The highest value skill in the modern economy

... by far

Hey guys,

I recently started a new job! This is my first full-time role out of uni and this new chapter of my life got me to revisit a book that I read a long time ago - ‘Deep Work’ by Cal Newport. This book created one of the most profound changes in my life and I would love to share some of the actionable insights that really moved the needle for me over the past couple of years.

The premise of this book is that in a world filled with distraction there is immense value in being able to suppress these distractions and work deeply. Cal defines 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.

The idea is that deep work is valuable, rare and meaningful, and if you are able to master the art of working deeply you will have a distinct advantage in this economy. What this implies is that you don’t need a rarified job to be successful, but rather a rarified approach to your work.

Let me repeat that. You don’t need a rarified job to be successful; you need a rarified approach to your work.

One thing I would add as well; beyond being able to thrive in this economy, you will feel a greater sense of pride in your work. There is a sense of accomplishment that comes from creating something of value, knowing that you put in deliberate work to achieve a certain outcome.

Let’s take a look at some key concepts of Deep Work.

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Structuring Deep Work

It is important to take a structured approach to your deep work sessions. It can be very difficult to sporadically drop in and out of deep work on a whim because it requires stretches of distraction-free, uninterrupted time.

Many of us, whether working full-time, studying for a degree, or working on personal projects, would likely take a journalistic approach to deep work. This means fitting blocks of uninterrupted sessions into our busy calendars where we can give our full focus to a single task. These time-blocks don’t need to be long but they should be discrete as to not make them feel like an open-ended slog.

I would strongly recommend marking these sessions in your calendar as you would with any other event. This may feel very unusual and restricting at first, but in reality it can be quite freeing. The knowledge that your session of focused work has an end means that you are likely to be more efficient in that given time-frame, leaving you free to enjoy the rest of your day without the lingering thought of that task.

You can additionally support these deep work sessions by minimising friction in your environment. Make it easy to do work and make it difficult to get distracted. Keep your phone out of your room, block social media websites, and ensure you have a bottle of water or a coffee on your desk.

Finally, it is recommended that you focus on a limited number of tasks, ideally one, in a single deep work session to avoid the drawbacks of task switching. Research shows that the brain can take an average of 9.5 minutes to switch contexts when going from one task to another.

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Lag vs Lead Measures

The concept of lag vs lead measures was a real eye-opener for me in this book. A lag measure describes any metric that you are trying to improve - e.g. grades, income or customer satisfaction scores. The reason they are called lag measures is that once they’ve been measured, the performance that drove them is already in the past. There’s nothing you can do to alter them once they’ve been measured.

Lead measures, however, are measures of the behaviour that will drive success on lag measures. They turn your attention to improving behaviours that are directly in your control and will have a positive impact on your goals. One of the most important lead measures for cognitive work is hours spent in deep work. Adding more sessions of deep work into your schedule is something you have direct control over, and doing so will have a positive impact on your desired lag measures.

In my personal use case, I aim to schedule hours of deep work into my work calendar where I can focus on producing valuable output. These time blocks will switch my status to unavailable, just as any meeting would, meaning my colleagues will be aware that I can’t be reached during those times. My actual output will be a lag measure but my hours of deep work will be a lead measure.

Everything I’ve been saying might sound exhausting to you. So the question is, how can you keep your brain rested while you aren’t working to support your efforts while you are working?

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Embrace Boredom

Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you do not simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.

It is very difficult to stay in a state of focus during your time-blocks if your mind is constantly buzzing with a thousand different thoughts at once. If you are always switching to high stimulus activities at the slightest hint of boredom, your mind won’t be able to deal with low stimulus and high value activities when it matters.

As such, Cal states that the ability to simply wait and be bored is an extremely valuable skill. It’s not that you need to completely eliminate distracting behaviours, but rather that you shouldn’t allow them to hijack your attention. It’s okay to watch Youtube or scroll on social media when you are being intentional about it, but it shouldn’t be your default behaviour at the slightest hint of challenge or boredom.

It can also help to have a shut down ritual at the end of your work day. This is a specific ritual you conduct which signifies to your brain that you will no longer think about work until the next morning, and once you shut down your mind must be left free. This shutdown is required to recharge the energy needed to work deeply the next day.

The final game changer from this book is an obvious but controversial one. Quit social media. Although we might use social media to ‘relax’ after a long day, it is actually a drain on our energy. A strategy I use to limit social media use while still avoiding FOMO (fear of missing out) is to delete social media off my phone and only use it in my browser. This creates a lot more friction and makes it difficult to default to scrolling whenever I feel bored. This small tweak has given me back so many hours in my days and allowed me to regain control of my attention.

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Deep Work is an extremely well written and insightful book that I would recommend to almost anyone. I hope you took something valuable out of this blog post and decide to experiment with some of these ideas.

Thanks for reading,

Kush ✌🏼