Penny University Book Club: Deep Work

[Timothy James]

Participants:

Tim Dobbins

Chang Lee

John Barryman

Tactics we’ve gotten from the book (or other books):

• When Tim get’s to work, he prints off his calendar and opens his clock app on his phone (which is on Do Not Disturb). While doing deep, focused work, he’ll minimize all windows except for those that are necessary (if developing then pycharm and chrome, if reading a paper then prints the paper off and closes all apps). The clock is used to keep track of time and to track his time on certain tasks to make sure time is not haphazardly being lost. 

• Tim arrives at work early now (6:30, as opposed to 9 like he used to). This allows him to arrive at work unrushed and free of stress (no traffic, no meetings that he needs to cram for, no disruptive small talk on the way in, plenty of quiet time). Arriving at work calm and relaxed allows for a more mindful day. By using the first 3-4 hours of the day to be productive, Tim can be more mindful and relaxed in meetings throughout the day since he has a sense of accomplishment early on, instead of him having to think about work that he didn’t get done because he arrived at 9. 

• When working, Chang will put his phone in his desk so he can’t get it for several hours (out of sight, out of mind). 

• When his phone is out on his desk, Tim feels like it’s natural to reach for the phone and check messages, linkedin, twitter, etc. But when it’s in his backpack and he reaches for it, it feels like he’s cheating himself since he has to work to actually get the phone out. 

• Chang likes to employ the Bi-modal form of deep work: modeled after Carl Jung’s focused work habits, the bi-modal philosophy of deep work allows you to divide your time, “dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else”—as opposed to the monastic philosophy of deep work where you spend the majority of your time in deep concentrated work (modeled after Donald Knuth). 

• Chang will use his Friday afternoon to plan his next week and blocks 20 hours for focused work so no one can block that time.

• Embrace boredom: Ween your mind from dependencies on distraction. Don't take a break from distraction; instead take a break from focus—completely reframes how Tim sees productivity. Dedicate time blocks for non-work internet time and only use that time for non-work internet use. All other time should be productive time. We only have so much will-power. And when we use our will-power to fight off the temptation to look at our phone all day, eventually we get tired of resisting the temptation and give in, but if we have dedicated time blocks to do non-productive activities, this allows us to keep our will-power reserves at high levels. 

• Meditate productively: when doing things that are physically stimulating but not mentally, use this time to think and meditate on a big task at work, or a paper you're writing.  

Experiments:

• Internet Sabbath - dedicating one day a week to be completely internet free (Tim)

• Quit social media for a month (mainly Facebook).

John Berryman’s notes on Deep Work:

- basically an approach to being able to better focus on your work and get more done. I've taken away some specific practices from the book:

1) to have specific, uninterruptable focus periods (one hour at a time) and see how many of those I can rack up in a week/day -- my average is about 3 periods per day of uninterrupted focus

2) Define a reasonable workday start and end time and then don't cheat by catching up outside of this time. If you need to get more done then you can either intentionally extend your workday schedule OR you can work more efficiently so that the stuff you need to get done fits in the schedule - cheating by working outside of the the prescribed time is just an excuse to be less efficient during the prescribed time

3) Close out the work day (this is really just a corollary to #2) - At the end of the day, write up what you've done, what you're planning to do next, and then literally say "shutdown complete" - effectively you're making an audible promise to yourself that you're not going to cheat by working outside of the alloted time. This way you can be more present with your family.

[JnBrymn]

I really liked the idea that focus can be learned (embrace boredom as you say). If every time we get the slightest bit bored we reach for the satisfaction of ... X, then we are training our mind to be ok with being flighty and unfocused. For me X is Twitter. So much so that if I open a new tab and I'm not really thinking I might just type out twitter before I recognize that I'm doing it. Per the books advice I dropped Twitter for a week, and then 2, and found that I basically didn't miss it. I am not forming deep and meaningful relationships by tapping out 280 character messages to the masses. Since then, I've gone back to Twitter occasionally, but it not something I lurch to whenever I'm bored. It's not that Twitter itself took much time, it's that whenever I would jump into Twitter it too my mind off of what I was focused on and that context switch would become time consuming.

Slack has been more challenging because I both use slack to relieve my boredom but also I need it to get my work done. I'm still trying to figure that one out.

Outside of the book, here's a little piece of related advice for getting a lot done - embrace boredom by not watching TV (or similar useless things). Instead, make sure you have "meaningful" past times that produce results that you can look back on and say "I'm glad I've done that!" Chances are that watching the 4th season of Game of Thrones when you already know the series ended poorly is not going to be a "I'm glad I've done that" experience. Instead, build thing, develop talents, meet people. I certainly could do better here, but this is what I'm working towards.