Deep Work and Agile

How Deep Work fits with an Agile way of work

What is Deep Work?

Deep Work is a term that was coined by Cal Newport in 2016, in his book by the same name. He 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 skills, and are hard to replicate.

In contrast, the opposite of Deep Work he called Shallow Work and defined as:

Cognitively undemanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world & are easy to replicate.

Source. Cal Newport’s book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

Why is Deep Work Important?

The key is in the ‘push your cognitive capabilities to their limit’ part of Cal’s definition. We human beings all have a huge amount of potential when it comes to our cognitive abilities, often far more than we realise. In his book, Cal suggests that perhaps genius (think Einstein) is more a question of being able to wield this cognitive potential effectively, rather than any real differences in IQ.

Deep Work is essentially a way to tap this potential.

Especially in knowledge work, tapping this potential can make a significant difference in how effective we are. And we are not just talking about ‘computing’ power. More elusive skills related to serendipity, like for example lateral thinking, become more easily available during Deep Work.

The Challenge

The ability to do Deep Work is something you need to develop. Our brains are like a muscle — they need exercise to become stronger. But we human beings are inherently lazy. This is born from the fact that our brain is a pretty expensive organ when it comes to energy consumption. 

Research suggests that to cope with this high cost, we make most of our decisions without really thinking about them. Some go as far as to claim that 95% of what we do is on autopilot! It is an energy-saving strategy, saving our brainpower for the really important things.

Wielding the brainpower we have available effectively is not something we are properly taught to do. The result is that Deep Work isn’t easy. It takes willpower, discipline and practice.

To make it even harder, working against us are distractions. Our modern world is full of distractions. Things like meetings, e-mail, chats and social media, things which incidentally are also examples of Shallow Work. All these distractions not only make it hard for us to focus for longer periods of time — a requirement for Deep Work — but in the long term they actually damage our ability to focus. Without exercise, the brain unlearns how to do Deep Work. 

This is an unfortunate result of how our bodies are wired to encourage us to accomplish things. You see, every time you accomplish something in your daily life, your body produces a small dose of dopamine — our highly addictive and pleasurable reward hormone. It makes you feel good about yourself. It’s what we call fulfilment.

Since Shallow Work is easy to accomplish and often consists of small tasks, it becomes a perfect source of regular doses of dopamine. It is the reason why you fall back to checking your email or your phone when you really should be focusing on that hard task.

The psychological effect of this dopamine addiction can become so strong that as we continue doing shallow work and do less land less Deep Work, Deep Work becomes harder and harder to use, simply because our bodies are unable to handle going without that regular dose of dopamine.

It is a withdrawal symptom. If you find that when you need to concentrate on something, you feel restless, distracted, even irritable, and your brain seems to blank out, that is your Shallow Work addiction talking.

The way our work is organised doesn’t help. Our modern way of work seems to be addicted to shallow work too. Busy-ness is a proxy for productivity. Everything needs to be a transaction. At work Shallow Work not only gets us our regular doses of dopamine, but also earns us a pat on the back.

How to Kick our Addiction to Shallow Work?

The key is to re-evaluate the value of our work. We have to embrace the fact that it is no longer a question of delivering as much as possible, it is a question of delivering value. We have to start thinking about the value of what we are doing and prioritizing for that value. 

This can be quite counterintuitive, simply because you have to learn to stop your busy-ness. You have to ween yourself from that rewarding feeling of being busy, and you need to learn to create space for your brain to work better. Indeed, doing nothing to achieve more.

This is no easy task because it is the social norms of how we work and your own hormones working against you. You have to develop strong discipline about what you do, and a strictness in avoiding shallow work.

One way to re-evaluate the value of your work is by getting into the habit of quantifying work shallowness. Cal Newport has a simple technique for this: think about how long it would take to train someone to complete a specific task. The easier it is, the shallower the work.

And of course, he also has a technique for quantifying Deep Work:

High quality work = time spent x intensity of focus

Just remember that just like with our Agile focus on outcomes instead of output, the idea here is not so much about being able to measure things reliably, but about creating awareness. So don’t worry if you can’t measure Deep and Shallow work accurately. Simply being able to distinguish between the two will already have a big impact on your work.

Source. In our world of busy-ness, being able to take the time to think even just a little bit can make a huge difference to how effective you are. “Doing twice the work in half the time” in this sense is a reality of Agile.

Tips for Deep Work

Once you figure out what work you want to focus on, the next step is to create the best environment for Deep Work. Below, I’ve collected a number of practices that will help you to get started with Deep Work.

As you read further, you will probably notice that these tips tie in very well with our Agile way of work. This is not surprising, considering that the goal of both Deep Work and Agile and is to get the best out of ourselves.

1. Create an overview of your work

Nothing is worse for Deep Work than feeling overwhelmed by all the things you need to do. Making your work visible is good for two things: it makes it easier to see what you are doing and maintain focus, while at the same time providing you with a place to ‘park’ other stuff, making it easier to deal with distractions.

Incidentally, this is precisely what we achieve in Agile when using a board and a backlog. A board creates a clear overview of the work we want to focus on. And a backlog is the perfect place to ‘park’ incoming work. 

2. Plan your day for Deep Work

With a good overview of your work, Cal Newport encourages us to take the time to plan the day for Deep Work. For example, by breaking the day up into blocks for Deep Work, leaving Shallow Work for the breaks in between.

He also suggests keeping the amount of time you spend on shallow work as small and as segregated as possible, to limit its psychological effect.

This of course fits very well with the Daily Scrum or Stand Up — whatever you want to call it: taking a moment just to make a plan for the day. But with Deep Work, we give some extra focus to the kind of work.

3. Remove distractions

An obvious one, of course. Mute your phone. Put your headphones on with light music to block everything else out. Mute teams and outlook. Or even better, switch them off.

And remember the psychological effect of distractions? These operate outside your work too. So you need to be critical of distractions everywhere. Mobile games and apps are a perfect example. They are often designed precisely to keep you continuously engaged in small doses, increasing the opportunities for Shallow Work.

Cal Newport suggests the Craftsman’s approach: weigh the value of any tool against its cost in terms of Deep and Shallow work.

For me, this idea is a vindication for something with which I’d been struggling for a while, namely that I refuse to install Team or Outlook on my phone. This may be frustrating to some of my colleagues: it’s become so normal to expect everyone to be available at all times, but absolutely essential for how effective I am.

4. Take a break

Deep Work is not about doing more work: it is a way to do better work.

Having effective downtime is essential for Deep Work because it not only gives your mind a rest from the rigour of Deep Work, but it also allows your subconscious to get to work. This can be a surprising source of insights, innovations and creative ideas. In fact, this is one of the main sources of those serendipity things we mentioned earlier. 

If you are curious and want to know more, John Cleese has a brilliantly funny video about the subject of creativity.

5. Create rituals for yourself

This might sound pretty weird, but rituals are a powerful way to develop new habits and improve self-discipline. They help to calm you and prepare you for the effort ahead. And they are an effective way to help you switch your focus, reducing cognitive load — helping you flush your RAM from previous work, so to speak.

Source. Sherlock Holmes — A Game of Shadows

The word ritual may conjure thoughts of hocus pocus, like the ritual with Lord Blackwood in Sherlock Holmes at the beginning of the first movie, but that is not what we are talking about here. Instead, we are talking about little habits like:

• taking a deep breath before focusing,

• muting your phone,

• rewarding yourself with a coffee every time you finish something hard,

• putting on your headphones and a specific kind of music when you do Deep Work.

Rituals can also be big, like:

• starting the day with meditation,

• going for a walk before you start a Deep Work block,

• changing clothes for Deep Work,

• finishing the day by updating your backlog (and feeling good about everything you accomplished).

But they really can be anything. Basically, it is whatever works for you to help you get into the right mindset. Know thyself.

6. Working Together

And last but not least, working together! One of the most effective ways to get into Deep Work is by doing it together with someone else, or even in a group. This is surprising, because you might expect working with someone else to be distracting, but that is not the case.

Working together means we share responsibility and hold each other accountable. It’s a basic instinct most of us have, with the effects working on us mainly unconsciously. We want to look good and not let our colleagues down. Working together also makes us more confident and reduces the opportunities to get distracted.

So if you only remember one thing from this article, remember working together. Working together is free Deep Work without having to put in all the effort!

Deep Work and Agile — putting it all together

Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned here, the fact that having a clear understanding of something is not enough to harvest the rewards. It’s the reason we have a Scrum Masters - we need someone to keep us focused on making the change.

Deep Work is not straightforward. It takes practice and discipline. You can put in the effort to really focus, but sometimes, often if you are starting with Deep Work, your mind just doesn’t want to collaborate.

And that is the beauty of an Agile way of work, that it creates a holistic approach to help us achieve Deep Work. From the focus on team work and pair programming, to the use of rituals — which is what people often call the Scrum events — it all seems to fit perfectly.

This should not be a surprise. The fact is that Agile has always been an accumulation of new ideas and practices, all geared to make us excel at our work. Deep Work, at least for me, is the newest addition.