During the C.H.B. Seminar Series this year
you will be taken to the cutting edge

of science every week except this week so
this week I'm going to

continue to continue my annual tradition
of giving a non-technical seminar and

talking about some of the things that we
can all do to help make the research work

that we do better before I get into what
this title is all about though I want to

make a couple of announcements and so I'd
like to welcome a couple of new arrivals

professor you hung who is right here
in the middle so welcome to you thank.

You Hong is an assistant professor who
has already had some faculty experience

at the University of Illinois is
joining us she has a joint appointment

between chemical engineering and chemical
engineering so we're very glad to have you

here also with us here today is John
blaze like this John over there thanks.

John will be joining us as an assistant
professor in the spring and

you can see in this photo he's not smiling
that's because he's not at Georgia Tech

yet so so in the spring he'll be here most
have a different crowd of him smiling

I want to highlight a couple of successes
in the school over the past few months or

so the department of energy and

energy front here Research Center
that's headed by Professor Walton and

with the president of myself as
deputy directors has been funded for

a second phase so we've received another
eleven billion dollars from D.O.A.

this is the result of many many people
in this room actually contributing

work to the center and so that's
a great success and in a similar vein

Professor Hong Lewis the co-director of
a new southeast center for mathematics and

biology and this is about eleven billion
dollars that's coming from the N.S.F. and

the Science Foundation Now one thing
that's in common with all the people

you see on this slide is
that their success has come

from many many years of sustained work and
really that's going to be the topic of

the talk today is how do we
organize our personal time.

I'm in our effort so that we can do
the things that we know will lead to

long term achievement so that's going
to be the topic for the software but

first I'm going to do something I've
always wanted to do this in a seminar So

OK you've been to a concert or something
like that everyone pulls out their cell

phone and waves in the air so
I want you to help me here you phone man

you can do it you've all got your friends
here I know it that's it wave it around.

It looks so cool all right but now all I
want you to keep your phone in your hand.

And I want you to turn it off.

Not set it to mute not set it to buzz but

actually turn it off so you know you can
do that right not going to hurt you.

And one of the things I want you to think
about is actually what it takes to really

truly concentrate on something for a few
minutes now if you have a close relative

who's on an operating table right now
you could leave your phone on but

otherwise you don't going to need it for
the next few minutes all right so

the talk today is based on this book
by a guy called Cal Newport His book

is called Deep work Cal is an associate
professor of computer science

at Georgetown University he's written
extensively about work productivity but

he's also a very very effective
academic research are and

so he offers this definition of deep work
that will be sort of the starting point

for us today he says deep work is
professional activities done in

a distraction free state that push
cognitive capabilities to their limit and

I'm going to argue that we all
know what this is like OK so

when you are truly concentrating on
something it's actually in the enjoyable

thing to do and so you can identify
when you're doing this and

I think you would also
agree with me that the more

you can achieve this state the more you
can actually get done in your work life so

that's what we're talking about today
I want to mention that I'm going to

tell you some anecdotes
that come from said.

All of the books atomic adventures is
a book written by a Georgia Tech along and

I'll tell you about that in a minute
the drug Qantas's a fascinating book about

the world of drug discovery and
then daily rituals it's a book that just

accumulate sent from ation about how
famous artists and some scientists

just how they organize their day and
find they all mention a paper from this

journal Biological bulletin which sounds
like a hideously boring thing to read but

actually have strongly recommend that you
read this paper very very into tightening

and will get to part of that
later in the tool or right so

let's talk about the title I've
already told you what deep work is and

I think you can all identify what that is
we can also talk about shallow work so

Cal Newport defines this as undemanding
logistical style tasks often

perform ball distracted I'm not going
to argue that this is an important so

this is things like completing
your annual ethics training

changing the oil in your vacuum pump
calibrating an instrument in your lab

there are many many things that you
have to do in your professional life and

you have to do them in a timely way but
they don't involve deep work OK and so

they're just things that
we have to get done so

in a sense we can get on to the real work
of what we're trying to do now the thing

that I'm going to add to Cal Newport's
taxonomy here is inside your refrigerator

This is a pretty old fashioned word not
all of you might know this word but

you can probably guess what
it means it means this.

OK So frittering is stuff it's
the empty calories of time management

OK it's not necessarily bad for you but
it's not good for you either way it just

kind of fills up your time and
one of the challenges in life today and

one of the reasons I urge you to turn off
your phone is that we have surrounded by

these things and they are really set
up in a way to keep our attention and

draw our attention more and more and so
we'll talk about ways to avoid this side.

Refrigerate so we can get more of the work
done or right so let's talk about some of

the characteristics of deep work one of
the characteristics of deep work is simply

that it takes a long sustained effort
to achieve something that's really

significant and to illustrate this I'm
going to take you back to an episode in

georgia tech history that illustrates
the opposite of this all right so

on Thursday March the twenty third nine
hundred eighty nine I'm going to ask you

to pay close attention to the dates
because they actually matter here

these two gentlemen Martin Fleischmann and
Stanley Pons had a press conference in

Utah and they announced that they
had discovered how to achieve fusion

at room temperature in a tabletop
device this was worldwide news this

took what people thought was impossible
in terms of thermonuclear fusion and

said you can actually just do it on this
desktop right here people didn't look

before and so the promises energy to cheap
to meter this was going to revolution

revolutionize the world by
coincidence the next day.

The Exxon company managed to run
aground a gigantic oil tanker in Alaska

this at the time was the largest oil spill
that occurred in the world and so you can

imagine that this just tremendous interest
in finding clean sources of energy and

there's no way to say it other than that
a gold rush started in the scientific

community to reproduce the work that
Pons and Fleishman had been doing.

The next Wednesday March the twenty
ninth Bill Mahaffey here I

submitted a proposal asking
internally to provide him for

twenty five thousand dollars Now this is
going to make all of my faculty colleagues

said he submitted his proposal in the
morning it was funded in the afternoon.

Doesn't always work like that OK So
they've got their money

they start procuring they've got
to get a polite am electro the.

To get a letter chemical sell they've got
to get neutron detectors they get all

this stuff together it takes
them about a week to do that

finally on Saturday April eighth so
this is now about two weeks after Pons and

Fleishman is announcement they start their
experiment to run by the way Pons and

Fleishman haven't published
anything this surf on the G.T.

our i team they've entirely based
their experiment on what they know

they store on the television news OK
they sort of took still images and

that's what they use so they start to
run their experiment on Saturday and

this people all over the world trying to
do this the thing that's really cool about

this experiment is it works it actually
shows that they're generating heat they're

generating neutrons that means they
have fusion All right so what do they do

Georgia Tech gets everyone together they
call a news conference on Monday morning

they have a news conference I talked to
John toon who's still here Georgia Tech

he said they had people fly in from
everywhere for this news conference and

they announce that they have called
fusion it's national news coverage so

here is this is just from the front page
of the Atlanta paper there's no question

it's fusion said Dr live say I still
don't believe it even though I see it

it happened so soon we thought it was
an equipment malfunction said Dr have yet

you'll see the Hill he's
regret those words.

But to give you a sense of you know what
grip the scientific world about the next

day there was another article in the paper
and I'm going to read a quote from that

which says you can invest a graduate
student James Langton Broner helped

build three cold fusion cells within eight
days of the Flashman announcement and

missed his girlfriend's birthday party
in the process we were busy he explained

he's reluctant to return to his
pre-code fusion work in nuclear physics

quote You don't know what a drag it is
to use that Excel or it you can work for

days without getting
any usable data at all.

Probably he's also regrets
having that newspaper I suspect.

Now unfortunately this story doesn't
have a happy ending you know

that we don't have cold fusion producing
energy today that's because it's not

a real scientific effect and
it turns out that.

There was a mistake in the Georgia Tech
experiments what they didn't know

was as the neutron detected heated up
which was what the cell was doing it would

give a signal as though it was detected
neutrons in fact there were no neutrons

Georgia Tech took the very bold step
of calling another news conference so

they had another news conference on
Thursday and then hear stories from

The Atlanta Constitution and
the New York Times the next day so

they had to admit that in fact
they hadn't seen fusion and

the next Tuesday there's a yet
another story in the newspaper about this.

There's lots of lessons that we can draw
from this one lesson is be very careful

how you talk to the press about your
research and actually one outcome of this

is to this day Georgia Tech is
incredibly reticent to hold an actual

news conference about research they we
will run the issue press releases but

not to a news conference but the real
point I want to get across here is

in a sense just the timeline here should
tell us what we already sensed was

true that it's really difficult to believe
you could make a major earth shattering

scientific discovery just based on
a few days' worth of work OK So

doing something that
really makes a difference

in the research community takes
a significant amount of time.

Well I've already indicated then that
doing deep work is hard because it takes

a lot of time why should we even try and
do it now I hope Actually I don't have to

convince you of this but I'll just mention
a couple of quotes from you port's book

he points out that the pork is
becoming increasingly rare but

increasingly valuable those who make it
the core of their working life will thrive

at cultures shift towards
the shallow is exposing a man.

Assif opportunity for the few who
prioritized it this is actually worth

thinking about quite carefully many
of you are just stopping your Ph D.

and you have a chance to really sort
of a stablish patterns of work that you

probably followed for many many years and
what he's pointing out here is that

if you are willing to organize your
time and organize your life so

that you truly work in a deep way that
will give you an enormous advantage

over the great majority of people who
are simply not willing to do that.

Or write another characteristic of
deep work is that it's valuable So

here's a picture of Marie Curie
just sitting outside my office is

a reproduction of this amazing photograph
from nine hundred eleven I know the labels

are too small to read but you can come and
visit my office and see them below

the picture as well this was a conference
that got together everybody who was

anybody in physics in about nineteen
eleven so you can look at this picture

there's Einstein there that is you know
you can go down the list many of these

names that you know one of the things that
strikes me of course this was an era when

gentleman had what I would call
heroic facial hair right and so

in particular right in the middle of the
picture there that's Knutson who we now

know in terms of nudes and floor he has
a particularly impressive Mistah thing so

what you see though is this is one woman
in the room and that's Marie Curie and

by the way she can't be bothered to
be part of this conference photograph

she's busy having a technical
discussion with poincaré the great

mathematician sitting next to her Marie
Curie is a wonderful example of someone

who reached the rewards I would say of
sustained deep work I would actually

also argue that even though she was
thought of as a chemist and a physicist

I'll show you she was actually a chemical
engineer so the thing that she did that

brought her great fame was she realized
that there must be some highly right.

No active element hidden away in the OR
that also contains your brain and

so she use crystallization this is the
chemical engineering pot where she started

with a ton of this or and
working in a tiny unheated

shed she managed to crystallize that
until she purified point one grams

of radium chloride this was the first
time that radium had ever been produced

Now again this was a time when of course
the man who were in charge of things

didn't weren't really very impressed by
women doing science and so it took many

many years before she was recognized for
her work her department where she worked

finally in June of ninety three decided
that she should be given her Ph D.

It turns out that whoever was the
department head made a pretty good choice

because later that year
she won the Nobel Prize.

You know just in time was good enough and

you know many of you
are just starting your Ph D.

So you want to aim high I think and now it
turns out she didn't stop there she want

another Nobel Prize eight years ago this
one by herself she's one of very very few

people who won two different Nobel Prizes
this is an example again I want to

emphasize the value of deep work this
wasn't just grunt work in the lab she had

conceived in a theoretical way that
there had to be an element out there and

so her conception of the science was
what drove her to do these things.

I'm also going to argue that deep work is
rare but if you look around our society

most people don't want to do it and the
people who are willing to do it really can

make a big mom and so the example I'm
going to give here is two gentlemen who

were assistant professor at Yale Medical
School in the one nine hundred thirty so

I just introduced to assistant professor
is two years and they're starting

their careers they need to think about all
the things they need to do to get tenure

Well one of the things that happened
to these two individuals as they were

assigned to teach the pharmacology
course and at that time pharmacology was

really not a well defined field they had
the experience that's extraordinary.

Greenly common as a university professor
which is they looked at the books

that were available and
they didn't like any of the books

they decided well the solution
is we should write a book.

Looking at the system
presses do not do this OK but

they decided to write a book and
they wrote a field defining book so

by one nine hundred forty one they'd
written their textbook it was over

a million words long that's longer than
the King James Bible by the way but

this book completely redefined the field
of pharmacology it turned this field

from an anecdotally driven area into
something that's now based on evidence and

this book is still the standard
reference in pharmacology So

it's now in the twelfth edition the
gentleman have long since passed away so

this other Orson's who is now involved
now you might imagine that they spent so

much time writing this book that they
probably didn't get too much else done

you would be wrong so around the same time

working together they developed
the first chemotherapy agent so

they were the first people to cure
a cancer using chemotherapy that alone

is really an amazing achievement I just
want to tell you one footnote about these

guys who a number of years later Goodman
had moved to the University of Utah and

he got interested in developing
new anaesthetics there's always

a need for good anesthetics and he knew
that there is a compound called rary

which South American tribes put on their
blood dots and it's a paralyzing poison so

he decided this might make
a good anesthetic he convinced

his department head to let him inject
his department head with Kerry.

Don't ask Corey I'm not going to do it for
you OK so the department has

instructions were you will probably
your muscles will be paralyzed

then we will prick you with pins and you
should communicate by blinking whether.

It hurts OK So
sure enough the guy becomes paralyzed

they start poking him with pins and
he blinks like crazy It hurts right so

he's paralyzed but it's not
an anaesthetic so the experiment is a bust

Unfortunately a few minutes later
the problem had stopped breathing OK so

that's not good so that fortunately
the professor was also a doctor and so

he artificially ventilated the guy till
finally it wore off and everyone was happy

so you know this it was a different
era of drug discovery back then.

Or I but this is so the example is that
deep work is valuable deep work is rare

I'm also going to argue that it's a
fundamentally meaningful thing to do that

if you get engaged in doing deep work you
don't do it for other people you do it for

yourself because it's a fundamentally
satisfying thing to do

many of you will know what
this image is if you open up

any biologically oriented journal you'll
see a photo or an image like this that

uses green fluorescent protein in
order to label various things so

this was actually discovered by this
gentleman Asama Schumann Moore who has

an interesting life he was actually
living in nag a soccer when

the atomic bomb was dropped in egg Saki
at the end of the Second World War And so

as a young boy he had fallout rained down
on his head he then grew up in a very

poor surroundings because post World War
two Japan really had very few resources

he also when they came to
United States and became scientists.

He was engaged when he first came
in trying to understand a jellyfish

that expresses a protein that fluoresce OK
So that sounds like an interesting thing

to do it turns out this is pretty hard
work and it's all described in this paper

I mentioned at the bottom notice that the
paper is written many many years before

he got the Nobel Prize long before he was
really recognized for this work and as I

said it's a very actually entertaining
paper and highly recommend you take

a look at so in one nine hundred sixty
he started collecting jellyfish and he.

That first summer he collected
ten thousand jellyfish and

each jellyfish she had to catch in
the ocean then he had to dissect

it in a very very particular way to
get the sample of what he needed so

you can tell that he really needed
some strong motivation to do this.

Over the next twenty years he continued
to do this after a few years he

realized that he could probably soul the
structure of the molecule but he needed

a fraction of a gram of the chroma for
that meant he had a needed two and

a half tons of jellyfish and so he spent
the next couple of years in the summers

fishing jelly fish out of the ocean
dissecting them he developed a machine

that would dissect them all kinds of
things to increase the throughput but

he spent a lot of time up
to his elbows in jellyfish.

That continued as I said over the next
twenty years now this guy maybe needed

a chemical engineer to work with him
because he improved the yield to

the point where fifty thousand jellyfish
gave him half a gram right to it still not

very much the point that I want to
make here though is that ultimately he

won the Nobel Prize and I'm sure that
was a wonderful thing for him but

that was many many years decades after he
did the work that fundamentally he was

doing this work because he was interested
in solving a scientific problem and

he had habits of work that allowed him to
do I won't go through all the details but

again disk in his paper he describes many
of the situations that he went through in

the innovations that were made in
order to do the work that he could do.

Or it was so far I've talked about what
didn't work is and I've OG you that it's

rare it's valuable and it's meaningful
now hopefully I didn't really need to

convince you of all that stuff but I think
it is worth recognizing that this is not

just something that's nice to have in your
life this can be a life changing thing for

you that if you really are able to do
this can be a very very deeply satisfying

thing to do while now what we need to talk
about is how do we actually get there how

do we change from the way that I
use my time today use your time so

that we can do more of
this deep work stuff.

So the first idea that Newport describes
in his book is a very simple one and

that is that you need to train
yourself to do this it does not happen

by accident and I've got a photograph
here of Jessica Dickinson kicking Randall

these were the first U.S. athletes to
win medals in cross-country skiing

in the Winter Olympics and they like
all elite athletes you can imagine

they don't just train part of the time
they train day in day out and

their training doesn't just consist
of the exercise they do but

they pay attention to that diet in this
sleep it's an entire lifestyle and

part of the idea here is that to be really
effective in the long term in terms of

doing deep work it has to be a lifestyle
you have to really have a way where you

start to organize your life around it and
the goal is in order to get there.

Now it's true that many things in
our society mitigate against us

doing that including the tendency for
all of us to want to multitask and

so I actually have a couple of help us
here going to help illustrate this so

I want to welcome a couple of members
of the wheel high school marching band

come on out guys so they're going to.

Present a different.

Thing.

Actually.

I rather applause for any amount.

Thank you very much gentlemen.

You can return your ears
to the usual setting now.

The point that I was trying to make here
is that if you believe you can multitask

and do deep work you are mistaken OK so
doing deep work is something that really

involves trying to find some concentrated
space now a misconception often when

people think about this kind of work is
that's what I should be doing all the time

and I want to show you that that is not
true let me remind you of that definition

this is something that pushes your
cognitive capabilities to the limit that

straight away implies that you can't do
this all the time if you can do this for

a few hours a day that's really
a wonderful thing to do.

We all have these shallow work tasks that
I talked about before that are still

important in our life we still have to
get them done and make them happen so

I'm going to argue that doing one hundred
percent the work is not the goal my

example for this is H.L. Mencken So
this is a guy who lived around the turn of

the last century he was one of
the most prominent authors and

social critics at that time he worked
twelve to fourteen hours every day now

I know some of my colleagues are thinking
here that he would be a perfect graduate

student going to be in the lab all
the time now one of the things about H.L.

Mencken is he's he's a really quotable
guy so he said for instance for

every complex problem there is an answer
that is clear simple and wrong.

He also said a man may be a fool and
not know it but not if he is married.

But he has my old colleagues here nodding
knowingly is OK so how did Mencken

organize his time as I said every single
day twelve to fourteen hours of work it

turns out that in the morning he basically
spent his time reading some stuff and

answering his mail so I feel like that's
what I do and so my email he was basically

doing that he wrote over one hundred
thousand letters in his life to.

TIME So you pretty serious about
answering his mail he spent the afternoon

doing editorial things he was a journalist
and so he had to make sure that

things were working only in the evening
did he work in a concentrated way and

write and this is one example of
someone who's organize their day

he presumably found that he could most
effectively work in the evening but

he deliberately set up
the schedule of his life so

that he could focus on the thing
that he really wanted to get done.

Now I'm going to make this claim that if
you can train yourself to work deeply for

three to four hours a day you could get
an amazing amount of stuff done and

I'm hoping that all of you are at work for
more than three to four hours a day but

there are all these other topics that we
have to get done if you can train yourself

so that you can set aside the distractions
set aside your phone close down

your e-mail do all those things and
truly focus for three to four hours a day

that would be really an amazing amount
of productivity that you could develop.

So this is an example of this the idea
that in order to do deep work it's really

important to develop either ritual or
a strategy a ritual might be something as

simple as you make yourself a strong cup
of coffee when you start that period of

work a schedule that sort of self and
explanatory but I want to show some data

that I've actually shown before in one of
these talks but I find very persuasive so

this was a study done a number of years
ago about professors trying to write so

all of us who are professors feel guilty
that we don't get enough writing done and

so they took a bunch of professors and
they were randomly assigned into three

categories one category was told
Don't write anything not allowed

to write anything unless it's truly
an emergency not sure what that means.

One group was told to be spontaneous
This is what we all think we could do

just right when you feel

there were thing you've got some wonderful
idea to write it down the law was told to.

Make a schedule just sit down and

write these fifty times whether you
think you have anything to say no.

And so the people during the study then
measured how much people wrote it's not

surprising that the people who scheduled
their time wrote more OK So this is in

pages per day and the schedule group
writes enormously more than the other

two groups now you might look at this and
you think well sure that's fine but

they're not writing anything that's good
they were just writing something they

asked the participants in the study itself
assess how many creative ideas they had

to what's being shown here is the interval
between creative ideas and what a bunch of

notices the group that scheduled their
time they came up with way more creative

ideas so this is actually a very very
simple idea that you shouldn't wait for

motivation to strike you you should just
decide I am going to sit down and work

in a concentrated way from nine to eleven
in the morning or whatever then you have

to decide something that works for you but
this will make a tremendous difference.

I want to give you a personal example of
doing this from a relatively busy guy

I travel quite a lot to give you a hint
of how much I travel I got on the fly

last week down at the airport and as I
was getting on the lady who was welcoming

people in the plane said I think I
recognize you welcome back that's really

a sign that maybe I'm travelling too much
so a couple of years ago I decided you

know I'm going to try and use my time
sitting on a plane in a different way

I'm not going to try and catch up on the
manuscripts from my group sorry guys I'm

not going to check my email read a book or
watch a movie instead I'm going to try and

write something and
after eighteen months I finished a novel

now I am not going to claim that this is
the great American novel OK It's just that

it's just a novel that a thousand
words long I will say that I've had

a couple of people who are not related to
me tell me they liked it so that was good.

But my poor.

It is that if someone came to you
tonight and said Do you think you could

finish a novel between now and a year from
now most of you would think that's crazy I

can't possibly do that actually
you could if you allocated your

time in a particular way I got into
the habit that as soon as I sat down

on the plane I would open up my laptop and
I would stop working on this novel and

to be honest I found it made the travel
much more enjoyable than when I was trying

to amuse myself before on the plane
the next piece of advice that.

Newport has in his book is that we need to
embrace border I want you to imagine for

a moment that it's lunch time you've
headed over to the student center and

you're waiting in line to audio lunch
you're there by yourself what do you do.

Pretty sure for
many of you we do this right.

I know I would I'm going
to pull out my phone and

there will be something that I can look at
this is really become incredibly common

Now if you see people waiting for
stuff you know no one's going to talk to

the people around you you want to do that
so instead you can look at your phone and

I want to go back and talk about Shemar
Moore so in his article he describes that

every day they had to do all this work
you know slopping up the jelly fish and

cutting them up into a kind of stuff but
they a key insight

that came to him about how to imagine
this whole process that he was working on

occurred because each day he
would take a rowboat out and he

would just kind of let it drift around in
the water and he would sit in the rowboat.

And he said there was I had no goal I
was just out this thing in the road but

he wasn't doing anything in his mind was
percolating over the problems that he had

and in fact he had an insight that then
ultimately led him to many many years

later when the Nobel Prize now I want you
to think about how this would work for

each of us so we'd get the regrowth that
would be good and then you'd think well

you know I've got to take a photograph the
workload right so you pull out your phone

to take a photograph of a robot and
then sure enough you realize there are all

these other things that you can look at on
your phone you know you can send an image

to your mother you can do all these
things all these things are fine.

But they have trained
us to not be bored and

so Newport's advice which I really
think is powerful is that we need to

actively have times in our life when
we're sort of not doing anything and

we just let our minds rotate over
problems that we're working on if we

are always giving ourselves
external stimuli it's going to

cut down on the creativity that you can
have as I said at the top that your time.

It is a zero sum game.

Once you've spent an hour before the five
minutes sitting here listening to me

you do not get that time back so
I'm sorry for that but

that's the way it works with every
hour the implication here is that

when we have all these things that
are potential tools that we can use

that we really should be careful
about which ones we decide to use so

Newport actually argues you should get off
social media completely just go to zero

there are other people who have argued
that a maybe that's not necessary.

But let's think about how you choose let's
say which of these electronic tools to use

now a typical way that I would maybe
choose as I would say I'm going to look at

Instagram by the way I'm not sure I
even understand how Instagram works so

this is a hypothetical example but
I would think is this some

benefit to my life that I could
identify if I used Instagram and

the answer is shore right I'm
sure I could be delivered and

an ending series of
pictures of budgerigars or

something that would make me happy right
that's the wrong question to ask a better

question to ask is is the time I'm using
with that tool is that actually getting

me somewhere that I want to go in the long
term and so I'm going to illustrate a tool

that Newport recommends which I think is
very very effective when you're trying

to evaluate this question so
let's imagine that I use Instagram or

Twitter regularly he argues you should do
the following You should just stop for

one month you don't tell anyone I'm going
to do it if you just decide I'm going to

uninstall this thing from my phone
I'm going to stop for a month and

then just wait and
see what happens by the way one of

our colleagues here Dr Walton who couldn't
be here this afternoon did exactly this so

it turned out a couple of years
ago she got in the habit of you.

Twitter.

There I guess good reasons
to be on Twitter but

you know she found it that it really took
up a lot of her time and so earlier this

year she decided to try the exactly
that she just stopped using Twitter for

a month and then after a month you ask
yourself the following two questions.

Would the last thirty days have
been substantially better not just

a little bit better but substantially
better if I was using the tool and

did people who are truly important to
me care that I wasn't using the tool of

course this someone out there who misses
you but are they people that are genuinely

important to you now Newport suggests that
if you answer both of those questions

with no you have just made a useful
decision you should never go back to using

that tool it's just sucking up your time
and not using things in a useful way.

I know from Dr Walton when she
spent a month not using Twitter

that's exactly the surgeon she came to she
said she's actually considerably happy and

now for not doing it I've done
a similar thing with some other

electronic based things that
I used to use regularly.

Even if one of the answers is just
weakly Yes I would argue she says

she should still think about not
doing OK remember that these kinds of

things are designed very very
carefully to capture and

hold your attention they are not designed
with your best interests in mind

they are just designed to glue
your eyeballs to a device.

All right so what we've talked about
today is this idea of deep work

I think ensured of Lee We
all know what it is but

I want to emphasize again that if you
can organize your time to do deep work

it's actually a extremely satisfying thing
to do and it can really enhanced not just

your professional success but your joy and
satisfaction in the work that you do.

I've argued that there are several
strategies you should think about in order

to enhance your ability to be to do deep
work first of all you should actually

think about how to train yourself to do
it it's not going to happen by accident

it doesn't happen just by doing it alone
you do have to think in a sort of holistic

way about all the different
ways that you spend time.

You need to set deep work schedules and
rituals if you just wait for

it to happen it is not going to happen and
so you really have to find ways that

you can organize your time blocked all
those other things out from around you and

spend time doing these things you need to
learn to embrace boredom do the experiment

by the way all of you manage to turn off
your phone for about forty minutes so

that's a good start right you probably
really bored at the moment but

this is a good thing to do next
time you're standing in line for

food try not looking at your
phone see what happens and

finally I argue that you should make
conscious choices about the resources and

the way that you spend your life I said
at the beginning that there is the pork

the shallow work and this frippery
the thing that you need to try and

strip away is for every It's not bad as
I said it's sort of the empty calories

of time and so instead of just
letting those things fill in your time

really make conscious
choices about how you spend

your time the things that you enjoy doing
and spend your time doing those things so

I hope this is useful to you this
brings to the end of my talk thanks for

your attention not be happy to entertain
any questions you might have thanks.

Everyone's either dying
to get back to the lab or

dying to check out what's on the phone
I'm not quite sure which really.

Yes like it's a very common in case you
didn't hear it was the idea of scheduling

time I showed it for writing I would argue
it's for all aspects of deep work and

so it's for it's for thinking it's for
reading really the idea is to set aside

that time to really focus on what you're
trying to do very good comment thanks.

Yes.

I.

Hear.

He's.

Here.

All.

Right.

All her.

Yeah a great great question about
how do you deal with I mean just all

the constraints that are placed on you
I mean I'll give you a personal example

Laurie who was here before has control of
my calendar and is that's her job to put

stuff on my calendar things show up all
the time I've blocked out times when

she knows not to do that because
that's my time to do this kind of work

you have to sort of take proactive steps
to do it it might involve going and

working in a different environment go and
sit in a coffee shop or

work at home come in early stay late but
just think about it in a proactive

way because you're exactly right there's
always things around you either xtal or

actually internal that will seek to
distract us from what we're doing.

That's you.

Know.

It's a very good no I think it
definitely can be collaborative work.

There certainly are instances where and

I think another way to
rephrase your question is.

When we collaborate with others how do
we achieve that state of deep work over

time and again I would say it takes
a long long time because you need to

be sort of achievement to what people
are thinking now that's a great idea.

That you have a question just you're
just hoping at this seminar last year.

One of my illustrations
involved a cold beer and

I was asked by several of my colleagues
if I sit in the front to get a beer.

Sorry not this time.

O..

But they're all going to have
to go through an I.R.B. So

you know as long as we do that then yeah
but new anaesthetics are definitely off.

Yes.

Why so I think what I meant to say is
the pressures on all of us this so

many things that sort of not
just towards doing shallow work

that doesn't mean that there is less
value in doing deep work so actually

you know to really accomplish things you
have to spend time doing deep work but

you're right that often companies and work
environments and things like that a sort

of set up almost oppositional to it so
it's a challenging thing.

All right well thank you again dear
attention have a great afternoon.