229. Deep Work

[@Infantry12345]

I'm still thinking about this weeks later, it hits on some of the deepest chords of my frustrations with work. Thanks again for your excellent work!

[@kapoioBCS]

As a researcher in mathematics, these 2-4 hours of complete focus is what I ultimate strive for every day, but almost never can get even 1 hour of uninterrupted thinking 😢

[@undercoverduck]

I can't imagine a job that's harder to do with constant interruptions than that of a mathematician. The only way I've ever been able to do math since high school is with headphones on and everyone in my immediate surroundings knowing full well they shouldn't disturb me or I'll snap at them.

[@THUNKShow]

I've seen Nerf guns wielded more or less like spray bottles for cats. Might be worth a shot?

[@bthomson]

Soft violence!

[@scotthalland]

You just gave me a name for the thing I've been trying to describe about recent negative changes at my workplace.

[@THUNKShow]

It's a good term! Sorry to hear about your workplace. 🙁 FWIW Newport has some helpful advice about how to talk management around to a more deep-work-focused mindset, highly recommend checking out his blog for some tips.

[@scotthalland]

@@THUNKShow Thanks. I'll check that out!

[@ngoriyasjil2085]

This is one reason why I enjoy homework. The focus is really something else, once you get started.

[@THUNKShow]

Good exercise of that muscle, if you can lock your phone in a lead box for a couple hours.

[@enzoniaf3863]

This is very true, especially as someone with ADHD, and is something I had to learn myself the hard way. It wasn't until I had to regulate shifting attention between emails and other tasks that it properly showed itself. The expectation of always being responsive to emails is still something I struggle with, as well as getting pulled out of a focused state by even someone interrupting to say hello. I am like a shark - if you stop me swimming, I die.

[@5hirtandtieler]

In the same boat! Love the shark analogy too. I usually describe it like riding a bike with no tread - time is needed to build up momentum, but then it only takes a pebble to send me swerving 😅

[@THUNKShow]

I'm like a shark - I gotta keep making metaphors. ;) TBH I had to do therapy to realize that 20 minutes of lag time between email & response wasn't a colossal failing on my part. I built that there panopticon in my own damned head!

[@ferulebezel]

An anecdote I saw in a magazine ad: A reporter is walking through a hallway towards a business owners office for an interview and passes an open door and sees a guy with his feet on his desk, hands behind his head, staring into space. When he sees the owner he tells him of this and the owner replies that that man saved him $largesum money and that was the position he was in when he did it. This was followed by further ad copy about how we're such a smart company that we value smart employees and don't have superficial management, blah, blah, blah.

[@nikita1351]

Great video, thanks

[@THUNKShow]

Glad you liked it! :)

[@johnhershberg5915]

For me there's an element missing from these discussions. Why should we strive for maximum efficiency in these situations? You hear lots of talk of the 4-hour (on average) productivity window. And as a software developer I can tell you it's 100% true. But there's more to it than that. It's also true that if I'm working on a project that I care deeply about, a personal project, or if it's my own startup company that I have a stake in, those 4 hours seem inadequate. I can suddenly put in 4 hours in my 9-to-5 and another 3-4 hours in my startup. And the reason is incentive. If my startup succeeds I could be doing my own thing. Maybe even getting rich? Who knows. But we understand this when it comes to other things. Like if I told you I wanna be in the Olympics. You would think it's odd if I only trained for 4 hours a day, or until I'm tired. We understand that to perform at olympics-level you need to put in the time. Likewise with Chess masters. They put in ungodly amount of hours. It's not like once you pass that 4-hours mark you become completely useless. You just do less efficient work and you do it more slowly and you make many more mistakes. In production those mistakes can add up quickly. Like in video-game crunch time. If you're "crunching" for however many months, eventually all you do is mistakes and you waste your 4 good hours fixing yesterday's mistakes. So then this discussion turns into companies maybe reorienting how they do things to let people use up those 4 hours best. But is that what we want? I don't want corporations sitting there thinking how to best extract value from me. There's an issue here of motivation too. If the motivation is not there, say if you work for some faceless corp, then all the tricks in the book about leaving someone alone for 4 hours, or whatever, are just not gonna work. Nor should we want them to. I'm ok with wasting company dime on answering emails. It's a bloated corporation with a tall hierarchy that exists to waste. Let me waste my time, and put my energy into something *I* deem useful.

[@THUNKShow]

> the 4-hour (on average) productivity window This was more an example of Huh's particular deep work style than a general rule about productivity - I was highlighting how norms of hours/responsiveness/etc. don't even make room for this (incredibly useful!) work. IMO the "putting in hours" mentality is the whole problem - I don't care how many hours you trained for your shot put throw, I care how far you throw the damned shot put! > I don't want corporations sitting there thinking how to best extract value for me. Oh boy, have I got some bad news... > I'm ok with wasting company dime on answering emails What if, rather than relishing the opportunity to dig holes & fill them in again instead of performing useful labor, we simply didn't compel people to dig the holes to begin with?

[@johnhershberg5915]

@@THUNKShow There have been other studies about that number and I see 4-hours or so brought up a lot. I think it goes beyond Huh's work. On the rest of it, I totally agree, would be awesome for my job to actually be the thing I want to spend my time on. But the fact remains that as the world exists right now corporations exist. And as such all this ends up being is a tool to extract more productivity from people. Only corporations are too stupid to notice any of this. For the time being I'd like to keep it that way.

[@Fiddling_while_Rome_burns]

Interesting you make this post as we are halfway through the world's largest 4 day week experiment, with preliminary results showing people can do as much work in 4 days as they can in 5 with a slight refocussing of priorities

[@THUNKShow]

The 40h workweek was totally arbitrary from its inception, & hasn't been reevaluated since! 😩

[@anakimluke]

Newton!! 👋❤

[@THUNKShow]

👋🐶

[@Xob_Driesestig]

In psychology it's called Task Switching: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Task_switching_(psychology) Some people seem to be better at it than others, so if you have autism you might be able to ask your doctor for a deep work prescription. If you want to test how good you are at task switching, you can do so here: www.psytoolkit.org/experiment-library/taskswitching.html

[@THUNKShow]

Thanks for the pointer - I added this to the links in the episode description. :)

[@_Aarius_]

I'm lucky that my job as a software engineer is in a company where I can spend as much time as I need 'unproductively' thinking whole I try to solve a problem, and rarely get distracted by colleagues Unfortunately, no other job I've had was like that

[@Fiddling_while_Rome_burns]

My first job ever was as a computer programmer. The whole job was people getting lost in a piece of code for weeks, barely grunting to another person, let alone talking. The amount of work that got done was phenomenal but every programmer loved coding and was socially misanthropic. The problem lies with the majority of people who hate their jobs and would really not like a period of intense focus.

[@auntiecarol]

I used to admin Solaris boxen back in the day, and part of that job was off the cuff writing of "glue code" (mostly in Perl, but some C). I'm pretty sure I spent more time with my finger hovering above the `Enter` than doing anything else, just reading and reading what I had just written. Most of this was done in the machine room, so away from people and distraction. Can't imagine what it must be like to be in a 'responsive' open-plan office futzing around with JS and whiteboarding every damned thing.

[@CompilerHack]

well there's always the DND status and 'Focus rooms' right? /s

[@THUNKShow]

🙄 Very effective. Totally sacrosanct.

[@frazkintsukuroi5836]

"The ease with which email can be sent drastically overshadows its value being read" ... Hit the nail on the head right there. And even if you try to increase the value, corporate culture still makes it fall flat. I have heard literally my entire life that my emails are too big, contain to much "details". But those details are in there, because I know that a singular yes/no answer isn't actually going to help them solve their specific challenge. But rather than taking a few minutes to actually read and reflect, they drop by for yet another game of " questions I already answered". All of this feels lazy: instead of using their own cognitive abilities, they are effectively asking me to do it for them. It's frustrating because I am someone who prefers to minimize the number of "hops" needed to get to the right answer to minimize the amount of overhead and "fuzz" I introduce in my communication, because less hops means less interruptions for literally everyone involved. But as you already acknowledged, most people don't seem to care, or see the value in it: as long as it doesn't hurt them clearly and immediately, they always opt for the path of least resistance.

[@THUNKShow]

I have a pet theory that the "lossy" nature of email communication reinforces office power dynamics - if you're low in the pecking order, sending an email to your boss about something critical isn't any defense if it goes unaddressed. (After all, they're very busy, & if it's really important you should work harder to bring it to their attention.) But also, you have *no excuse* if your boss sends you an email telling you to do a thing & you fail to do it. Sort of a "CYA for thee, but not for me."

[@frazkintsukuroi5836]

@@THUNKShow agreed. It's one of the reasons I am fond of methods like Scrum / Agile because they force the "high uppers" to explicitly choose what work should receive attention, as opposed to indiscriminately throwing work at their "underlings" and being shocked and/or disappointed when projects go three times over their deadline because everyone prioritizes work haphazardly and nothing is synchronized in a any meaningful way. Or even worse: when people burn out due to the sheer pressure put on them to "just figure it out already". Now that I think about it... I might even venture a guess that successful application of Agile/Scrum (or more accurately - any kind of systematic WoW) would significantly reduce the amount of emails being sent, by virtue of the work at company level being more focused... Interesting.

[@GeorgMayer]

In the companies I have worked for it would have been very easy to get these 1 or 2 hours, but just not at the time when one wants them. I guess most people feel mentally fresh in the morning, but also that is when work starts and everbody feels excited and driven to exchange what they experienced, thought and dreamed of, also that is when all planning meetings etc. are held. The later parts of the afternoon on the other hand are very often quiet. But then the mental capacities (at least mine) are mostly used up and one only works through the usual pile of necessitities that the morning stacked up. With home office this got a bit better, as the interactions in the morning are not that intense usually, but still - as you say - most people would stamp one as a-social who is hiding from the all-devouring screen in order to think of something useful.

[@JE-ee7cd]

😊👍

[@THUNKShow]

👉😎👉

[@bthomson]

Business triage! At least life and death are not at stake (although it sometimes seems that way!)

[@Joviex]

Sounds great. Let me know when there are a bunch of jobs willing to pay me a living wage for my thinking.

[@zorro_zorro]

I don't understand. A lot of jobs need you to be able to solve problems most people can't solve. It usually requires thinking. Was there a joke here that I missed?

[@Joviex]

@@zorro_zorro He said JUST THINIKING. I am a pipeline supervisor, I have lots of thinking to do all day, along with meetings, people management and my ACTUAL WORK. There are only a FEW JOBS that allow you to sit around and THINK ALL DAY. For example: THINK TANKS. That is about it.

[@zorro_zorro]

​@@Joviex Yeah yeah, you have to use the thinking for something. At the very least you have to tell people what your thinking was or write it down. That's still basically "you getting paid for your thinking" though. Think tanks also need you to have meetings sometimes, and write down what you thought, and so on. Same goes for engineers, philosophers, fundamental physicists, editorialists, military strategists, judges, developpers, mathematicians, analysts, lawmakers, diagnosticians, and well... a lot of jobs really.

[@danessa53coach]

🤯

[@HumbertoRamosCosta]

2:15 The images lookalike

[@THUNKShow]

Glad you caught that! ;)

[@PetersonSilva]

Interesting video, but I thought I might contribute by bringing politics into the discussion. After all, the idea that "least resistance" explains why the modern workplace is like this is very, very shallow. Like, there is one organizational project that gets implemented because it's the easiest people could think ok, ok - but if it's bad, why did people not go do something else? If they took long to notice it, why aren't they doing something about it now? Is "least resistance" natural / psychological, as this author seems to imply by your presentation, or socially constructed, the thing you get when resistance is actively thwarted? Maybe it has something to do with those most affected having the least power to do anything about it? Maybe technology is not neutral in that regard (e.g. centralised proprietary platforms are not adaptable to specific contexts)? Maybe bosses/owners don't want people to daydream and have time to use however they want because they are scared people will not be applying their energies for their aims? Because while statistically it will lead to better results they won't be sure they aren't being "robbed" of working time in their specific case (i.e. it's a risk most entrepreneurs are not willing to take)? Yes it's hard to put a dollar sign on these things, but our measuring the worth of activities in profit margins is part of the problem. Many of the things you mentioned - people being pressured into responding right away so as to not look careless for being unresponsive, etc. - are the results of contingent market pressures, not human nature; it might not be an autocratic imposition but it's still the outcome of capitalist domination. So in summary there's a lot here that's just about exercising and assessing control over workers, which is a political matter more than one of productivity, kind of like neoliberal policies that don't lead to economic growth but sure disrupt people's lives and popular organisations enough to divide and conquer the working class (and so this seems to be their whole point at the end of the day). So anyway, I just mean that a lot of this video reads as if workplace bullshit is something we're helplessly doing to ourselves as horizontal cooperatives of autonomous beings who agreed to work together for common aims! Hierarchy and the broader social environment that shapes even what such a thing as a "workplace" is (e.g. before the industrial revolution home/work division was barely there in most places; why must we go back to offices since the pandemic proved working remotely works well for so many people?) kind of disappears into the background. I understand though that these questions might have been largely absent from the original work whose argument you were tyring to summarise, so this is probably a criticism of the author not of you :)

[@darrellglenn4113]

Ｐｒⓞм𝕠𝕤𝐌 😩