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

Don’t Work Alone
The relationship between deep work and collaboration is tricky. It’s worth taking the
time to untangle, however, because properly leveraging collaboration can increase the
quality of deep work in your professional life.
It’s helpful to start our discussion of this topic by taking a step back to consider
what at first seems to be an unresolvable conflict. In Part 1 of this book I criticized
Facebook for the design of its new headquarters. In particular, I noted that the
company’s goal to create the world’s largest open office space—a giant room that
will reportedly hold twenty-eight hundred workers—represents an absurd attack on
concentration. Both intuition and a growing body of research underscore the reality
that sharing a workspace with a large number of coworkers is incredibly distracting—
creating an environment that thwarts attempts to think seriously. In a 2013 article
summarizing recent research on this topic, Bloomberg Businessweek went so far as to
call for an end to the “tyranny of the open-plan office.”
And yet, these open office designs are not embraced haphazardly. As Maria
Konnikova reports in The New Yorker, when this concept first emerged, its goal was
to “facilitate communication and idea flow.” This claim resonated with American
businesses looking to embrace an aura of start-up unconventionality. Josh Tyrangiel,
the editor of Bloomberg Businessweek, for example, explained the lack of offices in
Bloomberg’s headquarters as follows: “Open plan is pretty spectacular; it ensures that
everyone is attuned to the broad mission, and… it encourages curiosity between
people who work in different disciplines.” Jack Dorsey justified the open layout of the
Square headquarters by explaining: “We encourage people to stay out in the open
because we believe in serendipity—and people walking by each other teaching new
things.”
For the sake of discussion, let’s call this principle—that when you allow people to
bump into each other smart collaborations and new ideas emerge—the theory of
serendipitous creativity. When Mark Zuckerberg decided to build the world’s largest
office, we can reasonably conjecture, this theory helped drive his decision, just as it
has driven many of the moves toward open workspaces elsewhere in Silicon Valley
and beyond. (Other less-exalted factors, like saving money and increasing supervision,
also play a role, but they’re not as sexy and are therefore less emphasized.)
This decision between promoting concentration and promoting serendipity seems
to indicate that deep work (an individual endeavor) is incompatible with generating
creative insights (a collaborative endeavor). This conclusion, however, is flawed. It’s