I read the “The Dip” a number of years ago. I have a vague memory of reading it in Denver Airport so I think it might have been soon after it was first published in 2007. It created a lasting impression. I reread it again during the holiday period at the end of 2021.

Insight: most projects hit a low point. It could be a temporary setback (a dip), a cul-de-sac (the French phrase for a dead end), or a cliff. They can be represented graphically like this:

1. The dip is a point between starting and mastery. If something is worth doing it has a dip. The dip creates scarcity because not everyone will get through. This in turn creates value for those who make it through.
2. In a cul-de-sac, you can work hard but nothing much changes.
3. In a cliff, the project might seem like it’s going great but suddenly, everything falls apart.

Insight: Strategic quitting is the secret of success for people and organizations. Successes quit fast and commit to beating the right dip for the right reasons. Many people (and teams) quit reactively when a project becomes painful or they stick with a lost cause when they should quit.

Guideline: Godin says if you want to be a "superstar" find a steep dip and quit all the cul-de-sacs that you’re idling in. Persistent people (or organizations) see light when others can't. Smart people are realistic about not imagining a light that isn't there.

Guideline: at the start of a project decide stopping criteria so you can quit at an early stage before getting to the "dip". This can work because you’re still clear headed. At work, at the start of a project, we try to decide “acceptance criteria” so we know when we’re done. We could also define “stopping criteria” so we know if we’re in a dead end.

Guideline: continuously review active projects. The key is to determine if more hard work will lead towards long term goal or a dead end.

Guideline: if it’s a dip, lean in: push harder, change the rules, whittle away at the problems because they won't last as long. Reframe the difficult situation as a gift. Without the obstacle no learning would take place. The dip is the reason you're here. As Godin says:

"never quit something with great long term potential just because you can't deal with the stress of the moment"

Guideline: if it’s a cul-de-sac or a cliff, quit immediately. Godin calls these “the biggest obstacle to success in life”. Reframe quitting as freeing resources for the dips that matter. Quit as early as possible, ideally before you start. You have two choices for every project, quit or be exceptional.

Guideline: before quitting, ask yourself three questions:

• Am I panicking?
• Who am I trying to influence?
• What sort of measurable progress are we making? Be aware of delayed effects.

If you’re trying to influence an individual, it's easy to cross the line and become a pest. It's hard to change someone’s mind when they’ve made it. If you’re trying to influence a market, most of the people probably still haven't heard of you. Later when your product or service get’s better they'll influence each other.

Guideline: view quitting as a positive tool. Write down some positive statements about how would quit. For example, "quitting would enable me to rededicate my time..."

Random bonus insight: Godin says "Selling is about a transference of emotions, not a presentation of facts." The attitude of the sales person is transmitted to the prospect and changes the dynamic. If the seller is committed to selling because there’s a benefit to the prospect then that comes across.

Aside: it’s interesting to see how the examples in the book have aged. At the time Godin wrote the book, Netflix sent DVDs in the mail and the space shuttle was still active.

I have a feeling that Godin’s insights could be extended by connecting them with ideas like the rollercoaster curve of a startup company or cost-of-delay estimations for project value. I hope to return to this in future posts.

For now, thanks for reading…

If you have any other examples or feedback please comment/follow/share below or on: twitter, medium or linkedin.

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In post 1 and post 2 of this series, I outlined earlier sections of this book Deep Work by Cal Newport. In this post, I complete the series by outlining Newport’s Rules 2-4:

• Embrace Boredom
• Quit Social Media
• Drain the Shallows

As before, I have organized these insights, examples and guidelines within the framework and headings of the book. In a way, these are my detailed notes from the book.

Rule #2: Embrace Boredom

Example: Orthodox Jews spend time every weekday studying the religious texts such as the Talmud. Some read alone. Others discuss the text in pairs or bigger groups.

Insight: concentration is something that must be trained.

Insight: Clifford Nass a behavior and communications researcher, discovered attention switching has negative effects on the brain. People who multitask find it hard to filter irrelevance.

While Rule #1 (Work Deeply) helps one reach the peak of concentration, this rule helps extend that peak or limit.

Guideline: take breaks from focus rather than breaks from distraction. Taking a whole day, an Internet or technology “sabbath” won’t help. Schedule your breaks in advance and deep work until then. As I write this, my iPad is disconnected from the internet. I’ll take a short break in 19 minutes. I usually work in pomodoros, but that’s another story for another post.

Guideline: work intensely like Teddy Roosevelt. Identify a difficult but important task and give yourself less time to do it than you’d normally take. Set a countdown timer. I now have 15 minutes to my next break and I hope to have this section finished by then.

Insight: artificial deadlines are like interval training for the attention centers of your brain.

Guideline: meditate productively. Focus on a problem you’re trying to solve while doing something else physically (walking, driving, showering). When your attention wanders, gently bring it back to the problem you’re trying to solve. This requires practice.

Example: Daniel Kilov is a memory athlete. He wasn’t born with a strong memory but he worked on it and over time this training helped his general abilities.

Insight: memory researchers discovered the elite memorizers direct their attention. They don’t use rote memorization. They’ll use techniques like representing a card as a person then imagining that person in a place in their house.

Guideline: practice focusing your attention. Memorization, meditation, playing music and reading the Talmud are all examples of attention training.

I finished this section with 90 seconds to spare so I’m going to go back and check spelling before a 5 minute break when I’ll stretch my left achilles and make a cup of tea.

Rule #3: Quit Social Media

Right, I’m back for another 25 minutes.

Insight: electronic communication and social media, fragment our attention and erode our ability to concentrate. Social media is designed to keep our attention and get us to consume things.

Guideline: accept social media can be useful but set a threshold for using them.

Insight: throughout history, craft workers carefully selected the tools they worked with.

Guideline: use a structured process to identify the communication tools you’ll use.

• Identify your top level goals
• List 2-3 activities that help you achieve each goal
• Assess each network tool for it’s positive and negative impacts

Example: Newton mentions Twitter and the author Michael Lewis.

Guideline: assess whether the tool’s benefits outweigh it’s drag on your attention.

Insight: the “law of the vital few” (or Pareto principle), 80% of an effect is due to 20% of the possible causes.

Insight: social media services are products from private companies that have massive funding & revenues. They employ talented people who capture and sell your attention (and personal details) to advertisers.

Guideline: be deliberate in selecting your entertainment. Modern humans have access to so much good content. Don’t use social media or the auto suggestions of an algorithm to decide what to consume in the moment. Create lists of quality alternatives in advance.

Insight: Newton quotes Arnold Bennett discussing structured relaxation:

“the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change—not rest, except in sleep.”

My 25-minute timer just went off. Time to take a break and check the news (I have notifications turned off).

Rule #4: Drain the Shallows

Insight: most knowledge work needs some amount of shallow work (checking email, meetings).

Insight: deep work is exhausting. It pushes you to the limit of your cognitive abilities. Researchers like Anders Ericsson (of deliberate practice fame) have estimated the upper limit to be four hours a day.

Guideline: schedule every minute of the day. Don’t spend the day on autopilot. I work in half hour blocks of time (pomodoros) and move things around as I work through the day (because no day runs perfectly to plan).

I just realized I forgot to restart my pomodoro timer after that “news break”.

Insight: on some days you’ll rewrite the schedule multiple times. The goal is not to stick to a rigid schedule but to be thoughtful and deliberate about what you’ll do with the time remaining.

Guideline: if you uncover a promising insight, rework the schedule.

Guideline: quantify the depth of each activity. This can be hard to do. Newton recommends asking yourself - how long would it take to train a recent college graduate to do this activity?

Guideline: ask your boss for a shallow work budget. For most knowledge workers this should be in the region of 30-50%. Below 30% you could become a hermit who thinks big thoughts but doesn’t communicate.

Insight: this limit frees up time for more important activities and stops shallow work from filling up your day. We tend to fall into shallow work moment by moment and not see the cumulative impact.

Guideline: don’t work after 5:30pm. Newton calls this fixed-schedule-productivity.

Guideline: beware of saying “yes”, the most dangerous word in the knowledge worker’s vocabulary. When saying no, be clear in your refusal but ambiguous for the reason. For example, “that sounds interesting but I can’t do that because of scheduling conflicts”.

Insight: fixed-schedule-productivity is a meta-habit that switches you into a scarcity mindset and attunes you to disruptive requests for shallow work. It makes the default answer “no”.

Guideline: become hard to reach. Email is impossible to avoid but anyone with your address can send a message that consumes more time than it took to write. Newton has some specific guidelines for those who want to be open to contact from the general public like a form or FAQ with checklists.

Guideline: do more work when you send or reply to emails. Newton calls this the process-centric approach to email. Identify the process (or project) the email relates to then the current and next steps. This can reduce the number of responses and time spent rereading the thread in future, saving time in the long run.

Guideline: don’t reply if:

• The email is ambiguous
• It’s not a question that interests you
• Nothing good/useful would happen if you responded and nothing really bad would happen if you didn’t.

On the latter, Newton quotes Tim Ferris: “develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things, whether important tasks or true peak experiences.”

Personally it drives me crazy when I receive a long email and the key information or the important action I’m expected to take, is hidden in the second sentence of the third last paragraph. I have developed some standard replies like…

“Thank you for your detailed email. It’s not clear what action you expect me to take, so I’m assuming none is required. If some action is required, please reply to let me know.”

I’m a big believer in action-based communication but that’s yet another story for another day.

Insight: deep work can be intense and cause uneasiness. It’s easier to be artificially busy and swim in the shallows. As you get closer to producing your best work you can become nervous that your best is not yet good enough.

Insight: deep work can generate a life rich with productivity and meaning. Newton finishes the book with a quote from Winifred Gallagher, “I’ll live the focused life, because it’s the best kind there is.”

Postscript

In the time since reading the book I’ve been finding some of Newport’s rules or guidelines have made their way into my daily work. I’m using a work-shutdown ritual and scheduling the day with tasks from my GTD projects. In some cases I’ve modified guidelines I’ve been using for years. I schedule deep work for 2-3 hours every second day. I’ve started using the Pomodoro technique again because it seems to resonate with some of Newton’s ideas.

Thanks for reading!

If you have any other examples or feedback please comment/follow/share below or on: twitter, medium or linkedin.

If you’d like to write for LearnShareDo, please send an email to (write at learnsharedo dot com).

Credits: photo by Devin Lyster on Unsplash

Disclosure: some links in this post may use Amazon affiliate links.

I purchased Deep Work by Cal Newport a couple of years ago. Soon after, it must have strayed off the first page of my Kindle and I forgot about it. Recently, I was talking to a good friend about juggling many projects and priorities at work. He suggested this book and then I remembered I had already bought it.

In the book, Cal Newport explains the challenges many knowledge workers face and strategies we can apply to find time to do more meaningful work.

I’ve written this post to better learn and share what I’ve learned. I’ll summarize Newton’s book as a set of:

• Insights: his astute observations
• Examples: people or stories
• Guidelines: tips, patterns or principles you can use to work more deeply

I have organized these insights, examples and guidelines within the framework and headings of the book. In a way, these are my detailed notes from the book.

Of course a summary is just a map, not the territory. I highly recommend you buy and read Newton’s book.

Introduction

Insight: Newport defines deep work as

“Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”

Examples: he cites Carl Jung, Peter Higgs, JK Rowling, Bill Gates and Neal Stephenson as people who have leveraged deep work to accomplish extraordinary things.

Insight: modern communication tools have fragmented knowledge workers’ attention “into slivers” and 30% of their time is spent in email.

I have seen higher estimates in other places. In my previous role at Goshido, our mission was to redefine communication and replace email. Unfortunately we didn’t succeed, but that’s another story for another day.

Back to the book.

Insight: meaningful work that needs deep thinking, gets dispersed into “distracted dashes” and the quality of the outcomes suffer.

Insight: to be valuable in this fast moving economy you need to be able to learn hard things fast. This means you need the ability to do deep work but it’s becoming rarer and harder to do.

Newport neatly condenses his approach in one paragraph which I’ll break down as a guideline:

Summary: “I’ve invested significant effort to minimize the shallow in my life while making sure I get the most out of the time this frees up.”

How: “I build my days around a core of carefully chosen deep work, with the shallow activities I absolutely cannot avoid batched into smaller bursts at the peripheries of my schedule.

When: “Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out…”

Why: “...can produce a lot of valuable output.”

First Newport describes the problem and explains how deep work is valuable, rare and meaningful. The rest of the book explains four high level “rules” for how to do deep work:

• Work Deeply
• Embrace Boredom
• Quit Social Media
• Drain the Shallows

Guidelines

My first draft of this post was 12 pages so I’ve decided to break it up into 3-4 parts. In the meantime here are all the guidelines I noticed in the rest of the book.

Out of context these guidelines might seem a bit abstract but I’ll go into more detail in future posts.

How Deep Work is Valuable, Rare and Meaningful

• In a company or team, communicate best practices around use of chat applications.
• Find the emotional “leverage point” to convert a negative event into a more positive outcome.
• Redesign jobs so they resemble flow activities.
• As an individual, seek opportunities for flow because that will lead to deep satisfaction.

Work Deeply

• Develop rituals to minimize the amount of willpower needed to switch into and maintain concentration.
• Decide your “depth philosophy”, how you will integrate deep work into your schedule. Options include: monastic, bimodal, rhythmic, or journalistic.
• A deep work ritual decides: where, how long, how you’ll work, how you’ll support the work.
• If designing an office space, make sure to include spaces for deep work.
• Apply “The 4 Disciplines of Execution” (4DX): 1. focus on the wildly important, 2. act on the “lead” measures, 3. keep a compelling scoreboard & make it visible, 4. create a cadence of accountability.
• Use a shutdown ritual at the end of the work day. Say a phrase to provide an explicit cue to your mind, for example “shutdown complete”.

Embrace Boredom

• Take breaks from focus rather than work-breaks from distraction.
• Work intensely like Teddy Roosevelt. Identify a difficult but important task and give yourself less time to do it than you’d normally take. Set a countdown timer.
• Meditate productively. Focus on a problem you’re trying to solve while doing something else physically.
• Practice focusing your attention.

Quit Social Media

• Accept social media can be useful but set a threshold for using it.
• Use a structured process to identify the communication tools you’ll use. Assess whether each tool’s benefits outweigh it’s drag on your attention.
• Be deliberate in selecting your entertainment. Create lists of quality alternatives in advance.

Drain the Shallows

• Schedule every minute of the day. Don’t spend the day on autopilot.
• If you uncover a promising insight, rework the schedule.
• Quantify the depth of each activity - how long would it take to train a recent college graduate to do this activity?
• Ask your boss for a shallow work budget. For most knowledge workers this should be in the region of 30-50%.
• Don’t work after 5:30pm.
• Beware of saying “yes”, the most dangerous word in the knowledge worker’s vocabulary.
• When saying “no” to a request, be clear in your refusal but ambiguous for the reason.
• Become hard to reach.
• Do more work when you send or reply to emails. Identify the process (or project) the email relates to then the current and next steps.
• Don’t reply if: the email is ambiguous, it’s not a question that interests you, nothing good/useful would happen if you responded and nothing really bad would happen if you didn’t.

In future posts I’ll explain how to implement some of these guidelines and why they work.

Thanks for reading.

The bigger picture

This is an example of a guideline that we use in this blog/publication. Guidelines are also known as:

• best-practices
• patterns
• principles
• tips
• hacks
• mental models
• directives

In future posts we’ll curate individual guidelines or glean collections of them from articles, books and other content. We’re planning posts on:

• Productivity
• Starting a business
• Managing cash flow in a growing business

If you’d like to write for LearnShareDo, please send an email to (write at learnsharedo dot com).

Thanks again for reading! If you have any other examples or feedback please comment/follow/share below or on: twitter, medium or linkedin.

Credits: photo by @pascalvendel on Unsplash