The Dire Danger of Distraction for Knowledge Workers
“The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.”
— Cal Newport, Deep Work
Are you a knowledge worker?
If so…and you have not yet read Cal Newport’s 2016 book, Deep Work; Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, I highly recommend it.
As a writer, I can’t believe I haven’t come across it until now. But then again, I think the books we need to read find our way to us when the time is right.
Although I learned a long time ago the importance of devoting the first two one-hour sessions of my workday to distraction-free writing, over the past year I began to notice that something had changed…and I wasn’t able to concentrate properly anymore during those daily deep-work sessions.
So what is “deep work”?
In the book, the author defines “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.”
“Deep work,” says Newport, “is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity.”
In order to demonstrate the importance of deep work to readers, the author cites multiple examples of great thinkers—past and present—who utilize/d the practice of deep work to do what they do (Carl Jung, Bill Gates, Peter Higgs, Woody Allen). But it was the words of Neal Stephenson, “the acclaimed cyberpunk author who helped form our popular conception of the Internet age but who is near impossible to reach electronically himself,” that hit me the most:
“If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks I can write novels. [If I instead get interrupted a lot] what replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time…there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons.”
Ouch. If I could transcribe all the e-mails I’ve written over the years into novels…I would have twenty published books to my name. Alas, I only have one.
“The ubiquity of deep work among influential individuals is important to emphasize,” explains Newport, “because it stands in sharp contrast to the behaviour of most modern knowledge workers—a group that’s rapidly forgetting the value of going deep.”
And why are knowledge workers forgetting the value of going deep?
“The reason knowledge workers are losing their familiarity with deep work is well established: network tools.” These tools are: e-mail, SMS, social media and infotainment sites.
“The rise of these tools,” says Newport, “combined with ubiquitous access to them through smartphones and networked office computers, has fragmented most knowledge workers’ attention to slivers.”
That sentence is so important, I am going to repeat it:
The use of e-mail, SMS, social media and infotainment sites have fragmented most knowledge workers’ attention to slivers.
“This state of fragmented attention cannot accommodate deep work,” cautions Newport, “which requires long periods of uninterrupted thinking.”
Aha! This is starting to help explain why I can’t seem to think as deeply—and concentrate as much as I used to be able to—during my morning deep work sessions. Something has changed: my brain.
“Modern knowledge workers are not loafing,” says the author. “In fact, they report that they are as busy as ever. What explains this discrepancy?”
They are spending the vast majority of their time doing shallow work.
And what is “shallow work”?
Newport defines “Shallow Work” as:
“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.”
“In the age of network tools,” says Newport, “knowledge workers increasingly replace deep work with the shallow alternative—constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction. Larger efforts that would be well served by deep thinking, such as forming a new business strategy or writing an important grant application, get fragmented into distracted dashes that produce muted quality.”
Does this ring a bell for you? It sure did for me. Unfortunately, the news isn’t getting any better.
“To make matters worse for depth,” cautions the author, “there’s increasing evidence that the shift toward the shallow is not a choice that can be easily reversed.”
Yes, you read correctly.
“Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.”
Yikes!
“Network tools are distracting us from work that requires unbroken concentration,” says Newport, “while simultaneously degrading our capacity to remain focused.”
On the bright side, this reality is opening up tremendous opportunities for those people who are able to figure out a way to make deep work a priority over shallow work:
“Our work culture’s shift toward the shallow is exposing a massive economic and personal opportunity for the few who recognize the potential of resisting this trend and prioritizing depth.”
“Deep work is not some nostalgic affection of writers and early twentieth-century philosophers,” say Newport. “It’s instead a skill that has great value today. Whether you’re a computer programmer, writer, marketer, consultant, or entrepreneur, to succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of producing—a task that requires depth.”
I don’t know about you…but these insights have raised the alarm bells for me, my brain and my productivity. The time has come to fundamentally shift how I structure my workdays so that I can accomplish all that I want to…versus simply leaving behind a legacy of thousands of forgotten e-mails.
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