{"id":551,"date":"2018-03-25T12:45:41","date_gmt":"2018-03-25T16:45:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/?p=551"},"modified":"2018-03-25T12:45:41","modified_gmt":"2018-03-25T16:45:41","slug":"getting-organized-in-2018-the-limits-of-deep-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/blog\/2018\/03\/25\/getting-organized-in-2018-the-limits-of-deep-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting organized in 2018 – The limits of deep work"},"content":{"rendered":"

Getting organized in 2018 – links to the series<\/a><\/p>\n

Last week I introduced the idea of deep work<\/a>, <\/p>\n

\nProfessional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The key words there are distraction free<\/strong><\/em>. I picked up some useful tips from reading Deep Work<\/em>, but there\u2019s also at least one limit to be aware of.1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

In Deep Work<\/em> Cal Newport describes the working style of two people who have been exceptionally productive and who exemplify what he calls the monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling<\/em>, Adam Grant and Don Knuth. I don\u2019t think I\u2019d heard of Adam Grant before,2<\/a><\/sup> but anyone who\u2019s done more than a little programming has heard of Don Knuth<\/a>. Not only is he the author of the monumental The Art of Computer Programming<\/a><\/em>, he grew frustrated with the typesetting for TAoCP and wrote TeX and Metafont to compensate. He is also famously inaccessible by e-mail. He stopped answering e-mail in 1990. If you want to contact him, you\u2019ll need to send him a letter to his postal mailing address. His administrative assistant will sort through them and pass along any that seem relevant. Grant isn\u2019t quite as extreme as Knuth, but he batches his availability. He stacks all of his teaching into the fall semester, turning his attention fully to research for the rest of the year. He\u2019ll answer e-mail, but if you happen to e-mail him during one of the 3-4 day periods when he\u2019s focused on a research task, you\u2019ll get an auto-response telling you that you\u2019ll have to wait to hear back from him.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no question that a monastic approach to deep work allows those who can adopt it to accomplish an enormous amount. But there\u2019s also no question that society can continue to function only so long as there are only a few people who adopt that approach. A functioning society depends on functioning institutions, and functioning institutions depend on people<\/em> to keep them functioning. If you work with a very small group of people, you might be able to agree among yourselves that interruptions are allowed only between 11:00am and 1:00pm or only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but if you work with more than four or five people you\u2019re unlikely to be able to set aside consistent \u201cdo not interrupt\u201d hours except relatively early in the morning or relatively late in the day.3<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

And it\u2019s not just the people you work with face to face. If you\u2019re an academic, the functioning of your scholarly community depends on your willingness to review papers and grant proposals and to serve as a leader in your scholarly society. I know a few people4<\/a><\/sup> who have made many important scientific contributions, in the sense that they\u2019ve published important papers and discovered important things, who have also made few or no contributions at all to supporting the scholarly community on which they depend. If you decide to adopt a monastic approach, you better be sure that you can make contributions large and important enough that they compensate for your lack of community spirit. <\/p>\n

For most of us, we won\u2019t even be able to adopt the bimodal philosophy<\/em> that Jung employed – periods of intense deep work in seclusion interspersed with periods of involvement in day-to-day life and work.5<\/a><\/sup> It\u2019s most likely that we\u2019ll have to adopt the journalistic philosophy<\/em> – developing the discipline to do concentrated deep work whenever the opportunity presents itself. That\u2019s why setting up your workspace in a way that you can avoid distraction is important. Any time you find yourself with more than 15-20 minutes of uninterrupted time ask yourself, <\/p>\n