Deep Work
With so much distraction around due to work from home, social media, new (better) collaboration platforms like Slack/MS Teams, people are ALWAYS ON. Big questions are -
- Are we productive? How to measure it?
- Are we investing enough for new ideas, learning new technology, and providing profound solutions to existing problems?
- How to get time from your busy schedule for deep work? The new phenomenon is 996 (9 AM to 9 PM, 6 days weeks). People are over-stretched and no one has time for introspecting where we’re heading? How we will have a work-life balance? Is it a sustainable model? Is there any solution?
What is 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.
Newport, Cal. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (p. 3). Little, Brown Book Group. Kindle Edition.
Cal Newport written a nice book on this subject -
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal NewPort
Cal has given enough evidence around the need and rationale for deep work. Nice weekend read, do read the book. Will avoid repeating that stuff, as I presume, everyone understands the importance of deep work. And interested in how to achieve that.
Good news. It is NOT a new problem. It has been there for generations and people were able to solve that.
If you see the recent past, many successful people have been practicing deep work. And one of them is Bill Gates and his Think Week deep work practice (read more here). J K Rowling’s story of how she wrote the final Harry Potter in a 5-star luxury hotel (read more here)
How we can do Deep work?
Firstly, just good intentions are not enough. We need to find out exact bottlenecks, which avoids us from deep work, and resolve them. Few tips -
- Avoid multitasking
Multi-tasking is NOT productive. There is enough study published (just google) that categorically proves the point that people are NOT productive while multitasking. Per one of the studies, just 2.5% of people can multitask effectively, and for the rest of the people multitask effort fails.
Tip: Focus Assist on Windows and DND Macbook turns off all the notifications, giving you 100% uninterrupted time. These features are developed for deep work. Enable them.
2. Meetings
People mostly attend all the meetings, where they are invited to. Evaluate whether we’re going to add real value? Can we skip that meeting and MoM/recordings will help to be up to speed? It will free up some slots for deep work.
Evaluate whether we really need a 1 hour / 30 mins meeting. Some data shows that 1-hour meeting is productive only for 40 odd minutes etc. In short, avoid setting up 60/30 mins meetings (rather have 5 / 10 mins less, say 50 mins, 25 mins meeting).
3. Self Block Calendar
Based on the study, we need to train the brain for deep work hours so that over time, the mind and body give better throughput during that slot. In short, finding an appropriate slot and the following rituals is important.
You might have heard about ancient techniques of starting work at early hours (4:00 / 5:00 AM). It is a kind of similar practice. But, it might not be useful, if you’re not sleeping early. Find out the best possible slot (maybe hours in a day or a particular day in a week) for a deep hour, based on your schedule. And self block calendar
4. Build Eco-system
Some practices need to be followed at the team level. Educate and execute. e.g. using particular slots for scheduling meetings (like all the meetings early morning between 9 :00 AM to 11:00 and making sure that no meetings between 11:00 to 4:00 PM). It will help people to better find bigger deep work slots rather than getting distracted due to meetings.
Evaluate the option of No Meeting Day. The day when you avoid regular SCRUMs, sync-ups, etc. You really don’t need SCRUMS every day.
6. Pockets of excellence
Data shows 3 hours of deep work is helpful. But, I wonder if people will get such a big slot during the day. Trick is you should plan for what you will do for scattered / small deep work pockets. e.g. 10 mins, 30 mins, 1-hour pockets — If you’re cautious, you will find a way to utilize these for deep work.
side note — Microsoft released a feature where you can reduce meeting timings by default. e.g. 30 mins meetings automatically set to 25 mins, 1 hour to 50 mins. Rationale was to provide pockets of excellence.
Satya Nadalla is very active around this deep work stuff. And some of the Microsoft product features around deep work were driven by his own practices
Conclusion
Work-life balance, optimal productivity, improving health parameters are interrelated. If you observe, all these deep work techniques were taught to us through different forums like Yoga, early schooling days, and ancient principles. Over the years, we have become ignorant and wrongly assumed that higher productivity is proportional to busyness.
If you’re a leader, it is especially important that you find at least 1-hour free slot for deep work. And for finding a slot, you need to free up your calendar, delegate etc. To start with — make an attempt to get that 1-hour deep work slot, completely focused during meeting, no pop-ups (set DND). And you will see the difference in your life within 1 week.
Post Script:
Microsoft launched Viva Insights to help achieve some of the above things. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-viva
