Catatan Baca: Deep Work (Cal Newport)
Judul: Deep Work
Penulis: Cal Newport
Penerbit: Grand Central Publishing (Kindle Edition)
Rating: 9/10
Berbekal dari kecocokan dengan So Good They Can’t Ignore You, saya jadi penasaran ingin baca buku Cal Newport yang lain. Deep Work akhirnya terpilih karena subtitle “Rules for focused success in a distracted world” itu rasanya cocok dengan kondisi saat ini.
Buat saya, makin lama distraksi seperti makin beranak-pinak tanpa pernah ada tanda akan berkurang jumlahnya. Ada yang bentuknya jelas “ah, ganggu banget ini”, tapi ada juga yang muncul dengan halus sampai nggak sadar kalau itu sebenarnya distraksi. Contohnya: Menghabiskan berjam-jam untuk balas-membalas chat. Sekilas dilihat, wajar kalau dimaklumi. Kan sedang berkoneksi dengan manusia lain. Namun, pertanyaannya, kalau dilakukan dalam jangka waktu lama, apakah setelahnya masih punya energi dan fokus untuk mengerjakan pekerjaan utama dan terpenting yang dipunya?
Buku ini terbit 2016, tapi isinya masih relevan untuk 2021. Cal Newport mengingatkan pembaca bahwa untuk bertahan sekaligus berhasil di ekonomi sekarang, kita perlu bisa menguasai dengan cepat hal-hal yang kompleks.
Cepat dan bisa belajar → Skill bertambah → Bisa menghasilkan sesuatu yang bagus. So good they can’t ignore you kan ya. *eh
Kalau kita mudah puas dengan kondisi sekarang, merasa sudah cukup dengan skill yang dipunya, we’re going to be easily replaced with someone else. That’s the harsh truth. Antara pekerjaan jadi dibuat otomatis dengan mesin/teknologi, atau muncul (manusia) pengganti yang jauh lebih andal menggantikan orang yang kerjanya biasa-biasa saja.
Beberapa pembahasan yang ada di buku tidak sepenuhnya baru buat saya, tapi saya tetap suka dengan cara Cal Newport menyusun buku ini. Premis, problem statement, dan actionable steps yang jelas pasti kita dapatkan tanpa bertele-tele :D
Takeaways:
Pilih filosofi deep work mana yang cocok dengan kondisi pekerjaan yang dipunya. Untuk pekerja 8-5/9-6, The Rhythmic Philosophy yang paling memungkinkan untuk dicoba (cek bagian Highlights → The Rules → Work Deeply untuk melihat penjelasannya). Misalnya, alokasikan dan kunci dua jam pertama untuk deep work tanpa menyalakan alat komunikasi sama sekali. Quit Slack, turn on airplane mode on your smartphone (put it away), lock your room and put “do not disturb” post-it on your door. Masukkan ke dua jam ini ke dalam rutinitas kerja.
Untuk sebagian orang, terutama yang belum punya anak, situasi work from home justru memungkinkan kita untuk melakukan deep work. Berada di rumah sendiri dan bukan di open office yang penuh distraksi memberi kita kontrol penuh dengan situasi kerja yang ingin diciptakan.
Konsep kantor terbuka/open office sudah terlanjur menyebar di mana-mana. Kecuali kamu bos yang punya kantornya, sangat kecil kemungkinan untuk punya ruangan sendiri. Harapannya, makin banyak kantor yang membebaskan pekerjanya untuk memilih kerja di mana. Selama ada sistem, goal atau OKR dan reporting system yang jelas, nggak perlu melihat fisik seseorang nongkrong ngejogrog di kantor pun bisa. The old beliefs, such as you have to look busy in front of your boss, or I have to see you at the office need to be destroyed. #prayeroftheday
Kelihatan sibuk, bukan berarti lagi melakukan deep work. Leaders, take notes :p (Cek juga penjelasan Busyness as Proxy for Productivity di Highlights)
Bisa melakukan deep work mendatangkan kebahagiaan. It’s good. Not only for our career, but also for our mental health. “Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.”
Bagian ini mengingatkan saya dengan artikel Adam Grant tentang Languishing (thanks for sharing, Cica!). Menurut Adam Grant, languishing adalah kondisi yang nggak bisa dibilang burnout, bukan depresi, tapi rasanya nggak ada tujuan dan nggak ada kebahagiaan dalam hidup. Hidup rasanya kosong dan stagnan. “Obat” untuk mengatasi languishing? Konsep flow yang dipopulerkan oleh Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
By the time you’re reading this, I guess you can see the connection already. “Deep work is an activity well suited to generate a flow state (the phrases used by Csikszentmihalyi to describe what generates flow include notions of stretching your mind to its limits, concentrating, and losing yourself in an activity—all of which also describe deep work). And as we just learned, flow generates happiness.”
Otomatis saya juga teringat apa yang ditulis Mark Manson dalam The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. “To be happy we need something to solve. Happiness is therefore a form of action; it’s an activity, not something that is passively bestowed upon you, not something that you magically discover in a top-ten article on the Huffington Post or from any specific guru or teacher.”
And it actually starts from cultivating a deep work habit.
Law of productivity: High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus).
Pick your battle. “The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.”
Highlights:
Chapter 1: Deep Work is Valuable
Deep Work: 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.
Shallow Work: 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.
To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work. If you don’t cultivate this ability, you’re likely to fall behind as technology advances.
The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.
In this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage:
those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines,
those who are the best at what they do, and
those with access to capital.
Two core abilities for thriving in the New Economy:
The ability to quickly master hard things.
The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.
If you can’t learn, you can’t thrive.
If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.
Chapter 2: Deep Work is Rare
Many other ideas are being prioritized as more important than deep work in the business world, including, as we just encountered, serendipitous collaboration, rapid communication, and an active presence on social media.
Open offices, for example, might create more opportunities for collaboration,* but they do so at the cost of “massive distraction,” to quote the results of experiments conducted for a British TV special titled The Secret Life of Office Buildings.
The Principle of Least Resistance: In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment.
To return to our question about why cultures of connectivity persist, the answer, according to our principle, is because it’s easier.
Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.
Chapter 3: Deep Work is Meaningful
Another issue muddying the connection between depth and meaning in knowledge work is the cacophony of voices attempting to convince knowledge workers to spend more time engaged in shallow activities.
Depth-destroying behaviors such as immediate e-mail responses and an active social media presence are lauded, while avoidance of these trends generates suspicion.
“Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.” - Winifred Gallagher.
“The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” Csikszentmihalyi calls this mental state flow.
Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.
A similar potential for craftsmanship can be found in most skilled jobs in the information economy. Whether you’re a writer, marketer, consultant, or lawyer: Your work is craft, and if you hone your ability and apply it with respect and care, then like the skilled wheelwright you can generate meaning in the daily efforts of your professional life.
[…] to embrace deep work in your own career, and to direct it toward cultivating your skill, is an effort that can transform a knowledge work job from a distracted, draining obligation into something satisfying—a portal to a world full of shining, wondrous things.
The Rules:
Work Deeply
The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.
Decide your depth philosophy:
The Monastic Philosophy: This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations. Practitioners of the monastic philosophy tend to have a well-defined and highly valued professional goal that they’re pursuing, and the bulk of their professional success comes from doing this one thing exceptionally well.
The Bimodal Philosophy: This philosophy asks that you divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else. During the deep time, the bimodal worker will act monastically—seeking intense and uninterrupted concentration. During the shallow time, such focus is not prioritized. For example, on the scale of a week, you might dedicate a four-day weekend to depth and the rest to open time. Similarly, on the scale of a year, you might dedicate one season to contain most of your deep stretches (as many academics do over the summer or while on sabbatical).
The Rhythmic Philosophy: This philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit. The goal, in other words, is to generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you’re going to go deep. The chain method is a good example of the rhythmic philosophy of deep work scheduling because it combines a simple scheduling heuristic (do the work every day), with an easy way to remind yourself to do the work: the big red Xs on the calendar.
The rhythmic philosophy provides an interesting contrast to the bimodal philosophy. It perhaps fails to achieve the most intense levels of deep thinking sought in the daylong concentration sessions favored by the bimodalist. The trade-off, however, is that this approach works better with the reality of human nature. By supporting deep work with rock-solid routines that make sure a little bit gets done on a regular basis, the rhythmic scheduler will often log a larger total number of deep hours per year.
The Journalist Philosophy: You fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule. This approach is not for the deep work novice.
There’s no one correct deep work ritual—the right fit depends on both the person and the type of project pursued. But there are some general questions that any effective ritual must address:
Where you’ll work and for how long.
How you’ll work once you start to work.
How you’ll support your work.
The whiteboard effect. For some types of problems, working with someone else at the proverbial shared whiteboard can push you deeper than if you were working alone. The presence of the other party waiting for your next insight—be it someone physically in the same room or collaborating with you virtually—can short-circuit the natural instinct to avoid depth.
Embrace Boredom
Clifford Nass’s research revealed that constant attention switching online has a lasting negative effect on your brain: People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand… they’re pretty much mental wrecks.
Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction, Nass discovered, it’s hard to shake the addiction even when you want to concentrate. To put this more concretely: If every moment of potential boredom in your life—say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives—is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the “mental wrecks” in Nass’s research, it’s not ready for deep work—even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.
Instead of scheduling the occasional break from distraction so you can focus, you should instead schedule the occasional break from focus to give in to distraction.
By segregating Internet use (and therefore segregating distractions) you’re minimizing the number of times you give in to distraction, and by doing so you let these attention-selecting muscles strengthen.
Structure your deep thinking. Starting with a careful review of the relevant variables for solving the problem and then storing these values in your working memory. With the relevant variables stored and the next-step question identified, you now have a specific target for your attention.
Quit Social Media
Willpower is limited, and therefore the more enticing tools you have pulling at your attention, the harder it’ll be to maintain focus on something important.
To master the art of deep work, therefore, you must take back control of your time and attention from the many diversions that attempt to steal them.
The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.
The author gave an idea to ban ourselves from using social media for thirty days (I’m not sure about this). After thirty days of this self-imposed network isolation, ask yourself the following two questions about each of the services you temporarily quit:
Would the last thirty days have been notably better if I had been able to use this service?
Did people care that I wasn’t using this service?
Part of what makes social media insidious is that the companies that profit from your attention have succeeded with a masterful marketing coup: convincing our culture that if you don’t use their products you might miss out.
Arnold Bennett: Put more thought into your leisure time. In other words, this strategy suggests that when it comes to your relaxation, don’t default to whatever catches your attention at the moment, but instead dedicate some advance thinking to the question of how you want to spend your “day within a day.”
Drain the Shallows
If your schedule is disrupted, you should, at the next available moment, take a few minutes to create a revised schedule for the time that remains in the day. You can turn to a new page. You can erase and redraw blocks.
If you find that schedule revisions become overwhelming in their frequency, there are a few tactics that can inject some more stability.
First, you should recognize that almost definitely you’re going to underestimate at first how much time you require for most things. When people are new to this habit, they tend to use their schedule as an incarnation of wishful thinking—a best-case scenario for their day.
The second tactic that helps is the use of overflow conditional blocks. If you’re not sure how long a given activity might take, block off the expected time, then follow this with an additional block that has a split purpose. If you need more time for the preceding activity, use this additional block to keep working on it.
The third tactic I suggest is to be liberal with your use of task blocks. Deploy many throughout your day and make them longer than required to handle the tasks you plan in the morning.
Schedule your day, but be flexible:
Cal Newport’s way: I maintain a rule that if I stumble onto an important insight, then this is a perfectly valid reason to ignore the rest of my schedule for the day (with the exception, of course, of things that cannot be skipped). I can then stick with this unexpected insight until it loses steam. At this point, I’ll step back and rebuild my schedule for any time that remains in the day.
In other words, I not only allow spontaneity in my schedule; I encourage it. Joseph’s critique (re: about his way of scheduling the day) is driven by the mistaken idea that the goal of a schedule is to force your behavior into a rigid plan. This type of scheduling, however, isn’t about constraint—it’s instead about thoughtfulness. It’s a simple habit that forces you to continually take a moment throughout your day and ask: “What makes sense for me to do with the time that remains?” It’s the habit of asking that returns results, not your unyielding fidelity to the answer.
Without structure, it’s easy to allow your time to devolve into the shallow—e-mail, social media, Web surfing. This type of shallow behavior, though satisfying in the moment, is not conducive to creativity. With structure, on the other hand, you can ensure that you regularly schedule blocks to grapple with a new idea, or work deeply on something challenging, or brainstorm for a fixed period—the type of commitment more likely to instigate innovation.
GREAT TIPS:
Ask your boss for a shallow work budget. Here’s an important question that’s rarely asked: What percentage of my time should be spent on shallow work? This strategy suggests that you ask it. If you have a boss, in other words, have a conversation about this question.
For most people in most non-entry-level knowledge work jobs, the answer to the question will be somewhere in the 30 to 50 percent range (there’s a psychological distaste surrounding the idea of spending the majority of your time on unskilled tasks, so 50 percent is a natural upper limit, while at the same time most bosses will begin to worry that if this percentage gets too much lower than 30 percent you’ll be reduced to a knowledge work hermit who thinks big thoughts but never responds to e-mails).
a job that doesn’t support deep work is not a job that can help you succeed in our current information economy.
Be cautious about the use of the most dangerous word in one’s productivity vocabulary: “yes.”
A clean break is the best to refuse shallow works/requests.
The key is to avoid providing enough specificity about the excuse that the requester has the opportunity to defuse it. If, for example, I turn down a time-consuming speaking invitation with the excuse that I have other trips scheduled for around the same time, I don’t provide details.
Resist the urge to offer a consolation prize that ends up devouring almost as much of my schedule (e.g., “Sorry I can’t join your committee, but I’m happy to take a look at some of your proposals as they come together and offer my thoughts”).
Make people who send you e-mail do more work
Create a sender filter. e.g. If you have an offer, opportunity, or introduction that might make my life more interesting, e-mail me at interesting [at] calnewport.com. For the reasons stated above, I’ll only respond to those proposals that are a good match for my schedule and interests. (LOL, I need to try this)
Do More Work When You Send or Reply to E-mails
Use these prompts:
What is the project represented by this message?
What is the most efficient (in terms of messages generated) process for bringing this project to a successful conclusion? Spend more time thinking about your messages before you compose them.
Don’t respond if any of the following applies:
It’s ambiguous or otherwise makes it hard for you to generate a reasonable response.
It’s not a question or proposal that interests you.
Nothing really good would happen if you did respond and nothing really bad would happen if you didn’t.
Topik dalam buku ini yang menarik untuk dieksplor:
Digital minimalism (OBVIOUSLY)
Attention economy
Workflow restructurization
Buku lain yang ingin dibaca setelah Deep Work:
Flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)
Digital Minimalism (Cal Newport)
Rework (Jason Fried and David Hansson)