Review- Deep Work, Cal Newport
Thought-Provoking Things 2021
Looking back at the books, podcasts, and media I encountered this year that I’ve caught myself thinking about again and again…
Before I dive into this next thought-provoking thing, I beg your patience while I indulge in sharing several life experiences that set the stage for what follows.
On the morning of my last law school final of my first year in law school, I vividly remember sitting at the kitchen table in our Chicago apartment, trying to force dry toast into my nervous stomach contemplating my upcoming exam and mentally drilling through flash cards and case names. My wife was thirty-eight weeks pregnant and in the “hot zone”, with a baby that could be coming into our lives seemingly at any minute. Thinking I didn’t look stressed enough, my wife got a plastic water bottle, put it under her skirt, and then squeezed it with her thighs pretending that her water had broken. After sixty excruciating seconds looking at the floor, then back at her, then back at the floor, then back at her again, I determined she was joking. We are still married, and welcomed our son three weeks later.
By the time I graduated law school, my son was two years old and it started becoming clear that his speech delay was not just “boys learning differently”, but that he would be needing extra support. After taking the bar exam, I went to work at a downtown Chicago firm. I understood that my chosen career path would be demanding, that there would be late nights and many weekends spent supporting clients. While I was willing to do the work, I was apprehensive about how to balance my career and home life. Unlike many of my peers, I was already well into parenthood, and a parent to a child with additional needs to boot, so I couldn’t simply throw several years into the grinder as a junior associate at a big law firm–prioritizing work above all other pursuits.
Thankfully, during this time I had stumbled across Clayton Christensen’s great book “How Will You Measure Your Life” where he recounts facing a similar dilemma early in his career. Christensen’s solution was a bright-line rule of not working for one day each week, in his case Sunday.
After mulling it over and unsure whether I wasn’t handicapping my career, I decided to follow Christensen’s suggestion. I told all the partners in my practice group that I had religious and family commitments that meant I would not be available to work on Sundays. From midnight on Saturday to midnight on Sunday, I would not be available. I landed on this approach for three reasons.
First, while my time with family might otherwise be limited, I wanted my partner to be able to depend on consistent time where she could know she could have a break or we could have family time. Six days a week, the firm would basically have full reign on my schedule, but one day a week, we wouldn’t have to be juggling work. Sometimes Sundays were fun-filled family adventures to the beach or Maggie Daley park downtown. Sometimes, Sundays meant being on duty as a single parent while my wife enjoyed a morning with friends, and sometimes it involved us blitz-cleaning the apartment and attacking the chore list to keep life going.
Second, the approach was easy to remember and had clear boundaries. It was hard enough to make this decision at all, and I knew that if I employed a more flexible approach, that it would be very difficult in the pressure of the moment to keep the commitment. I didn’t want to have to relitigate this decision again and again, because I knew that I’d eventually cave to the pressure.
Third, I wanted to force myself to plan ahead. So often work tasks, like goldfish, expand to take up the amount of time given to them. Knowing myself, if I had work that needed to be accomplished over the weekend, it would likely bleed through Saturday and Sunday, even if with a more disciplined approach it could have been accomplished in just one day. Aside from outside pressures from partners and clients, I didn’t want to battle my inner sloth to put off work and ruin my weekend.
Once I had told my partner mentor and group heads about my commitment, it was greeted with a little bit of bewilderment and some bemusement, but to their great credit, they were accepting and respectful. I was very grateful that there were several practicing Jews who observed Shabbat in the group so it was easy to frame my commitment as a similar practice. It was actually quite convenient that another associate consistently was out from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. There were several times that we would tag-team for each other on projects to ensure our clients had consistent coverage.
While there were times that my commitments were inconvenient to myself and my teammates, I would say that I absolutely made the right decision. We are a culture addicted to work, and constant connectivity comes at a significant cost to our mental health and our relationships. I believe there are significant diminishing returns associated with additional hours spent checking emails and monitoring communications, but in a competitive landscape facing pressure from a group, the Nash equilibrium can settle in a sub-optimal space: All of us working all the time.
I was amazed to see that my decisions didn’t just benefit me and my family, but also had broader impacts on our team culture. I noticed other associates felt empowered to sign off more and told me it was because I. Once one person takes time off, then others feel free to voice their own needs without feeling like they are letting the team down or that they appear non-committed.
In our culture, family demands and religious commitments are at least somewhat understood and respected. But it shouldn’t just be that only those who have parenting responsibilities should feel empowered to step away from their phones or the office. If I didn’t have those commitments, then I’m almost certain that I would not have implemented boundaries for myself, and I would have suffered greatly because of it.
I have since left private practice and now work in-house in an environment with fewer demands for urgent night and weekend work. But particularly in this past year, as Covid has shattered all boundaries between work and home, I have seen a dramatic increase in the amount of work and monitoring that happens outside the office. If the future of work appears to be something outside of the physical confines of an office building, then we need to institute more cultural boundaries and habit structures to prevent work bleeding into all aspects of our attention.
To help with this reset of habits, I really enjoyed Cal Newport’s “Deep Work”, in which he recounts how the modern workplace is structured around too much time spent in what he terms “the shallows”, i.e. doing menial tasks that really do not contribute to effective or “Deep” work. Newport offers compelling evidence of the diminishing returns of an “always-on” mentality and the need instead for distraction-free periods to do cognitively-demanding work regularly punctuated by time away to rest and recharge. He offers several rigorous strategies to wrest back control of our schedules that proved very helpful to me this past year. If you are working from home for the foreseeable future then this is a must-read.
One of my favorite takeaways from Deep Work was reading about a 2009 study published in the Harvard Business Review by Leslie Perlow and Jessica Porter, identifying the benefits of regular scheduled disconnection from work. Working in conjunction with the prestigious Boston Consulting Group, an environment very similar in intensity and rigor of a modern law firm, Perlow and Porter required team consultants to sign off regularly for one day in the middle of the week. The requirements were strict. Over a five-month period, during the 24-hour “day off” consultants were locked out of BCG’s internal systems and were told to shut off their phones and were forbidden from sending email. They conducted over ten such experiments with different teams. The study found that experiment participants reported higher levels of career satisfaction, work-life balance, and more open team communication. The benefits were not just isolated to the team participants, with teams reporting greater value delivery to their clients.
One participating project manager summarized the experience, “It’s a way to open up a conversation that everyone on your team wants to have, which is ‘How can we work smarter? How can we work together more often, and how can we make sure we deliver without sacrificing work/life balance?… the experiment not only allows you to talk more, but it forces you to do so weekly. In the end, the process creates efficiencies and promotes work/life balance — without sacrificing anything on the client side.”
These passages spoke to me because I had lived my own version of it. If you need further convincing to take time for yourself and others outside of work and want to know how to better utilize the time you do spend at work, then Deep Work might help you get there.
