 We're going to talk about individual focused solo work and collaboration and the divide between them. I'll quickly introduce myself as most of the introduction, I'll do it later. I'm primarily an engineer. I'm not a people person. I basically write code. I get up early in the morning, start working at 7. By lunchtime I'm done. Then take a break in the afternoon, by evenings of a meeting, stand-ups and whatnot. My focused work and collaboration work is clearly divided into two halves. That's how I work. And the other things, I'll talk about myself a little later. Today's talk is sort of in three sections, the premise and the problem. What is deep work and what is the problem with deep work or what are the problems facing deep work practitioners, some rules and strategies and some pitfalls. So around in 2016, a Georgetown University professor called Cal Newport wrote a book called Deep Work. In that he talked about having disproportionately high impact through individual performances and going deep down hours of focused work, et cetera. Carl Jung was one of his case studies, Carl Jung featured in Tobias' talk. And he spoke about all this, the pattern of deep work and how to go about it. And around the same time, notable leaders in the community like David Heinemann Hansen, the creator of Ruby on Rails or Jason Fried founder of Basecamp, started talking about their very iconoclastic view of open offices and how they're bad for fostering a deep work culture. And so my interest was big. I picked up the book. I read it three times back to back and I started practicing and last two years I have been practicing deep work in my work. And this talk is sort of like a culmination or an experience report of me doing it. What works? What doesn't work? What are the rules? We should follow. How do you enforce or how do you foster a deep work culture in your team? And I'll try and raise a few eyebrows during the talk. I promise to make it a little controversial. But before we raise eyebrows, let's raise a few hands. So raise your hands if you have worked as a knowledge worker, programmer, writer, designer, researcher. Right? Keep your hands up if you are still doing it, if you are still a knowledge worker. Okay? Cool. Raise your hand if you have worked as a people person, a manager, a leader, executive coach. Wonderful. This is my ideal crowd. People have done both and people who want to do either both or lean towards one thing. Also raise your hand if you were present in a meeting where you weren't required. Everyone. Everyone. Right? Or you are so engrossed in your work that you forgot to have your lunch. Yes? There you go. Smart people in the room are beginning to figure out a pattern or you are extremely satisfied about how you wrote a particular user story, you know. You shared it in your team and people were happy. So you are beginning to see the problem or the pattern. Right? So with that, let's come to a quick, let's go through a quick primer and a pitch. The idea is that we live in a knowledge economy. Right? This is undisputed. This is not Cold War era. This is not steam engine era. This is not World War era. This is knowledge economy. And so naturally knowledge work is the most value producing work in this era. Writers, programmers, they have disproportionate impact through their work, knowledge or craft work. Craftsmen, art artists. So it also follows that knowledge work is the most rewarding work of this era. And being a highly skilled worker is one way of thriving amongst many. There are other ways of thriving, you know, having access to capital, investment, leadership, social impact. But most of these other ways of thriving are not very accessible to the common person. You know, often to have access, you need to be born in a rich family to have access to a capital. You need to be known as a leader to have easy access to investments, for example. You can't just wake up one day and say that you are a leader. You have to grow into a leader. It's a long path to leadership. However, developing high skill is not as long path as some of the others or it's not as inaccessible. And so deep work basically paves a path into becoming a high skilled worker. Right? But there's always a but. We are fundamentally social, like we are social animals. So naturally our work is also social, right? Success, value creation, wealth creation, this is all derived from society, people being social. And so the work we do, our performance, et cetera, basically is a balance between solo work and collaborative work. But again, there's a but. There is no balance. In Matrix, Neo founded that there was no spoon. In life, I figured out that there is no balance between collaboration and deep work. And modern work environments lean heavily, heavily towards collaboration. There's not enough fostering for deep work mentality. And that's what my gripe is about. I'm on a mission to change that. Collaboration is mainly about an open exchange of ideas, decision making. If you have meetings, then they're much better used in decision making than status meetings, for example. And collaboration is also about responding to external stimuli. People are talking, you have your decision making, you're speaking about things, people are exchanging ideas. So it's all about responding to stimuli. Whereas deep work is about immersive thinking, long threads of thoughts, getting engrossed in your work, or in fact shutting down external stimuli. So what that means is that there are odds with each other, right? The way you do deep work is fundamentally different from the way you do collaboration. And so if you're going to do both, it's very clear that you cannot do both at the same time. It's like chess versus cricket. Chess, you could categorize as deep work. There is no meaning to teams in chess, right? You can't play doubles in chess. It's a very solo individual effort. You have to go long line. You have to hold all that state in your mind. You have to go deep. Whereas cricket is a team game, right? One person cannot alone ball, field, and wicket keep, and bat at the same time. It's a team game. So that's the difference. Chess is sort of deep work, and then cricket is collaborative work. So my idea behind this talk is basically do less to do better. We need to do less collaboration in order to better collaborate. That's the fundamental premise of the talk. So far I've spoken a little bit about deep work. I've thrown that term around casually. But what is deep work? If you want to understand what deep work is, we need to start here. This is the book that I spoke about. The book that Professor Cal Newport wrote. He lays a foundation of what deep work is and what are the tenets of deep work. The thing is, deep work is not new. Cal Newport did not certainly invent deep work. It's been around for centuries. Carl Jung famously recluse himself in his family-owned castle to develop his theory of introversion. He was gone for a couple of months. He would come out, when the lunch was ready, the servers would come and ring a bell. So he would know that it's lunchtime. Otherwise, he would off in his castle doing his deep work, coming out with these theories. And so that kind of focused attention was needed to come up with a groundbreaking theory, having large impact on the world of psychology through his work. What Cal Newport says in the book is that professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to a limit. Don't worry about the definition so much. Focus on the main points, which is professional activities, distraction-free concentration, and then pushing your limits. These are the three pillars of what deep work is made up of. So just focused working is not enough. If you're just focused without distraction, it's not enough. Just distraction-free is not enough. Often it happens that there are no distractions. You're working from your home, there's no distraction, and yet you're finding it hard to actually get some deep work done. So that's not enough. Challenging work in a deep focused mode over a long period of time, that is the key. You need to have work that is at the edge of your ability. What you currently know, what you are currently capable of, if you have work that is at the edge of that ability, then that is going to constitute to deep work. And the result is that these efforts create new value, they improve your skills, and they are hard to replicate. That's what CalUport says, and that's what research suggests. Again, if you want to focus on what the important bits are, creating new value, improving your skills, and they're hard to replicate. That's your X factor. If you can do these things, then that's your X factor. That's going to set you apart from the rest of the people. And then that's not all. The hypothesis is that over a longer period of doing deep work, you tend to develop two abilities. Number one, to quickly master hard things. And number two, to produce at an elite level in terms of both speed and quality. And these abilities are worth investing in. If there's a process which is going to give us these two abilities, then I believe that this process is worth investing in. And so if you want to really summarize what deep work is about, it's basically distraction-free work that pushes limits and creates new value and improves your skill. It's a process, right? It's not a destination, it's a journey. Again, distraction-free work pushes limits and creates new value. So let's agree to this definition. And if you want to summarize, deep work is valuable because it gives us these abilities, it brings out teams to do their best. Deep work is rare because modern work environments are basically not conducive to deep work. Since the status quo really favors collaboration. We are here at an agile conference talking about agile, which is the heart of how we do collaboration. And I'm here telling you that we're doing too much agile. So with this, let's move on to the next section, which is the main section that I really want to talk about, is how do you really go about practicing deep work? Like what are the tenets of deep work? How do you stay on course? How do you not follow the wagon? First, some meta talk, there's a disclaimer. This is not a decades of PhD research coming out. This is my experience report. I have been practicing this for many years. So your mileage may vary, there's no one silver bullet. Often in the talk, I'm going to talk about things like, do this, don't do that. What it means is that this worked for me and this didn't work. Maybe it will work for you, right? Like I said, this is not a PhD research. But at the same time, I have been practicing it with my team. I've helped a lot of people get on the deep work track. And this is like a culmination of the experiences together. So, and again, this talk is not just about this book. If Kalanipur lays a good foundation about what deep work is, but he doesn't talk about how to practice in your day life, how to incorporate in our work culture. There are some really good case studies about being a high performer and working with others in a collaborative environment while still practicing deep work in this book. And Dr. Kallar Dweck's phenomenal book called Mindset talks about a complementary strategy of growth and success. She talks about how you can set yourself with a growth mindset, which is a complementary sort of, it complements your deep work ability or your deep work practice. Very, very good book, strongly recommended. I mean, today is an Ejian mindset day. No better book to recommend than Mindset by Dr. Karal Dweck. This book does come from years and years of PhD research. She has a team of PhDs, which together they have over 100 years of research behind this. Very, very good book. But the important thing is practice, practicing deep work, learning from the experience and getting, like basically it's a feedback cycle. You do something, you figure out what works, you incorporate it back, right? So the number one tenet which I like to follow is that deep works and shallow work is like apples and hot dogs. You don't mix together, you know? Apples and oranges are different, but they do mix together. Whereas deep work and shallow work, they do not mix together. You have to draw clear boundaries, separate them into clear silos if you want to do deep work. Like I said, my work days typically mornings are for deep work and evenings are for collaborative work. Those four programmers here, specifically Ruby, have you seen this error? Here are too many meetings. The idea is that the number of meetings in any software organization is always more than needed, right? Software teams have a pathological need to meet and talk. I don't know where and how this has come to, but that is how it is. So if you want to reduce, the idea is reducing the number of meetings, right? So what I recommend strongly is that you discourage status meetings. Status meetings are terrible. Your tools like Jira, Clubhouse, Trello, they're really good for writing statuses and updating statuses. If there is a, show me a team lead or a leader who insists on status meetings and I'll show you a team which is weak, either weak in communication skills or not mature enough in their communication. And I do not make this claim lightly. Only allow meetings with pre-written agenda. You cannot say, hey, let's talk about OAuth workflow. No, that's a pickup line. That's not a meeting agenda. Only allow meetings that are sufficiently in advance and have a pre-written agenda. What happens is when you have a pre-written agenda, people who are not comfortable meeting introverts, for example, they can do their research. They can come prepared and there's no in the moment. There's no, there's no talking. You can't pinpoint people. Everybody's prepared for the meeting. Nobody's gonna waste anyone else's time. The other thing is no meeting should ever be an obligation. Anyone who wants to prioritize other work over a meeting must be allowed to do so without any stigma, without any hard feelings. Do not ever ask anyone why they cannot make it to a meeting. If somebody cannot make it to a meeting, they cannot make it to a meeting. End of story period, right? But more than that, these are sort of the thumb rules of our meeting. More than that, have meeting three days, right? On a day, absolutely zero meetings, no meetings. Like I said, like lots of people who come from the XP agile mindset, typically have stand-ups. We like to have our stand-ups. Meetings are more conducive for bonding with other people than, you know, talking and discussing things. If we are doing business communication, it's my claim that it is done way better through written media. And speaking of having meeting three days, you can go one step ahead and have meeting three weeks. You know, why stop at day? I'm meeting three one week, no meetings. Give yourself 25 hours of undivided focus time, and you'll be astounded at the quality and the quantity of work you get done. I know I have emails, Asana, Trello, Jira, PR reviews, et cetera, these are all what I call as the shallows, right? Draw them in a clear, separate silo. Have separate, fixed time slot for them, right? The thing is, even though these are sort of what I call as shallow work, they're still important. We work with other people. We need to update Trello. We need to update Jira. We have to have, like, other people have to have, like, leaders who are multiple hops away from a particular team. They need to know what's going on. So all these things are important. So we cannot not do them, right? So the solution is to have a fixed time slot for them in the day, preferably towards the end of the day. At the end of the day, go update your Trello's, go update your GitHub issues, PRs, add your logs, or whatever. The other thing that the side effect of this is that when there's a fixed time for these kinds of things, people don't drop the ball in communication. Every day I know I'm gonna update Trello at five o'clock, then I go and do it. Whereas if there's no fixed time, I may forget to do it. I may not do it. I may not feel inspired enough to do it. I can drop the ball at it. But if you have a fixed time for it, you know, it happens, people don't drop the ball. Written communication is very, very effective. Like, do not downplay it. The sheer power of writing a one-page document to explain why a particular meeting is needed or issue analysis or maybe taking a decision, a data-driven decision cannot be understated. Written communication is incredibly effective. The other advice I give to programmers often is that 100% pairing is basically 100% distraction. If you're always in a pairing mode, then you're always distracted. This applies to coaching as well. If you're always coaching, then you're not really focusing, you're not, you're always distracted. Reserve coaching to, like, maybe at the beginning of a business relationship, or like the beginning of a quarter, a month, et cetera, like have silos, like I said. Have pairing-free days, right? On some days, absolutely no pairing. Or again, have pairing-free weeks, no pairing for a week. On-call rotation, pager duty, et cetera. These are all shallow by definition because being on-call requires you to respond to an external stimuli. There's a call, somebody pings you, some problem, angry customer is granting something. You need to go look at it. These are all shallow by definition. If you're doing on-call duty, do not do deep work in that week. Avoid doing deep work during that period. So in our team, we have an official title, temporary title called triage commander. We use Slack for communication. And if there's an emergency or a customer issue or something, nobody pings developers or nobody pings individual developers on the Slack. Everybody pings triage commander. And it changes every week. Every week, one or two people are triage commanders. It's their job to basically funnel all those things back into issue trackers and project management tools. So other developers are then free to go on their focus zone, get the work done. The idea is that when we know we won't be distracted, we tend to focus better. When our brain knows that we are not going to be distracted from anything, then we automatically easily get into focus zone. Whereas if you already know that you are going to get distracted, then your brain is not going to let you get into that focus zone at all, inertia, law of inertia. The second group of strategies that I really want to talk about is focus on focus. Work deeply, plan for depth. You cannot make focus work happen just like that. You have a lot of things you have to align before you can get into a distraction-free focus mode. Planning is generally your friend. Uncertainty is a big focus killer. If you're starting your work on Monday morning, you don't know what to do. That's your day. Your day is gone. You have to have an idea about what exactly you want to do on that day, on that week. So naturally, plan your day well. Sit on a Sunday morning, figure out what you want to do. And let your team invest in your team's planning. Let everybody foster this culture of planning their days well. And in fact, why stop at a day? Plan your week well. In our company, what we do is we have these three stages of planning, long-term planning, mid-term and short-term. And then long-term planning is generally driven by executives and CEOs and the general direction of the company. Mid-term planning is from the product people. And then short-term planning is left to each team on their own, like what they want to do. So basically, if you plan your week well, you know what you're going to get done in a week. You can just go about and get it done. Especially if it's a complex thing that you need to do where you have a meeting free week, then this is going to sort of be a force multiplier. Invest in a productivity system like GTD. Getting things done basically takes a lot of things off your mind into a test-test system. And it removes the onus from the developer or from the people to remember things. It brings clarity that very few other systems bring. Leisure time is essential, budget for it. If you know like slacking off is a problem, a lot of people face. If you know that you will have time in the end of the day or somewhere during the day to check Facebook, Twitter, Netflix or whatever, your mind will not wander on it during the day. When you know that at five o'clock, you have 30 minutes to watch whatever Netflix or something, you won't care if Daredevil season three lands during your week day. You know you'll have time for it in the end of the day or end of the week or whatever. For me, like Saturday evenings are reserved for leisure time. I know like I can watch whatever movie I want, whatever Netflix I want on Saturdays. And every day I give myself 30 minutes of slack, chill out time. When I'm working, I know that I have that time reserved for like whatever I want to do, like browse hacker news. Then I don't browse it when I'm actually working. And the idea is like forgive yourself for wanting to have fun and actually go have fun. Work environment is critical. Like where you sit and work matters a lot. Like in general, human beings are designed to work in an environment which is closer to nature with ample natural light, air, et cetera. We are not designed to sit in boxes of air conditioned, air conditioned airflow. Being close to nature is a great privilege if you have access to it, use it. Noise is a distraction, right? It's one of the most well-known distractions out there. You're working on something, some light, loud noise, people talk around. Your focus is gone. Maybe invest in a good noise canceling headphones for your team or for yourself. Have, like Gojek recently did their office plan where all the walls are like noise absorbing walls. So there's no echo around. Even if people are talking, you don't get the sound. So these kind of things, these are important. The thing is we understand noise as a distraction, but viewport activity actually is a bigger distraction. You're working on something. Suddenly somebody moves in front of you. Your focus is gone. Ours of focus gets wasted because of viewport activity. Sometimes facing the wall actually is a good thing. Have walls around, have meetings, have cabins where you are not going to get that much viewport activity. Trust me, like this one small change will probably make the biggest impact on your work environment. Even Tobias mentioned having walls where dedicated walls where teams can stick their things is good. That also helps in bringing or retaining focus, retaining concentration. Workplaces suffer from this thing I call as a tap on the shoulder disease. Open offices, open office plans, basically the costliest mistakes since null pointers. The idea is do not walk up to people and break their flow, not even for coffee meetings. Have an establishment etiquette within your team, within your culture, within your office, and then stick to that etiquette. Like if my headphones are on, don't come and talk to me. That's what, like I work from a co-working space and the rule is that if my headphones are on, nobody comes and talks to me. And people have their own rules, right? Some people have their mugs or some people have their headphones or whatever, like you decide your rules. The golden rule is that there should be no surprises. This is one rule we follow in terms of hiring and firing as well. If you're firing someone, it should never be a surprise to them. Same rule applies to distractions and walking on the shoulder, tapping on the shoulder. You know, learn from this restaurant called Barbecue Nation. Anybody know about Barbecue Nation? Like basically if you want food, you keep the flag up and when you want the food to stop, you keep the flag down. So flag up, bring the food, flag down, so on. That's the etiquette. Establish this kind of etiquette in your office and then stick to it. Speaking of Barbecue Nation, hunger is a big distraction. You have to manage it well. Lots of time, like hours and hours of concentration can break because of, because if you're thirsty or you're hungry, right? If you have work, like if your work style is like something like Pomodoro techniques, then you can use those five minute breaks to replenish yourself. I keep munching on fruits to not get hungry. Like basically avoid those sugary nonsense things like donuts and stuff. Eat the food we mean to eat and then manage your hunger well. Maybe eat every two hours or something, whatever works for you, right? Coordinated lunches are great for bonding. If you can take lunch, you can use, strategically use your lunch breaks for bonding, have lunch with coworkers, talk to them. In general, collaboration works way better if you know the people well, right? So use lunches for that. The other deep work tenet and this is a core rule is called embracing boredom. This is a core deep work rule. What it means is that we have to avoid jumping onto other things when we are waiting on some things, when we are bored. Like don't jump on Twitter when your app is sort of loading up or for example, dial up the verbosity on your logs, SSH sessions, et cetera, et cetera. Put your phone away in a different meeting, in a different room when you're working. Or maybe train yourself by not carrying the phone to the loop. I tend to do this. So raise your hand if you're in a queue and you immediately reach by your phone. There you go. So what happens is that our minds are trained for distraction, right? And the idea is that this, breaking this habit requires a lot of training. This is possibly one of the hardest things to change about ourselves. And why is it important? Well, the hypothesis is that the jumping around and reaching for things like Twitter or other distraction, it trains our mind to, it basically prevents long hours of focus and eventually it reduces our ability to focus. Which is why we need to avoid that. If you can embrace boredom, be in the moment, live in the moment, that works for you. Okay, so the next up is stretching your limits. Remember when I talked about deep work and how deep work has to be at the edge of your skill set? That's one of the tenets. Pick something that is, that stretches your ability at the edge of your skill set. Allow your team to have work that is beyond their current capabilities. Pick something you haven't done, for example. For example, if you're able to Ruby programmer all life long, right, Haskell. Or if you're a front end developer, understand how minification works, understand how Gzip really works. Write a new compiler or design a new typeface, right? If you're a programmer all life long, design a new typeface. The whole different set of skills needed, which are just beyond you at the moment. Invest in these kind of skills and it'll allow you or help you with your deeper practice. In general, basically pick something outside your domain. If you're an agile coach, maybe try learning a database or something. Or pick something adjacent to your skills. If you're a back end engineer, maybe do DevOps. If you're a DevOps engineer, maybe do systems. Or if you're front end engineer, do some design, et cetera. Adjacent works. The idea is that it has to be knowledge or craft work because these are the two kinds of work that are conducive to deep work. And if your work is not offering you a stretch, then you pick a book to work through or a MOOC, you know? Allow your team to have that. You know, the five hour rule that Google has improved something like that where people can learn on their own. They have the opportunity to do something. If not all work we do is groundbreaking or rocket science or anything. Most of the work is like quite mundane. We don't always have work that challenges our ability. So allow your team to pick something that does actually challenge their abilities. Side projects are often overrated. Like people like to do side projects. But my claim is that side projects are overrated because they're side projects, right? If you want to work on something, don't make it a side thing. Take a few days off, make it the main thing for those days. Offer your team a stretch time where they can hone their craft. You know, inculcate this habit or this culture. So in our team what we do is like Thursdays are typically half Thursday, five hours or either they can take whole Thursdays off or they can take like half the Thursdays to get something better. And then they generally speak about that the next week. Like people take something up, they work on it for weeks and then they give a talk about it. This kind of culture we have built. So you can build something like that. Anything that helps your team hone their craft or improves their skill. Invest in and get better at writing. Nothing like writing is a very, very fundamental deep work activity and nothing really brings out deep focus like writing does, not even programming. Remember all those meetings we skipped where all those meetings can be replaced by a carefully written document, a data-driven decision that doesn't have to come from, that doesn't have to suffer people's biases, et cetera. If you invest in writing that improves collaboration, right, writing improves communication, writing improves collaboration. If you want to get better at collaboration, write more, talk less. The other thing, the other sort of group of strategies that I want to offer is about biology, right? Don't fight biology. Like be aware of your boundaries. What that means is that sleep well. This is a very, very well-established advice that sleeping like enough number of hours will help you focus and perform better. Lots of stuff has been written about it. Getting enough sleep is essential. Gift yourself regular exercise, you know? The impact of having regular exercise in our life is understood, like it goes way beyond work and anything about work. It basically improves your overall life. In whenever, so I work from my home remotely, my team is based in Durham, North Carolina, and we have these regular on-site meetings every six months or so. So one of the rules that we do is like when we meet, most of our meetings are post-lunch walking meetings. What we do is like we go have quick lunch and we walk around the downtime or walk in a park and then have an important meeting. So that gives us like a little bit of an exercise plus walking sort of focuses you. It helps you get in the moment and you get your time in the nature with your coworker. So sort of like it works both ways. Understand your biological cycle. Some people are late risers, some people are early risers. Don't fight it. Don't force people into a schedule that their body is not aligned to, right? Discipline is important because it brings reliability, but the idea is that we should seek reliability and not discipline. Don't try to like, don't say nine to six office. You come in at 8.30, go at five o'clock. If somebody wants to come early, leave early, then that's their choice. Somebody wants to come late, go late, then that's their choice. Somebody wants to work from home, then that's their choice. In general, distributed teams and working from home like really, really helps deep work, but that's a topic for another talk like remote work is a topic for another talk. I'll not talk about remote work so much in this particular talk. Like the idea is allow people to choose their own schedule. Let them sleep like, how many people here get up with an alarm? Yeah, so for the last three years, I've not gotten up with an alarm. This is a habit I developed based on like, I've been lucky enough to like sleep on my own schedule, but if you can do something like that, it really helps improve your quality of life. Don't wake up using an alarm. Wake up whenever your body allows you to wake up. So if I have to sum up the strategies, they're into these four groups, separate the deep and shallow, have clear silos for them, focus on focus, like invest in getting an environment which aids focus, stretch the limits, do something beyond your skills, allow your team to hone their craft, and then don't fight biology, don't make people conform to a certain discipline or certain schedule, et cetera. Don't fight biology, eat well, sleep well. So that was about sort of the practice and what we should do and should not do. But the thing is, it's not all hunky-dory, right? It's not all rosy. There are some pitfalls associated with deep work. There are a few traps, some false negatives, some false positives, and some gotchas. The biggest one is basically going too far down the rabbit hole, losing the big picture. What happens is like often in search of focus, we tend to abdicate responsibility in search of focus, right? We are so much in search of the focus, that we want to focus on our thing, we want to go do our individual work, do the contribution, that we tend to lose the big picture. Or we abdicate responsibility. Sometimes you don't come to a meeting where you are supposed, where you are a key part, or you don't update, or let your coworkers know, you don't communicate well, et cetera. So that happens. So ineffective collaboration is a very, very what is a possible side effect of seeking the depth too much. Ineffective communication also, like you are so much on your own that you don't communicate enough. And as a result, you don't communicate good enough. Becoming a Jira ticket pusher, this is also a very real possibility. Lots of time in search of people, people have this 10 tickets, Jira, one, two, three, four, five, whatever, just go and do whatever is in Jira. Become a ticket pusher, that happens a lot. Especially with individual contributors, right? They tend to lose the big picture. Why are we doing this? Why is this ticket here? What is the big picture? Where, what is the direction the team is headed? We tend to lose the sort of big picture when we become a ticket pusher. Often we overestimate our deep workability. You know, we have, we have honestly, like most people have very inflated, you know, opinions of themselves. They think, like the idea of how much deep work or how much focused work you can do and how much you can actually do, there is a gap in that. So like, in general research suggests that in a day, you cannot sustain more than four to five hours of deep work, that too with good practice. People who are just beginning the deep work practice can probably only do like one or two hours. At the end of like, now I've been doing it for about two to one half years. I'm able to do around four to four and a half hours. At the, at the end of the fifth hour, I'm basically completely drained. I cannot do, I can like do more. And so these kind of limits, you have to discover your own limits as you practice. But the idea is that you need to be aware of these limits and then you need to be aware that you, there will be a limit for you. And you cannot just, you cannot pick a project that is too big. And then, you know, basically just try to do it all in a day, like you'll say, okay, I'll get focused for eight hours a day and whatnot. So these kind of limits are real. They're often, they're often what happens is there's a point of diminishing returns after which you cannot really get stuff done. The reverse is also true. There are sometimes like you really have limits. I'll give an example from my team. We were in the middle of a large data refactoring, like in software code refactoring is pretty common. Data refactoring is not very common. So we're in the middle of a large data refactoring and there was a particular set of queries that I was finding pretty hard to sort of build, test around and basically build those queries. I was finding very hard. And so one day basically I woke up, started working at eight o'clock in the morning, referring to a book, working these queries out on paper, they're not drawing truth tables, drawing test tables, et cetera. What happens, this transformation diagrams, et cetera, started working and when I actually looked up, it was three o'clock. At the end of it, I was done with the queries, but I forgot to have lunch, I forgot to have my midday meal. I stretch for over six hours. After that, after those six hours, I was able to get all the work done. It was a fruitful session, but in my decision making abilities were completely zero. I could not decide if I want to have a cake or whether I want to have a coffee. So these kind of things happen. So we have to plan for these things. At the end of a good grueling four hour deep work session, your decision making abilities are going to be depleted. These kind of limits we need to be aware of. The other pitfall, and this is a big one, especially for the crowd here, is that missing out on leadership is actually a real possibility. Research indicates that deep work is a very, very individual effort and it's mostly along the lines of individual contribution. And so if you do deep work for a long time, chances are that you'll probably miss out on leadership. And if you're the kind of person who really thrives on leadership, who wants to be a leader, wants to build your career as a leader, then this is a pitfall you need to be aware of. In general though, so these are the sort of four major pitfalls that I see. Losing the big picture, losing out on the collaborative aspects of work. It's a joy to work with other people, right? If you have a team that trusts you, if you have a team that you have a bond with, then it's a joy working with these people. In search of depth, we can miss out on that collaborative aspects of work. For example, pairing is really, really good for knowledge transfer. If you're learning something new, pair programming is one of the best ways to get there. And if you go, if you abdicate pair programming for focus, maybe you lose out on that. Which is why the idea of separating deep work and shallow work is important. That we need to do both, but then we need to do it in a clear, separated boundary. The other two are basically trying out too much deep work and getting like burning out or losing trust in yourself, burning out. You're not able to do all the deep work you want. You're not able to gain. You're not gaining as much from deep work as you want. And then you end up missing or mistrusting yourself. You end up getting close to burn out, et cetera. We all have capacities, right? I know I'm never going to be a good programmer as good as, say, John Carmack. And so if I give myself the false hope that I will be one day, I'm only going to go and burn myself out trying to be there, right? I have to understand my limits. Similarly, everybody has to understand their own limits. And then finally, missing out on leadership, like I said, deep work is a very, very individual effort. And you may miss out on leadership. But do not despair, because remember what we are working towards, right? To quickly master hard things and to produce at an elite level in terms of both quality and speed. This is what we're shooting for. Thank you. So that's me. I work at this company called First.io. I run the Bangalore Ruby users group for the last 10 years. I've been running their meetups. I occasionally blog at this blog. And then currently I'm taking a workshop called Postgres Workshop, where I help people get better at relational databases. I'm happy to answer questions. Anything? If you have questions. No meeting, yeah. There's no meetings or not. No meetings, not doing, having asynchronous communication, et cetera. Lots of people, these are, sort of they go against the agile principles in some ways. But it's good in my opinion. I have a question if nobody else is starting off. Okay, so for somebody who's, so you said don't fight biology. So I am biologically scatterbrained. Like I don't reach for a phone because I'm already, you've got like little Tweety birds running through my head in a line, right? So I'm very easily distracted. I mean, if you, I don't know if you've seen up. Up, yeah. I am Doug. I'm an ex-quid. That's me. Yes. How would you suggest? What are the first baby steps I can take to sort of start getting into? I'm not going to get an hour of deep work done like in the next year maybe. What can I do for like the first half an hour? The idea is like you do what you always do. You train yourself, right? So there's a difference between practice and training, right? Like what weight lifters do in the gym? It's called training because it has a specific purpose. It's a program designed with a goal in mind. And whereas when we play cricket or sport on say Sunday, that's called practice. So deliberate practice and practice are different. So what you want to do is you want to get into deliberate practice. You have a goal, you train yourself with that. And embracing boredom is one of those things, right? You can maybe, for example, if you're constantly reaching for your phone, don't carry your phone with you. Like do these little things that amplify your experience. In the beginning it's going to be hard. Like I said, embracing boredom is one of the hardest things to change about ourselves. And so if you're typically scattered brain, what happens is work through books. Books are great for fostering, basically bringing out that focus or write. Like I said, start writing. Typically like if you're writing a blog post or something it's going to take you multiple drafts, right? Try to write like two drafts or draft and one revision in one go, et cetera. That kind of thing. Basically, the idea is you need to do deliberate practice and train yourself. Then don't do practice, do deliberate practice. Welcome. Cool, all right. Sir App. Oh. Hi, this is Anirudha. Do you observe or do you agree that most of the organization for most of the teams now, there is no explicit awareness about deep work as a concept itself? There isn't, sadly. That's one of my biggest gripe about modern work environments. So how do we create a passion about deep work into team members? All these practices, guidelines, absolutely agree, no issues. But there is still a missing element of passion. How do we develop passion about deep work into people? Do you have any thoughts on that? Very, very difficult question to answer. Or in the sense it's a very difficult problem to solve. Like inspiration has to come from within. Like somewhere, team or the members have to feel the need to be better at their jobs, right? Like if somebody is happy getting paid by for slacking off, then it's on them. You can't make them go through deep work. You can't make them learn a compiler when they're a front-end engineer, right? You can't make them do anything. Some somehow like this works like better for people who are like sort of autodidacts or people who are already inspired. But what you can do is like set better examples have examples, have case studies or example within the team to look for, like if they have people to look up to, then they can maybe aspire towards it. Like inspiring people is like one of the hardest things to do, right? That's what keynotes are for, like inspiring. Yeah, okay, thank you. So I'm afraid I don't really have a solution for you, but like the only thing I can do is like you can start setting up examples or like have them people to look up to, basically. Cool, anything, no? All right, thank you.