The phrase ‘Deep Work’ sounds like the term for a kind of meditative practice, something distant that requires immense effort to accomplish. Author and Computer Science Professor, Cal Newport, would simultaneously agree with, and dispel the previous statement. In his fifth self-help book ‘Deep Work’, he proposes that we are slowly losing (or have, scarily enough, already lost) our ability to focus on tasks that require our utmost attention. In light of this, he provides some suggestions and ‘deep work’ methods to help us focus and get back on our track to success.
What is ‘Deep Work’, though?
Newport describes it 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.’’
Newport believes that engaging in deep work will help us hone the abilities we need to come out on top of our fields, i.e. writers doing deep work will be able to finish their books faster, and the content of the books will be of a higher quality.
This book is divided into two parts, with the first part describing the concept and its importance; and the second delving into the ‘rules’ of deep work and how to achieve it. There is no meaningless sentence or paragraph in this book, every word seems to carry proper intent and weight in trying to convey the importance of deep work in our lives. The pages are filled with real-life examples too, with Newport drawing from Carl Jung’s bimodal approach method of engaging in deep work (Jung had an isolated retreat off of Lake Zurich where he would go to work on his research when he wasn’t attending patients) and even contemporary people who have turned their life around by incorporating the minimal deep work requirements into their everyday life. The process of reading this book really makes you feel like success and creativity are just one-act-of-deep-work-every-day away.
There are four deep work strategies that Newport has devised so that a little bit (or a lot) of deep work can fit into everybody’s day regardless of their schedule:
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The Monastic Approach – This approach is pretty straightforward and, for many, the hardest to achieve. It involves isolating yourself from completely until the work you intend to do is complete. This means eliminating all technological, social and work distractions.
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The Bimodal Approach – As mentioned before, this is the strategy that Carl Jung used to follow (although neither the term ‘deep work’ nor this particular strategy existed at the time) because he divides his time between his research and his life back in Zurich. This method has to do with dividing your time into deep work hours and ‘hours for everything else’; you set aside a fixed number of hours/days wherein you will do nothing but develop the skill/task that you have to work on. Once you’ve completed you’ve completed the hours/days, you’re allowed to go back to your other tasks and duties.
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The Rhythmic Approach – This method follows the principle that ‘‘the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to turn them into a habit.’’ Unlike the bimodal approach, this method is just concerned with your tasks for a day. Based on this strategy, you can bring deep work into your life by setting aside about 90 minutes (or more if possible) aside each day to engage in deep work. This way, you get something done every day through a routine and, in the long run, this accumulates to several hours spent in a state of concentration.
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The Journalistic Approach – This is another straightforward method, and to some, it may be the most appealing one. According to this strategy, you engage in deep work whenever you get any free time for it.
Out of all the proposed methods, I think that we, as college students, would be most adaptable to method #3 – the rhythmic approach.
In our busy lives, I highly doubt we’d be able to cut off from civilization (AND OUR PHONES!) for long periods of time, so that rules out #1 and #2. The Journalistic Approach sounds tempting but it doesn’t ensure any kind of regularity and leaves too much up to chance. If the goal is to consistently and fruitfully engage in deep work, we need to have a schedule, a rhythm, if you may, that we can follow to achieve that goal. Doing deep work at our own whim and time will not be helpful.
I think that Newport’s book is a very useful one to read because he takes our pre-existing knowledge and reworks it to enable us to start making changes in our lives. As a person whose first questions is always: ‘But how can I possibly start this?’, I’ve been given no way out by the methods he has proposed. And so, for those people like me who feel like they need a push, Newport is here to tell you how you can push yourself to the top of your game.
Edited by Vasudha Malani
All images are curated by Sanjna Misra