Skepsis #27: Deep Work
Living that Deep Work lifestyle. 💡
What I’m thinking about
What work do you do that is meaningful, cognitively demanding and that moves your goals (personal or professional) forward? Do you set aside time to make sure you make progress across that axis? How much of your time is spent on “shallow” busy-work vs the more meaningful “deep” work? What is the kind of work that only you can do?
As part of my never-ending pursuit for improved productivity, I’ve started paying more attention to how much of the work I do that is so-called deep.
Deep Work is a concept popularized by computer science professor Cal Newport in his book with the same name. Deep Work is any work you do in the absence of distractions, that requires and benefits from focus; it's what you do that produces real value and requires a lot of cognitive effort. It’s different but related to the concept of Flow. Cal classifies Deep Work as:
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.
In the book, Cal frequently references famous scientists and writers and how they would have special work rituals, locking themselves away for hours or days at a time to in a cabin to work on their craft or books with no external distractions. Although it’s fairly straight forward to see why Deep Work is important for writers, academics, students and artists, etc. I think most people in most knowledge professions, even managers, can benefit from increasing the amount of Deep Work they do. It’s a concept that can be usefully applied to all kinds of knowledge work that benefits from focused attention during cognitively demanding tasks.
For someone like myself who does a wide range of things as part of my work, and produces value not just through creating things but even more so through the people I work with, Deep Work is important since:
Most work should be done sequentially with focus on the task at hand; doing one thing at a time.
Most meetings, discussions, and workshops benefit from deep focus - committing yourself fully to the person or topic at hand without succumbing to distractions (smartphones, emails, etc).
Deep Work is not just a solitary activity but can be done together with others.
Managing is cognitively demanding - it needs deep focused attention to do it really well, to empathize, and listen to people.
More broadly, Deep Work is about being mindful during work and during transitional moments, moving from one thing to another with intention and purpose. Having an idea of what you’re going to achieve when you sit down to work, clearing the table to get that work done (turning off distractions, etc), and giving your full attention to the task at hand.
Interesting things I've come across
The perfect cold email is:
Short and grabs attention.
Super clear on who you are.
Value prop for the receiver.
Has a specific ask.
Self-help: the good, the bad, and the ugly
Most self-help literature is at best ineffectual and at worst counter-productive or harmful. But it feels great to consume. People (including myself) don't buy self help books because it reliably makes them better, but because it makes them feel better. So what actually works? Even today, with the recent/ongoing replication crisis within academic psychology, there's a lot of doubt in the findings and an even greater doubt in its practicality in terms of producing improvements in people's personal productivity, happiness, relationships and so on. In this post at Less Wrong, the author shares a few findings that seems to be rather uncontroversial and supported both in practice and in the literature.
Factors that don't correlate much with happiness include: age, gender, parenthood, intelligence, physical attractiveness, and money (as long as you're above the poverty line). Factors that correlate moderately with happiness include: health, social activity, and religiosity. Factors that correlate strongly with happiness include: genetics, love and relationship satisfaction, and work satisfaction.
An essay about Thomas Sowell, one of the most underrated economists and thinkers of the 20th century.
A frequent theme in Sowell’s writing is what philosophers would call reversing the explanandum—the phenomenon to be explained. Take poverty. Many observe the enormous chasm between rich and poor nations and, understandably, wonder why poverty exists. But the real question, in the constrained vision, is why wealth exists [at all].
Nevertheless, the French descendants earn only 70 cents for every dollar earned by the Russian-Americans. Why such a large gap? Sowell’s basic insight is that the question is posed backward. Why would we think that two ethnic groups with different histories, demographics, social patterns, and cultural values would nevertheless achieve identical results?
Thiel on progress and stagnation
I’ve shared an interview with Peter Thiel before. He’s one of the most interesting and original intellectuals alive today, in my opinion. This is a collection of several key quotes from various interviews, articles, and books of or with Thiel. If you haven’t come across Thiel previously, prepare to have your world turned upside down.
We live in a world where we've been working on the Star Trek computer in Silicon Valley, but we don't have anything else from Star Trek. We don't have the warp drive, we don't have the transporter, we can't re-engineer matter in this cornucopian world where there is no scarcity. And how good is a society where you have a well-functioning Star Trek computer, but nothing else from Star Trek?
Name me one science fiction film that Hollywood produced in the last 25 years in which technology is portrayed in a positive light, in which it’s not dystopian, it doesn’t kill people, it doesn’t destroy the world, it doesn’t not work, etc., etc. Instead, we have one sort of catastrophic, anti-technological scenario after another, and the future is some combination of the Terminator movie, and Avatar, and Elysium, and you know,
A definite view, by contrast, favors firm convictions. Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it “well-roundedness,” a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something substantive—to be a monopoly of one. This is not what young people do today, because everyone around them has long since lost faith in a definite world. No one gets into Stanford by excelling at just one thing, unless that thing happens to involve throwing or catching a leather ball
There’s nothing automatic about history. History is made up by the choices people make and it’s in our hands to decide.
How to find anything on the Internet
Googling is a skill. You can save a lot of time and increase the likelihood that you'll find what you're looking for by using some special syntax when searching. Something I often do is putting words within quotation marks "..." to indicate that I want to find those words as a full phrase. Aside from using Google search to find pages, you can also search directly within a specified site, you can search for email addresses, and you can search for files and more.
What makes Russia and the United States rivals?
Podcast
The Past, Present, and Future of the US-China Relationship with Tanner Greer
- The differences in perspectives between east and west.
- Why China didn’t liberalize as it got more prosperous.
- How the US’s foreign policy should have been different in the past with respect to China.
- Why people are becoming more hawkish on China.
Stay safe out there,
/Phil