What is deep work?

Why deep work matters

The three laws of deep work

Deep work isn’t just about work

The underrated skill of daydreaming

The hidden value of exploration, part I

The hidden value of exploration, part II

Why you need to laugh more, part I

Why you need to laugh more, part II

Why you need to take play more seriously

What is deep work

There’s going to be three main ideas that are going to undergird and govern absolutely everything that we’re talking about whenever it comes to deep work, and we’ll, we’ll call them the three Ps because, well, alliteration is always a useful and fun thing right?

The three Ps are: practice, protection, and principles.

Let’s talk about practice first, because developing the kind of sustained concentration that’s required in order to do deep work isn’t necessarily easy these days. You’ve got social media notifications, text messages, emails, 20-plus tabs open your web browser.

We’re living in a world which is an information highway. The constant flow of data that we are consuming and interacting with almost continuously isn’t always necessarily a negative. It’s conferred quite huge benefits and positives for us. We have a whole life’s of worth of information available to us at our fingertips now; we can source whatever knowledge that we may desire or require with just a simple click of a button, just a tap on the screen, we can connect and communicate with people on the opposite side of the planet.

We’ve pretty much redefined or transcended a lot of our conventional notions for community by this point. But, for all of these very many apparent benefits that have been conferred to us as a consequence of this instantaneous connectedness that we now experience there is still just as many drawbacks to it as well.

One of the main ones being that developing the ability to do deep work is becoming an increasingly difficult skill for us to master, which is why practice is absolutely key.

See, building the capacity to engage in sustained intervals of highly focused cognitive work is really where the treasure is going to be when it comes to deriving our very best insights, ideas and solutions. But building the protections to surround this practice – our second ‘P’ – is going to be absolutely paramount.

Setting aside time, scheduling, informing colleagues and co-workers and friends and neighbours or strangers on the street if you have to. You’re going to need to do whatever it is that you can in order to ensure that those who need to know, understand and realise that that particular time at that particular day is ring fenced. You’re not going to be able to respond immediately to messages during that period.

Now, we’re gonna spend more time delving into each of these first two tenets in more detail as we progress, but this third tenet of ‘principles’ is going to be absolutely key. It’s going to really form the basis on which our whole practice going forward will be built. And there’s a whole suite of principles that we’re going to get into.

But for now, perhaps the most important principle for us to be introduced to is going to be an understanding and realising that when it comes to deep work, well… it’s not just about work.

The three laws of deep work

What Next?