 Believe it or not, some of the most insightful modern philosophers were in the Navy on submarines. Those guys really know how to think deeply. I'm going to describe a fairly typical start to my workday. Let me know if any part of it seems familiar. I go to my desk, flip on my computer, and notice after it boots that I have an email sent late last night, something critical that requires my feedback so another team can move forward with a project. I start searching through some documentation to answer the question and my Microsoft Teams icon blinks in the corner of my screen with a message from a coworker wishing me good morning and asking if she can go ahead and order the parts I left in the McMaster car shopping cart. I type a quick response and go back to my search, just as another email chimes in my inbox. It's a company-wide reminder to enroll on the 401k plan by the end of the month. Nothing urgent, I'll look at it later. I find the relevant document and, as I wait for it to open, Teams blinks again with a confirmation from my coworker. While I'm reading and thinking about how to answer the email, my boss taps me on the shoulder to confirm that I saw it. This turns into a quick discussion about how the project is going and what sort of resources I might need to move forward. By the time the conversation is finished, I have three more emails, four more Teams messages, and I forgot to start reading the document from the beginning, trying to pick up my train of thought where it left off. Even if we discount the many engineered distractions lurking on our smartphones, many jobs involve a fair amount of interruption and distraction, just as a matter of course. The way most of us work is intensely collaborative, with many different channels for communication and synchronization, a structure that demands vigilance, responsiveness, and continuous prioritization, attention to and weighing of various signals and messages to determine which can be safely ignored, at least for the moment, and which require immediate action. If you ask computer scientist and productivity blogger Cal Newport, we don't bounce from slack to stand-up meeting to SMS because it's the best way to ensure the most fruitful application of labor. Quite the opposite. For Newport, the most important and productive work that happens in an office occurs in a state of intense, unbroken concentration. The frame of mind you might use to solve a particularly sticky math problem, or wrap your head around a challenging work of art, the sort of cognitive effort that would be spoiled if something were to distract you. Newport argues that, rather than leaning harder and harder into the frantic and insistent hive mind that characterizes modern office jobs, we should find a way to cultivate more of that state, what he calls deep work. Because as inconvenient as it might be for the work culture that we've grown accustomed to, it produces better results, both in terms of productive output, and individual satisfaction with one's work. He's collected a wide array of anecdotes about individuals whose adoption of deliberately slow-paced habits has resulted in profound creative or intellectual output, citing those cases as evidence of the power we might be leaving untapped with a frenetic hashtag rise and grind approach to productivity. Take Jun He, a mathematician at Princeton who has recently awarded the prestigious fields medal for his work in combinatorics. He says that he can only manage about three to four hours of focused mental effort a day. He splits those hours between writing lecture notes scheduling out his calendar and solving problems that have been impenetrable to the world's most brilliant mathematicians for more than 40 years. If you were to drop Ha into a standard 8-5 office job, it seems likely his three-hour timer would be exhausted rapidly by back-to-back meetings and urgent emails. Not to mention that being mostly useless for five hours out of his standard workday would probably single him out for a stern talking to by his manager. For anyone who works like Ha, a few hours of solitary concentrated effort per day might have the potential to wrench a field forward by a few decades. But there's no real place for that style of labor in a standard workplace, which suggests that we may be leaving an enormous well of Ha-shaped fields medal-worthy deep work totally untapped. Newport also cites a number of psychological studies that seem to support the idea that deep work might be the most effective way of applying cognitive effort to a given problem. For example, Sophie Leroy's research into the phenomenon of attention residue suggests that switching from one cognitive task to another is never a clean process. Some amount of brain power appears to lag behind the conscious effort to change contexts, remaining dedicated to the prior task, and leaving us a little less horsepower to focus on the new one. That sort of psychology seems to lend itself well to a single block of undistracted time, not so well to the distraction-rich multi-tasking environment of a modern office job. With all these hints at the untapped benefits of focused cognitive labor, you might wonder why we work the way we do. Is there any particular reason we don't see many companies encouraging their employees to be unreachable for some part of the day? Newport suggests that the way we currently structure work is mostly a historical accident. Nobody sat down and said, how should we assign tasks and communicate with each other to be most productive? I know. Let's bug each other constantly whenever we need anything. He posits that the emergence of the hive mind workplace was a path of least resistance thing. After all, deliberately developing systems and tools to minimize interruption of focused work takes time, effort, and a lot of experimentation. There isn't a one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of feedback loops between individuals and teams. For better or worse, email was a useful crutch that kind of got the job done for a price. Newport cites IBM's first foray into email in the 1980s. The nerds designed an email server to replace all internal phone calls and handwritten memos, and built it with enough capacity to handle that volume of information. Unfortunately, the first day it was active, the system collapsed because the rate of internal communication had increased by five times over that initial value. The hive mind work structure had evolved, and nobody was safe. Anyone with a huge number next to their inbox icon can attest that, on average, the ease with which email can be sent drastically overshadows its value in being read, and if Newport is to be believed, even that microsecond of stolen attention from an email notification is enough to interrupt immensely valuable focused work. He doesn't think email is the sole problem. It's just emblematic of the many myopic shortcomings we find in the workplace when it comes to deep work. The more general principle here should be familiar to anyone who's heard of Good Heart's Law. The most obvious proxies for useful work have become targets of behavior, leading to perversely unproductive norms that preclude any sort of deep work. For example, the speed of a reply is often taken as a proxy for how attentive or on the ball someone is. There's an assumption that substantial lag time between messages is the result of some oversight, or maybe even callous disregard. The pressure to be responsive incentivizes short surface level off-the-cuff responses. Nothing that would require thinking long and hard about the question, or wondering if there might be more meaningful and valuable responses that can't be formulated in a short window. Busyness is another good example. Concentrated cognitive effort very rarely looks like a flurry of bustling activity. Often it appears as a distinct lack of activity, or maybe some aimless task, like doodling or spinning in a chair. If you took a snapshot of a standard office, you probably wouldn't see anyone fiddling with a Rubik's Cube, or sitting with their feet kicked up, staring off into space. Contemplation is mostly invisible, and its value can be hard to quantify, so employers who are worried about employees slacking off may opt to dispel any appearance of idleness, just in case, as well as any potential of deep work. For Newport, it's easy to understand why we've adopted these sorts of norms. At least in a historical sense. He calls it the principle of least resistance. If it's not painfully obvious how a bad policy might affect a company's bottom line, if you don't have a discrete dollar amount of what's being wasted in comparison to some other system, companies will default to whatever process requires the least effort to implement, regardless of how much they might benefit in the long run from trying different approaches and seeing what works best. Emails were a rough-and-ready solution to synchronizing efforts across teams that didn't require any real foresight or planning to achieve that goal, so that's what we all ended up with. Without any regard for the damage constant email notifications might be doing to valuable focused work. Internal chat applications like Slack were attractive because they were a quicker and easier way to do the same thing, but that just meant that we could interrupt each other even more frequently with even less effort. Again, none of this was irrational in the moment. We needed a way to do a thing, we stumbled onto an answer, and we implemented it. But writ large, considering the potential value of deep work, we might have shot ourselves in the foot by failing to think of something better. Newport's observations suggest that, perhaps, if we really wanted to maximize our productivity and generate the greatest possible advances in fields where an ounce of insight is worth several tons of busy work, we should try to pry ourselves away from the buzzing hive mind model and adopt workplace practices that facilitate that state of deep contemplation. Maybe, instead of simply expecting people to be available at the drop of a hat, we could invest a little more energy in scheduling periods where we're available for questions, and more importantly, when we're not. Instead of casually CC'ing everyone tangentially involved with the project to make sure that they're in the loop, maybe we could use email more judiciously, picking and choosing exactly what sort of messages really need to be in someone's inbox and which would be less disruptive as scheduled phone calls or weekly summaries. Instead of looking for hustle and grindset in a fast-paced open plan office, maybe we should give people a little more space to reflect, daydream and think carefully about their work. And this probably goes without saying, but maybe we should collect every single server that's running some part of Twitter and drop them all into a volcano. Do you think Newport's theory of deep work rings true? Are you also considering adding an hour of isolated thinking time to your day? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to bubble, subscribe, and share. And don't stop thunking.