This past year, my theme was FOCUS. I used the book Deep Work by Cal Newport to help turn this theme into actionable changes. This book has been an invaluable help in rethinking time management during Graduate School - a playground of unstructured time. There are plenty of book summaries you can find online and in reality - you can also just read the book. I will now make an effort to summarize the key questions that will help you implement deep work in to your life and my personal answers in orange. I hope this can turn into a worksheet for other graduate students to also follow.
On working deeply
What is your depth philosophy?
There are different kinds of depth philosophy - meaning how you incorporate deep work into your life: monastic, bimodal, rhythmic, or journalistic.
My depth philosophy is rhythmic, meaning I like to work 3-4 hours every weekday afternoon.
How can you ritualize? Where: My office or a coffee shop or library. I enjoy having others around. When: 2-5 pm on Mon-Fri
How will you work? Make a list of tasks. Use the pomodore technique (50 min work/10 min break)
How will you support your ritual? I will be sure to eat lunch (meal) beforehand so I’m satiated. I will sleep at least 8.5 hours the night before. I will also handle any urgent matters earlier in the day (before lunch) so my afternoons are distraction-free.
What is a grand gesture you can do?
I can escape to an internet-limited remote location (ex: Mendocino) for a week or two to focus on writing.
How can you leverage working with others?
Presenting at lab group meetings encourages me to come up with a deliverable by the due date.
Project meetings on a weekly/biweekly cadence encourage me to complete tasks
By working in-person alongside by co-authors during lab and paper editing
How can you execute deep work better?
What are your wildly important goals you will focus on? Choose 1-3 only! I hope to publish 2 high-quality peer-reviewed papers in the next year (2023). I also hope to attend 3 conferences and present at them.
How can you act on lead measures? Lead measures track critical activities that lead or drive you to achieve your goal. These should (mostly) be in your control and quantifiable. I choose to track my hours/days spent on deep work related to my research and publication goals.
How can you keep a compelling scoreboard? This scoreboard should be visible daily to serve as a reminder. I like my google calendars a weekly visual of my deep work time. But I need something that can help me track my current/expected hours. I also need to set a hours/month goal. ex: 15 hours/week = 60 hours/month. I have tried to keep track of my hours in notion, but I think I need to take 5 minutes every month to instead copy them over from google calendar. Also, how can I come up with a way of “lapping”? i.e. seeing how many hours it takes to get to a key milestone?
How can you hold myself regularly accountable? This step is important. Ask other people to help hold you accountable if needed. On Mondays, I should take 5 minutes to evaluate how the previous week went and arrange the current week’s schedule to catch up on deep work time if needed.
How can you be more lazy? Time for rest and recovery is just as important as the deep work sessions. My goal is to exercise at least 5 hours/week (non-thinking time). I also limit my scheduled meetings to be from 9-12 pm on Mon-Fri (busy, shallow work). I also do not work on the weekends on research-related tasks.
On Embracing Boredom
How can you take breaks from focus?
Moving from a default state of easily distracted to deep focus is difficult enough. Thinking that then you have to be 100% focused all the time is impractical. Instead, try to think about how you can take breaks from your deep work focus time to give in to these distractions:
browsing social media/email/ or the internet
checking your phone
chatting with colleagues.
using the internet to look up a tangential thought
I personally like to use the pomodore technique which allows for a period of focus (ex: 25 or 50 min), followed by break (ex: 5 of 10 min). The activities above fall into the break period, along with time to relax my eyes and body from computer strain. I also encourage myself to work or take breaks outside since I’m able to look at natural stimulus instead of screens for distractions.
I’m also trying to incorporate 10 min morning meditation back into my routine. This practice helps build a tolerance for boredom so it’s not so scary and uncomfortable.
How can you meditate productively?
You’ve probably heard the anecdote of how some people “wake up with the answer”. Meditating productively means 1. setting your mind up with a problem, then 2. letting your subconscious make progress while your conscious brain is engaged in something else. Meditating productively requires noticing distractions and looping back to the problem. Guided meditation apps like Headspace help with practicing this skill. It also requires structured thinking: 1. load variables or information necessary for the problem. 2. Process the next step. 3. Review the outcome. Some of my best thinking happens when I’m relaxed in a hot shower. I also tend to think about research problems when I wash dishes in the morning or clean around the house. One example of structured thinking for me is storyboarding my next conference talk during a shower. My existing variables are the current storyboard and the research results I have thus far. The processing step is imagining what the additional story (slide) steps should be about. Finally, I would review the whole story in my head.
Warning: it’s difficult to meditate productively while driving to work AND driving safely at the same time. Choose activities that don’t require active decision making.
On quitting social media
This is a controversial suggestion given by this book. In our generation, social media has become the main glue between ourselves and our family/friends who we don’t get to see on a daily basis. But hear me out and go through these questions:
What are the social media platforms you use? I use Facebook, LinkedIn, Email, Slack, Amazon, Whatsapp, iMessage/SMS, Facebook Messenger
What are platforms that you can reduce usage on? I would like to lessen my Facebook newsfeed usage even more. But more importantly, I would like to reduce the number of emails I receive and have to spend time deleting every morning. I’ve started to take one day a week and hit unsubscribe on each of those emails before deleting. But even that takes time. And so, I’ve created a new email address that I will ONLY SHARE WITH HUMANS and not machines (sign up forms, username logins, contact emails, etc).
How can you use the craftsman approach? The craftsman approach is to be extremely selective about which conversations and platforms you choose to engage in. Instead of being tangentially involved in everything, be intentional. Suggestions that I am happy to share include: - Use Newsfeed eradicator on your computer for Facebook - Delete the app version of social media so you are forced to use the clunky browser version - Delete old slack groups and leave old Whatsapp groups
Don’t use the internet for entertainment. What can you do instead? This is also tough since almost all my entertainment exists on the internet. But the point is to encourage you to come up with structured hobbies and distractions. My structure hobbies include: playing ultimate frisbee, windsurfing, exercise, watching tv (streaming tv/movies/music via internet is okay), reading, singing and theater (working on incorporating more art in my life).
On Draining the Shallows
Everything that isn’t deep work is shallow(er).
Can you quantify the depth of activities? Most meetings are shallow(er), especially if I am an attendee OR if there are more than 3 people total.
Can you create a shallow work budget? Given that I spend 3-4 hours on deep work and 1 hour for lunch break per day. I really only have 2-3 hours a day for ALL shallow work (meetings, emails, etc). I’ve moved my shallow work and stacked it to be together (morning block) every day. Given that I only have 10 hrs/week for all shallow work, I am becoming more conservative with my professional commitments. As a senior graduate student, one of these commitments includes mentoring/helping/meeting with junior graduate students and undergrads that reach out. I tell people I’m only available during the allotted shallow work hours and if that doesn’t work for them immediately, they usually are okay with waiting till the following week.
How can you be more hard to reach? Our culture stipulates a response to EVERY message so it can be uncomfortable to leave people unanswered. Thus we spend a lot of time responding to every message and request. Here are some suggestions: I make it so that only people who REALLY need to contact me are able to. That way they self-filter their distractions for me. I often will ignore emails from people I don’t know for a few days until the sender follows up. I’ve also added default response on my contact page for my website: “I will respond only if your message meets my interest and abilities. Please follow up after a couple of days if the matter remains relevant to you and is in need of a response.” I also do not respond to text/sms message at the speed of light. Those who text me know that if they need something urgent, they should call me instead so I don't need to be glued to my phone.
Conclusion (My Reflections)
I wish I had read this book during my first year of graduate school at MIT. It would have saved me a lot of time agonizing over my slow research progress/lack of sufficient time for research and helped me write my thesis earlier. I arrived on the deep work philosophy on my own during my masters thesis writing months - when I would write 3-4 hours a day every weekday for 5 months. I also wish to point out that transition times and extenuating circumstances are the most difficult periods to conduct deep work. Ex: start of my Ph.D, moving houses, COVID
In general, I tend to need a 3-hour block to deep work. My next challenge for myself is to be able to do deep research in smaller chucks (ex: 1 hour). It will require making explicit subtasks for deep work tasks. Transcribing this blog post in 1 hour and then finishing publishing after lab clean this afternoon is a good start to that. :P
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