Deep Work - Great book for software professionals

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It was a nice winter day at Balmoral hotel. The writer of Harry Potter series J.K. Rowling left a signed statement on a marble bust of Hermes in her room which read: “J.K. Rowling finished writing Harry Potter and The Deathly Hollows in this room (552) on 11 January 2007.

Yes, you have read it right. J.K. Rowling wrote the final book of Harry Potter series in a hotel. Because, she needed undistracted concentration to produce a world class work. Not only her, but also Bill Gates did require such uninterrupted attention to complete the first version of “basic” in 1974 which laid the foundation of a billion dollar company “microsoft”.  He used to close himself up in a separate room most of the time for 8 weeks to produce such a program. Mark Twin, Rabindranath Tagore and so on also had similar patterns. So, what were they actually doing! What is it called?

Deep Work by Cal Newport 

Author Cal Newport, an MIT graduate and Georgetown professor has named this as “deep work” and explained this phenomenon in his book “deep work”. He also claimed that, this deep work helped him to double the output of his research papers while raising a family, writing the book and teaching fulltime in a prestigious university.

Now, you might think that, they were some extreme examples or privileged people to do so. But the author shows us some way of how we can manage to do deep word despite busy or daily schedules of other works. Before this, you should know why we need deep work because we all don’t want to be Bill Gates or J.K. Rowling.

According to the author only 3 types of people are going to be successful in the upcoming tight economy.

  • People who have large capitals to invest in companies

  • People who are very good at technologies

  • People who are very good at what they do

 For most of us, the first two are usually not possible, but we all can manage to attain the third quality. That’s where deep work becomes significant. Neuroscientists have found that intense level of focus in isolated fields of work caused “myelin” to develop in relevant areas of the brain. Myelin is a white tissue that develops around our neurons  and allows brain cells to fire faster and cleaner. So in a sense, when we practice deep work, we upgrade our brains and allow specific brain circuits to fire more effortlessly and effectively. It also allows us to rapidly connect ideas and uncover creative solutions. It helps us to produce something standout amongst the noise and avoid being forgotten by the flood of information that we deal on a daily basis.

Shallow work vs deep work

Shallow work are such works that allows distractions like talking to colleague, listening to music, replying texts etc. We also call them multitasking. It decreases our productivity and wastes our time. Whereas, deep work is totally the opposite. Deep work increases our thinking capacity and increases concentration that boosts productivity and makes our work hard to replicate. The shallow work that we do today will be replaced by automation in near future and more people will be willing to do it in lesser payment since that’s easy to do with other tasks.

Attention Residue

Suppose, you are writing a novel with 100% attention. Suddenly, the phone beeps and you reply your friend. Then when you come back to the novel, you can come back with 70/80% of your attention. Rest of the attention stays with your phone. The more you multitask or get distracted, the more you lose your attention to the particular task and in the end, you can’t give your 100% which leads to an average output.

Four methods of deep work

Monastic deep work

Here, we completely separate ourselves from the daily or distracting environment and focus on our work. We have to isolate ourselves from the world until our goal is achieved.

Bimodal deep work

Here, we can conduct deep work for a particular period and live our usual life for the rest of the time. For example- J.K. Rowling used to separate herself into a hotel and for writing all day long and by the evening she used to join the regular world.

Rhythmic deep work

Here, we can fix a particular period (couple of hours) for deep work such as morning of the day to work without distraction and do our rest of the works at a regular basis.

Journalistic deep work

Here, people who are very busy with their schedule, can prepare themselves in such a way that whenever they get free time, they use it for deep work. Peter Shankman can be a great example for that: the author needed some distraction free isolated environment in his very busy schedule to write a manuscript for his book, he bought a round plane trip business ticket from USA to Tokyo. He got 30 hours without distraction in the air to complete his work. Here, he paid some expense but the output that he got, outweighed the expense.

We also need proper food and sleep for the brain to keep focusing on our work. Deep work requires serious will and patience to accomplish. And the result is always something special. So, if we want to be successful in this modern world where unemployment and overpopulation will take over the job sectors, deep work can lead us to the way of success and make you the best version of yourself at your work.

Here’s a quick book summary in Bangla…

Atomic Habits - Great book for software professionals

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We are starting a new series on great books for software professionals. The plan is to find books that help us become better professionals in the software development field. We plan to cover both technical books like programming, architecture, etc. and also non technical books that help with our people skills, improve motivation, that help us manage work and life better.

We start this series with one our favorite self help book - Atomic Habits by James Clear. A book that is for everyone. It shows in very simple and clear language with actionable steps how making small changes in our life leads to amazing improvements overall. This is a perfect book for software professionals as they deal with a huge amount of complexity in their work for which they have to constantly learn new things, manage their time better to improve and hone their skills. We’ve benefitted a lot from it and hope you will too.

Summary

When we want to achieve a goal, what do we do? We set the goal and work for it. But is that enough or does that truly lead to the goal that we want to achieve!

Here comes the big question, what does it take to truly achieve the goal? The simple answer is process. But when we hear about the process, we think of a long boring stuff that requires patience and persistence. So, is it really that tough?

What makes the difference between the winners and losers is action. When we set a goal and do nothing but watch the time passing by, in the long run become losers. On the other hand, who follow the system, make continuous small improvements, actually achieve the goal. Just like any particle is made of small atoms, remarkable results are also made of atomic habits. Habits that make the real difference. So, if we want to achieve it, we have to forget the goal and follow the system instead.

Changing Habits

Generally, habits can be changed in two ways- outcome based and identity based. Let’s draw a very practical example that can help us.
Suppose, someone wants to quit smoking, now if he is asked to smoke, he can possibly give this answer “Sorry, I am trying to quit smoking”. Now, let’s be honest, we all know it doesn’t help much. Here, the person is trying to improve but is not ready to change his identity. And this makes it harder for him to fight against the person who he thinks he is.

WHAT IF ….

He put a different answer instead? Like, “Sorry, I’m not a smoker”.

Anything that we do repeatedly, becomes our identity. Our every action votes for the person we want to be. Because no single action can change our identity. Rather the repeatability of that action can change our identity. When we confidently talk to someone, our identity as a public speaker gets recognized; when we influence others, our identity as leader gets recognized.  Hence, first we have to decide, what type of person we want to be and according to that, we have to keep voting on that identity. If you want to be a gentleman, then your behavior on the road, bus, train should be accordingly. Because we are changing our identity with our belief system.

Four actions

Our habits are generated through the following four steps-

·         Cue

·         Craving

·         Response

·         Reward

Cue is what reminds us of the reward. Craving pushes us towards get the reward and our response makes us to achieve the reward. And we want the reward because we will either have satisfaction from it or we can learn something. And if anything is insufficient among these 4 steps, changing any habit won’t be possible properly.

From these 4 steps, we can say that, we can follow 4 steps to build a book reading habit- 

  • Cue: This should be highly visible. If the books are visible, then we can easily notice that, yes, I have to read books.

  • Craving: Here we have to make the visibility attractive. For example- we can add bookmarks on the book so that we can easily know how much we have and where we had left.

  • Response: This should be easy to respond. So that, it doesn’t become hard for me to reach them.

  • Reward: Here we can choose the right book. So that, it brings a higher level of satisfaction for us.

Ways to remove bad habits-

·         Cue should be invisible

·         Craving should be unattractive

·         Response should be difficult

·         Reward should be unsatisfying

 

We can apply these 4 steps to remove any addiction like- smartphone addiction.

We usually imitate our habits from these three groups of people

The close, the many, the powerful. We are inspired by these three groups in general. Some people think that, they lack motivation. But actually, they lack clarity. They actually don’t know how to start things and how to proceed them. In real- environment is more important than motivation. For example- in case of buying a product, the things that are placed in front of a store, we tend to try them in the first place. So, in case of building a habit or leaving it, we have to setup proper environment for that.

People think that, self-controlled people are driven by their willpower and self-discipline. But actually they design their life in such a way that in order to be disciplined, they don’t need much of discipline. For example- if they think television is killing their time, then they will remove the television from their house.

And when we try to build a habit, we have to keep tracking that process that we are following and try to measure that progress.

To sum it up

We have to remember that, our brain loves challenges. That doesn’t mean it will like challenges that we can never achieve. For example- I love to play tennis. Now if I am put against Roger Federer, then very soon I will lose all my enthusiasm. And if I start to play against a little kid then I will get bored. So, the challenges should not be bored or overly challenging.

Atomic habits are the key to a massive change. So, rather than daydreaming, we have to develop a process and act on it.

Here’s a quick book review in Bangla…