities to continually improve.

Deep work, if made the centerpiece of your knowledge work schedule, generates three key benefits:

Continuous improvement of the value of your work output.
An increase in the total quantity of valuable output you produce.
Deeper satisfaction (aka., “passion”) for your work.

A working life dedicated to deep work, in other words, is a working life well-lived (a point I argue in detail in Rules 1 and 2 of my book). The question, therefore, is how to integrate deep work into your specific job.

Below I describe four steps for accomplishing this goal in almost any knowledge work profession…

Step #1: Prepare

Deep work is energy intensive. Our brains are stingy when it comes to expending energy, so you shouldn’t expect to casually switch over to a deep work mindset. It helps to instead cultivate a ritual that transitions you from normal shallow work to the deep variety.

This strategy works because it’s easier to convince your mind to do the first step of a simple ritual than to dive straight into intense contemplation. But once a ritual is begun, you’ve engaged your habit circuitry, and can expect to come out on the other side ready to focus.

In my own job as an academic theoretician, for example, this ritual might involve: shutting down my computer, shutting down my overhead lights (leaving on only my desk lamp), brewing a cup of coffee, and putting a “do not disturb” sign on my door.

Step #2: Clarify

Deep work requires a clear image of the outcome you’re seeking and a clear understanding of why it’s valuable. A hazy goal is not enough to sustain your concentration at the needed levels.

Be specific about what success will look like and why that success is important.  Keep in mind that it can take a surprising amount of research to define a good goal, so give this step the attention it requires.

In my own job, I’ve found that it’s easy to come up with reasonable sounding problems, but that these problems often fail to hold my attention. In order to achieve consistent deep work, I usually need to first immerse myself in the relevant research literature, seeking a problem that it is recognized as important, unanswered, but probably answerable with my skill set. This is not easy.

Step #3: Stretch

Take your clear overall goal from the previous step and identify the next logical chunk of work (we’re talking about a chunk that can be accomplished in a small number of sessions, whereas the overall goal might take weeks to complete). When you tackle this chunk, push for a result that is beyond — but not too far beyond — what’s comfortable for your current skill level.

This is the cornerstone of the whole philosophy, so let’s take this slow…

If you can breeze through this chunk like you’re cranking a widget, then you’re not stretching yourself enough.

You need to design this chunk to feature enough difficulty that you quickly get stuck. At this point, you should slow down, and advance deliberately, in a state of real mental strain. This is where you might need to bring in expert coaching — e.g., turn to a textbook or ask a colleague.

This stretch is important to: (a) extract the most out of your current abilities; and (b) ensure that your abilities continue to improve.

Finding chunks that require stretch, but are not so hard that you get permanently blocked, is non-trivival, but is also something that will improve with practice. Keep in mind that most knowledge workers implicitly go out of their way to avoid a feeling of stretch at all costs (because it’s uncomfortable and much less fun than replying to some more e-mails) so by seeking it out, you’ve already put yourself on a much more ambitious trajectory.

In my own job, this is where I need the most improvement. I’ve observed that when I’m working on a proof intuition, if the math needed to formalize the idea gets tricky, I flee the strain, mark the intuition as “probably right,” and move on to something else. Step #3 tells me that this is exactly where I need to slow down and move deliberately, embracing the strain generated by reducing intuition to algebra (a process that often sends me back to my basic textbooks or pestering colleagues). This feeling of strain is the feeling of getting better at my profession, which is why I’m dedicating so much attention toward learning to embrace it.

Step #4: Obsess

The nice thing about deep work is that it’s a clear state of mind. You begin a session with a well-defined ritual, you work on a stretch chunk for 1 – 3 hours, then you finish and go rest. This clarity allows you to track how much time you spend in the state. This tracking gives you a number to try to improve.

You’ll be surprised by how little time you naturally spend doing deep work. You’ll also be surprised by how quickly you can increase these numbers once you know what you’re looking for and are keeping track of what you’re doing.

In my own job, I’ve occasionally used an hour tally to keep track of how much time I spend working on hard research projects. I’ve found, however, that this strategy was often too vague, as I could pump up those counts doing what was essentially shallow work related to a hard project. The specificity of the deep work routine described above, however, eliminates such abuses. The only time I now track is the time spent in this state of deep contemplation. If I can increase the time spent in this state, I’m confident that good things will follow.

(Photo by sparre.enger)

#deepwork

My New Project

Max Jacob Newport. Born 11/6/12. Future Study Hacker…

Productivity is Not Dead, Just Downgraded

The Cautious Return of Nuts and Bolts Productivity

Last year, around this same time, I wrote an article titled Welcome to the Post-Productivity World. In it, I claimed that we had moved on from the early 2000′s dream that David Allen, teamed with the Lifehacker RSS feed, could deliver us to a knowledge work nirvana — a place where success and distinction flowed effortlessly from a well-tuned task-management system.

The attention of the online world, I noted, had shifted toward bigger questions, like “how do I make my work the foundation of a good life?”. Building a remarkable career, we now know, has little to do with organization, and very much to do with focusing ruthlessly on a small number of important skills and becoming so good you can’t be ignored.

And yet…

Now that I’m a professor, I realize that I miss productivity. It’s still true that my level of organization has little to do with my success as a scholar. It’s also true, I’m discovering, that it has everything to do with my stress level.

I spend much of my time focusing deeply on important projects. But I still have a lot of small things to get done in the time that surrounds this concentration. And without a thoughtful system, these tasks are getting done fitfully, often driven by deadlines — causing unnecessary stress.

So this gives us a new vision of productivity. We have dethroned it from its prior role as the center of our workplace universe, but it still plays an important (albeit, downgraded) role as a stress reliever.

I am, in other words, re-embracing nuts and bolts productivity. (God help me, but I just spent 10 minutes browsing the web page for OmniFocus!) But I’m doing so with caution. I want to tune up my organizational systems, but I also want to remember that these systems play only a supporting role in my bigger effort to craft a remarkable career.

Now excuse me while I shift my context…

(Photo by tsmall)