Deep Work

Switching between tasks has a cost. Research on workplace interruptions by Gloria Mark and colleagues has found that getting back to the original task can take more than twenty minutes. A day cut up by pings loses much of its time to that recovery alone.

Newport also argues that the ability to concentrate is becoming rarer. People who can think hard for a few hours produce work that others cannot easily copy, and AI tools make this clearer: they take over much of the shallow work, which leaves the hard thinking as the part that still needs you.

• Book two-hour blocks a few times a week and treat them as fixed as a client meeting.
• Walk in with one clear objective, such as a finished draft, so nothing needs deciding once you sit down.
• Remove distractions first: close unrelated tabs, silence notifications and tell colleagues you are unreachable.
• Batch the shallow work into a separate slot, so people learn when to expect a reply.
• Be realistic. Newport suggests that around four hours a day is the ceiling for most people.

The term comes from Cal Newport's 2016 book of the same name. He sets deep work against shallow work: logistical, easily repeated tasks like answering messages, scheduling and filing. Deep work is the writing, analysis, planning or building that produces your most valuable output, and it only happens when your attention stays on one thing for a long stretch.

A founder writing the offer page for a new service is a good example. Spread over a week of ten-minute gaps between calls, it takes days and reads like it. In one protected morning with notifications off, it is done and sharper.

• Calling a day of back-to-back meetings with a few spare minutes "focus time".
• Starting a block without a defined outcome, then drifting into email.
• Blaming discipline when the real problem is that the task was too big for one block.