
Deep Work: A welcome kick in the butt - cpbotha
https://cpbotha.net/2017/01/09/deep-work-a-welcome-kick-in-the-butt/
======
ggregoire
The first part of the book has a really good description of the "modern" work
environment and its defects, and how it valorizes superficial work over deep
work. I was actually surprised by how identical this description was to my
last work environment.

\- Open space to promote communication and knowledge sharing (and controlling
what people are doing), but at the end you are interrupted every 5 minutes by
people walking and talking/screaming/laughing about anything but work.

\- People expect you to have Gmail and Slack open all day and to reply in the
5 minutes.

\- You are encouraged to go on Facebook/Twitter/Youtube/whatever to like and
share the latest news/video/open position/whatever posted by the company. Then
you start reading/watching something else that looks interesting and you lose
easily 30 min / 1 hour.

\- At the end, what matter is how many hours you spend in the office. Nobody
cares if you spend a full week on a task because you can't never focus on what
you do.

~~~
BeetleB
>People expect you to have Gmail and Slack open all day and to reply in the 5
minutes.

When I was looking for my last job, I explicitly queried about this:

"Will it be OK if I check my email only 3 times a day (at work)?"

In my previous job, too much work was done through email. Person wants me to
do some work and return a plot. I send it to him. Within 5-30 minutes, he has
a question about it. I have to respond soon. And it goes on and on - with each
email interrupting whatever work I'm doing.

So I don't have "meetings through email" any more. They want to ask me stuff?
Let's get in a room and at a fixed time and work through them.

"I keep my messenger app permanently off. Is that a problem?"

>but at the end you are interrupted every 5 minutes by people walking and
talking/screaming/laughing about anything.

For me, this is a non-issue, and much preferred to emails and IM's. Especially
IM. Also, phone calls are OK too. Why?

With IM, they start a conversation and then suddenly disappear, only to
reappear 15 minutes later when I think the issue is closed and have started to
work on something. No one does that in person (well, _almost_ no one).

When they come to me in person or call me on the phone, they cannot just
browse the Internet while talking. They are mindful of my time. And somehow, I
feel they prepare their questions better, too.

~~~
ensignavenger
-"have to respond soon."

What is it about the email that makes you think you have to respond soon? Is
it the culture at the company around email?

I work at a non-technology Fortune 500 in the IT dept. (I work remote, too)
and the general expectation is that we check our email 2-4 times a day.
Occasionally I go a day going through my inbox once all day, and it has never
been a problem.

I suppose it is a company culture issue?

~~~
ryandrake
Frequent sender of such E-mails chiming in here:

Often when there is a response expectation, I'll explicitly say so in the
subject, so that if you're scanning your E-mails it will stick out. Will also
specify my default assumption should you not respond. I like to be super
clear. Company culture is the product of the people who participate in company
culture.

SUBJ: [Reply needed by 5PM] Deadline for project approval approaching

(somewhere in body): Blah, blah, blah. If I do not hear back, I will assume we
will go forward with the project.

~~~
BeetleB
I think the part that is missing in your comment is the company expectation on
how often people should check their emails. This is why in my interview I
specified something like "Morning, after lunch, and before I head home".

If getting an email like yours, sent at 2pm where a reply is needed by 5pm,
then the answer to my question should be "No, checking your email at that
interval is not OK".

I'm not going to say your expectation is objectively bad or anything. Some
businesses may need to work at a fast pace. Just that I would not want to work
there if this is the norm. Frankly, in the places I've worked, I didn't see
why it had to be through email vs coming to my office or calling me.

------
milesf
I've found this combination works well for me:

\- The "Emergent Task Planner" is my daily piece of paper that I physically
write out what I want to accomplish. At the end of the day I know what I've
done and haven't done. ([http://davidseah.com/node/the-emergent-task-
planner/](http://davidseah.com/node/the-emergent-task-planner/))

\- I break my sessions of work into 2 or 4 hour blocks, and shut off all the
distractions.

\- If I'm struggling to stay focussed, I use a Pomodoro timer
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique))

\- If I'm struggling to stay off social media, I fire up Self Control
([http://selfcontrolapp.com/](http://selfcontrolapp.com/))

\- If I'm really having a garbage day for productivity, I find stuff to do off
my OmniFocus List that involves physical activity (cleaning the house, fixing
things, going for a walk). I work from home now, but when I used to have an
office cubicle I would just walk around the building.

~~~
Hates_
Those emergent task planners are great!

------
ianbicking
Hard work is hard, but I wonder if it truly requires an anti-social approach.

The nice thing if you are working in isolation is that everyone involved in
your work environment is probably aligned towards a goal. Or at least we hope
you yourself are aligned – and yet even that is hard to manage, as we all know
from our own ability to distract ourselves.

An open office, messaging, all those distractions aren't just distractions,
they are external influences that aren't designed to help you get YOUR work
done. Someone else has a question to help them get THEIR work done. Someone
else is monitoring your productivity to help them alleviate their own
anxiousness.

I'm not a big fan of pair programming, but I do like how it can lead to better
focus. It's like you are focus accountability partners. I also like ad hoc
meetings setup for a specific purpose, if the purpose really is important for
the participants I think it's productive. And if the problem is really
important, I like a meeting where we talk things through and then get quiet
for a long time. We don't give up. We don't defer the problem, leave and go
our separate ways. Part of doing hard work, in my experience, is loading up
the tensions, piling up everything that makes it hard, and then finding the
way out. It's not always easiest to do that alone.

------
kordless
As the poster child for this stuff from a few years back, I've lit on the
simple intent on being present for a small amount of time each day. There are
hundreds of ways to meditate - find one that works well for you and practice
it. Work toward sitting and observing without judgement. Work toward quieting
the conversations in your head.

I would also recommend not over thinking about any of this too much. Thinking
about thinking has the same lowered efficiency as being distracted by
gadgets/media.

~~~
pcmaffey
Yes, thinking about productivity is a rabbit hole that devours your
productivity.

~~~
derrickdirge
I've spent years not being able to find a functional organization strategy due
to this very trap.

------
gdubs
If you want to get deep on this subject, I highly recommend "The Organized
Mind" and "The Power of Habit".

The Organized Mind really breaks down the cost of "task switching" and
explores the brain's strengths, quirks, and weaknesses, and how strategies of
highly effective people exploit those traits.

The Power of Habit is good for developing a less naive approach to behavior
change. It's eye opening.

------
dsschnau
i've never seen anyone actually use a pomodoro in real life, and the
occasional day i've given it s a shot, I end up thinking "this is silly, I'll
just focus on my work".

I guess my protest is that it seems silly, especially when I'm focused on
something and the timer goes off and I'm supposed to stop. It seems like its
adding structure only for the sake of structure. Has anyone actually started
using pomo, and stuck with it, and seen positive results?

~~~
RUG3Y
I've had positive results with pomodoro. I honestly think it's more likely to
be useful for people who are worse off than you are and can't focus or manage
time. If you can sit and focus on your work without help, you don't need it.

~~~
dsschnau
Haha, I wish! I have a notoriously hard time focusing through the day,
especially if personal matters are weighing on my mind.

~~~
qwer
The pomodoro technique makes work easy to start because it's a promise to
yourself that it will only be for a limited amount of time. If you break that
promise to yourself by not stopping, you've lost the entire point.

------
dominotw
>Extending the length of the 25 minute pomodoro. If I’m in the deep work flow,
I’ll continue past the 25 minute alarm.

Someone told me that its 25 minutes because it prevents you from building too
much context in your head that prevents you from taking a break at 25 min
mark. You can't do creative work if your brain is filled with lot of context.
eg: TDD goes really well with pomodoro because you are only thinking about the
next test and you can break on failing test so you can pick up right back. Is
this a reason for 25 min for Pomodoro?

~~~
josephg
I'll be honest; I've never understood this mindset. The idea of purposefully
interrupting my flow every 25 minutes, explicitly dropping my context is
ghastly. If you could design an ideal hell for me it would involve hard,
interesting programming problems and constant (every ~10-20 minute) seemingly
random external interruptions. (Its not an accident that I don't have
children.)

Most of the work I'm really proud of happens in 1-1.5 week long coding binges,
during which I code ~14 hours a day, don't eat well and don't get outside
much. During that time my entire being is oriented around the problem. I sleep
when I'm too tired to be productive and wake up with the problem spilling out
of me.

I usually need a couple of weeks recovery time afterwards during which I'm
pretty useless for anything thats not light and fluffy. But that time is 100%
worth it. If I could work at that intensity for 1 week out of each month I'd
be more productive than I have been at any 9-5 job I've ever had. Well, for a
given definition of productivity.

So I guess I like pomodoros - I just think they should be about 1 week in
length.

~~~
erikpukinskis
I think it suits your style of programming. My guess is you work in large
repositories where you need to keep many complex data structures in your head
in order to reason about what the code is doing. That's quite a common way of
programming, and it does necessitate large blocks of undistracted time.

The Pomodoro/25 minute approach your OP is advocating I think requires that
you write software a different way. You can't write big source files that
reference hundreds of data structures. You can't write modules that require
other modules to be structured just-so in order for things to work. You can't
throw hundreds of views, models, etc, into a big repo and let them all call
each other. You have to spend time constantly creating new interfaces,
shuffling responsibilities around, and generally keeping your codebase such
that no particular module requires you to reason much about the modules other
than its few neighbors.

Frameworks tend to discourage this way of programming, because they want to
give you a small set of primitives and have you fit everything into one of
those boxes.

But if you can manage it, by avoiding frameworks, learning about all of the
component systems available to you, and getting comfortable writing your own
middleware, the 25 minute requirement can actually help you, since if you find
a problem that you can't wrap your head around in 25 minutes, you know your
next task is to move some module boundaries around so that you can get a
clearer view of the problem.

Many software teams choose to operate on the bleeding edge of "could a very
smart, full-time programmer with a lot of coffee understand what's happening
after poking around for a couple hours?" rather than "does this interface
create a region of the codebase which can be independently understood?"

~~~
josephg
80% of the programming I do is the style you suggest. But ... software
development has bifurcated into two skills, and we don't yet have the words to
differentiate them.

\- There's the technician skill, where you poke at your react elements and
fiddle with CSS until it looks like the mockup the designers gave you. Every
20 minutes you need to trawl through stackoverflow to find the exact way to
use flexbox to get the layout you want, or to work around a bug in safari.
When you're done you do some refactoring and feel good about it and call it a
day.

\- And there's the engineering skill, where you scratch your head and read
wikipedia & some academic papers until you know what search terms to use. And
then you realise that really you want something like an invertible bloom
filter, except there's some small % chance it will fail each time you query it
so you need a fallback mechanism. Except then you realise that fallback
mechanism will have O(n^2) - but if you use a slightly different data
structure then it'll become O(nlogn + klogk). But that requires modifications
to the bloom filter itself and a funky network protocol, so you write that.

If the only programming you do is the first type, thats fine. Thats where we
all start. Thats the majority of work out there. 25 minute pomodoros are
probably fine for that. I like pair programming, because I can stay focussed
better with a friend. Sometimes I listen to excited music while I work.

But all the work I'm most proud of is the second type. I wrote a streaming
incremental compiler for a 2d air pressure based language. I got 90% of the
way to making an OT algorithm work for arbitrary JSON structures (including
object move), only to realise that it absolutely needs conflict markers so I
put it down for awhile. I wrote a nodejs server from scratch thats compatible
with google's browserchannel protocol - basically reimplementing TCP in the
process. I implemented a PEG parser - and I'm going to need a session like
this to add the ability to pass realtime streaming text updates through the
parser.

These sorts of things can't be reduced to 25 minute context increments. They
just need too much mental state. Maybe once they're done they can be broken
down into pieces that you could explain in 25 minute chunks. But figuring out
that some particular abstraction is the right one requires fitting the entire
system together in your head, so you can turn it around. And thats a spacing
out in the shower followed by a day with a whiteboard kind of task.

I guess the way I see it is that large amounts of uninterrupted time doesn't
simply make it _easier_ to do hard engineering. It makes it _possible_. Is
that what the book refers to as deep work? If so then I think pomodoros are an
anathema to that.

~~~
erikpukinskis
> But all the work I'm most proud of is the second type.

I think if that's true, you should spend your time structuring a back-end such
that other people in the organization can take the "technician" stuff off your
hands. People who care most about those parts of the codebase. Potentially
even non-engineer. Start them in a read-only front end app. It doesn't get you
out of the woods, because you still have to support all of those people. But
your real job is doing the hard engineering work to create a robust framework
which is safe for people to build on top of.

In the long term, you'll spend part of your time basically teaching, and the
other part of your time doing that gnarly researchy stuff you love.

And you could eventually opt out of teaching too, if you found someone on your
team who likes that work. Then you're just the wizard deep inside the machine
making magic happen. Your teammates would probably help. Good people will take
as much of the responsibility as they can, since they don't want you as a
bottleneck anyway.

------
wccrawford
>Yes, even after work, he makes the case for structuring your leisure
activities in a similar fashion.

I find that this attitude makes it hard for me to relax. I've always been like
this, and while I do derive a certain amount of comfort from it, I find it
hard to schedule time to sit and do "whatever", and therefore it's hard to
relax during that time.

To put it another way: A day at the beach sounds horrifyingly boring to me,
but a day at a waterpark sounds awesome. I feel the need to be _doing_ things
during my relaxation time, even if I might be more relaxed doing "nothing".

~~~
imesh
I wonder, I used to feel that way, but now nothing is better than a full day
at the beach truely relaxing and doing absolutely nothing. I wonder if it's
because of age or because my job is really burning me out and leaving me with
no energy.

~~~
wccrawford
Maybe I'll get there, but I hope I don't have to burn out to do it.

------
hkon
I agree that social media and internet is a great distraction. But co-workers
can be a source of good distractions. However for the distractions to be good.
Everyone must be on track, around the same knowledge levels and focused on
what problems needs to be solved. If you don't have these kind of colleagues,
you might as well stay at home. When you are at work you will have to answer
questions from those who didn't get the memo...

------
espeed
Was it Eric Schmidt, Larry or Sergey who said ideally everyone would have the
opportunity to do a three-year "deep think"?

~~~
nine_k
...and a flying car, and a pony?

Jokes aside, for most of us, the only person who can give you a three-year
"deep think" is yourself. Save up money, schedule off distractions, plan
ahead, and have that deep-think semi-vacation.

Doable? Quite probably. Easy? Well, no. You have to already have a lot of
concentration and determination to give yourself that large chunk of
uninterrupted concentration and determination.

------
ptrk
I made a macOS app [1] after reading this book that helps keep track of deep
focus sessions.

[1] (free) [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/zen-
time/id1089216789?mt=12](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/zen-
time/id1089216789?mt=12)

------
cauterized
How does this work if you're on a "manager schedule" and 50% or more of your
job is _supposed_ to be dealing with interruptions, having ad-hoc
conversations, and the like?

~~~
svachalek
I haven't read this book but in my experience, "shallow" work is also a
necessity, always has been; it's just that in last decade or so we seem to
have glorified it and let it replace all other forms of working.

IMHO it's not a matter of avoiding shallow work altogether, but more about
blocking off time and space to really think and prioritize rather than react
react react. As a manager I'd imagine you'd need less of this time than your
direct reports but it'd be good to help protect their focus as much as you
can, assuming they want it. (Depending on the nature of the work, some people
seem to thrive on bite-size jobs.)

------
outworlder
> Even worse, if we continue doing it this way, we’ll start losing our ability
> to focus.

Is that true? Based on my own anecdotal evidence, I'd say it is, but I'm a
sample size of 1...

------
0xD3ADB33F
Heard a lot of good things about this book, but the writing is just atrocious,
and after a couple of chapters I didn't actually learn anything new... don't
get the hype.

~~~
parallel
I thought the writing was excellent and the content insightful.

