Deep work. Essentialism in asynchronous culture

Your level as an engineer should be based on how much deep work you can do without screwing the pooch. The best engineers can be left alone for months and be sure to return with something cogent. The most junior will be required to have daily design check ins and regular code reviews as they go from start to finish on a project whose problem space needs to be well understood and mapped out before any deep work begins.<p>It is very damaging to an organisation when someone who cannot create understandable solutions is given the deep work breathing space to go crazy. It is a difficult but important thing to find out about candidates &#x2F; probationary employees sooner rather than later. It’s important to keep a stash of pre-baked project ideas on hand so that you can use them to assess newcomers to the team, especially if you only have three months to figure out if they are able to meet your expectations before being confirmed as a full time employee.

I agree with the main point here, but one thing that has always puzzled me is how to think about what might be called deep collaborative work. Most meetings, especially the status-y kind, are manifestly not &quot;deep&quot; but some of the most intense work that I have ever done has been with one or a small handful of collaborators.

a common trap in &quot;deep work only&quot; teams is local optimisation. while interruptions should be minimized and batched, the overall flow of cards and a low average cycle time requires focused collaboration and regular slack time to resolve blockers. Otherwise, important issues spend more time waiting than getting completed. Individual deep work with low collaboration while more important work is piling up would be an antipattern.

&gt;This approach is based on pushing information rather than pulling it<p>This is really what&#x27;s at the heart of almost every discussion regarding communication. Many if not most places introduce polling rituals as a one-size-fits-all solution, whereas many people work best pushing information and having everyone else react to it. It is no different than event-driven structure vs polling.<p>Every time you create more &#x27;polling&#x27; systems and push some claim (the infamous &#x27;new employees won&#x27;t speak up without standups&#x27; comes to mind), there is less pressure to teach them asynchronous ways of working. Every time some manual procedure is pushed as a fix, the alternative of an automatic procedure is pushed aside because &#x27;costs too much money&#x27; and &#x27;look, manual works, communication!&#x27;.

I really like this concise consolidation of these ideas. In my opinion, both Deep Work and Essentialism — like so many books in that genre — could&#x27;ve been pamphlets. It Doesn&#x27;t Have to be Crazy at Work was pretty jam-packed with different ideas, though.

&gt; Monastic and bimodal modes are rather reserved for professions that can manage work without intensive communication with people, like writers, scientists, researchers, etc.<p>Many or most scientists are academics. Communication time dominates the job of a professor. Teaching, and the invisible job of running a university takes between 1&#x2F;3 and 2&#x2F;3 of a 40 hour week. Both of these are based around strict schedules, so the actual schedule in a non-sabbatical, non-buyout semester ends up journalistic or approaching rhythmic at best.<p>Thus the deep work slots are very precious. I did most of mine after dinner, or after kids&#x27; bed time. A professor I respect, well known for his reliable productivity, did a couple of hours of email at 2am for &gt;20 years to create time in the work day for the real work.<p>Professor is a wonderful job, but making time to be a productive scientist is a constant struggle. This is why graduate students feel the science is delegated to them.

As a low-level employee, my noise-cancelling headset helps me way more when it comes to concentration than any how-to book on “deep work” could.

For a rhythmic workday, you can try using Pomodoro with other people at the same time like here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;remoteyo.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;remoteyo.com&#x2F;</a>

The article is right: Deep work hates interruptions (including everything synchronous)<p>However, the kind of rigid scheduling it proposes goes against the freedom deep work loves. It is not the lazy&#x2F;mindless kind of freedom I’m referring to, but the freedom from over-quantified environments : IMO it is counterproductive to aim at always rigidly controlling that &quot;in the zone&quot; experience.

What works for me is a rhythmic schedule but that concentrates all shallow things in the morning and deep work in the afternoon. I&#x27;m also more productive in the afternoon evening, so depending on your inclinations the opposite may work, deep work in the morning and shallow the rest of the day. The challenge is scheduling calls in the morning only.

All people in a company need to do deep work to make it count.<p>Because if you are able to concentrate and find a solution for a problem, you also need other people to concentrate and understand your solution.

Deep Work is not a concept that was popularized by that guy. If he popularized anything it was a new name for an existing concept.