Deep Work to Grow Your Small Business.

• The Book: “Deep Work – Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World” by Cal Newport.
  • Cal Newport also authored “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”
  • Cal coined the term “deep work” in a series of articles published on his popular blog, “Study Hacks: Decoding Patterns of Success”
• Deep Work (Cal’s definition): Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive [thinking, reasoning, or remembering] capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.
• Shallow Work: Non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.
• The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time is it becoming valuable in our economy.
• Collaborative Deep Work: Isolation is not required for productive deep work. For many types of work, especially when pursuing innovation, collaborative deep work can yield better results.
• “A 2012 McKinsey study found that the average knowledge worker now spends more than 60% of the workweek engaged in electronic communication and internet searching, with close to 30% of a worker’s time dedicated to ready an answering e-mail alone.”
• “…fragmented into distracted dashes that produce muted quality.”
• “…Network Tools [email, text, social media] are distracting us from work that requires unbroken concentration, while simultaneously degrading our capacity to remain focused.”
• What are some of our common distractions? As Business Owners?
  • Focusing on too many things at once (i.e. too many projects or businesses at the same time).
  • Allowing (desiring?) Network Tools to interrupt our focus time.
  • Allowing our teams to interrupt us.
  • Allowing our clients/customers/patients to interrupt us.
  • Switching Costs – Productivity costs of trying to “multi-tasking”
    • “Attention Residue – a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the previous task.”

• The danger is that we can lose our ability to perform deep work. (Cal argues that you can lose this ability permanently. Thoughts?)

The Opportunity:

• Deep Work leads to two core abilities needed to thrive in the new economy:
  • The ability to quickly master hard things. Deep work helps you quickly learn hard things.
  • The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed. Deep work helps you produce at an elite level.

The Rules:

• Decide your Depth Philosophy – will you eliminate or minimize everything else, or will you use time blocking?
• Ritualize:
  • Where will you work (conducive locations) and for how long? (What about working at night?)
  • How you’ll work once you start to work?
  • How you’ll support your work.
• Don’t Work Alone (Collaborative Deep Work) – for a business owner, this may mean an off-site meeting or retreat with your leadership team.
• Planning and Time Blocking
• Focus – the more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.
• Be Lazy – Downtime aids insights. Downtime helps recharge the energy needed to work deeply. The work that evening downtime replaces is usually not that important. (Free Days)
• Prioritize – what’s most important? How do you determine what’s most important? The rest is probably noise!
• Say NO – turn down time-consuming commitments.
• Quit Social Media (?)
• Don’t try to do schedule too much Deep Work time at once. The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained.
• This requires a change (perhaps drastic) of habits.
• Other Productivity Tips:
  • David – what’s one of your top productivity hacks?
  • Henry – Tuning off notifications during my focus times (i.e. email, text, music, etc.)
• Related Episodes:
  • Episode 283: Kris Ward – Time Management
  • Episode 052: Lauren Midgley – Productivity & Time Management
  • Episode 232: Personal Productivity Tips & Hacks