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

This strategy argues that you should follow Kreider’s lead by injecting regular and
substantial freedom from professional concerns into your day, providing you with the
idleness paradoxically required to get (deep) work done. There are many ways to
accomplish this goal. You could, for example, use Kreider’s approach of retreating
from the world of shallow tasks altogether by hiding out in an “undisclosed location,”
but this isn’t practical for most people. Instead, I want to suggest a more applicable
but still quite powerful heuristic: At the end of the workday, shut down your
consideration of work issues until the next morning—no after-dinner e-mail check, no
mental replays of conversations, and no scheming about how you’ll handle an
upcoming challenge; shut down work thinking completely. If you need more time, then
extend your workday, but once you shut down, your mind must be left free to encounter
Kreider’s buttercups, stink bugs, and stars.
Before describing some tactics that support this strategy, I want to first explore
why a shutdown will be profitable to your ability to produce valuable output. We
have, of course, Tim Kreider’s personal endorsement, but it’s worth taking the time to
also understand the science behind the value of downtime. A closer examination of
this literature reveals the following three possible explanations for this value.
Reason #1: Downtime Aids Insights
Consider the following excerpt from a 2006 paper that appeared in the journal
Science:
The scientific literature has emphasized the benefits of conscious
deliberation in decision making for hundreds of years… The question
addressed here is whether this view is justified. We hypothesize that it is not.
Lurking in this bland statement is a bold claim. The authors of this study, led by the
Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis, set out to prove that some decisions are better left
to your unconscious mind to untangle. In other words, to actively try to work through
these decisions will lead to a worse outcome than loading up the relevant information
and then moving on to something else while letting the subconscious layers of your
mind mull things over.
Dijksterhuis’s team isolated this effect by giving subjects the information needed
for a complex decision regarding a car purchase. Half the subjects were told to think
through the information and then make the best decision. The other half were distracted
by easy puzzles after they read the information, and were then put on the spot to make a
decision without having had time to consciously deliberate. The distracted group