During these years, I shared a graduate student office down the hall from a MacArthur “genius grant” winner—a professor who was hired at MIT before he was old enough to legally drink. It wasn’t uncommon to find this theoretician sitting in the common space, staring at markings on a whiteboard, with a group of visiting scholars arrayed around him, also sitting quietly and staring. This could go on for hours. I’d go to lunch; I’d come back—still staring. This particular professor is hard to reach. He’s not on Twitter and if he doesn’t know you, he’s unlikely to respond to your e-mail. Last year he published sixteen papers.
This type of fierce concentration permeated the atmosphere during my student years. Not surprisingly, I soon developed a similar commitment to depth. To the chagrin of both my friends and the various publicists I’ve worked with on my books, I’ve never had a Facebook or Twitter account, or any other social media presence outside of a blog. I don’t Web surf and get most of my news from my home-delivered Washington Post and NPR. I’m also generally hard to reach: My author website doesn’t provide a personal e-mail address, and I didn’t own my first smartphone until 2012 (when my pregnant wife gave me an ultimatum—“you have to have a phone that works before our son is born”).
On the other hand, my commitment to depth has rewarded me. In the ten-year period following my college graduation, I published four books, earned a PhD, wrote peer-reviewed academic papers at a high rate, and was hired as a tenure-track professor at Georgetown University. I maintained this voluminous production while rarely working past five or six p.m. during the workweek.
This compressed schedule is possible because 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. 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. Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.
My commitment to depth has also returned nonprofessional benefits. For the most part, I don’t touch a computer between the time when I get home from work and the next morning when the new workday begins (the main exception being blog posts, which I like to write after my kids go to bed). This ability to fully disconnect, as opposed to the more standard practice of sneaking in a few quick work e-mail checks, or giving in to frequent surveys of social media sites, allows me to be present with my wife and two sons in the evenings, and read a surprising number of books for a busy father of two. More generally, the lack of distraction in my life tones down that background hum of nervous mental energy that seems to increasingly pervade people’s daily lives. I’m comfortable being bored, and this can be a surprisingly rewarding skill—especially on a lazy D.C. summer night listening to a Nationals game slowly unfold on the radio.
This book is best described as an attempt to formalize and explain my attraction to depth over shallowness, and to detail the types of strategies that have helped me act on this attraction. I’ve committed this thinking to words, in part, to help you follow my lead in rebuilding your life around deep work—but this isn’t the whole story. My other interest in distilling and clarifying these thoughts is to further develop my own practice. My recognition of the deep work hypothesis has helped me thrive, but I’m convinced that I haven’t yet reached my full value-producing potential. As you struggle and ultimately triumph with the ideas and rules in the chapters ahead, you can be assured that I’m following suit—ruthlessly culling the shallow and painstakingly cultivating the intensity of my depth. (You’ll learn how I fare in this book’s conclusion.)
When Carl Jung wanted to revolutionize the field of psychiatry, he built a retreat in the woods. Jung’s Bollingen Tower became a place where he could maintain his ability to think deeply and then apply the skill to produce work of such stunning originality that it changed the world. In the pages ahead, I’ll try to convince you to join me in the effort to build our own personal Bollingen Towers; to cultivate an ability to produce real value in an increasingly distracted world; and to recognize a truth embraced by the most productive and important personalities of generations past: A deep life is a good life.
PART 1
The Idea
Chapter One
Deep Work Is Valuable
As Election Day loomed in 2012, traffic at the New York Times website spiked, as is normal during moments of national importance. But this time, something was different. A wildly disproportionate fraction of this traffic—more than 70 percent by some reports—was visiting a single location in the sprawling domain. It wasn’t a front-page breaking news story, and it wasn’t commentary from one of the paper’s Pulitzer Prize–winning columnists; it was instead a blog run by a baseball stats geek turned election forecaster named Nate Silver. Less than a year later, ESPN and ABC News lured Silver away from the Times (which tried to retain him by promising a staff of up to a dozen writers) in a major deal that would give Silver’s operation a role in everything from sports to weather to network news segments to, improbably enough, Academy Awards telecasts. Though there’s debate about the methodological rigor of Silver’s hand-tuned models, there are few who deny that in 2012 this thirty-five-year-old data whiz was a winner in our economy.
Another winner is David Heinemeier Hansson, a computer programming star who created the Ruby on Rails website development framework, which currently provides the foundation for some of the Web’s most popular destinations, including Twitter and Hulu. Hansson is a partner in the influential development firm Basecamp (called 37signals until 2014). Hansson doesn’t talk publicly about the magnitude of his profit share from Basecamp or his other revenue sources, but we can assume they’re lucrative given that Hansson splits his time between Chicago, Malibu, and Marbella, Spain, where he dabbles in high-performance race-car driving.
Our third and final example of a clear winner in our economy is John Doerr, a general partner in the famed Silicon Valley venture capital fund Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Doerr helped fund many of the key companies fueling the current technological revolution, including Twitter, Google, Amazon, Netscape, and Sun Microsystems. The return on these investments has been astronomical: Doerr’s net worth, as of this writing, is more than $3 billion.
Why have Silver, Hansson, and Doerr done so well? There are two types of answers to this question. The first are micro in scope and focus on the personality traits and tactics that helped drive this trio’s rise. The second type of answers are more macro in that they focus less on the individuals and more on the type of work they represent. Though both approaches to this core question are important, the macro answers will prove most relevant to our discussion, as they better illuminate what our current economy rewards.