Rule #1: Practice Deep Work

Now that you understand what deep work is and why it’s important, you’ll learn how to fill your schedule with deep work and reduce your time on shallow work.

To be more productive, the first step is to spend more of your time in deep work. But it’s not enough to just will yourself to do deep work on demand. The more effective approach is to approach deep work with structure, habit, and discipline.

Make deep work a ritual. Don’t let it be a question of willpower.

While you know in our heads that you should be spending time on deep work, distractions get in the way. Distractions are things that you’d rather be doing than deep work - like eating food, sleeping, or browsing the Internet.

When you try to overcome your distractions, you use willpower to get back on task. But you have a finite amount of willpower each day. If you have to continuously force yourself to switch back from distractions, you’ll deplete this willpower, at which point you’ll be more vulnerable to distractions. This limits you from reaching the maximum of your deep work potential.

Instead, if you make deep work a ritual or habit, you no longer have to employ your willpower. Deep work happens automatically as a routine, and there are no distractions that you have to will yourself to overcome. In turn, this lengthens the time in which you’re doing deep work, and it reduces the rate of failure.

The Four Types of Deep Work Scheduling

An effective way to build a habit of deep work is to set a deep work schedule - setting aside time in advance to focus on deep work.

The book offers four types of deep work schedules, with different time requirements and efficacy. To be successful at doing deep work in the long term, you have to find the deep work schedule that best fits your lifestyle and work needs.

Monastic Schedule

• Structure: Remove as many shallow work tasks from your life as possible. Outsource any necessary shallow work tasks to assistants. Spend nearly all your time on deep work. It’s called “monastic” because, like a monk, you spend your time somewhat isolated and in deep focus on your work.
• Examples: Some authors go off the grid and aren’t contactable by email or through social media. All correspondence comes in by postal mail or through their editor.
• Pros: You get extended periods of deep work – it becomes your default working style, not something you have to plan for.
• Cons: This is too luxurious for most people to be able to do given the requirements of their career.

Bimodal/Periodic Schedule

• Structure: Carve out regular periods each week, month, or entire parts of the year to focus on deep work. The book stresses that the period should be at least 1 full day to reach the maximum intensity of deep work (a few hours each morning is insufficient)
• Examples: Professors often take semester-long sabbaticals to focus on deep research. Bill Gates takes "think weeks" twice a year. You might carve out a 3-day block of the week where you aren’t able to be contacted, while preserving the other 2 days for shallower work.
• Pros: This is more realistic than the monastic schedule. Setting aside at least 1 full day of deep work produces the maximum concentration intensity.
• Cons: Despite being more realistic, it’s still impractical for many workers, who are logistically required to perform certain tasks daily.

Rhythmic Schedule

• Structure: Set aside a regular block of time each day to focus on deep work.
• Examples: Set aside the morning (eg 8AM to 11AM) for deep work, before jumping into shallow work.
• Pros: The regularity is conducive to forming a habit. It’s more realistic for most careers and lifestyle.
• Cons: By being restricted to less than a full day, it doesn’t give the full day of deep work that the Monastic and Periodic schedules provide.

Ad hoc/Journalistic Schedule

• Structure: Find time to do deep work when you get it.
• Examples: When visiting your in-laws, carve out a few hours to do work, before meeting back up with your family.
• Pros: This is the most flexible. You can conduct deep work at any point when it’s possible.
• Cons: Because it’s irregular, it’s the least successful in setting up a habit. It requires the ability to switch on deep work instantaneously. Because it’s more variable, you’re more likely to run into distractions and thus more likely to consume willpower.

As a side note, Anders Ericsson, author of Peak, notes that a novice can do only about an hour a day of intense concentration. Experts who have extensive practice can expand to up to 4 hours, but rarely are able to exceed this. (Shortform note: Read our summary of Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise here.)

Building an Environment for Deep Work

In addition to scheduling time for deep work, you should also build your environment to be most supportive of deep work. Suggestions:

• Choose where to do deep work
  • Ideally, choose a place that you go to ONLY for deep work (like a conference room, the library, or an office in your home). In this place, you will do only deep work and no shallow work. Keep your shallow work in another place dedicated only for shallow work. Compartmentalizing your location this way will cement the habit of deep work more strongly.
• Create a distraction-free environment
  • Remove your most appealing distractions. Shut down Internet connectivity.
  • (Shortform suggestion: Shut off your phone and put it in a place that’s annoying to reach. If you must use the Internet, consider installing website blockers in your web browsers.)
• Add supporting materials
  • Add things that will make your deep work more focused, like starting with coffee, having enough food, integrating light exercise.

Deep Work Practices

Once you have the schedule and the environment, what do you actually do to engage in deep work? The book offers a few suggestions

The 4 Disciplines of Execution

These 4 principles come from the book of the same name.

1. Focus on the wildly important.
   • Rationale: Choosing what to work on is important. You should spend time on things that have the largest impact.
   • Instead of trying to say no to trivial distractions, say yes to the “subject that arouses a terrifying longing.” This will crowd out everything else.
   • Choose only a small number of such goals. This way you’re forced to remove the trivial tasks, rather than maintaining a large to-do list.
2. Act on the leading metrics.
   • Rationale: Metrics are useful to figure out how well you’re doing and how you can improve.
   • Definition: Leading metrics are immediately measurable. Lagging metrics measure the long-term thing you’re ultimately trying to improve. Lagging metrics are the real result, but they take too long to measure, and so they don’t give feedback in time to change your behavior.
   • For deep work, consider leading metrics like the number of hours you’ve spent in deep work, the number of pages you’ve written, the number of new ideas you’ve generated, etc. These are all easily measurable and help you see how effective you are at deep work.
3. Keep a scoreboard.
   • Rationale: Making your leading metrics visible will motivate you to keep up the habit and allow celebration of successes.
   • Keep a physical artifact in the workspace that shows your leading metric, like hours spent in deep work.
   • If you work with other people, show metrics across your team and allow friendly competition to increase the metric.
   • Each hour, mark off major accomplishments you achieved. This will make clear what concrete goals you’ve achieved in deep work.
4. Create a cadence of accountability.
   • Rationale: Periodically analyzing your deep work will keep you honest about how well you lived up to your goals. It’ll show opportunities to improve.
   • Set up a weekly review to make a plan for the week ahead.
   • Review good and bad weeks and what led to each.

Shutdown at the End of the Working Day

If you’re the type to want to be productive, it may be tempting to spend every waking hour working. Cal Newport thinks this is a counterproductive mindset, and that you should instead deliberately shut off your work and let your brain relax. Here are a few reasons.

First, as mentioned before, even experts can only accomplish 4 hours of intense concentration each day. At the end of the day, your brain is depleted of willpower and is usually at its least effective in doing effective tasks. If you try to work, you’ll often waste your time doing shallow work slowly, possibly tasks that didn’t need to be done at all.

Secondly, giving your brain time to relax is useful for solving difficult problems. This arises from two theories of thought:

• Unconscious Thought Theory: the subconscious parts of the brain are constantly working in the background to solve problems, in ways you can’t perceive. This subconscious work is high bandwidth and sifts through lots of possible solutions. In a stressful environment, such as one where your brain is overworked and given no chance to relax, your subconscious is less effective at this. (Shortform note: this may also explain why some surprisingly good insights come at relaxing but otherwise odd times, like while in the shower or driving a car.)
• Attention Restoration Theory: like willpower, your ability to focus is limited and needs to be recharged. Deliberately setting aside time to relax today improves your focus tomorrow.

Both suggest that giving your brain time to relax is useful for solving difficult problems.

So how do you shut off work and relax? The book suggests creating a shutdown ritual, where you check your work for anything you forgot and plan your next day’s work. Here’s an example ritual:

• Check your emails for any last urgent items.
• Keep a todo list of unresolved items.
• Make sure every item in the todo list is scheduled to be completed.
• Look through your calendar to make sure there aren’t important deadlines you forgot.
• Make a todo list of tasks tomorrow.
• Say “shutdown complete” or some equivalent phrase to explicitly mark the end of work.

The important concept here is to convince yourself that things will be fine when you shutdown. You’ll never be able to finish all your important work in one day. Instead of feeling anxious about unfinished tasks, be confident that all the important tasks are accounted for, and that you’ll make meaningful progress the next day.

One specific suggestion on how to relax after work - walking in nature. Unlike city streets, they’re cognitively undemanding, since there are no crosswalks and cars to navigate around. But they provide enough interest to the senses (sight, smell, hearing) to avoid a rambling mind.

Other Deep Work Tactics

Here are miscellaneous tactics to improve your deep work.

• Consider collaborating in shared deep work. Having a thinking partner can push your thinking to the limit.
• “Make a grand gesture” – commit an investment to jumpstart the activity.
  • If your deep work space costs you money, you will feel more compelled to use it.
  • Examples:
    • While writing Harry Potter, JK Rowling rented an expensive hotel room to escape her home’s distractions.
    • Another writer booked round-trip flights to Tokyo to write a manuscript without the distractions of normal life.
• The ideal office floor plan: hub and spoke.
  • The spokes contain quiet private places for people to do deep work. The hubs allow communal work.
  • People spend time in the private places by default. As they walk down the spokes to the hubs, people will serendipitously bump into each other.
  • In contrast, in the common open office model, workers spend time in the distracting open floor as the default. Meeting rooms are the occasional deep work area that workers need to escape to.