Canadian Government Executive - Volume 22 - Issue 6

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June 2016 // Canadian Government Executive / 25
around deep work, starting with where and how you’ll do it–per-
haps hiding away in an empty conference room or with your door
shut. Think in advance of how to support such work, be it a cup of
coffee brewed beforehand or some quick light exercise to main-
tain energy.
He offers a fascinatingly contrarian look at boredom: Instead of
taking breaks from distraction to focus as we routinely do, train
yourself to take breaks from focus for distraction. That means
scheduling when you’ll look at the Internet and keeping other
times absolutely Internet-free, since the Internet is a chief distrac-
tion in our lives. You need to rebuild the powers of concentration
that the modern world has eroded. “To succeed with deep work
you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distract-
ing stimuli. This doesn’t mean you have to eliminate distracting
behaviours; it’s sufficient that you instead eliminate the ability of
such behaviours to hijack your attention,” he observes.
If these ideas by Bailey or Newport hit home, you may want to
include their books in your summer reading. Both are practical
and easy to read.
consequence, the fewwho cultivate this skill and then make it the
core of their working life will thrive,” he writes.
His research found four ways to accomplish deep work, most
of them not easily accessible to government executives unfortu-
nately:
• Monastic: Eliminate or radically alter shallow obligations, find-
ing a monastery-like setting for much of your working life. Don-
ald Knuth, a celebrated computer scientist, stopped using email
on January 1, 1990, after 15 years, figuring that’s plenty for a
lifetime. “Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role is
to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be at the
bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and
uninterruptible concentration,” he said. He clearly wasn’t run-
ning a government department.
• Bimodal: People who can’t succeed without substantial com-
mitments to shallow work can balance that with concentrated
deep work periods of at least a day. Carl Jung would hold regu-
lar retreats to a rustic stone house he built in the woods, then
return to Zurich and his busy clinical practice.
• Rhythmic: The reality of our lives may make those first two
approaches unreasonable but we can build in solid routines
to ensure we do deep work regularly. Here Newport points to,
of all people, Jerry Seinfeld. Every day the comic takes time to
write jokes he crosses out that date on his calendar with a big
red X, trying to keep the chain of those marks from ever being
broken. Make deep work a regular habit, complete with real or
imaginary Xes. That takes away the energy you might invest in
deciding if and when you’ll do it.
• Journalistic: Just as journalists are trained to shift into writing
mode on a moment’s notice, you grab the opportunities for deep
work, even if short. Newport stresses this is not easy for novices
since switching from shallow to deep mode doesn’t come natu-
rally. But it may be the technique you are most familiar with
and can build on.
Just thinking about deep vs. shallow work, in the context of your
day, is a helpful exercise. Newport urges you to develop rituals
web
user/21-harveyschachter.html
Cal Newport offers a fascinatingly
contrarian look at boredom: Instead of
taking breaks from distraction to focus
as we routinely do, train yourself to take
breaks from focus for distraction.
The Leader’s Bookshelf
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