A few months ago, I had trouble focusing on my work. I tried asking ChatGPT for book recommendations to solve my problem, and it gave me several suggestions. But the most interesting one was Deep Work by Cal Newport. Here, I will share what I have learn from the book, and I hope this article can serve as a guide if you want to buy the book or as an insight if you are experiencing productivity issues like I did.
This article will not review the book Deep Work, but will focus more on the substance of the book. What is the main idea, can the idea be applied in our daily lives, and are there any reference books that can be read to support the ideas in this method?
Deep work
To apply this method, we first need to understand what deep work is. I will quote Cal Newport’s statement that there are two types of work in this world: the first is deep work and the second is shallow work.
- Deep work: Professional activities conducted in a state of distraction-free concentration, pushing your cognitive abilities to their limits. These efforts create new value, improve your skills, and are difficult to replicate.
- Shallow work: Light logistics-style tasks that do not require cognitive abilities, often performed when focus is disrupted. These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.
Deep work is a state where we are so deeply focused on the task at hand that we achieve maximum results. Shallow work, on the other hand, refers to easy tasks that do not require much focus, such as replying to WhatsApp messages and signing a few documents that are not very important.
I believe that not all people need to use this method because not all jobs need it. But if you want to do deep work to get more productivity than ever before, I’ll give you some points that you can take into consideration.
Where is my bollingen tower
Bolligen is the name of a village in the St. Gallen region of Switzerland. Near the northern shore of Lake Zurich, there is a tower inhabited by a psychiatrist named Carl Jung. There, he isolated himself in order to work with focus. Jung woke up at seven in the morning, and after breakfast, he spent two hours writing without interruption in his private office. In the afternoon, after all his work was done, he would meditate or take walks in the surrounding village. There was no electricity in the tower, so when evening came, the only light came from oil lamps. Jung said, “The silence and refreshment I feel in this tower have been very strong since the beginning.”
In 1921 Jung published Psychological Types. After publishing this book, Jung continued to published other articles that reinforced the ideas in his book. Jung always came to Bolligen tower during his holidays. Not to rest, but to sharpen his ideas.
We may not be able to replicate Jung’s methods completely; we don’t have to build a tower near a lake to be able to do our work seriously. There are several things to keep in mind if you want to build a Bolligen tower like Carl Jung.
Set a schedule for deep work
The easiest way to do deep work is to set a schedule for it, for example, spending the first two hours of work on administrative tasks. Then follow that with deep work. When doing deep work, eliminate all distractions, such as turning off notifications, putting your phone out of sight, and not listening to music that distracts you. Do your work with full focus. Make mistakes and then correct them. Do deep work within the deadline you have set.
I only use this method for a maximum of two hours every day. But the results I get are much better than before. Before using this method, it took me two weeks to finish a blog post. But now it only takes me three days to finish a blog post. My advice is not to use this method for too long. Even though this method is very effective, I often feel excessive fatigue if I work too much using this method.
Evaluate the technologies we use
To be honest, my daily screen time is eight hours, which is a huge amount of time. In other words, I spend a third of my day staring at my smartphone. After evaluating my habits, I realized that I don’t need to hold my smartphone all the time to stay connected with my friends and get the latest information. Sometimes technology makes it too easy for us to do anything, including distracting our attention.
Making plans
Before planning, you must determine what your priorities are. For example, you are a student who wants to finish your final project as soon as possible. You can allocate Monday and Tuesday to gathering easy-to-find references for your final project, then use Wednesday and Thursday to check whether there is a lot of research available to support your final project. The more research that has been done, the easier it will be to make citations. On Thursday and Friday, you can seek assistance from your lecturer.
You can use Google Calendar to manage your work schedule. I personally use it on Sundays to plan my activities for the following week. Of course, we can’t always do everything exactly as planned, but at least we know what needs to be done and which activities deserve our attention.
The image shown above is an example of the Google Calendar I use. As you can see, I haven’t been able to do everything I planned on doing perfectly. But that’s okay, I can still fix it later. The idea behind planning is that we can figure out what our priorities are. That way, we know where we should focus our energy to get the most out of it.
Supplementary book
There is a book that I think is suitable to read after reading Deep Work. The book I am referring to is Learning How to Learn by Barbara Oakley. This book is about how the brain works and how to develop the brain properly.
Basically, all of our activities require the brain to be able to function. The more you understand how the brain lernt and how it works, the more you will understand which activities make the brain work effectively. For example, the brain absorbs everything we learn when we are awake and stores it when we sleep. This means that we need rest to be able to work optimally.
In Learning How to Learn, Barbara introduces the concept of studying intensively for a certain period of time, a method known as the Pomodoro Technique. This concept is very similar to the method introduced by Cal Newport. There are many things in the book Learning How to Learn that can serve as additional resources for you after learning this method.
Apart from all that, I highly recommend the book Learning How to Learn to anyone to read. This is because its content is so practical and the book can basically be read by anyone, no matter what age or background.