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

tower. It’s also located only a couple of blocks away from Edinburgh Castle—one of
Rowling’s inspirations in dreaming up Hogwarts.
Rowling’s decision to check into a luxurious hotel suite near Edinburgh Castle is
an example of a curious but effective strategy in the world of deep work: the grand
gesture. The concept is simple: By leveraging a radical change to your normal
environment, coupled perhaps with a significant investment of effort or money, all
dedicated toward supporting a deep work task, you increase the perceived importance
of the task. This boost in importance reduces your mind’s instinct to procrastinate and
delivers an injection of motivation and energy.
Writing a chapter of a Harry Potter novel, for example, is hard work and will
require a lot of mental energy—regardless of where you do it. But when paying more
than $1,000 a day to write the chapter in a suite of an old hotel down the street from a
Hogwarts-style castle, mustering the energy to begin and sustain this work is easier
than if you were instead in a distracting home office.
When you study the habits of other well-known deep workers, the grand gesture
strategy comes up often. Bill Gates, for example, was famous during his time as
Microsoft CEO for taking Think Weeks during which he would leave behind his
normal work and family obligations to retreat to a cabin with a stack of papers and
books. His goal was to think deeply, without distraction, about the big issues relevant
to his company. It was during one of these weeks, for example, that he famously came
to the conclusion that the Internet was going to be a major force in the industry. There
was nothing physically stopping Gates from thinking deeply in his office in
Microsoft’s Seattle headquarters, but the novelty of his weeklong retreat helped him
achieve the desired levels of concentration.
The MIT physicist and award-winning novelist Alan Lightman also leverages
grand gestures. In his case, he retreats each summer to a “tiny island” in Maine to think
deeply and recharge. At least as of 2000, when he described this gesture in an
interview, the island not only lacked Internet, but didn’t even have phone service. As
he then justified: “It’s really about two and a half months that I’ll feel like I can
recover some silence in my life… which is so hard to find.”
Not everyone has the freedom to spend two months in Maine, but many writers,
including Dan Pink and Michael Pollan, simulate the experience year-round by
building—often at significant expense and effort—writing cabins on their properties.
(Pollan, for his part, even wrote a book about his experience building his cabin in the
woods behind his former Connecticut home.) These outbuildings aren’t strictly
necessary for these writers, who need only a laptop and a flat surface to put it on to