This Skill Is Only Getting More Valuable

Adam Grant knows how to produce at an elite level.

At age 28, he became the youngest professor to be granted tenure at the prestigious Wharton School. He later became its youngest Full Professor.

He was Wharton’s top-rated professor (yes, there is such a rating) from 2011–2017.

Before becoming a professor, Grant was an All-American springboard diver, an advertising director, and a professional magician.

When writer Cal Newport profiled Grant for his book Deep Work in 2016, Grant had already published sixty peer-reviewed articles in his field.

Seeking to understand his success, Newport credited two factors with fueling this output: batching and intensity.

Grant structured his schedule to have long, uninterrupted time on difficult tasks. He batched important tasks to make significant headway. He would work on analyzing data, drafting an article, or responding to reviewers’ critiques.

As Newport reported, Grant would take multiple days and set them aside completely for accomplishing a major phase of research. He would even set an auto-responder on his email saying that he was out, and not available. (This led to some awkward hallway conversations, since his colleagues could see him working in his office.)

During these sessions, he worked with complete focus and intensity.

He engaged with what Cal Newport calls deep work.

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

Discraction-free and cognitively demanding. These are the characteristics of the work that will allow you to produce on an elite level as well.

But as it turns out, this kind of work can’t just be switched on. You can’t just decide to start doing it. You have to practice.

Think of mental fitness like physical fitness.

You can’t hop off the couch and run a half-marathon if your lifestyle is sedentary and filled with junk food.

Your ability to focus on deep work is the same way. You shouldn’t expect yourself to be able to focus on a long stretch of creative deep work if your current habits include checking your email or social media every 7 minutes, reacting to the never-ending stream of notifications on your various devices (and even worse, taking the time to respond/comment).

So this new year, commit to developing the skill of deep work. Even better, commit to developing creative deep work. It’s a skill that’s becoming more rare every year, and therefore more valuable if you can do it.

So start small. Just 15 minutes with no distractions allowed, fully focused on your task. Then work your way up to 30 minutes, 45, and ultimately up to 90 minutes or beyond.

If you make this the year where you develop the skill of creative deep work, you will look up next January 1 and see your greatest year of output yet.

Mark Samples

P.S. To learn more about deep work, see Cal Newport’s book Deep Work. Deep work is one of the most important concepts I’ve learned in the past decade.

P.P.S. The website neal.fun has a great way to visualize the toll that distractions take on your day. Check out “Where does the day go?” (h/t Henry Samples)