The Answer to Being Happier and More Productive is Deep Work

The 21st Century has a lot of wonderful things despite comments and criticisms. Technology is advancing at rates that were unimaginable decades ago, extreme poverty is being eradicated day by day, and diplomacy is starting to be the main way to solve conflicts (of course, all of this from a holistic perspective). However, we’re missing one thing: happiness (or meaning, technically speaking). The solution, Cal Newport argues, lies in Deep Work.

Some distressing news can be found in the conclusions of a recent Nature study titled “Accelerating dynamics of collective attention”. It seems that the global or collective attention span is becoming smaller as time goes by. This has been concluded after finding that, for example, Twitter trending topics don’t last as long as they used to last. It seems that people are consuming more and more media online, and collective attention hasn’t been as fragmented as it is today.

And you can confirm this idea yourself. How many hours do you spend on social media? How many hours do you spend checking your phone for new messages, or checking new emails in your inbox at your work office? It seems that this is not only making us less productive and more distracted overall but also, it is making us less happy.

You see, what we really need in life is not happiness (that’s why I mentioned “meaning”). According to the famous Psychology Professor Jordan Peterson, as he mentioned on a recent interview: “It’s a luxury to pursue what makes you happy, but it’s a moral obligation to pursue what you find meaningful.”

Meaning is what makes us want to live. Meaning is what makes us want to leave bed each morning and face life head on every day. Thus, it seems reasonable to pursue meaning instead of happiness (and really, who wants to be happy all the time?). In life, we need to experience everything, but meaning should always be present.

This is where Cal Newport’s “Deep Work” book enters into the stage.

By focusing our attention on shallow tasks (i.e., tasks that do not add new value to the world and are easily replicable by other people that don’t need qualifications or expertise to carry them out), we’re losing meaning and also confidence in ourselves, since this is clearly not moving us towards where we really want to be (to our individual goals in life, whatever they may be).

This is hard to explain to anyone because people can easily fall prey to the idea that by focusing on shallow tasks we’re outputting more, we’re producing more. This is, according to Newport, an illusion, basically.

In our modern economy, specifically at our “knowledge work” (as Newport puts it), it’s becoming increasingly difficult to measure how beneficial a certain tool is. That’s why everything we can complete, as small as it may be, is absolutely positive to us. Sending an email? Success. Finishing a PowerPoint presentation? You’re killing it. However, this is not adding new value either to the world nor to your life (he calls this lack of an appropriate measure the “metric black hole”).

Newport makes the case for why it is important to dedicate more time to Deep Work. Deep Work basically consists of devoting uninterrupted blocks of time to do a difficult task that requires 100% of your attention. Work that is done Deeply is characterized by the fact that it cannot be easily replicated. You really have to exhaust all of your mental resources and push yourself to the limit to accomplish the task at hand. By doing so, Newport says, we can start finding meaning again in our lives and be happier on average as a result.

He explains through different examples and anecdotes that famous people like Bill Gates, Carl Jung, Teddy Roosevelt, and many more, have achieved success in their lives thanks to Deep Work. He even puts himself as an example of how Deep Work can transform a person’s life! After dedicating most of his time to Deep Work instead of the shallow one, he mentions that now he finishes doing work-related stuff by 5 PM and that he rarely works on weekends. Also, his number of published peer-reviewed papers has grown exponentially since then.

You may have felt this before in your life. You’re looking at your Twitter timeline or your Instagram feed, and refreshing it continuously, and, although you know you’re not doing work at that particular moment (maybe you’re avoiding it), you feel guilty or empty. The main reason for this is that we humans are made to be busy doing important things. We are made to produce important things and to push our bodies and our minds to produce great things. Doing otherwise means misaligning this divine concept for something mundane.

We also need structure. Most of us cannot endure long periods of uncertainty and ambiguity. That’s why, even when you take a full day off from work or from your studies, and you haven’t figured out what exactly are you going to spend your time in, and start doing random things haphazardly (like looking at your Instagram feed), can feel empty or even depressing at times. Newport argues that even in those days you should have a structure and that it is worth it to spend time doing something less shallow like reading a book. And no, you’re wrong, this can be as refreshing as sleeping and has the capability to really restore your willpower! Another advice Newport gives on his book, based on lots of studies, is that you should visit nature from time to time. For some reason, this is highly effective to fill our willpower and make us more productive later when we have to devote our attention to some task.

But, in summary: we humans were made for more. We were made to produce value and great things, and we’re totally capable of doing so if we start applying Deep Work today. Not only are we going to be happier with our individual work, but also, we’re going to become more expert and smarter at what we do, thus, increasing the chances of finding a better job later, achieving our goals in life, and ultimately becoming winners in an economy that fosters distraction, but values deep work more nowadays.

And all of us can do this, because, as Venezuelan intellectual Arturo Uslar Pietri once said: “Excellence is not something of the elite… It is that each one of us, at their level, strives to be the best that can be”. It just requires persistence, confidence, and, most of all, concentration!