Category: Deep Work – Cal Newport

Self-Control Depletion, Continued

Self-Control Depletion, Continued

Posted on by jabittan
“The evidence is persuasive,” writes Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow, “activities that impose high demands on System 2 require self-control, and the exertion of self-control is depleting and unpleasant. Unlike cognitive load, ego depletion is at least in part a loss of motivation.”

 

Yesterday I wrote about our misconceptions regarding individual self-control. I wrote about how important it is to structure our environment accordingly for productivity and self-restraint. We are influenced by far more factors in our environment than we like to admit, and we don’t have as much self-control over our behaviors as we believe we do. Being intentional with our environment, shaping the systems, structures, and institutions around us, will enable us to move through life without needing unreasonable (or unattainable) self-control and motivation.

 

Today’s quote from Kahneman gets more detailed with self-control, ego depletion, and our experience of focus, attention, and mental effort. Cognitive load, as mentioned in the quote, is the effort put on our thinking processes. Remembering a 7 digit number is a light cognitive load, while holding 7 digits in your mind and adding one digit to each number to get a new number is a higher cognitive load. At a certain point under cognitive load, our mind simply can’t hold any more information and can’t continue to accurately do more mental weight-lifting. This is the point where ego depletion sets in if we continue to try to push through and maintain the hard work.

 

The more we engage System 2, the part of our brain needed for focus activities and complex problem solving, the quicker we lose motivation for mentally taxing activities. This is the ego depletion that Kahneman writes about. Our brains in theory can keep going, we could keep reading, writing, plugging away at a spreadsheet, but our brains start to get tired, and our motivation to focus and push through with continued mental effort fades. If we continue to exercise self-control, preventing ourselves from a diversion, such as playing a video game, then we are slowly going to wear ourselves out, and we will be more likely to get a cookie, have a drink, or binge watch a whole TV series once we do stop.

 

Just as our brains are not able to continually hold more and more information without making mistakes, our brains are not able to continually do more and more deep work without reaching a breaking point. As Cal Newport writes in his book Deep Work, for most people who are serious about doing their best work, the limit is roughly 4 hours of intense deep work per day. The mind, even a well trained mind, will get tired and lose the motivation to keep pushing through more deep work without making dangerous mistakes and becoming less productive in the long run. We have to keep in mind the twin forces of cognitive load and ego depletion, and focus on doing the right work at the right time, before our cognitive load is overwhelming and before our self-control has been depleted. We can do great work, but we have to be intentional about how we do our deep work, and we have to set up our environment to minimize the pull of distractions and the need for self-control.
Depleting Self-Control

Depleting Self-Control

Posted on by jabittan
A theme that runs through a lot of the writing that I do, influenced by Stoic thinkers such as Marcus Aurelius and modern academics and productivity experts like Cal Newport, is that we don’t have as much control over our lives as we generally believe. Writings from Aurelius show us how much happens beyond our control, and how important it is to be measured and moderate in our reactions to the world. Newport’s work shows how easily our brains can become distracted and how limited they are at sustaining long-term focus. Fitting in with both lines of thoughts is research from Daniel Kahneman, particularly an idea he presents in his book Thinking Fast and Slow about our depleting self-control. His work as a whole shows us just how much of our world we misunderstand and how important structures, systems, and institutions in our lives can be.

 

Regarding our ability for self-control, Kahneman writes, “an effort of will or self-control is tiring; if you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion.”

 

Self-control is overrated. We think of ourselves and others as having far more self-control than is really possible. We are quick to judge others for failing to exercise self-control, and we can beat ourselves up mentally when we don’t seem to be able to muster the self-control needed to achieve our goals, stick to a diet, or hold to a resolution. But the work of Roy Baumeister that Kahneman’s quote describes shows us that self-control is limited, and that we can run out of self-control when we are overly taxed. Self-control is not an unlimited characteristic that reveals a deep truth about our personality.

 

It is easy to think up situations where you might have to restrain yourself from behaving rudely, indulging in vices, or shirking away from hard work. What is harder to immediately think of is how your initial act of self-control will influence the following situations that you might find yourself in. If you spend all day trying hard not to open Twitter while working, then you might give in to a post-work cookie. If you sat through an uncomfortable family dinner and restrained yourself from yelling at your relatives, then you might find it hard to hold back from speeding down the freeway on the drive home. We don’t like to think of ourselves as being so easily influenced by things that happened in the past, but we are unable to truly separate ourselves from things that happen around us. As we exert effort via self-control in one situation, we lose some degree of our ability to exert self-control in other situations.

 

It is important that we keep Kahneman and Baumeister’s research in mind and think about how we set up our environment so that we are not fighting a self-control battle all day long. There are tools that will stop you from being able to open certain websites while you are supposed to be working, you might have to decide that you just won’t buy any cookies so that they are not in the house at 2 in the afternoon when your sweet tooth acts up, and you may need to just Uber to and from those tense family dinners. If we put it all on ourselves to have self-control, then we will probably fail, but if we set up our environment properly, and give up some of the idea of self-control, then we will probably be more successful in the long run.
Limited Effort for Focus and Deep Work

Limited Effort

Posted on by jabittan
A little while back I wrote a blog post centered around a quote from Cal Newport, “You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.”

 

The idea is that our brains get tired, and as they get tired, they become worse at practicing self control. When you are exhausted, when you have had to concentrate really hard on school work, a business presentation, or on paperwork to ensure your child’s medical care is covered, your mind’s ability to focus becomes deminished. You have trouble staying away from that piece of cake in the fridge, from scrolling through Facebook, and you have trouble being patient with a child or spouse when they try to talk to you.

 

In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman writes something very similar to the quote from Newport, “self-control and deliberate thought apparently draw on the same limited budget of effort.” 

 

Our brains only have so much ability to do heavy duty thinking. It is as if there is a set account for deep thinking, and as we think critically we slowly make deductions from the account until our brains are in the red. Using our brain for serious thoughts and calculations requires focus and self-control. However, our willpower is depleted as we use it, so as we focus for longer periods of time, our brains become worse at ensuring that we stay focused.

 

Kahneman suggests that this is part of why we spend most of our life operating on System 1, the automatic, quick, and lightweight thinking process of our lives. System 2 is the deliberate thought process that we engage to do math, to study a map to make sure we know where we are driving, and to listen seriously to a spouse or child and provide them with support. System 2 takes a lot of energy, and has a limited budget. System 1 runs on low-power mode, and that is why it is our default. It makes mistakes, is subject to biases, and doesn’t always answer the right questions, but at least it saves us energy and allows us to reserve the effort of attention for the most important tasks.

 

Kahneman and Newport would likely both agree that we should use our budget for System 2. We should maximize the time we spend in deep work, and set ourselves up to do our best System 2 work when we need to. We can save System 1 for unimportant moments and tasks, and work with our brains so that we don’t force too much System 2 work into the times when our effort budget has been depleted.
Deep Work is Pragmatic

Deep Work is Pragmatic

Posted on by jabittan
The final quote that I have from Cal Newport’s book Deep Work is just a reminder of the pragmatic reality of deep work: “the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done.” The reason we should take ideas of deep work seriously is because it will help us be better at doing the most important things. Everyone has goals for their life, everyone has things they want to accomplish, and everyone has something they are aiming toward, but nobody will get there if they cannot focus on the things that matter.

 

Whether it is at work, in our family and social lives, or with a new hobby, being able to focus on the important things is crucial. Without developing concentration skills, we are going to be distracted by social media, outrageous news reports, and one million other notifications on our smart phones. These distractions will stop us from putting  the necessary effort into the meaningful things in our lives, and will train our brains to expect constant input.

 

As the world becomes even more distracting, with phones continuing to grab a foothold in our lives and with more opportunities for distraction all around us, it is important that we remember the value of concentration. It is important that we work on becoming better versions of ourselves through focus and deep work so that we can excel where others become bogged down and unable to move forward with complex high value tasks. Without being able to truly concentrate, we will never get important things done.
Deciding Which Tasks to Own

Deciding Which Tasks to Own

Posted on by jabittan
In the knowledge economy, many of us have a thousand things we could do with our time at any given moment. Email (as I have written about previously) is always an available option to us, we usually have a lot of reports we could work on, and there is always another meeting we could be doing more to prep for. How do we decide which activities are the most important, which tasks we will own, and which things will be left behind?

 

One answer, is to think about how specialized the task is to your own skill set. This gives us a question to ask when considering the work that is the most important, and what should be our priority. The question comes from Cal Newport in his book Deep Work, “How long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task?”

 

Responding to a bulk of emails, creating a PowerPoint slide, and plugging some data into an Excel file are examples of activities that don’t require much thoughtful training. Sure, your emails need your insight and decision-making for response, but a smart college grad could plug through a bunch of emails just as well as you could. They could also throw together a decent PowerPoint, and enter a bunch of info into a spreadsheet without a much specialized knowledge and training. They could easily replace you if that is what your day consists of.

 

Newport would suggest that you start to focus your day around those tasks which rely on your specialized knowledge and abilities if you don’t want to be easily replaced. If you want to maximize your value, produce at a high level, and get important stuff done, then you should look to delegate those tasks that a recent college graduate could complete and spend more time deliberately working on the challenging tasks. You will get better at doing the things that matter the most, and you will have a greater impact in your organization.
Estimating Our Schedule

Estimating Our Schedule

Posted on by jabittan
How much time do you need for some of the mundane tasks in your life? You probably have a good sense for how long it takes you to get yourself together for work in the morning, how long it takes to prep your easy Thursday dinner, and how long it takes you to brush your teeth and get into bed at night. What you probably don’t have a great sense of, however, is how long it will take you to complete something new in your routine. If you are looking to introduce something new into your routine you will probably misjudge just how much time you will need.

 

This is an idea that Cal Newport presents in his book Deep Work. Newport specifically writes about new habits for work and leisure that help us improve our focus and spend more time with important things that truly matter. He encourages us to create schedules not just for our workdays, but four our entire days, and warns us that it is going to be hard to plan our days when we first start. Newport writes,

 

“Almost definitely you’re going to underestimate at first how much time you require for most things. When people are new to this habit [scheduling their full day], they tend to use their schedule as an incarnation of wishful thinking – a best-case scenario for their day.”

 

I started this post reflecting on common activities that we do daily, and our sense of how long those activities really take us. The reality for even these simple things is that we don’t have a great sense of how long they actually take, especially if we are not focused while working through those tasks. Deliberately getting ready for bed is a lot quicker than distractedly getting ready for bed while simultaneously watching YouTube videos. If we likely get these daily things wrong, then we will surely have a poor estimate for just how long new habits, routines, and tasks will take us.

 

For work, scheduling just how long a spreadsheet or report will take us can be challenging, especially if we have varying demands and levels of interest from our supervisor. But the more we practice, the more we can focus and engage with deep work, the better we will eventually be at getting a sense for how long something will take. This will carry over into other areas of our life as well. We will eventually get a good sense for how long the new physical therapy routine will take us, how much time we need to set aside for exercising, or how long a board-game with our family will take. Along the way, we will develop muscles for flexibility in our time and scheduling, helping us make better predictions and adjustments as we schedule out our days.
spend time on autopilot

Spending Our Days on Autopilot

Posted on by jabittan
“We spend much of our day on autopilot – not giving much thought to what we’re doing with our time,” writes Cal Newport in his book Deep Work. “This is a problem. It’s difficult to prevent the trivial from creeping into every corner of your schedule if you don’t face, without flinching, your current balance between deep and shallow work.”

 

Good habits are everything, but they are hard to develop without deliberate, conscious effort. Bad habits, on the other hand, spring out of nowhere and are always ready to creep into your life. When we spend time on autopilot and fail to recognize how much time we lose to TV, to our smartphones, or to the snooze button, we start to allow bad habits more space to creep into our lives. Living on autopilot encourages us to do easy things, and to default toward limited action rather than put effort into things that take effort but in the end provide more value.

 

Newport’s solution to our autopilot days is to literally, “schedule every minute of your day.” We can schedule time for deep work, we can schedule time to do the important things around the house that need to get done, and we can schedule time for TV or scrolling through the internet on our phones. If we try to schedule out what we are doing and when, we can start to think about how we spend our time and begin to redirect ourselves toward more meaningful activities. Scheduling our full day, not just our workday, will give us a chance to jump out of autopilot, to stop moving through the motions each day, and to use our time meaningfully.

 

This isn’t to say every minute of the day has to be productive, but it gives us a framework to keep distractions and low value tasks and activities away from the times when we are trying to focus and get important things done. If we find that we have bad habits that waste a lot of time in the morning or early afternoon, we can schedule activities during those times that get us away from the distractions, helping us be more engaged and intentional with the world. Planning is everything if we want to get away from spending our days on autopilot, and if we want to find a balance between excitement, important work, and mindless leisure.

Focus on the Few Major Items

Posted on by jabittan
Cal Newport writes, “in many cases, contributions to an outcome are not evenly distributed,” in his book Deep Work. Across many different domains, several of which Newport mentions in his book, we find an 80/20 split emerge terms of relationships between important things. Newport states that 80% of computer program crashes are caused by just 20% of the known bugs, and in other areas of science and society, we see similar 80/20 splits.

 

Newport believes that this 80/20 split also applies to the goals in our lives, and considers how we should approach our lives is we believe that 80% of our outcomes will be based on 20% of what we do. He writes, “many different activities can  contribute to your achieving these goals. The law of the vital few, however, reminds us that the most important 20 percent or so of these activities provide the bulk of the benefit.”

 

We do a lot of different things throughout the day, but a lot of what we do is relatively short and doesn’t have a really large impact on the outcome of our life. There are really just a handful of things that we actually do that really make a big difference. Exercising, fighting off the desire to eat pie for breakfast, engaging with some type of productive hobby, and doing something meaningful with our family have large impacts on the outcomes we see in life. The millions of small things we do, pick out socks, play cards, scroll through social media, and drive to work, fill in the rest. They might be important in some way, but they are not the key factors that determine the outcomes of our lives.

 

What we should do, Newport argues, is think about those handful of thing that really make a difference. We should prioritize those moments, and make sure they have our full focus and attention, so that we maximize the areas that truly matter. We can then divert our energy away from the things which don’t matter, cut out any unnecessary clutter in our routines, and do our best at managing the big factors which have the biggest influence on the outcomes we see in life.
How We Think About Our Digital Tools

How We Think About Our Digital Tools

Posted on by jabittan
In his book Deep Work, Cal Newport contrasts two types of approaches to the digital tools that we use and create. We have a lot of powerful social media and network messaging applications, and these tools and applications are often given to us, or seemingly forced onto us, without much choice on our end. If everyone we know is using Facebook, then we feel left out without it. If everyone in the office is using Slack for communications, then we feel that we must join in so that we don’t miss any important messages and updates. The tools we create put pressure on us to use them, even if we never wanted the tools to begin with.

 

Newport calls this standard approach to network tools the Any-Benefit Approach and he defines it this way, “You’re justified in using a network tool if you can identify any possible benefit to its use, or anything you might possibly miss out on if you don’t use it.”

 

We don’t want to be left out of conversations at the water cooler, so we download social media apps to talk about what other people have said. We don’t want to miss a message about something in the office, so we join all the Slack channels at work. We might get an early insight into something our favorite sports team is doing, so we install the Twitter app. We don’t think critically about whether we get a lot of value from these network tools, we only ask if there is some potential benefit we might receive from the tool.

 

Newport describes the opposite strategy for determining what network tools we use as 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.” 

 

With this frame, we don’t add twitter unless we think it is going to really make our lives better to know what our favorite sports stars are up to. We don’t install social media apps if we think we will waste time with them or if we think that we will become jealous looking at all the cool things others are doing. Rather than worrying about what we might miss out on if we don’t get the app, we worry about what we might miss out on if we lose time and attention to the app. We bring in new applications at work if they help us perform better, not if they help us stay up on office gossip or give us a few popular tidbits to chat about during our breaks. Switching to the Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection matters if we want to do meaningful work and be present with our families in meaningful ways.
The Value of Boredom

The Value of Boredom

Posted on by jabittan
How often are you bored? How often do you actually experience boredom without instantaneously having something to do that will keep your mind at least somewhat occupied, even if not occupied by anything important? You have probably had a boring work training that you had to sit through without nodding off, but outside of that, there probably are not too many pure moments of boredom in your life.

 

Instead of having to live with boredom, we live with distraction. In line at the grocery store, on an airplane, and in a doctor’s waiting room we have an easy distraction available. We might not be thoroughly entertained and might not enjoy our wasted time, but we are not exactly bored. Because of our phones, our minds are trained to expect that that any moment of potential boredom is a moment of distraction instead.

 

Cal Newport thinks this is a problem. In his book Deep Work he writes about the value of boredom, “to simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, it’s incredibly valuable.”

 

The value of boredom doesn’t come from any particular insight you might have when it is only your thoughts that keep you occupied and entertained. The value of boredom is instead in what it doesn’t let slip into your brain: bad habits of distraction seeking expectations. Newport continues, “to succeed with deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli.” This is where boredom comes in.

 

Being bored allows us to get used to an absence of distracting stimuli. It helps our brain accept that at some times we are not going to have new news articles to scroll through, we are not going to have red notifications telling us that someone has acknowledged our existence, and we are not going to have something flashing on a screen to keep our brain engaged. If the brain becomes comfortable with boredom, it will be better at deep work, and we will be more productive.