Every Sunday morning I go to the Starbucks about five minutes from my apartment, grab my venti caramel macchiato and mentally start mapping out how I want to write out my blog post for the week while I wait in line. I got home, opened my laptop and it’s almost as if I sounded the alarm to my upstairs neighbors that I was ready to get deep into my work because they immediately began blasting their go-to tejano music and stomping their feet around as they kicked off their end of the week clean-up party. They usually start blasting music at about 6pm on Sundays, which is long after I’ve finished my posts. I looked at the blank Google Doc in front of me and sighed. There went my morning of full concentration. I called my boyfriend, who lives in the same complex as I do, but on the third floor in the building next to mine and asked to use his office area for the morning. He happily agreed so I packed my Macbook and notes and started walking across the street. While walking over I chuckled to myself because I was doing exactly what Cal Newport said in “Deep Work” that Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling did while writing Deathly Hallows, the last book in her Harry Potter series. In her desire to fully concentrate and pump out a book that would be satisfying her fans, she was distracted by her surroundings so she booked a hotel and finished it there. While I know I can’t otherwise compare myself to one of the most successful authors of our time, the idea of desiring a deep level of concentration is beyond relatable.
We’re on module four this week, which means I’ve been working on practicing deep work for about a month now, but even then, it’s been a struggle. Like Rowling, my desire for uninterrupted stretches of time continues to be just out of reach as I work to balance between my day-to-day in both my professional and personal life. This has been a goal of mine for years, but in a world of distractions, it being tough is definitely an understatement. I went to school for broadcast journalism for my undergraduate degree, during which I spent my final two years as a breaking news reporter and digital producer at my local CBS-affiliate station. During those two years, I was a full time student trying to learn everything I could about the practice of journalism, while actually getting to apply what I learned in school in the newsroom during my night shift from 2 p.m. to midnight, six days a week.
In the second part of Newport’s book, he talks about the “The Journalistic Approach of Deep Work Scheduling.” He says the name is a nod to the way journalists are trained to switch quickly to writing mode at any given moment due to the profession’s deadline-driven nature. I had never related to a chapter more. He argues that it’s difficult to create focused chunks of time for true deep work when working in such a field, but not impossible. When I was still in school, I didn’t sleep a lot, and it didn’t help that I was also the news editor for my university’s newspaper and news director for the student-run TV station, but I found it, and those hours of pure concentration were relieving from the fast-paced environment of breaking news. I had to find pockets of time throughout my day; in between classes, before work, after extracurriculars, and not waste them. It was then I was able to be productive and accomplish everything I needed to— from studying for exams to working on 20-page research papers to producing a weekly newscast and newspaper article every week.
What’s different to me now than it was back when I got my Bachelor’s degree in 2015 is my cell phone. I didn’t rely on it or use it as much as I do now. TikTok wasn’t a thing, I wasn’t as invested in mindless cooking shows on YouTube as I am now. I had fewer distractions and therefore had one less obstacle to carve out time for. On Wednesday for instance, just after I had finalized my Trello board for my project management assignment, I grabbed my phone to download the app to ensure I’d always have access to my board. While it was downloading from the app store, my phone buzzed. It was a Snapchat notification from my sister on our family group chat. Without even thinking, I clicked on the banner, saw the Snap, replied to her, then started viewing a few other stories on my Snapchat Discover page. What started out as simply downloading an app for school turned into a nearly 20-minute inadvertent social media break. With this in mind, it’s no surprise Adam Greenfield calls the smartphone “the signature artifact of our age” in an excerpt from Radical Technologies titled “A Sociology of the Smartphone.” These glowing rectangles that dictate our lives have become such an indispensable mediator of where we are in time, I’m not sure I would have had the same experience trying to accomplish everything I did back in 2015.
So, the question now is how can we not only create a space for deep work, but keep it long enough to be productive both momentarily and long term? Everyone’s work-school-home life balances are different so there’s no one way to answer that. Our priorities are constantly shifting, so we owe it to ourselves to evaluate them constantly and create the opportunities for our own growth through deep work. So if it takes having to walk across the street to my boyfriend’s place on the third floor and lock myself in a room to block off the time I need and fill it with meaningful work whenever possible, I might as well keep my walking shoes nearby.
References:
- Newport, C. (2016). Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (1st ed.). Grand Central Publishing.
- Greenfield, A. (2017, June). A Sociology of the Smartphone (Radical Technologies). Longreads. https://longreads.com/2017/06/13/a-sociology-of-the-smartphone/.