Photo credit: midoriya21
In a recent Deep Questions podcast, Cal Newport talks about general and specific training for deep work. His idea is we should improve our general skills for concentration and focus by doing such activities as reading, taking walks, and enjoying periods during the day without stimulation or distraction. We should also practice doing the specific challenging work within our particular field. Cal uses the analogy of a triathlete training generally for fitness and training specifically for swimming, biking, and running. Only by doing both the general and specific training do we maximize our ability to do deep work.
But Cal appears to discount — or at least quickly rush past — the notion that deep work requires a similar general foundation as sports. Here are five similar prerequisites to top performance:
- Sleep. Adequate sleep is required for difficult cognitive tasks. There’s simply no way around this. Matthew Walker convinced me of this in his wonderful book Why We Sleep. If you don’t get enough sleep, forget about important work.
- Nutrition. Like sleep, we need fuel to operate our brains and run other systems. We need adequate amounts of the right nutrients. We also need to avoid processed “food,” which interferes with the healthy functioning of our endocrine system.
- Physical well-being. The healthier we are physically, the better we function mentally. We get the most done when we feel good. When I’ve had the flu or food poisoning, for instance, it was hard to read anything beyond easy fiction, and seemingly impossible to work. Feeling even mildly sick interferes with our ability to do our best work.
- Space. As many have rediscovered during shelter-in-place, we need physical (and aural) space to work.
- Mental ability. We need the ability to reach mental states of concentration and focus. While this resembles the general training Cal talks about, I’m thinking of something even more fundamental, like a mindfulness practice.[^1]
To extend Cal’s sports analogy, athletes need sufficient sleep, nutrition, and other mental and physical support to train. Actually, training without support is counterproductive — causing the body to breakdown, rather than build up.
But mental athletes need this support too. It’s also counterproductive to push ourselves cognitively without adequate support. This leads to stress, burnout, and frustration.
As a bonus, attending to our fundamental needs provides benefits beyond the ability to do deep work.
And these needs are achievable for most of us, in the sense that we either already know (or can learn) how to improve our sleep, nutrition, and so on. I’m not saying it’s easy to do these things, just that they aren’t a huge mystery either.
So, if you’re struggling to do deep work, is a fundamental need going unmet?
[^1]: Cal advocates “productive meditation.” He also recently pondered whether mindful mediation is a palliative to not living deeply, the implication being that a meditation practice is not so useful when we otherwise live well. While meditation can be healing (it can also open up old wounds and exacerbate existing problems), I would argue that mediation builds concentration skills and in other ways makes it easier to live deeply. There are other reasons to mediate too, of course.