Deep work isn’t just about setting aside time in bigger blocks, or about putting down the phone and turning off notifications—though those are good places to start.
Deep work is about the qualities of this sacred time you’ve set aside.
Think of the adjectives you’d use to describe deep work: focused, calm, exploratory, curious, lateral, creative, settled, playful, generative, spacious.
While there’s some overlap with how we’d describe our “non-deep” work— with words like efficient, bounded, clear, pace, and decisive—this overlap is probably small.
When moving between the two types of work, I sometimes struggle with how I experience time.
In regular work, time comes in small(er) increments. It exists as a helpful constraint to drive clarity and decisions. I’ve trained myself to get a lot done in 10 or 15 minutes, and that feels both comfortable and normal.
For deep work, I create blocks of time, but that’s just the beginning. My job is to hold the space I’ve created: the larger block of time is permission, so when I enter that larger space, I have to adhere to a different set of rules. I’m not checking the clock. I’m not looking for efficiency. I’m not thinking about what came last or what comes next. I’m not judging the success of the last moment against any criteria other than presence and engagement. This is a big shift, and it can be difficult to maintain.
Paying attention to how time feels is a good clue for whether we’re “in it” or not.
For “regular” work, time keeps us on task. It is a metronome that drives forward progress. Quality and quantity play together, and both are equally important.
For deep work, time is a buffer that protects us, creating the space we need for exploration and for leaps. The quantity of our insights and decisions does not matter; what matters is quality. Our job is to force ourselves to slow down, to move deliberately, to sit with what we’ve come up with and keep asking “is this good enough?” Our goal, for a block of deep work, is one great outcome, not 5 or 15 small but (only) good outcomes.
Here’s a hint: if you’re 10 minutes into a deep work task and you notice you’re 10 minutes in, you probably haven’t fully shifted gears yet.
