So what has to happen for employees to focus on deep work?
Executives, managers, and employees can all take the following 8 steps:
1. Ask yourself what are the most important 1 to 3 tasks I can do today to add the most value to the critical path.
Too many people populate their to-do list with all the shallow work items that need to get done that day. They fall into the trap of making shallow work items equivalent in weight to deep work items. This occurs because much shallow work, like expense reports and emails, have external people bugging you about them and attaching their deadlines to them. You need to let your mind prioritize deep work over shallow work. Make a commitment to focus your first efforts of the day on those 1 to 3 critical path items and devote the majority of your time and energy to getting them done. Celebrate if you make progress on them and feel bad if you do not give them the attention they deserve.
2. Schedule deep work on your calendar, not shallow work.
If you examine most people’s schedules, you will see that their days are built around other people pulling them into other people’s shallow work. Meetings show up on the calendar, as do phone calls. Before long, no sizeable time blocks are left for deep work.
To remedy this situation, schedule in blocks for critical-path deep work before anything else gets on the schedule. Preserve your most productive times each day, and let all the shallow work commitments have to fit themselves around them. Don’t schedule in the distractions first, and then hope that you’ll have time left over for your real work. It just won’t happen, Instead, plan to do the shallow work after your important work is done. Don’t ruin your deep work time blocks by attending to some shallow work. Cluster your emails or phone calls at the ends of the morning and afternoon—after you have added value to the critical path.
3. Build in Flow.
A major key to successful deep work is “flow.” Think of the times when you’ve done your best work, those times when your brain is churning out good ideas one right after another, those times when you lost track of time because you were just so into your work and you didn’t want to lose track of your thoughts, those times when your work energized you rather than ground you down, those times when, at the end of the day, you knew that you had done good work that would make a difference.
Those times are what Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, a psychology professor, calls the state of flow, the condition that brain-powered workers strive for in the quest for greatest productivity. In flow, all cylinders are humming, all energies are directed at the work, other aspects of reality are blocked out, and your best work gets turned out. There is an innate sense of progress, a feeling of moving forward.
The star performers who recount their experiences in a state of flow also evaluate their workday as satisfying and enormously productive—centered on important contributions. They find meaning in their work and are happier than people who spend most of their day on the mind-numbing shallow work. One key to star productivity, though, is that the flow occurs on work connected to the critical path, not just on tangents and diversions that fascinate the worker but are far removed from the path.
4. Know how to get into flow.
How do star performers move into the flow state to accomplish their deep work? In my book, How to Be a Star at Work, I describe how it helps if you find meaning and enjoyment in the critical path work. Next, you need to create a work environment that gives you the mental space to get into your work. In today’s open-door, no-walls, be-available-on-demand work environment, this is often easier said than done.
In one study of daily productivity, we found that a major cause of low personal performance was frequent interruptions. This is why scheduling un-disturbed blocks of deep work time on your calendar is so important. Most managers or line workers would not dream of going into a factory and stopping the production line every 30 minutes to discuss something. Yet, these same people think nothing of interrupting their co-workers on the critical-path deep-work production line, either by talking, phone calls, emails, or text messages.
Deep work can be compared to launching a spaceship. The greatest amount of fuel is used and the greatest stress is incurred from takeoff to breaking out of the Earth’s atmosphere and from re-entry to landing. The same is true for deep work. The hard part is getting into flow. Once there, it is like floating in space. When flow is interrupted, then you waste all that time and energy taking off again.
So, when brain-powered workers’ concentration is broken, productivity suffers as they lose their train of thought and waste time starting over again.
Stars take varied approaches to both getting into flow and avoiding interruptions. Francis, a star engineer, took to wearing headphones when hunkered down at her computer keyboard. Co-workers thought she was engrossed in classical music to stimulate her transition into flow, but there was nothing playing. The headphones were in place to ward off her chatty colleagues.
Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Annie Dillard insists on the most lackluster office environment possible to induce her writing flow—a cinder-block cell overlooking a tar-and-gravel roof. “Appealing workplaces are to be avoided,” she tells aspiring writers. “One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.”
Other people hide away in a spare conference room. Or, they work at home early in the morning or late at night so that co-workers can’t bother them. The key is to find a space where you can get into and stay in flow.
Once there, you might need a ritual that signals that you are starting deep work. For some, it means turning off the cell phones, internet, email, and all social media. For others, it means having a good cup of their favorite coffee. I know one star performing stock trader, Andrew, who meditates for a few minutes to clear his mind so that he is ready to jump into the deep work. The idea is to create all the cues you need to signal that you are now ready to concentrate on the cognitively challenging, but personally rewarding, deep work.
5. Keep track of your how you spend your time.
Most people feel like they have too much work to do. Everyone complains about feeling overworked, but few do much about it.
To paraphrase the great management thinker, Peter Drucker, if you measure something, you can better manage it. So, you need to keep track of how you spend your time, especially your ratio of deep work vs. shallow work.
A tool that I developed groups the tasks and time spent into the following categories:
Deep thinking or doing of critical path work alone or with others
Shallow administrative work, e.g., doing paperwork, answering emails, etc.
Managing bosses
Developing or managing subordinates
Influencing/managing across other parts of the organization
Dealing with outsiders, e.g., customers, suppliers, partners, etc.
Other (Specify)
If these categories do not capture your work adequately, you can devise ones that work better for you. Once your categories are settled, you can then keep track of your time over a few weeks, noting what you do, using 15-minute intervals. Sample your workdays for a month or so to see what patterns emerge.
This will give you a good idea of how your time is allotted.
If you want to take it a step further, you can analyze that data at another level. I merged categories in the Time-Task Analysis chart above with some ideas drawn from Julian Birkinshaw’s and Jordan Cohen’s Harvard Business Review article “Make Time for the Work That Matters.” You can separate each task into one of the following buckets:
These tasks are essential to the critical path; I (or someone more senior) must do it; and it is pretty efficient already.
These tasks are essential to the critical path and are essential to me; they are one of my favorite parts of the job, energize me, and I want to keep doing them.
These tasks are essential to the critical path but need a more efficient process. They either take too long or consume too many resources.
These tasks are essential to the critical path, but it is not necessary that I do them. In fact, someone with a different skill set is better qualified, someone junior could handle it (if properly structured), or it could be outsourced.
These tasks are low-value work relative to the critical path. They could be dropped altogether or handled on a discretionary basis when time allows.
Other (specify)
Again, if these categories do not work for you, then create your own that will better represent how you envision your critical path work.
This analysis allows you to look at how much time you spend in each cell, column, and row. Think about what you could do differently so that you free up time for your most important critical path work.
6. Ask the critical path question and say no to everything else.
If you say “yes” to every request that comes along, your colleagues may like you, but your productivity will usually suffer, and you will find yourself with little time to do deep work. As we discussed in the chapters on make-work, you need to get into the habit of responding to every request on your time with “I’ll be glad to help if need be. But first tell me how your request is related to the critical path so that I can prioritize it alongside my other critical path work.” Then, say “No” to anything that is not more important than your current critical path work.
Saying “No” gives you focus and protects your time from low-return investments. As Warren Buffett is reported to have said, “The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say ‘no’ to almost everything.”
But, you need to learn how to do it so that your colleagues do not think you are a jerk. In my star performer work, I came across one such individual who was able to find that balance. Here is her story.
“Joann, a star self-manager and busy grant reviewer for a large philanthropic foundation, is easy-going and approachable. No wonder then that she was coming under siege in her regular office cubicle—phone, fax, e-mail and unscheduled visits from co-workers in need of help. So, she found her tree house—a vacant office in the foundation’s legal department. But Joann didn’t just disappear. In keeping with good self-management, she told her boss about the switch. She also made arrangements to catch up with the world after her flow session by posting a sign-up sheet outside the office and leaving a message on her voicemail.
“Notice that Joann balanced her need to reduce interruptions with her colleagues’ need to have access to her. Co-workers often have to consider each other’s needs. When I’m stuck on the critical path and need to network with Joann to get some knowledge that will get me back on track, I may need to interrupt her. Her loss of flow enables me to get back into it. But as the requester, I owe Joann the courtesy of finding a time that works for her. Similarly, she needs to let me know her pressures and when she will be available.
“When she is approached by Fred, a co-worker in another section of the foundation, asking her to be on a Juvenile Crime Task Force he’s been asked to chair, Joann doesn’t make an instant decision.
“‘It sounds as if it would be well worth my time, Fred. There’s an opportunity to have some real impact on the community but I’m going to have to take a hard look at my schedule. I promise I’ll give you an answer by Friday.’
“Joann does review her own commitments and realizes that the bulk of the task force meetings fall during the crunch period for decisions on several large grant programs. There is no way she can do one without the other suffering. So Joann’s first order of business after settling into her office Friday morning is to call Fred.
“‘I’ve looked at my own commitments over the next two months, Fred, and I’m sorry to say I wouldn’t be able to give the task force the time it deserves. But I have a suggestion for you. Peng-Si Adams is a good friend from college, and she works as an assistant district attorney specializing in prosecution of juveniles who are tried as adults. She’s had years of experience with the issues you’re going to be confronting and she’s served on an American Bar Association Committee on the same topic. I’d be happy to approach her if you’re interested.’
“In two brief conversations, Joann has been able to protect her demanding schedule from being over-run, maintain good will with a co-worker, and contribute indirectly toward a solution for Fred’s problem. Joann realizes that effective self-management is rarely self-focused. The way she manages her own affairs affects others on a daily basis.”
7. Prioritize critical path deep work with your boss.
The most common responses I get from all the above suggestions are:
I’ll get fired if I try to be like Joann, the grant reviewer;
My boss will never go for this.
Sure, if you suddenly stop showing up for meetings without any notice, blow off your boss’s emails, or stick up your nose to your colleagues while doing an about-face to get away from them, well, you probably will get fired—and deservedly so.
This is where talking to your boss (and eventually your colleagues) comes into play.
In my experience working with star performers, when your boss knows you are putting your focus on the critical path, what happens is usually just the opposite of all the nightmare scenarios above. But, how do you tell your boss you don’t have enough time for deep work, you don’t want to be overwhelmed by shallow work, or that you simply have too much to do? As we saw with Joann, the grant writer, you want to be careful not to come across as lazy, uncommitted, or not a team player. You protect your image as not only a hard worker, but also one who produces positive outcomes for the critical path.
My advice is to sit down with your boss to explain your attention to the preceding six steps. Share with her or him the data you’ve collected about how your time is spent. Give your manager examples of work that others requested of you and how you fit those requests into your critical path priorities.
Explain the difference between deep work and shallow work. Tell your manager that you want to be measured on your outputs and outcomes, not the false metrics of the number of meetings you attend nor the response time of your emails. Emphasize that your goal is to move the critical path needle as much as possible. Show her or him the progress that you’ve made and your plans to do more.
Hopefully your manager will see that looking busy is not nearly as important when you can show results that demonstrate that you’ve actually been very busy on what matters most—the critical path.
Then ask your manager for ideas on how she or he would like you to prioritize your work and what the split should be between deep and shallow work. Ask your manager for ideas as to how you can be more effective on the critical path.
Cal Newport’s advice in his book on deep work is to emphasize to your boss that, “I’m tracking my time, so what percentage should I be aiming for?” Get your boss to actually try to commit to a vision like, “About 50% of your time should be unbroken and 50% should be doing these shallow tasks.” When they’re actually confronted with how much time you’re spending trying to produce real results with your skills, they have to start thinking, “Okay, we need to change some things.”
One way to prioritize your work is to weight the tasks using the Fibonacci Sequence. Agile management uses a variation of this method to determine the relative importance of tasks compared to each other. So, the most important task gets a 1, the next also gets a 1, the next gets a 2, the next gets a 3 , the next gets a 5, the next gets an 8, the next gets a 13, and so on. This helps you see how important the first 4 or 5 items on your to-do list are and that you have to stay focused on them and not give much time to the later items.
If you still need more ideas, take a look at Rebecca Knight’s Harvard Business Review article, “How to Tell Your Boss You Have Too Much Work.”
8. Talk to your colleagues.
It is hard to go it alone on the critical path and to create more time for deep work. Try making it a group effort. Just as with your boss, discuss the concepts of the critical path and deep work vs. shallow work with your colleagues. Brainstorm as a group on how to make it a group norm and how you can all work together to keep each other on track. Discuss what the critical path for your department is and how your individual work fits into it. Maybe when a team member is pulling someone off the critical path, they have to put a dollar in the team jar as a reminder not to do it again. When critical path outcomes occur, celebrate with the money from the team jar (though, hopefully, the jar will be empty).
Conclusion
I’ve tried my best to help you understand why the critical path is the key that unlocks your organization’s success and your career success. It is the way to improve your chances of:
getting a job;
making yourself indispensable on that job;
bullet-proofing yourself from losing your job;
receiving higher compensation for that job;
moving up the career ladder; and
having companies fight over you to help them be successful.
I’ve also given you ways to get yourself and your company on the critical path.
Will you leverage you, or will you let others leverage you?
Will you exploit your assets, or will you be exploited?
Will you and your company lead your industry, or will you be after-thoughts?
It’s your choice.
Critical Path Action Items
How can you schedule more deep work into your calendar and off-load shallow work?
What do you need to get into “flow”?
What have learned from your time and task analysis?
How can you say “no” to less important activities without causing ill-will in your workplace?
How can you frame a conversation with your boss to reduce non-critical path work?
How can you work with your colleagues to create a critical path culture?