Rather than taming it (you can not), some people need to live it, and only go deep when they need it. Any reasonable person knows this unpredictability. Discovery process is unpredictable, you could find yourself distracted when you plan to work or focused when you don’t plan to work. A scientist can not simply sit and “do the job” because it is not same with signing a bunch of documents which you can do just by forcing yourself to do it. What you miss in your work is unpredictability of the discovery process. Otherwise they are distracted, they don’t do plans.
Of course they do intermittently but in a disorganised way. I don’t say, these disorganised people are not working deeply. Please don’t go to meaningless analogies. Push through the initial barrier of boredom and get to a point where your brain can do what it’s probably increasingly craving in our distracted world: to think deeply. The bottom line is that if you’re intrigued by depth, give real depth a try, by which I mean giving yourself at least two or three hours with zero distractions. This week I managed this on two different days. I try to put aside one day per week to spend a stretch of six to seven hours straight without distraction - no e-mail, no Internet, lots of walking ( some in the woods), too much coffee - all focused on a small number of crucial, hard work tasks. The former also describes a more satisfying work experience. Having studied and experimented with deep work for years, I can tell you with confidence that the session described in the first scenario has the potential to produce an outcome an order of magnitude more compelling and effective than what Alice could produce in the state of pseudo-depth described in the second scenario. In the first scenario, by contrast, Alice gives herself the time required to really let her brain get up to speed on the demanding problem and then stay in high gear long enough to make progress. This effect has been validated from many angles in academic psychology and related fields, spanning the work of Bluma Zeigarnik, Clifford Nass, Gloria Mark and Sophie Leory (whose theory of attention residue I write more about here). More bluntly: context switches gunk up your brain. Something that came up again and again when I was researching my book on this topic, is that switching your attention - even if only for a minute or two - can significantly impede your cognitive function for a long time to follow. Here’s the key observation about this example: in the second scenario, Alice never went more than twenty minutes or so without switching her attention away from her primary task to something else. It’s tempting to dismiss these breaks because they’re so fleeting - lost in the standard background noise of knowledge work - but their cost is substantial.
Many people, new to the concept, would therefore consider both scenarios to describe deep work. In both scenarios, Alice dedicated a good stretch of time to working on a cognitively demanding task. She does take a break halfway through to gripe about an unrelated manner in the office kitchen with a colleague. She only checks her e-mail a few times an hour during this period (much less than normal) and peeks at Facebook to relieve her boredom only once. She finds it hard going, but sticks with for a couple hours. At the office she closes her door to work on the proposal. She checks her e-mail, sends off some replies, then drives into work. Scenario #2: Alice has to write a difficult client proposal.For the first time that day, she checks her e-mail before heading into the office. After another hour she has something special. Finally she hits a configuration she likes and returns to the library to work it into the draft. She feels the pitch is still too muddled, so she walks to a nearby coffee shop for more caffeine and works the outline over and over on paper.
She ends up at the local library, where she settles into a quiet corner for an hour and tries to write a rough draft. She begins by going for a long walk to clear her head and play around with the different proposal pieces. She decides to work away from her office for the first half of the day. Scenario #1: Alice has to write a difficult client proposal.To better understand this possibility, consider the following two hypothetical scenarios: A difficulty I’ve faced in promoting the practice of deep work is that many people think they engage in this activity regularly (and don’t get much out of it), even though what they’re really doing is far from true depth.
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