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Reason #1: Downtime Aids Insights
At a high level, this theory proposes that for decisions that require the application of strict rules, the conscious mind must be involved.
On the other hand, for decisions that involve large amounts of information and multiple vague, and perhaps even conflicting, constraints, your unconscious mind is well suited to tackle the issue.
Your conscious mind, according to this theory, is like a home computer on which you can run carefully written programs that return correct answers to limited problems, whereas your unconscious mind is like Google’s vast data centers, in which statistical algorithms sift through terabytes of unstructured information, teasing out surprising useful solutions to difficult questions.
Reason #2: Downtime Helps Recharge the Energy Needed to Work Deeply
This study, it turns out, is one of many that validate attention restoration theory (ART), which claims that spending time in nature can improve your ability to concentrate.
To concentrate requires what ART calls directed attention. This resource is finite: If you exhaust it, you’ll struggle to concentrate.
The 2008 study argues that walking on busy city streets requires you to use directed attention, as you must navigate complicated tasks like figuring out when to cross a street to not get run over, or when to maneuver around the slow group of tourists blocking the sidewalk.
Put another way, when walking through nature, you’re freed from having to direct your attention, as there are few challenges to navigate (like crowded street crossings), and experience enough interesting stimuli to keep your mind sufficiently occupied to avoid the need to actively aim your attention. This state allows your directed attention resources time to replenish.
The core mechanism of this theory is the idea that you can restore your ability to direct your attention if you give this activity a rest.
Put another way, trying to squeeze a little more work out of your evenings might reduce your effectiveness the next day enough that you end up getting less done than if you had instead respected a shutdown.
Reason #3: The Work That Evening Downtime Replaces Is Usually Not That Important
The implication of these results is that your capacity for deep work in a given day is limited.
Any work you do fit into the night, therefore, won’t be the type of high-value activities that really advance your career; your efforts will instead likely be confined to low-value shallow tasks (executed at a slow, low-energy pace).
By deferring evening work, in other words, you’re not missing out on much of importance.
The three reasons just described support the general strategy of maintaining a strict endpoint to your workday.
To succeed with this strategy, you must first accept the commitment that once your workday shuts down, you cannot allow even the smallest incursion of professional concerns into your field of attention.
In both cases, even a brief intrusion of work can generate a self-reinforcing stream of distraction that impedes the shutdown advantages described earlier for a long time to follow
Another key commitment for succeeding with this strategy is to support your commitment to shutting down with a strict shutdown ritual that you use at the end of the workday to maximize the probability that you succeed.
In more detail, this ritual should ensure that every incomplete task, goal, or project has been reviewed and that for each you have confirmed that either (1) you have a plan you trust for its completion, or (2) it’s captured in a place where it will be revisited when the time is right.
When you’re done, have a set phrase you say that indicates completion (to end my own ritual, ...
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The first thing I do is take a final look at my e-mail inbox to ensure that there’s nothing requiring an urgent response before the day ends.
The next thing I do is transfer any new tasks that are on my mind or were scribbled down earlier in the day into my official task lists.
I quickly skim every task in every list, and then look at the next few days on my calendar. These two actions ensure that there’s nothing urgent I’m forgetting or any important deadlines or appointments sneaking up on me.
To end the ritual, I use this information to make a rough plan for the next day.
Once the plan is created, I say, “Shutdown complete,” and my work thought...
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This effect, which is named for the experimental work of the early-twentieth-century psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, describes the ability of incomplete tasks to dominate our attention.
To quote the paper: “Committing to a specific plan for a goal may therefore not only facilitate attainment of the goal but may also free cognitive resources for other pursuits.”
While it doesn’t force you to explicitly identify a plan for every single task in your task list (a burdensome requirement), it does force you to capture every task in a common list, and then review these tasks before making a plan for the next day.
But once it does stick, the ritual will become a permanent fixture in your life—to the point that skipping the routine will fill you with a sense of unease.
When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done.
Adam Marlin’s experience underscores an important reality about deep work: The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained.
Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.
Much in the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, you’ll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom.
Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction, Nass discovered, it’s hard to shake the addiction even when you want to concentrate.
The strategies that follow are motivated by the key idea that getting the most out of your deep work habit requires training, and as clarified previously, this training must address two goals: improving your ability to concentrate intensely and overcoming your desire for distraction.
As Powers later summarizes in an interview: “Do what Thoreau did, which is learn to have a little disconnectedness within the connected world—don’t run away.”
I suggest that you keep a notepad near your computer at work. On this pad, record the next time you’re allowed to use the Internet. Until you arrive at that time, absolutely no network connectivity is allowed—no matter how tempting.
It’s instead the constant switching from low-stimuli/high-value activities to high-stimuli/low-value activities, at the slightest hint of boredom or cognitive challenge, that teaches your mind to never tolerate an absence of novelty.
Point #1: This strategy works even if your job requires lots of Internet use and/or prompt e-mail replies.
The total number or duration of your Internet blocks doesn’t matter nearly as much as making sure that the integrity of your offline blocks remains intact.
Point #2: Regardless of how you schedule your Internet blocks, you must keep the time outside these blocks absolutely free from Internet use.
It doesn’t take many of these exceptions before your mind begins to treat the barrier between Internet and offline blocks as permeable—diminishing the benefits of this strategy.
The key in making this change, however, is to not schedule the next Internet block to occur immediately.
Point #3: Scheduling Internet use at home as well as at work can further improve your concentration training.
The key here isn’t to avoid or even to reduce the total amount of time you spend engaging in distracting behavior, but is instead to give yourself plenty of opportunities throughout your evening to resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom.
To simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, it’s incredibly valuable.
“The amount of time he spent at his desk was comparatively small,” explained Morris, “but his concentration was so intense, and his reading so rapid, that he could afford more time off [from schoolwork] than most.”
In particular, identify a deep task (that is, something that requires deep work to complete) that’s high on your priority list. Estimate how long you’d normally put aside for an obligation of this type, then give yourself a hard deadline that drastically reduces this time.
Like Roosevelt at Harvard, attack the task with every free neuron until it gives way under your unwavering barrage of concentration.
