Notes from ‘Deep Work’ – Set 3

A few months back I read a book titled “Deep Work” by Cal Newport. I found that a number of points raised and solutions offered in the book resonated with me. It was a very well-written book and I compiled some useful snippets from it into a bunch of notes. The first and second set of these snippets are here and here.

Here is the third and final set of those notes which relate largely to quitting social media for deep work:

The first point is that we increasingly recognize that these tools fragment our time and reduce our ability to concentrate. This reality no longer generates much debate; we all feel it.

Willpower is limited, and therefore the more enticing tools you have pulling at your attention, the harder it’ll be to maintain focus on something important.

The Any-Benefit Approach to Network Tool Selection: You’re justified in using a network tool if you can identify any possible benefit to its use, or anything you might possibly miss out on if you don’t use it. The problem with this approach, of course, is that it ignores all the negatives that come along with the tools in question.

The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.

Notice that this craftsman approach to tool selection stands in opposition to the any-benefit approach. Whereas the any-benefit mind-set identifies any potential positive impact as justification for using a tool, the craftsman variant requires that these positive impacts affect factors at the core of what’s important to you and that they outweigh the negatives.

In a time when so many knowledge workers—and especially those in creative fields—are still trapped in the any-benefit mind-set, it’s refreshing to see a more mature approach to sorting through such services.

The first step of this strategy is to identify the main high-level goals in both your professional and your personal life.

Keep using this tool only if you concluded that it has substantial positive impacts and that these outweigh the negative impacts.

What about a less famous writer? In this case, book marketing might play a more primary role in his or her goals. But when forced to identify the two or three most important activities supporting this goal, it’s unlikely that the type of lightweight one-on-one contact enabled by Twitter would make the list.

The question once again is not whether Twitter offers some benefits, but instead whether it offers enough benefits to offset its drag on your time and attention (two resources that are especially valuable to a writer).

Our strategy, therefore, would return a perhaps surprising but clear conclusion: Of course Facebook offers benefits to your social life, but none are important enough to what really matters to you in this area to justify giving it access to your time and attention.

By taking the time consumed by low-impact activities—like finding old friends on Facebook—and reinvesting in high-impact activities—like taking a good friend out to lunch—you end up more successful in your goal. To abandon a network tool using this logic, therefore, is not to miss out on its potential small benefits, but is instead to get more out of the activities you already know to yield large benefits.

Don’t formally deactivate these services, and (this is important) don’t mention online that you’ll be signing off: Just stop using them, cold turkey. If someone reaches out to you by other means and asks why your activity on a particular service has fallen off, you can explain, but don’t go out of your way to tell people.

After thirty days of this self-imposed network isolation, ask yourself the following two questions about each of the services you temporarily quit:
Would the last thirty days have been notably better if I had been able to use this service? Did people care that I wasn’t using this service? If your answer is “no” to both questions, quit the service permanently. If your answer was a clear “yes,” then return to using the service. If your answers are qualified or ambiguous, it’s up to you whether you return to the service, though I would encourage you to lean toward quitting. (You can always rejoin later.)

By spending a month without these services, you can replace your fear that you might miss out—on events, on conversations, on shared cultural experience—with a dose of reality. For most people this reality will confirm something that seems obvious only once you’ve done the hard work of freeing yourself from the marketing messages surrounding these tools: They’re not really all that important in your life.

By dropping off these services without notice you can test the reality of your status as a content producer. For most people and most services, the news might be sobering—no one outside your closest friends and family will likely even notice you’ve signed off.

These services aren’t necessarily, as advertised, the lifeblood of our modern connected world. They’re just products, developed by private companies, funded lavishly, marketed carefully, and designed ultimately to capture then sell your personal information and attention to advertisers.

They can be fun, but in the scheme of your life and what you want to accomplish, they’re a lightweight whimsy, one unimportant distraction among many threatening to derail you from something deeper. Or maybe social media tools are at the core of your existence. You won’t know either way until you sample life without them.

In other words, this strategy suggests that when it comes to your relaxation, don’t default to whatever catches your attention at the moment, but instead dedicate some advance thinking to the question of how you want to spend your “day within a day.”

If you haven’t given yourself something to do in a given moment, they’ll always beckon as an appealing option. If you instead fill this free time with something of more quality, their grip on your attention will loosen.

If you give your mind something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you’ll end the day more fulfilled, and begin the next one more relaxed, than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in semiconscious and unstructured Web surfing.

The value of deep work vastly outweighs the value of shallow, but this doesn’t mean that you must quixotically pursue a schedule in which all of your time is invested in depth.

Without structure, it’s easy to allow your time to devolve into the shallow—e-mail, social media, Web surfing. This type of shallow behavior, though satisfying in the moment, is not conducive to creativity.

A commitment to deep work is not a moral stance and it’s not a philosophical statement—it is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done.

Deep work is way more powerful than most people understand.

To leave the distracted masses to join the focused few, I’m arguing, is a transformative experience.

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