Time Management Tuesday: A Summer Read...”Deep Work”

Last week I said I was going to consider whether the concept of  “deep work” could have any connection to “slow work.” Slow work, to the best of my knowledge, seems to be more about dealing with spiritual issues and slowing down to enjoy life rather than slowing down a work pace as a way to work more efficiently and do more, which would make me enjoy life a whole lot more. Deep work, a term coined by Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University, is a "skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time."

Okay, "quickly" seems as if it shouldn't have anything to do with "slow," but if producing "better results in less time" ends up meaning putting in fewer hours, that's slowing down as far as I'm concerned. Also, Newport is writing about working in an "information economy" or "new economy." He's not writing about writing.

But I've found my best time management ideas in books that were about managing other kinds of work.Therefore, I have a copy of Newport's book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. A summer read is something I think I can manage while continuing to recover from an elder's most recent health crisis. And if it leads to better use of whatever I have for work time when I start living the new normal, boolyah!

An Introduction To Deep Work

In Newport’s introduction to his book, 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 skill, and are hard to replicate." Examples for writers would be...ah...writing. Creating new content.

Deep work sounds like working in flow.  Hmm. Unless flow states are used in order to work deep. One leads to another?

Newport argues that most “most modern knowledge workers” are “rapidly forgetting the value of going deep.” The reason? “Network tools.” By which he means, among other things, the social media that has become part of writers’ work, now that we do a big chunk of our own marketing.  This type of work Newport calls “shallow work."

He describes shallow work as "Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate." Examples for writers would be growing a Twitter following, promoting books on Twitter, maintaining a presence on Goodreads, etc.

Shallow work is the enemy of deep work. "...fragmented attention cannot accommodate deep work, which requires long periods of uninterrupted thinking.”

So far, none of this is really news. In fact, Newport says that, himself. His more original argument is that as our culture shifts toward spending more and more time in the shallows, opportunities exist for the people who are capable of working deep. Because there aren't that many of them.

Think of this in terms of writing. For writers, marketing is the shallows. It doesn't require the kind of depth that producing new content does. (For  professional marketers, this may not be the case. Marketing may be their deep work, at least coming up with new marketing ideas.) I know one writer who has been writing successfully for many years describe how the percentage of time she spends writing has gone down, as she's had to spend more and more time promoting herself. I know of another writer who felt her first book sold, in part, because the publisher believed she had the marketing skills and drive to promote it. This is a case of a writer being rewarded for being good at shallow work or at least spending time doing it.

Nonetheless, no matter how good we are at the shallow stuff at some point we have to go deep enough to generate some content. Without the deep work, there's no need for the shallow work.

More to follow.

Time Management Tuesday: Be Ready To Start Again

Ernest Hemingway said of writing, "The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next."  And guess what? Jan Allen Graduate Mentor (Oh, how I love the name of that blog.) says something very similar. "There’s an essential task in your last five minutes of writing each day that will save time and increase your productivity. Five minutes before you stop writing, make a list of your next steps and ideas for continuing your writing at your next session."

What they're both saying is, Know what you're going to do when you come back to work.

What does this have to do with managing time? Getting started for the day can be hard and take a lot of time. If you know what you're going to do before you start working, you can hit the ground running.

Allen writes about flow in her Your Last Five Minutes of Writing Post post. Flow is a very desirable state in writing, and anything else. In addition to feeling good, it can move work along quickly. Among the conditions that can lead to it: concentration, feeling in the moment, and feeling in control. You don't get to flow struggling just to begin work.

As it turns out, I did know what I was going to do when I started work this morning.

Time Management Tuesday: Writing On Weekends, Flow, And The Impact Of Networking On Managing Time

Today's post from the past deals with a couple of things we've been discussing on Time Managment Tuesdays this year: 1. Finding time to write every day and 2. Writing in a flow state. I also think this post suggests that finding time to network with other writers might have a positive impact on how we use our time.

The writer friend referred to in this post has to be Lynda Mullaly Hunt, whose first book, One for the Murphys, will be published in May.

October 4, 2010 The Flow Thing

I can't make any big claims about writing in a flow state. However, I do think that when I'm...shall we say...flowing?...I continue to work after I leave my work station. Thoughts come unbidden while I'm making dinner and cleaning toilets. Problems are resolved while I'm driving or mowing the lawn. I have more breakout experiences.

I've had problems getting to that point this past year because I'm most likely to get into a flowish-like state when I'm working regularly. I have to stay involved with the work. As in every day. With the schedule I'm living with now of work work on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and family work on Tuesday, Thursday, and weekends, it's hard for me to stay involved enough to keep my mind working away while the rest of me is doing something else.

I had something interesting happen this weekend related to this. Out of the blue a writer friend I haven't spoken to since maybe March called me Saturday evening. A family member claims we talked for an hour and a half, though I wouldn't know. (Hmmm. Perhaps I was in flow.) I found the experience stimulating enough that I couldn't wait until Monday to get back to work.

So yesterday afternoon, while sitting next to a fire to tend a pot on some coals (I'll spare you the details about how I got started on that) instead of reading a magazine I brought my workbook with me and worked out what I needed to do today to, essentially, deep-six a chapter and replace it with something else that would incorporate some of the same material and yet be totally different.

As a result, today's work went really well, in spite of having a plumber sharing the house with me for the better part of the day.

So I'm thinking that I really need to do something--even something small--every day.

Yeah, another desperate plan. We'll see how that goes.

Time Management Tuesday: Writing Every Day

Today is our last initial discussion of Ellen Sussman's article, A Writer's Daily Habit: Four Steps to Higher Productivity, which was published in the Nov./Dec. 2011 issue of Poets & Writers.

The fourth step toward productivity for Sussman is daily writing. Breaks in writing, she says, make it difficult to "reenter a writing project." It also sounds as if she's an organic writer. "I don't outline my novels ahead of time. I let myself discover story and character as I write. And so I have to stay very focused to contain that fictional world." Her work goes easier if she is able to stay in the story and that means writing regularly, in her case, five or six days a week.

I totally agree with everything she says on the subject of writing daily. Perhaps I'm particularly sensitive to the problems related to writing breaks because I'm an organic writer, too. It is difficult to maintain flow, for instance, or stay in any kind of writing state, if you're always having to stop. Recently I was working three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and found that day on/day off schedule difficult because every day on came after a break of one or (on Mondays) two days. A chunk of my work mornings was spent fiddling around on-line, putting off attacking work. On the other hand, I can recall what a difference it made for Monday morning to be able to work for even a half hour or so over a weekend on a project I was deeply into. My computer guy has talked about writing code and how much easier it is to do if you've been doing it for a while. That, presumably, is why we used to hear stories about computer people staying up all night working, hopped up on caffeine. They didn't want to leave what they were doing and have to go through getting started again.

What's the connection with daily writing to time management, however? I think it's connected in two ways.

1. In terms of actually managing your writing time, if you can write nearly every day, you can get more done and not just because you're writing every day. You can get more done because the more you write, the easier it is to do. Plus, as Sussman says, "If I'm writing every day, four pages a day, then the novel stays in my mind during all the hours I'm not writing." So long as you can stay with the project, your mind keeps working even during those times you're not technically "writing." It's easier to experience breakouts. So writing every day has a connection to time management in that it helps you use your writing time more effectively.

2. To write every day, you have to make time to do it every day. This gets back to the issue of work and personal time. How can we possibly write every day and deal with personal time or day jobs? Sussman talks about habit. "Over time daily writing does get easier; it becomes a habit." You cannot exaggerate the power of habit. But it takes time to create one. How do we find the time to get started and do that?

I'm experimenting with squeezing in writing time on weekends and will write about how that's going next week. (And probably other weeks, too.) In the meantime, how many of you are able to write nearly every day? If so, how did you get started? If not, do you think it's worthwhile, and how might you try doing it?

ADDITION: Speaking of writing every day, in the essay Norman and Me, Amy Rowland says that Norman Mailer wrote every day. His biographer gave a tour of a house he lived in in Provincetown and told them "...Mailer believed writing had to be done every day, otherwise 'it was like leaving soldiers out in the rain.' He said you couldn’t tell yourself you were going to do it and then not do it, that it was a 'disservice to the subconscious.'" She also says he wrote in an attic room. "Toward the end of his life, Mailer would drag himself up the narrow stairs with a cane in each hand."

I was never able to get through the one book by Mailer that I tried to read and think the "disservice to the subconscious" bit is a little over the top. Still, I admire his dedication. Or perhaps perseverance.

Now That Was Writing In Flow

Years back, I read a book called Writing in Flow by Susan K. Perry. It made me a believer in writing in flow states, probably because I'd done it a few times, but I can't say I did a good job of learning how to do it whenever I wanted. However, writing in flow is something I aspire to.

Well, yesterday it happened.

I had received an essay back from an editor last Wednesday with his suggestions for changes, and I'd been working on it ever since. Yesterday morning I got up and went to the computer in my nightclothes. I changed into workout clothes, as I do every morning that I'm not training in the dojang, but I got distracted...by work...and went back to the computer. Around mid-day I considered cleaning up and getting dressed, but I remembered that I hadn't worked out yet. So I put in a load of wash, fixed something to eat, and took it back to the computer. The essay was in good shape around 2:30, so I got on the treadmill for a while. Then I got off and went back to the computer. Around 4 o'clock, I finished working out, finally took a bath, and got dressed. After dinner I went back to the computer for an hour and a half or so, just to tweek the essay and do things like spellcheck, then I submitted it. I never combed my hair, though I did brush my teeth. I think.

The day of work felt great. If the editor is no longer interested in the essay, it doesn't matter because the writing experience was so terrific, and I learned so much about writing memoir while working on this piece.

How did this flow state come about when it so rarely happens for me?

I think it was the amount of time I put into the essay before Monday, the flow state day. I worked on this thing for a couple of hours Thursday morning and all day Friday. It was not going well. I tried this and I tried that, I moved things here and there. Saturday morning I woke up around 3:30 and was still up at 4:30. So I got up and worked on the essay for 2 hours until going back to bed for a few hours. I think I worked on it some more Saturday afternoon or evening. I definitely worked on it off and on Sunday. I felt I was making progress, and Sunday night just before I went to bed I made a page and a half of freewriting notes in my hardcopy journal for use the next day.

Then I had my flow experience on Monday.

I think to finally get into a flow state you have to achieve a certain level of concentration before getting into the flow. (It's the same thing you need to do to trigger a breakout experience, though in that case you back off for a while after you've been working.) My present schedule of working only Monday, Wednesday, and Friday means that I'm not staying at work long enough to get to that level of concentration and stay there. I remember talking to Computer Guy about the whole flow thing years ago when he was writing code for games he was creating. He said he'd read that the reason you used to hear these stories of people who write code regularly living on caffeine and staying up all night was that they wanted to stay in some kind of work groove once they'd achieved it. That sounds like flow.

A few months ago I started trying to work for a half hour or so every weekday morning, even on the elder care days. It didn't lead to anything like the flow state I experienced yesterday, but it helped. Yesterday's experience confirms my impression that I need to find a way to work more.