Deep Work: The Secret to Achieving Peak Productivity [Link]

Wharton, University of Pennsylvania

MANAGEMENT

Deep Work: The Secret to Achieving Peak

Productivity
Jan 12, 2016 " Global Focus, North America ! Books

In a world full of digital diversions, how are some people able to

achieve a higher level of productivity than others? In the new book
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World,
Georgetown University professor Cal Newport demonstrates how
you can develop the skills necessary to focus at an optimum level
and reach peak productivity. Learning how to do “deep work,” he
argues, is among the most valuable skills people can learn, and
carries wider implications for economic growth.

In the following book excerpt, Newport examines how Wharton

management professor Adam Grant achieved an exceptionally high
level of productivity that made him stand out among his
distinguished peers.

1 of 6 2020-05-10, 3:42 p.m.

Deep Work: The Secret to Achieving Peak Productivity [Link]

Adam Grant produces at an elite level. When I met Grant in 2013, he was the youngest professor
to be awarded tenure at The Wharton [School at the University of Pennsylvania]. A year later,
when I started writing this chapter (and was just beginning to think about my own tenure
process), the claim was updated: He’s now the youngest full professor at Wharton.

The reason Grant advanced so quickly in his corner of academia is simple: He produces. In 2012,
Grant published seven articles — all of them in major journals. This is an absurdly high rate for
his field (in which professors tend to work alone or in small professional collaborations and do
not have large teams of students and postdocs to support their research). In 2013, this count fell
to five. This is still absurdly high, but below his recent standards. He can be excused for this dip,
however, because this same year he published a book titled Give and Take, which popularized
some of his research on relationships in business. To say that this book was successful is an
understatement. It ended up featured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine and went
on to become a massive bestseller. When Grant was awarded full professorship in 2014, he had
already written more than 60 peer-reviewed publications in addition to his bestselling book.

Soon after meeting Grant, my own academic career on my mind, I couldn’t help but ask him
about his productivity. Fortunately for me, he was happy to share his thoughts on the subject. It
turns out that Grant thinks a lot about the mechanics of producing at an elite level. He sent me,
for example, a collection of PowerPoint slides from a workshop he attended with several other
professors in his field. The event was focused on data-driven observations about how to produce
academic work at an optimum rate. These slides included detailed pie charts of time allocation
per season, a flowchart capturing relationship development with coauthors, and a suggested
reading list with more than 20 titles. These business professors do not live the cliché of the
absentminded academic lost in books and occasionally stumbling on a big idea. They see
productivity as a scientific problem to systematically solve — a goal Adam Grant seems to have
achieved.

“To produce at your peak level you need to work

for extended periods with full concentration on a
single task free from distraction.”

Though Grant’s productivity depends on many factors, there’s one idea in particular that seems
central to his method: the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long,
uninterrupted stretches.

2 of 6 2020-05-10, 3:42 p.m.

Deep Work: The Secret to Achieving Peak Productivity [Link]

Grant performs this batching at multiple levels. Within the year, he stacks his teaching into the
fall semester, during which he can turn all of his attention to teaching well and being available
to his students. (This method seems to work, as Grant is currently the highest-rated teacher at
Wharton and the winner of multiple teaching awards.) By batching his teaching in the fall, Grant
can then turn his attention fully to research in the spring and summer, and tackle this work with
less distraction.

Grant also batches his attention on a smaller time scale. Within a semester dedicated to
research, he alternates between periods where his door is open to students and colleagues, and
periods where he isolates himself to focus completely and without distraction on a single
research task. (He typically divides the writing of a scholarly paper into three discrete tasks:
analyzing the data, writing a full draft, and editing the draft into something publishable.)
During these periods, which can last up to three or four days, he’ll often put an out of office
auto-responder on his email so correspondents will know not to expect a response. “It
sometimes confuses my colleagues,” he told me. “They say, ‘You’re not out of office, I see you
in your office right now!’ ” But to Grant, it’s important to enforce strict isolation until he
completes the task at hand.

“The type of work that optimizes your

performance is deep work.”

My guess is that Adam Grant doesn’t work substantially more hours than the average professor
at an elite research institution (generally speaking, this is a group prone to workaholism), but
he still manages to produce more than just about anyone else in his field. I argue that his
approach to batching helps explain this paradox. In particular, by consolidating his work into
intense and uninterrupted pulses, he’s leveraging the following law of productivity: High-
Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus).

If you believe this formula, then Grant’s habits make sense: By maximizing his intensity when
he works, he maximizes the results he produces per unit of time spent working.

This is not the first time I’ve encountered this formulaic conception of productivity. It first came
to my attention when I was researching my second book, How to Become a Straight-A Student,
many years earlier. During that research process, I interviewed around 50 ultra-high-scoring
college undergraduates from some of the country’s most competitive schools. Something I
noticed in these interviews is that the very best students often studied less than the group of
students right below them on the GPA rankings. One of the explanations for this phenomenon

3 of 6 2020-05-10, 3:42 p.m.

Deep Work: The Secret to Achieving Peak Productivity [Link]

turned out to be the formula detailed earlier: The best students understood the role intensity
plays in productivity and therefore went out of their way to maximize their concentration —
radically reducing the time required to prepare for tests or write papers, without diminishing
the quality of their results.

The example of Adam Grant implies that this intensity formula applies beyond just
undergraduate GPA and is also relevant to other cognitively demanding tasks. But why would
this be? An interesting explanation comes from Sophie Leroy, a business professor at the
University of Minnesota. In a 2009 paper titled intriguingly, ‘Why Is It So Hard to Do My Work?’,
Leroy introduced an effect she called attention residue. In the introduction to this paper, she
noted that other researchers have studied the effect of multitasking — trying to accomplish
multiple tasks simultaneously — on performance, but that in the modern knowledge work
office, once you got to a high enough level, it was more common to find people working on
multiple projects sequentially: “Going from one meeting to the next, starting to work on one
project and soon after having to transition to another is just part of life in organizations,” Leroy
explains.

“Unless your talent and skills absolutely dwarf

those of your competition, the deep workers
among them will outproduce you.”

The problem this research identifies with this work strategy is that when you switch from some
Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow — a residue of your
attention remains stuck thinking about the original task. This residue gets especially thick if
your work on Task A was unbounded and of low intensity before you switched, but even if you
finish Task A before moving on, your attention remains divided for a while.

Leroy studied the effect of this attention residue on performance by forcing task switches in the
laboratory. In one such experiment, for example, she started her subjects working on a set of
word puzzles. In one of the trials, she would interrupt them and tell them that they needed to
move on to a new and challenging task, in this case, reading resumes and making hypothetical
hiring decisions. In other trials, she let the subjects finish the puzzles before giving them the
next task. In between puzzling and hiring, she would deploy a quick lexical decision game to
quantify the amount of residue left from the first task. The results from this and her similar
experiments were clear: “People experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely
to demonstrate poor performance on that next task,” and the more intense the residue, the

4 of 6 2020-05-10, 3:42 p.m.

Deep Work: The Secret to Achieving Peak Productivity [Link]

worse the performance.

The concept of attention residue helps explain why the intensity formula is true and therefore
helps explain Grant’s productivity. By working on a single hard task for a long time without
switching, Grant minimizes the negative impact of attention residue from his other obligations,
allowing him to maximize performance on this one task. When Grant is working for days in
isolation on a paper, in other words, he’s doing so at a higher level of effectiveness than the
standard professor following a more distracted strategy in which the work is repeatedly
interrupted by residue-slathering interruptions.

Even if you’re unable to fully replicate Grant’s extreme isolation, the attention residue concept
is still telling because it implies that the common habit of working in a state of semi-distraction
is potentially devastating to your performance. It might seem harmless to take a quick glance at
your inbox every ten minutes or so. Indeed, many justify this behavior as better than the old
practice of leaving an inbox open on the screen at all times (a straw-man habit that few follow
anymore). But Leroy teaches us that this is not in fact much of an improvement. That quick
check introduces a new target for your attention. Even worse, by seeing messages that you
cannot deal with at the moment (which is almost always the case), you’ll be forced to turn back
to the primary task with a secondary task left unfinished. The attention residue left by such
unresolved switches dampens your performance.

When we step back from these individual observations, we see a clear argument form: To
produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a
single task free from distraction.

Put another way, the type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work. If you’re not
comfortable going deep for extended periods of time, it’ll be difficult to get your performance to
the peak levels of quality and quantity increasingly necessary to thrive professionally. Unless
your talent and skills absolutely dwarf those of your competition, the deep workers among them
will outproduce you.

Excerpted from DEEP WORK by Cal Newport, published by Grand Central Publishing. Copyright
© 2016 Cal Newport.

5 of 6 2020-05-10, 3:42 p.m.

Deep Work: The Secret to Achieving Peak Productivity [Link]

All materials copyright of the Wharton School ([Link] of the University of

Pennsylvania ([Link]
Report accessibility issues and get help ([Link]

6 of 6 2020-05-10, 3:42 p.m.