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

about the rigid rituals followed by many great creative thinkers.) And because you’re
willing to abandon your plan when an innovative idea arises, you’re just as well
suited as the distracted creative to follow up when the muse strikes.
To summarize, the motivation for this strategy is the recognition that a deep work habit
requires you to treat your time with respect. A good first step toward this respectful
handling is the advice outlined here: Decide in advance what you’re going to do with
every minute of your workday. It’s natural, at first, to resist this idea, as it’s
undoubtedly easier to continue to allow the twin forces of internal whim and external
requests to drive your schedule. But you must overcome this distrust of structure if you
want to approach your true potential as someone who creates things that matter.
Quantify the Depth of Every Activity
An advantage of scheduling your day is that you can determine how much time you’re
actually spending in shallow activities. Extracting this insight from your schedules,
however, can become tricky in practice, as it’s not always clear exactly how shallow
you should consider a given task. To expand on this challenge, let’s start by reminding
ourselves of the formal definition of shallow work that I introduced in the
introduction:
Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These
efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.
Some activities clearly satisfy this definition. Checking e-mail, for example, or
scheduling a conference call, is unquestionably shallow in nature. But the
classification of other activities can be more ambiguous. Consider the following tasks:
• Example #1: Editing a draft of an academic article that you and a collaborator
will soon submit to a journal.
• Example #2: Building a PowerPoint presentation about this quarter’s sales
figures.
• Example #3: Attending a meeting to discuss the current status of an important
project and to agree on the next steps.
It’s not obvious at first how to categorize these examples. The first two describe
tasks that can be quite demanding, and the final example seems important to advance a
key work objective. The purpose of this strategy is to give you an accurate metric for
resolving such ambiguity—providing you with a way to make clear and consistent