As the United Kingdom prepared to celebrate Christmas in 1970, four musicians followed a narrow, tree-lined road to a crumbling country house named Headley Grange. They settled into the damp home, heated only by a wood burning fireplace, to distance themselves from interruption. Even in 1970, the world had achieved a pace and intensity that pushed creative people to the countryside in search of stillness. Living and working together in the house, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham found themselves inspired to create what would come to be known as Led Zeppelin IV, an album that has in turn inspired generations of musicians and listeners ever since. Headley Grange, a desolate but welcoming haven for creative work, is almost as famous, having also served as the setting for recordings by Bad Company, Fleetwood Mac, and Genesis.
The kind of focused creative work that brought the world Stairway to Heaven is the subject of Cal Newport’s 2016 book Deep Work. Mr. Newport describes deep work as cognitively demanding and requiring focused thought for some time. Deep work adds value to a project or the world, unlike shallow work, which includes high frequency but short duration tasks that require little thought. The author argues that deep work is more important than shallow work, but modern society and technology are making successful deep work more difficult.
I read this book two years ago. After two years of thinking about the depth of my own work, I’m convinced it is a worthy read for leaders.
How to do deep work
Mr. Newport distills his prescription for deep work into four rules. The first is to be deliberate about making time and having a place to do deep work. He suggests that the place for deep work should be separate from the everyday shallow work place. A quiet place free of interruptions is enough, but some people create a space perfectly suited to their preferences. More important than the physical place for deep work is a routine to fit it into your professional life. Some people prefer to take one full day a week for deep work, while others choose to set aside a little time every day. The key is to develop a place and practice to make deep work part of your routine. If you’re intrigued by the work habits of influential artists, writers and musicians, you may enjoy Daily Routines by Mason Currey, a book that Mr. Newport references and I found interesting.
Mr. Newport’s second rule is to embrace boredom. Recent research in neurology has learned that the brain is plastic – it can be molded or shaped. We can train it to perform like we can train any other part of our body. Smartphones allow us to fill our spare minutes with rapid fire inputs for our brains to digest. Short, superficial consumption trains our brains for short, superficial thinking. This reduces our fitness to do focused, intense and lengthy work. Boredom gives our brain time to think. Time without a task or stimulus is a chance for our brains to exercise – exercise that may also spark new ideas or enable our subconscious to find peace. Filling empty minutes by picking up our smartphone is a waste of the opportunity.
Smartphones are also the subject of the third rule of deep work. Mr. Newport advises readers to quit social media. He points out that most of us claim to find value in frequent monitoring of our Facebook, Twitter or Instagram feeds, but we haven’t paused to consider the actual value of those tools against the time we lose to them. The choice to bail out of social media entirely, or try to somehow moderate its use, is an important personal choice. I hope that articles on this blog shared via social media are of some useful value to readers, so it is difficult for me to concur with a total social media blackout. However, the idea of moderating social media has merit. Mr. Newport has written a new book about the use of technology called Digital Minimalism. I haven’t read it yet but it’s on my list.
The final rule of deep work is to drain the shallows. Mr. Newport suggests we should make a deliberate effort to minimize the amount of shallow work we need to do. Our focus should instead be on the deep work tasks that allow us to add the most value. He does acknowledge that we can’t abandon shallow work entirely – someone has to do it – but this rule certainly seems to have value if you can at least follow it in spirit.
What is the deep work of leadership?
The challenge of applying the idea of deep work to leadership is that Mr. Newport seems to be writing for solitary creative or knowledge workers. His advice is best aimed at people who create things: writers, architects, rock musicians. He assumes that deep work can only be completed alone. He does discuss how to work deeply in concert with others, but his suggestions focus on how several people could all do solitary, independent work on the same project. He does not discuss how a group of four people could do deep work collaboratively at the same table – or in the same English country house.
However, I think his advice can work for groups of people. His general strategy is to dedicate time and space free of distractions to do focused mental work in peace. I see no reason why that strategy can’t be used by a small team. It may take a bit more work to align time and space in a way comfortable for several people, but it is possible. I think that if everyone understands the goal of deep work, a team can achieve it the same as an individual. Leaders should be willing to introduce the concept of deep work to their teams and enforce the time and space boundaries needed to make it happen.
There is a deep work aspect of leading others
As I’ve thought about Deep Work over the past two years I’ve settled on three ways deep work can enable great leadership. The first is in the creation of a leader’s products. Architects create drawings of beautiful buildings and rock musicians create searing guitar riffs, but leaders create visions, inspiration, and decisions. A vision is an idea for the future that no one else may have. The idea and the words or images chosen to communicate it to others need to be thought out carefully. A vision is exactly the kind of creative product deep work is best suited for. Similarly, any time a leader needs to make a major decision, a deep work approach is going to give a better result than a quick, shallow approach. When faced with an decision, make time and space to work it over. Close the computer, hide your smartphone, and allow your mind to focus on the information and options available before coming to a conclusion.
A second application of deep work to leading others is more difficult but no less important. I believe conversations with other people are key opportunities to do deep work. True listening, as opposed to mere hearing, demands a deep level of focus and presence in the moment. The challenge is that conversations happen frequently, often without advance notice, and possibly in a space full of distractions. Despite the unfavorable conditions, I think leaders must strive to do deep work as listeners any time someone approaches us to talk. You never know when an unexpected or spontaneous conversation that may seem unimportant to you is hugely important to the other party. You never know when someone will reveal something of consequence. Leaders have a responsibility to be in deep work mode, or as close to it as possible, in the moment when we engage with another person. People who only get a shallow work type of response to their questions or concerns will not be inspired by their time with you.
The last way I think a leader should do deep work is in deliberate self-reflection. Our leadership relationships only move forward if we are thinking about them – and thinking about how to improve them. It is important for leaders to reflect on their words and actions and how they seemed to impact other people. Self-reflection, whether it happens through quiet thinking or writing in a journal, is absolutely a deep work activity. Over the past several years I’ve developed a journaling practice. I try to write a bit every evening. It is partly an effort to manage stress by dumping bothersome thoughts from my subconscious onto paper, and partly an effort to deliberately think about what I did and how I affected others that day. I do my best to get into a state of deep work for the minutes I spend writing. I have my writing place, I have my nice notebook and favorite pen, and I have my noise-cancelling headphones. Sometimes I even find my ability to do deep work is enhanced by listening to the result of other deep work done long ago in the English countryside.