You probably heard of deep work.
You might have even read Cal Newport’s 2016 book that introduced the idea—or my advice to get started.
But are you actually practicing deep work?
Sorry to break it to you, but you might not be doing as much deep work as you actually think.
Deep work is more than a badge you put on Slack to signal you’re working on something important. Deep work is more than working with noise cancelling headphones while sipping your caffeinated drink of choice.
To better understand the nuances of deep work, let’s look at the original definition from the book.
Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.
As you can see, there’s a lot that goes into deep work:
A state of distraction-free concentration
Cognitively demanding
Creating value and/or improving skills
Hard to replicate
Intense focus is necessary for deep work, but not enough. You can process email without getting distracted, but that is not deep work.
Likewise, a hard problem is necessary for deep work, but not enough. Implementing a new feature for a software product is hard, but if you do it while attending a remote meeting, it doesn’t count as deep work.
Deep work requires both material and execution. It’s a combination of how you work and what you work on.
Deep work is focused, uninterrupted attention directed to solving hard, specialized problems.
The strictness of this criterion is why true deep work is hard to come by. Being aware of these constraints is the first step in identifying truly valuable work, the kind of work that gets you promoted.
Keep these strict criteria in mind at your next team planning session and as you schedule your day. What hard problems are you most suited to tackle? How can you allocate time at the peak of your attentional rhythm and keep it free from distractions to make progress on them?