How to Structure Your Day for Deep Work and Create with More Impact
Want the secret to making meaningful work that stands out? The answer: deep work. It’s where you put yourself in a focused, intentional, and challenging state to get every bit of value possible out of your current intellectual capacity. Your ability to do deep work determines the value you create and affects future success. Deep work is ultra-valuable because most people do shallow work every day: writing emails, posting on social media, watching TV, etc. The person who does deep work creates above and beyond most people around them. Keep reading (or listening) to learn how you can start structuring your days for deep work.
Let’s talk about how to structure your days for deep work so you can create meaningful things on a consistent basis. Deep work is what it takes to produce streams of articles, books, or coming up with new ideas. Yet our world very much rewards shallow, aka less valuable, work. Things like attending meetings, answering emails, attending more meetings, posting on social media, and more. Make sure you listen to this whole episode to find out if you must quit social media to do deep work.
This call to doing more deep work is inspired by author and computer science professor Cal Newport in his book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World*. It came to my attention when YouTube recommended Newport’s TedTalk titled Quit social media. At that time I was so ready to quit. Instagram drained every ounce of my energy and I felt completely over it. Here was someone telling me to quit and I was sold. After watching the talk and reading the book here’s why deep work matters.
The Difference Between Shallow Work and Deep Work
If you’re able to differentiate between shallow and deep work and give yourself the time to do more deep work you’ll stand out from almost everyone else. You’ll be the person who’s seen as valuable in the economy. Cal Newport describes deep work as, “Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”
It’s the only way to get every last bit of value out of your current intellectual capacity. It’s the only way to improve abilities. When you create new value that’s not easy to replicate you stand out. Think of authors, inventors, business owners, and creators you admire. They didn’t get where they are because of shallow work.
Newport describes shallow work as, “Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.” Some examples include: Writing emails, posting on social media, responding to emails and texts, going to meetings, and so on.
How to Tell What’s Shallow Work
When deciding whether something is a shallow activity I would use the three prerequisites from the earlier quote on deep work. Asking yourself if the activity you’re doing is:
creating new value
improving your skill
hard to replicate
Activities may fall under one or two but not all three. I encourage you to write down everything you do in a day. Big and small then hold them up to those three values. How many things are you doing that are shallow versus deep? Don’t get too hard on yourself. This isn’t meant to cause judgment but gentle observation.
Why Deep Work is So Hard
Our ability to do deep work has been weakened dramatically because of network tools. The person who created those tools used deep work to make them. But as a user those tools inherently make tasks easy for everyone so in a sense the work one does with it isn’t deep.
I remember hearing somewhere that the reason the Romans stopped innovating so much is because they had slaves to do everything for them. Obviously a dramatic example but that was their version of network tools. Why exert the effort to invent something when I have servants to do stuff for me? Except we have network tools to do stuff for us.
What’s interesting to note is no one’s really questioned technology and its long term effects like they would food or other industries. Maybe now it’s starting to change but as a whole our society has 100% accepted and adopted without hesitation. Which makes sense. This is a new way of life that’s never happened before in the history of our existence that we know of.
Alright we zoomed out a bit there but now let’s zoom back in. As a result, the norm in our society is to go from shallow work to shallow work. In the corporate world, workers are incentivized to spend most of their time on email, Slack, and in meetings. Cal Newport shares that in “A 2012 McKinsey study [they] found that the average knowledge worker now spends more than 60 percent of the workweek engaged in electronic communication and Internet searching, with close to 30 percent of a worker’s time dedicated to reading and answering e-mail alone.” Society rewards shallow work because we don’t know how to gauge productivity.
Society Rewards Shallow Work
Before, the industrial age made it easy. We could see how many cars a team finished every day. Or how many garments a person sewed. With our knowledge-working society managers and executives can’t see what productivity is.
So they started gauging it by busy-ness. Which is the exact opposite of productivity. Plus, people get fired when they don’t seem busy. We overwork ourselves as a matter of seeming survival.
Then we added social media into the mix. The most addictive, shallow kind of work. Meant to give quick dopamine hits so the user comes back more often. Scrolling, liking, posting.
Hate to say it but those are all things a six year old can do. And if a six year old can do it the act is inherently not valuable in the economy and represents shallow work. Of course the act of creating content for videos or how-tos that add value I wouldn’t consider shallow work. It’s the act of posting and mindlessly scrolling that’s shallow.
As an example, I used to make quote graphics for Instagram. Yes, quotes can inspire and add value to someone’s day but any person could replicate what I did. So the act of posting quotes added no new value. Which won’t be rewarded in the economy. It also didn’t improve my skill.
This Isn’t Your Fault
I bet if you kept track of everything you do in a day you’d be shocked at how much is shallow work. It’s not your fault though. Our society lives and breathes shallowly. You get rewarded for shallow. We’re taught to believe that we’re no longer relevant or important unless we’re on social media. That’s awful. Businesses are told they can’t be relevant unless they exist on social media. Where’s the freedom and reward in that? Giving our seeming choice to some person's app that they want to use to sell us stuff?
Deep work however uses the depth of your mind and creativity. It allows you to create things that no one can replicate and therefore it becomes super valuable to our economy and society. It also feels more rewarding and fulfilling. When people feel they’re longing for something I bet you it’s because most of their life is based on shallow work. Things that don’t make them feel special or test their unique abilities.
Anyone who’s made a work that changed the world did so because they know the value of deep work. My hope is you’ll start giving more time to deep work and eventually base your whole life around it. When I heard about deep work I wanted to change my life right then and there. But I was also terrified that it meant quitting all social media. Proof that I attach my relevance to social media.
The good news is doing deep work doesn’t mean you have to quit social media or become a hermit to society. There’s a way to base your time around deep work and schedule in shallow work instead of the other way around. There’s also a way to gauge if social media is truly pivotal to the success of what you’re trying to do. For Cal Newport, it wasn’t necessary. For you, it might be.
Of course, if you want to go super in-depth I suggest you read Deep Work* by Cal Newport. But for now, I’ll give you some good steps to get started.
Here’s Where to Start with Deep Work
Write Down Everything You Do in the Next Three Days.
Look back at the end of each day and put an S for shallow or D for deep next to each item. If most of what you do is shallow don’t worry because that’s normal. Take this as an opportunity for more awareness about what kind of deep work is missing from your schedule. Are you holding off writing a book, creating a course or program, or thinking about an invention? Make note of that.
Schedule in Short Spurts of Deep Work to Start.
The most anyone can do deep work in a day is about four hours. When you’re just starting you’ll be lucky to do an hour without distraction. Take a look at your schedule and put two one hour blocks in each day. Do your most important work within those two hour blocks. For me, it would be writing a blog post/podcast episode. For the next hour I may edit my eBook.
Once you get through that first week then schedule two ninety minute blocks. Do that for a week or so then bump up to three ninety minute blocks a day. These blocks of time don’t need to be (or shouldn’t be) back to back. Writer and entrepreneur Doug Neill breaks down how he structures his day for deep work and it’s super fascinating. There’s even visuals. He has large blocks of time in between his deep work sessions. You can use that time in between sessions to answer emails, read, exercise, or do other shallow tasks.
If you work for someone else it doesn’t mean you can’t adopt this. When I worked on a project for VaynerMedia the schedule there was insane. I had meetings most of the day and a lot of deliverables to create. But that didn’t stop me from blocking off lunch in my calendar and a few hours a day titled ‘Deep work’. No one ever questioned why those times were unavailable and I was able to use them to get actual work done.Find Your System for Deep Work.
This image from Doug Neill perfectly lays out different ways to do deep work as shared by Newport in his book. Deep work doesn't have to be daily. It could be quarterly or monthly. It really depends on your personality and way of working.
What will it take for you to do deep work? For some you may need to go to a whole new location other than your house if it’s filled with distractions. For others you may be able to schedule in one hour blocks in your day and stick to it.
Some famous examples of accomplished people making deep work a priority are people like J.K. Rowling who went completely absent from social media when she was writing Harry Potter. Or Microsoft C.E.O Bill Gates who does “Think weeks” twice a year in complete isolation to read books and think thoughts. There is a way and style for everyone so I hope you feel excited to figure out what works for you.
Let me know in the comments which style you want to try first and also what are you working on? What’s something of value you’re creating?
Affirmation
I cherish creating meaningful work with clarity and focus.
Writing Prompt
What meaningful work do I feel my spirit telling me to create? What habit or mindset in my life may be stopping me from focusing on doing deep work?
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