Depth Over Distraction

Howdy from Durham,

I started my new job this week (more on that in a future newsletter).

Plus, I did some exploring before my first day (photo at the end).

For now, let’s jump into the importance of your focused attention.

Depth over distraction.

I’m currently reading Cal Newport’s Deep Work.

Newport is a CS professor at Georgetown University. When he’s not teaching or performing research, he finds time to author books at the intersection of productivity, technology, and society.

This includes 7 different titles (multiple of which are NYT bestsellers). In addition to his books, Newport writes for the New Yorker and hosts a podcast.

Oh, yeah - he’s also a husband and father of two.

“I…rarely work past five or six p.m. during the workweek.” - Newport

How the heck does someone pull all of that off in a “normal” workweek?

According to Newport, “Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.”

This directed concentration is what Newport calls “Deep Work.”

What is deep work?

Deep Work: 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.

One of my favorite parts in the book - the folks that Newport profiles all had spots to retreat to in order to engage in deep work (you know how I feel about tiny architecture).

Here are just a few examples:

• Michel de Montaigne - 16th century essayist who worked in a private library that he built in a tower of his French château

• Mark Twain - wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in a shed on the property of his farm in New York

• Bill Gates - would go to a miniature lakeside cottage for week long retreats to read and write

Deep work has been around for centuries.

While it is not a new phenomenon, Newport argues that deep work is becoming increasingly rare at the same time that it is becoming increasingly valuable.

This is due to the information economy.

From industrial to informational.

Until the last few decades, members of society produced value as manual laborers in an industrial economy.

“They were paid to crank widgets - and not much about their job would change in the decades they kept it,” says Newport.

This means that, for most of history, that there was little to no need for workers to be adaptable, continuous learners.

Things have changed.

Today, we operate as knowledge workers in an informational economy. We provide value by creating, processing, and using information.

We do so through the double edged sword of technology.

On the one hand, tech enables us to learn new, relevant skills, remain agile, and become increasingly valuable knowledge workers (added economic value).

On the other, tech causes us to become more distracted (focus is increasingly rare).

Hence Newport’s hypothesis that, if you learn to focus in the age of distraction, you will become rare and valuable.

I’m not through the entire book yet. I’ll report back once I complete it, but I already have one clear takeaway:

If you choose distraction over depth in your work, you will incur massive opportunity costs to your financial, social, occupational, and emotional health.

What I’m Paying Attention To:

The Shirky Principle - “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution”

Photo of The Week

Thanks for reading

How do you mitigate distraction?

Reply and let me know,

Josh

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