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

distractions.)
Before proceeding to these strategies, however, I want to first address a question
that might be nagging you: Why do we need such involved interventions? Put another
way, once you accept that deep work is valuable, isn’t it enough to just start doing
more of it? Do we really need something as complicated as the Eudaimonia Machine
(or its equivalent) for something as simple as remembering to concentrate more often?
Unfortunately, when it comes to replacing distraction with focus, matters are not so
simple. To understand why this is true let’s take a closer look at one of the main
obstacles to going deep: the urge to turn your attention toward something more
superficial. Most people recognize that this urge can complicate efforts to concentrate
on hard things, but most underestimate its regularity and strength.
Consider a 2012 study, led by psychologists Wilhelm Hofmann and Roy
Baumeister, that outfitted 205 adults with beepers that activated at randomly selected
times (this is the experience sampling method discussed in Part 1). When the beeper
sounded, the subject was asked to pause for a moment to reflect on desires that he or
she was currently feeling or had felt in the last thirty minutes, and then answer a set of
questions about these desires. After a week, the researchers had gathered more than
7,500 samples. Here’s the short version of what they found: People fight desires all
day long. As Baumeister summarized in his subsequent book, Willpower (co-authored
with the science writer John Tierney): “Desire turned out to be the norm, not the
exception.”
The five most common desires these subjects fought include, not surprisingly,
eating, sleeping, and sex. But the top five list also included desires for “taking a break
from [hard] work… checking e-mail and social networking sites, surfing the web,
listening to music, or watching television.” The lure of the Internet and television
proved especially strong: The subjects succeeded in resisting these particularly
addictive distractions only around half the time.
These results are bad news for this rule’s goal of helping you cultivate a deep
work habit. They tell us that you can expect to be bombarded with the desire to do
anything but work deeply throughout the day, and if you’re like the German subjects
from the Hofmann and Baumeister study, these competing desires will often win out.
You might respond at this point that you will succeed where these subjects failed
because you understand the importance of depth and will therefore be more rigorous in
your will to remain concentrated. This is a noble sentiment, but the decades of
research that preceded this study underscore its futility. A now voluminous line of
inquiry, initiated in a series of pioneering papers also written by Roy Baumeister, has