Cal Newport

I have to write complicated reports.

I'm a professor looking on research.

Then that's part of the activities that you will be scheduling.

So I don't think she's giving a referendum on the importance or lack of importance of depth.

But I like the second point is also worth talking about where Tyler says, are knowledge workers in general over-romanticizing this idea of a maker schedule, of having long stretches of time that isn't interrupted?

Well, here's what I think is relevant here.

If you're not used to depth, if you're not used to deep work and you just clear out a schedule, right?

then yeah, you might find that you have over-romanticized it and you don't really know what to do with all this time and it doesn't necessarily make your professional life better.

What I recommend people do is they start with specificity.

When it comes to deep work, schedule, like a meeting or appointment, deep work on your calendar for specific deep objectives, not just I've protected all day.

But you say, here's two and a half hours I'm going to spend trying to get a draft of this report done.

This afternoon, I blocked off 90 minutes to specifically work on trying to –

run down this bug in this computer program I'm working on.

So schedule specific deep work at first.

Now what's going to happen is you're going to learn a lot about depth and how much time and concentration it requires and what schedule is best for it as you do this exercise.

Sometimes you'll learn for a certain task that the amount of time you put aside was too much, and for a lot of times you'll be butting up against the boundaries of the time you put aside, like, man, I could have used a lot more.

This is where you learn

This type of hyper-specific time blocking is where you learn about the reality of your brain and the type of things you do.

This knowledge can then be deployed going forward into simpler heuristics.

Like you might realize, okay, the best way for me to get this, this, and this done is to keep my whole morning clear of meetings.