| One thing I wish Cal Newport's book had done better was to explain ways to be better at managing Shallow Work. Deep Work competes for time with Shallow Work. Therefore, if you want to have time for Deep Work, you need to either A) Do less shallow work. B) Do shallow work more effectively. Or schedule it more effectively. ------- How possible is option A? Well, what is Shallow Work and why does it matter. Some examples of Shallow Work off the top of my head: 1) Phone-Interviewing people to work for your employer. 2) Looking at Sentry and Dead Mans Snitch and seeing if any of the exceptions reported from your backend this week are actually real problems that should be investigated. 3) Editing the notes you took at a meeting so that you can send them out to attendees. 4) Writing a response to a well-structured question which a junior engineer emailed you about a task which you delegated to them. 5) Creating and sending out a doodle poll to pick a restaurant to eat at before contra dance. 6) Scheduling a time to talk to your father who lives 5 time zones away. 7) Filling in a PDF listing your bank accounts to report to the US Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network by April 15th. Each of these is backed by a responsibility -- either you're being paid to maintain a system or relationship for your employer or you are doing something to keep your social life running. You can dial back that responsibility, but that does have consequences. If nobody organizes pizza night, then you don't see your friends in real life and you end up scrolling through facebook out of a vague sense of loneliness. So there is a certain amount of Shallow Work that needs to get done if you have certain goals or want to avoid particular sadnesses. -------- How possible is option B? How possible is it to do Shallow Work so that it interferes less with Deep Work? For #1, you can push phone interviews to the beginning or end of the day...when the currently-employed will find it easier to get time to interview. For #2, you can establish a team habit to triage your Sentry and Dead Mans Snitch dashboards to Inbox Zero, that way you only need to glance at them and you don't need to load anything into your working memory. For #3... actually I'm not sure what is a good way to be more effective at this. Any tips? For #4... also not sure. For #5, you can establish a default restaurant and go there every time. For #6, you can have a default time every week. For #7, there's nothing to be done. It is annoying and Adobe Acrobat is the worst. -------- What techniques do you use to be skilled at Shallow Work or to at least get it out of the way of Deep Work? |
So if shallow work is your weak spot where you'd like some improvements, then all the classics like David Allen's Getting Things Done or perhaps Covey's 7 Habits of highly effective people would be relevant.