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

The story goes that Charles Dickens was apparently famous for the unapologetic way he would go about rebuffing and resisting dinner invitations from his friends and his associates. It was something that he was doing in order to maintain and protect his own prolific and creative output. 

I’m certainly not going to be suggesting that we ought to disengage from socialising, or become a recluse of some kind, I do think the fact that Dickens was so incredibly insistent and intentional about minimising interruptions and engagements does suggest to us that he may have been ahead of his time in more ways than just one. 

See, studies have now shown that it can take up to half an hour (30 minutes!) to regain focus if interrupted whilst engaged in the kind of deep thinking that’s necessary for doing complex work. It’s the consequence of this phenomena known as ‘attention residue’ – the sort of mini-hangover that the brain encounters whenever is forced to disengage from doing highly focused work in order to go and do something else. 

It hampers our cognitive performance, dilutes our capacity for focus. Which means that interruptions are the enemy. They’re the troll under the bridge. And it also means that actually learning how to develop the kind of practices whereby we can safeguard ourselves against the noise and the clamour of distraction is becoming an increasingly vital attribute in enabling us to do our very best work. 

See, there’s only 24 hours in a day. There’s only seven days in a week. 365 days, give or take, in a year. There’s no getting around those numbers. There’s no negotiating with them. Which isn’t necessarily a problem, but it does make time a currency, a commodity, if you like. And how finite a resource that time ultimately is, makes it the most precious commodity of all. 

So the important thing is not in having more time but rather optimising how we use it. Or as Stephen R Covey said: One of the keys not in spending time, but investing it. And that’s really what deep work is ultimately all about. It’s about deploying and investing our time in the most effective and efficient way possible, in order for us to eke out our full cognitive potential so that we can improve our qualitative and quantitative output. So that we can do better work, and more of it. 

But what does it actually look like for us to build these types of practices into our work life and what are the things that we need to understand or learn or appropriate in order for us to be able to render the very best for ourselves, and to produce an elite level.

Why deep work matters

What Next?