Creating something new or valuable, or improving your skills takes an inordinate amount of focus. Unfortunately, most of us today live in a hyper-connected, always-online AND distracted state that inhibits us from working deep – in a state that various researchers have equated to Flow, Deliberate Practice, etc. Ever since I read Deep Work by Cal Newport, it has had a transformative effect on my professional life and how I go about my work. I have been looking forward to sharing some of my learnings since then.

Throughout the ages, influential individuals (from Darwin to Carl Jung to one of my favourite authors Haruki Murakami) have committed to the idea of Deep Work to aid them in achieving their goals. Deep Work is professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

At the same time, our world is going through a shift that makes exactly this kind of deep work more valuable than any time in history. With the advent of tech, we are going through a transition in most industries that most white-collared jobs will not survive and deep work will become even more important for two reasons. One, the pace of change in tech means that you have to constantly learn and re-learn unlike earlier when going once to school at the start of your career was enough. You have to have the ability to quickly master difficult things. Two, in the networked world of #WorkFromHome, you are now competing not against the local labour market in your region but a global labour market online. This means you have to be at the top of your game in terms of the output and quality of your work than any time before. In both these cases, the ability to work deep is essential.

Paradoxically, the working environment of today makes this kind of deep work almost impossible. Instead of measuring outputs, people measure theirs’ and others’ performance based on the number of emails responded to, the number of meetings attended, the number of hours worked and generally signalling how busy we are. By keeping activity rather than output as short-term value indicators, we create an atmosphere where people are more intent on being busy rather than working on things that will create long term value. The productivity you are able to bring to the table is a factor of time spent on something AND the intensity of focus. By spending time without focus, by being busy without meaning, we end up reducing our own productivity, even if we are trying to signal the opposite.

The second-largest inhibitor to people picking up the ability to work deep is that most people feel that this kind of deep work is unattainable for them or takes more effort than they can expend on a daily basis. The truth is willpower is like a muscle – it gets stronger as we use it. But it also gets depleted while we are using it. Using willpower at every moment of the day is like being at the gym all day – it is counter-productive. In fact, people with the best work habits are the ones who are able to create the right environment and routines that are able to minimize the use of willpower.

I can’t emphasise the importance of this enough. It’s not how smart or mentally strong you are that drives your ability to work deep – the most important factor is the environment you create around you. There are several ways to do this.

• You could minimize your shallow time completely (works for authors, researchers or individual contributors but hard for people working in corporate environments) and cut off most engagements that are not enabling deep work – the monastic philosophy of deep work.
• You could split your calendar devoting some clear stretches (days, weeks, months) to deep work while keeping the rest free for everything else – the bimodal philosophy of deep work.
• You could also create a rhythm for this work so that you can slot it throughout your day depending on your calendar – the rhythmic philosophy of deep work. However, I would suggest a minimum of 90-minute stretches to do deep work in to ensure that you have the time to go deep enough. Any less and it is unlikely to be “deep” work.
• Finally, for people who become used to deep work, they can take any opportunity during the day, even small gaps in the calendar, to do deep work in what is known as the journalistic philosophy of deep work. However, this takes a lot of practice as well as the use of willpower and should be avoided until you get into the habit of working deeply.

Fortunately, in his book Deep Work, Cal Newport also discusses several ways in which all of us can create an environment around us that aids us in our quest for going deep.

Create a ritual

By creating a ritual that helps you set up your deep work sessions, you minimize the friction in transitioning to depth and can go deep more easily and stay in that state longer. In order to do deep work, you first need to define how you want to work deeply – where and for how long, what will you do once you start working and how you will support your work.

One example of this is one of my favourite authors, Haruki Murakami. For more than a quarter of a century, he has had the same work routine. When he is writing a novel, he wakes up at 4:00 am, drinks some coffee and works on his desk writing for 5-6 hours before the day gets busy and any of his family members are up and about. This ritual he believes is the main reason why he has been able to be so productive for so long. You can see this pattern repeated a lot with successful people. Even successful creative people – it seems discipline and environment are a large part of success.

During COVID, I have also been able to create my own routine for getting into deep mode. When not travelling, I try to schedule 2-3 sessions of deep work (60-90 mins) a day. Before starting these sessions, I usually brew myself some coffee, put my phone in sleep mode so that most notifications are off, put on a website blocker on my browser, put on my noise cancellation headphones and listen to functional music on the brain.fm app. Over a period of time, this has become a deep work ritual for me, and my brain almost always goes into a focused mode when I do this.

So, create your own ritual. It could be anything, but over time it becomes the cue for your brain to do deep and meaningful work.

Make a grand gesture

By leveraging a radical change to your normal environment, coupled perhaps with a significant investment of effort or money, all dedicated towards supporting a deep work task, you increase the perceived importance of a task. These gestures push your deep goal to a level of mental priority.

Rowling famously left behind a grafitti behind a bust in the room to mark the completion of the book.

JK Rowling already had a ritual for writing. For years, she would go to a café, order coffee and write for some time. However, by the time it came around to writing the last instalment of Harry Potter (The Deathly Hallows), she was suffering from serious writer’s block. To compound it, it was difficult for her, given her fame, to work from any place that she wanted to. So, she signed into a suite at the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh in early 2007 to dedicate most of her time to writing and was finally able to finish the book.

The takeaway is not that all of us have to sign into a five-star hotel but to create some importance around the deep work we are about to embark on. Since COVID, I have set up a small room in my home as my study where I work. I bought a couple of bookshelves to put in my book collection and a stand to put my tablet on to take meetings from. Suddenly I had a spot at home that was dedicated to working. Not only does it help me divide work and family time, but by getting a proper seat and desk I am just being kind to my back as well. Also, once I am seated at my desk every morning, it is a clear indication to my brain to get into work mode.

What gesture you make depends on you – it can be as small as buying a separate notebook/pen to work with when you are doing deep work. But it will just help signal to your brain that what you are doing is important and needs most of your attention.

Prioritize before you execute

Another aspect of deep work that a lot of people ignore is to make sure you are spending the effort of going deep only on a few clearly defined and significantly important projects that drive outcomes that are hugely important to you. Deep work is a deep dedication of resources, time and willpower. It should only be spent on things that drive you to improve or deliver outsized impact. Every morning, before starting my workday, I spend 5-10 minutes thinking through what is important for me to close today. Then I put it on a post-it note and stick it on my laptop where I can see it most of the day. This helps drive what I spend time doing today.

Also, by embracing the result you want before you start and being clear about the inputs (what you will put in – time, resources, etc) and outputs (what is the expected end-result) you get into the virtuous habit of chasing concrete results and using them to go the next level. Keeping a scorecard on this further helps you keep yourself honest (as it does with any other important initiative – what gets measured gets delivered). In short, don’t spend your deep work slots on clearing out your email inbox.

Be lazy/embrace boredom

Paradoxically, idleness is necessary to get deep work done. Multiple projects have proven that free time is important for creativity and learning. In resting state, the brain tidies up what you are learning, erasing the less important parts and strengthening those you want to remember (by rehearsing tougher parts autonomously to deepen neural patterns). Free time and reflection make a remarkable difference in understanding any difficult problem.

There are some simple ways to do this. Maintain a strict endpoint to your day – a sort of shutdown ritual. Since any incomplete task is likely to still be running in your head even after you log off work, try and capture them in a to-do system or just jot them down in a notebook before you end your day so that you know you will revisit them when the time is right. Then try and spend a little time away from work so that your brain can distil the insights of the day and turn anything new into long term memory.

Constant attention switching is also one of the most pervasive deterrence to working deeply. Every time we switch from deep work to say checking an email or a message, not only does it take our brain a long time to switch back to max focus but it also has a lasting negative effect on the brain. Even when bored, we need to overcome our desire for distraction. The simple way to do this is not to take a break from distraction but to take breaks from focus:

• Schedule occasional break from focus to give in to distraction. This means that you need to carve out blocks of time on your calendar where you do transactional stuff like checking your social media account and email. Outside these blocks avoid internet usage strictly. There are many apps that will help you track the amount of time you are using particular sites and apps and also block it after a duration
• It is ok if your work requires you to reply to emails and messages – it only means that you will have a greater number of such blocks on your calendar.
• Regardless of how you schedule your internet blocks, you must keep time outside of these blocks absolutely free from internet use. Don’t abandon a block if you are stuck on a task – even for a minute. The distraction will eventually lead to a lot more time wasted. Many of us have gone to the net to look up just that one little thing only to realize we are somewhere completely else 15 minutes or half an hour later. Like going to see the price of oats and learning how to make healthy burgers 30 mins later. (Yes, that happened)

Another practice that has been beneficial for me is to meditate daily. While I focus on my breathing every morning, many meditation formats allow you to focus on any one object – even a professional problem. The key is to be wary of distraction or looping. Redirect your attention back when you find it slipping. Dive deeper into the problem instead of going over and over again on what you already know about it.

Use social media mindfully

For most tools that we use in life, we calculate how beneficial it for us or what we miss if we don’t use them. We adopt a tool only when the benefits of using it outweighs the negative impact. However, when it comes to social media, we use it indiscriminately and mindlessly in most cases.

In today’s world, social media is a great tool to network, learn and find interesting ideas and opportunities. But more than any other tool, it is prone to be abused to the point where the negatives far outweigh the positives. Don’t use social media to fill in all of your shallow hours. Don’t allow notifications to distract you every minute. In fact, make it as hard as possible to be on social media unconsciously. Don’t keep the app on your home page, don’t create shortcuts for it on your browser, log off every time you log in so that you have to spend time to log in again.

Use the time instead to focus on your goals or meet people in real life. Be present when you are meeting people rather than staring into your phone. And most of all, give your brain the time to rest and regenerate. Use social media mindfully and it can be a great tool. Use it unconsciously and you are the one being a tool.

Schedule your day

Another important part of working deeply is to try and remove as much of shallow periods from your days as your work allows. The best way to do this is to schedule as much of your day as possible. When you fix up most of the time to do constructive work in advance, it is hard to waste time doing shallow work.

The idea is not to become inflexible. You can keep editing your calendar throughout the day depending on how your day is shaping up. For example, if you were scheduled to work on a project in the second half but an unscheduled meeting comes up, you can always reschedule that to later in the week or day. But keeping time blocked for deep work as well as shallow work helps you keep on track when it comes to how to use your time throughout the day. The idea is not to eliminate all shallow work (which is impossible) but to do it at a time of your choosing.

Decide in advance what you are going to do with every minute of your workday. It can seem unnatural at first as well as a chore but over time you will start reducing the time you waste on shallow work, social media, internet browsing, etc. simply because you are already doing something else at that time.

Of course, not all of these tricks will work for everyone. In fact, many founders/CEOs/top execs I have known have highly fragmented days where they have to work on multiple things and do a lot of back-to-back meetings.

However, what I have also observed working in close quarters with them is that almost any large initiative requires deep work to take off and they are probably the best at being able to prioritise and cordon off time for deep work on initiatives that are a high priority for them and the organization.

The ability to work deeply in today’s world is a superpower. The great thing is it is not a superpower you need to be born with (unlike Superman – and the cape is optional too). Deep work is available to anyone and everyone who wants to work on things that improve them and/or create lasting value. Hopefully, armed with the knowledge above, you can craft some deep work habits too.