Now that we’ve established why deep work matters and how to get better at it, it’s time to establish deep work routines.
We need to do this for three reasons:
- Deep work is a skill that requires consistent practice.
- Choosing to go deep is difficult in a world obsessed with the shallows.
- Going deep takes time.
Consistency
Engaging in deep work on a regular basis is the only way to train your brain to seriously focus on important work.1 Just as you cannot become an expert pianist or an excellent tennis player by just dabbling, you cannot become skilled at deep work by only doing it occasionally.
Furthermore, choosing to go deep in today’s world is increasingly difficult. What Nicholas Carr calls “the shallows” – the internet, television, email, etc. – pull on our attention, tempting us to forgo deep work in favor of shallow work and instant gratification.2
Thus, we need to use willpower strategically and turn going deep into an automatic habit, as Cal Newport explains:
“The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration. If you suddenly decide, for example, in the middle of a distracted afternoon spent Web browsing, to switch your attention to a cognitively demanding task, you’ll draw heavily from your finite willpower to wrest your attention away from the online shininess. Such attempts will therefore frequently fail. On the other hand, if you deployed smart routines and rituals—perhaps a set time and quiet location used for your deep tasks each afternoon—you’d require much less willpower to start and keep going.”1
So how do you establish a deep work routine?
Here are five principles that will make the habit stick:
1. Do Your Deep Work First
The first and most important principle of deep work routines is to go deep first. Don’t start your day in the shallows. Do your morning routine of self-care and then get straight to working deeply on your most important project.
Don’t check email. Don’t read the news. Stay in airplane mode.
WARNING: You will probably be, as I am, profoundly tempted to take a dip in the shallows before going deep. But you’ll regret it. I’ll just check email for a minute, you think to yourself, and 30 minutes later you find yourself with four browser tabs open, wondering where the time went. The shallows are like that.
Commit to starting your day by going deep. The shallows can wait. They’ll always be there, and you won’t have missed anything truly important.
Most people find that, once they’ve woken themselves up and done their self-care, their brains are at their best. So don’t devote the best mental hours of your day to unimportant work. Devote them to doing the difficult, deep work tasks that truly matter most. Don’t blow your best brainpower on unimportant work. Save that shallow work for those times of day when you’re feeling tired and lazy.
2. Schedule Deep Work Time Blocks
The second principle of deep work routines is scheduling the time.
Make appointments with yourself on your calendar or in your planner to go deep. Blocking out the time prevents you from scheduling shallow work, such as meetings, during the time of day when your mind is at its best.
Additionally, the act of making these appointments – especially if you write them out by hand in a planner each day – serves as a powerful reminder of your personal commitment to doing deep work.
Make these appointments as consistent as possible in order to install the habit faster. Set a schedule and stick to it. However, you don’t have to be perfect about your routine. Life will sometimes get in the way, and that’s alright. Remember: It’s not all or nothing, and everything counts.
3. Keep Track
As with all new behaviors, it helps to use an effort-tracker. By maintaining a record of how much time you spend in deep work, you’ll be reinforcing this new behavior. Plus, the tracker itself serves as another reminder of your personal commitment to going deep.
This also forces you to be honest with yourself about how much time you’re really spending in deep work.
4. Dress the Part
You can also tap into the power of the uniform effect by donning the same outfit every time you do deep work. It’s probably not wise to do deep work in your pajamas because that sends mixed signals to your brain about what your intentions are.
5. Work in Cycles
Don’t just grind for hours. You’ll burn out. As performance expert Jim Loehr advises, we need to “work hard” and “recover equally hard.”3 But more on recovery in a minute. Back to the mechanics of deep work cycles.
Your deep work sessions should be 30-90 minutes long, followed by 5-20 minutes of rest and recovery.
It will probably take 10 or 15 minutes of work just to get your brain into deep work mode. And since that’s where the good stuff happens, you’ll want to keep working for at least 20 minutes after you establish focus. That’s why 30 minutes is the minimum.
But there’s also an upper limit. I’ve found that after about 90 minutes, my mind starts to falter. Deep work is draining, so you need to take breaks. Additionally, even experienced practitioners of deep work find that more than four hours of it per day is difficult, so you shouldn’t expect yourself to spend an entire workday going deep.1
Okay, now that we’ve covered what deep work routines look like, let’s dig a little deeper (sorry) into this topic. When thinking about deep work routines, there are two important truths to keep in mind: 1) going deep takes time, and 2) deep work requires deep rest.
Going Deep Takes Time
Most of the time, your mind cannot instantly go deep. It’s not enough to just choose a task you care about and eliminate all distractions. You also have to stay with the task long enough to actually get into a groove with it.
It is possible to rapidly enter a state of deep work, but this is not the norm. In my experience, this only happens when you have 1) trained your brain to do deep work, and 2) previously spent a great deal of time in deep work on the relevant project. For example, I’ve been going deep in order to write for many years, and I have already spent several hours writing about this topic, so getting myself into deep-work mode today in order to pick up where I’d left off wasn’t very difficult.
This is similar to the way you cannot normally get into flow with a task instantaneously. It often takes several minutes for your mind to enter the flow state. But if you’ve already spent a lot of time in flow on a particular task (or hobby, such as skiing), you can enter flow as soon as you begin.
Understanding that going deep takes time is critical because, if you’re anything like me, you’ll be impatient when you first begin the work. The benefits of doing deep work – better understanding, more creativity, greater output, flow – don’t show up immediately, so you’ll be tempted to bail and go back to the shallows.
Don’t.
Stick with it. Don’t just sit down and write for five minutes. Stay put. Don’t open your browser or check your phone. Keep trying.
The reason it doesn’t work right away is that you’re not completely focused on the task yet. Remember “attentional residue?” As we’ve discussed before, when you switch from one task to another, part of your mind lingers on the previous task, making it difficult to fully focus on the new task.1 So if you want your brain to put all its resources toward the new task, you have to stick with it for a while.
This is really another version of convincing your brain to care. Just as your brain won’t devote resources to forming memories of what you’re learning if you don’t put in some work, your brain also won’t devote resources to deep focus if you don’t put in the time.
Struggling through the first ten minutes of a deep work session feeling unfocused and unmotivated sends a signal to your brain that you really care about what you’re working on. More often than not, your brain will hear this signal and respond by generating both motivation and focus. (For more on generating your own motivation, read this article.)
Sticking with deep work takes patience – something most of us, myself included, are lacking. But since your brain can change, patience can be cultivated.
Deep Work Requires Deep Rest
Deep work is cognitively demanding – it takes a lot of energy – so you need strong routines for rest and recovery in order to have the energy to go deep.
Think about the last time you didn’t get enough sleep for a few nights in a row. How hard was it to concentrate on serious, challenging work on day three? Exactly. You need rest.
So, as I said earlier, you need to take breaks, but you also need to make sure they’re real breaks.
What are real breaks?
Great question.
Real breaks are periods of time you spend away from mental stimulation. This could mean taking a nap, going for a walk, or just sitting and staring out the window. It could mean working on a jigsaw puzzle, drawing, or listening to some chill music. Exercise can be a good mental break, and it’s really good for your brain.
There are lots of ways to take a real break, but there’s one thing they all have in common: They don’t include the shallows.
The shallows are exhausting. So while it’s tempting to spend all your downtime surfing the web and binging Netflix, and it’s tempting to stay engaged with email right up until bedtime, these choices are actively harmful to your ability to do deep work, as Newport explains:
“Decades of work from multiple different subfields within psychology all point toward the conclusion that regularly resting your brain improves the quality of your deep work. When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done. Your average e-mail response time might suffer some, but you’ll more than make up for this with the sheer volume of truly important work produced during the day by your refreshed ability to dive deeper than your exhausted peers.”1
It’s not that you should never spend time in the shallows. It’s that you shouldn’t spend most of your downtime there. And you shouldn’t go there immediately after your deep work sessions.
Furthermore, the shallows rewire your brain to make going deep more difficult. When we have a bit of downtime, most of us don’t use it to rest. As Jim Kwik noted in Limitless, “we pull out our phones and train our distraction muscles.”4
All the downtime in our lives – all the little moments of potential boredom that we experience – are actually quite valuable. Unfortunately, we don’t use them to allow our minds to wander or even to recover from stress. We’d be healthier and happier if we did.
On the small scale, you need to avoid contaminating your mind with the shallows between work sessions. If you want to continue doing deep work after your break, make sure that your break doesn’t involve more stimulation (TV, internet, smartphone, etc.). That way, when you go back to work, you won’t be bringing attentional residue with you to the task, and you’ll get into deep work – and hopefully flow – more quickly.
On the larger scale, we need to set aside periods of time in which we don’t work at all and in which we don’t play in the shallows. Luckily, one such time is available to us each night: sleep.
As long as possible before you go to bed, put your phone in airplane mode and steer clear of email, social media, and the news. You don’t want to be shaking the snow globe right before bedtime because tomorrow’s deep work routine actually starts tonight.
1 Newport, Cal. Deep Work (Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World). Grand Central Publishing, 2016.
2 Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.
3 Loehr, James E. The New Toughness Training for Sports: Mental Emotional Physical Conditioning from One of the World’s Premier Sports Psychologists. Plume, 1995.
4 Kwik, Jim. Limitless: Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, and Unlock Your Exceptional Life. Hay House, 2020.