Many of my professional connections had been talking about this book, and a former colleague was a champion of the concepts presented in Deep Work (also by Cal Newport). Given my role as an Agile subject matter expert at Lirio, reading this book is part of my self-guided professional development. Many of the solutions come from the software industry, and even software shops aren’t immune to the problems presented here.
Keywords: asynchronous messaging, attention, attention budget, automation, autonomy, capacity planning, design sprint, Extreme Programming, Frederik Taylor, Getting Things Done, human cognition, information asymmetry, information theory, interruptions, Kanban, knowledge work, locus of control, multitasking, office hours, outsourcing, Peter Drucker, process aversion, productivity, protocols, Scrum, short emails, social loafing, specialization vs. generalization, support vs. specialist, work execution, workflow, written vs. non-verbal
For a chapter-by-chapter summary, check out my extended summary here.
From Neil Postman’s “Five Things We Need to Know about Technological Change”… “Technological change is not additive; it is ecological… A new medium does not add something; it changes everything. In the year 1500, after the printing press was invented, you did not have old Europe plus the printing press. You had a different Europe.”
Hyperactive Hive Mind – workflow centered around conversation fueled by unstructured and unscheduled messages delivered digitally (e.g., email, Slack)
Issues with email and other asynchronous communication:
- This style of communication – volume, back-and-forth style, irrelevant information – induces the hyperactive hive mind.
- Our brains work better in serial than parallel.
- We’re socially wired for 1:1 communication, or at best 1:few.
- Text-based communication dampens other communication channels we’re hard-wired for.
- Because email reduces the friction of communication, we have induced demand to communicate even more.
- Delays are unpredictable and sometimes unmanageable / invisible.
- We build cycles of responsiveness (i.e., a fast response gets you more requests).
- Communication at scale is required in the modern workforce, yet our biological hardware is ill equipped to manage this well.
- Knowledge work requires autonomy; it also creates two streams of effort: the work, managing work.
Autonomy is required for knowledge work (i.e., tasks that can’t easily be broken down into to sequences followed without thinking). Most people focus on work execution; managers need to focus on workflow – how work is identified, assigned, coordinated, and reviewed (i.e., the structure of the work).
Limit what you commit to, and deliver on what you do commit to.
Combining several available tools such as Kanban (Trello) and Getting Things Done help manage requests and make information visible to requesters without endless emails.
Principles
- Attention Capital – The productivity of the knowledge sector can be significantly increased if we identify workflows that better optimize the human brain’s ability to sustainably add value to information.
- Process – Introducing smart production processes to knowledge work can dramatically increase performance and make the work much less draining.
- Protocol – Designing rules that optimize when and how coordination occurs in the workplace is a pain in the short term but can result in significantly more productive operation in the long term.
- Specialization – In the knowledge sector, working on fewer things, but doing each thing with more quality and accountability, can be the foundation for significantly more productivity.