Deep Work_ Rules for focused success in a distracted world ( PDFDrive.com )

university,” she begins, before continuing to explain how she finally decided to
disregard the conventional wisdom and instead “deliberately… do specific things to
preserve my happiness.” This deliberate effort led Nagpal to enjoy her pre-tenure time
“tremendously.”
Nagpal goes on to detail several examples of these efforts, but there’s one tactic in
particular that should sound familiar. As Nagpal admits, early in her academic career
she found herself trying to cram work into every free hour between seven a.m. and
midnight (because she has kids, this time, especially in the evening, was often severely
fractured). It didn’t take long before she decided this strategy was unsustainable, so
she set a limit of fifty hours a week and worked backward to determine what rules and
habits were needed to satisfy this constraint. Nagpal, in other words, deployed fixedschedule
productivity.
We know this strategy didn’t hurt her academic career, as she ended up earning
tenure on schedule and then jumping to the full professor level after only three
additional years (an impressive ascent). How did she pull this off? According to her
article, one of the main techniques for respecting her hour limit was to set drastic
quotas on the major sources of shallow endeavors in her academic life. For example,
she decided she would travel only five times per year for any purpose, as trips can
generate a surprisingly large load of urgent shallow obligations (from making lodging
arrangements to writing talks). Five trips a year may still sound like a lot, but for an
academic it’s light. To emphasize this point, note that Matt Welsh, a former colleague
of Nagpal in the Harvard computer science department (he now works for Google)
once wrote a blog post in which he claimed it was typical for junior faculty to travel
twelve to twenty-four times a year. (Imagine the shallow efforts Nagpal avoided in
sidestepping an extra ten to fifteen trips!) The travel quota is just one of several tactics
that Nagpal used to control her workday (she also, for example, placed limits on the
number of papers she would review per year), but what all her tactics shared was a
commitment to ruthlessly capping the shallow while protecting the deep efforts—that
is, original research—that ultimately determined her professional fate.
Returning to my own example, it’s a similar commitment that enables me to
succeed with fixed scheduling. I, too, am incredibly cautious about my use of the most
dangerous word in one’s productivity vocabulary: “yes.” It takes a lot to convince me
to agree to something that yields shallow work. If you ask for my involvement in
university business that’s not absolutely necessary, I might respond with a defense I
learned from the department chair who hired me: “Talk to me after tenure.” Another
tactic that works well for me is to be clear in my refusal but ambiguous in my
explanation for the refusal. The key is to avoid providing enough specificity about the