TAKE ME DEEPER
EPISODE 008:
TAKE ME DEEPER
Our best work, our deeper work doesn’t happen accidentally. It needs focus and time, and often solitude, free from the distractions that threaten those very things. It’s all about flow and we’re getting less of it now than ever before. Let’s talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
I sat down in my chair this afternoon to get some writing done, to start a new chapter in the growing pile of words that I’m kind of hoping becomes my next book. When I looked up a couple hours had passed and I was two thousand words closer to knowing where that book was taking me. It doesn’t always go this well. Often the flow doesn’t come, blocked by distractions and too much getting in my own way. But I’m learning to get more reliably into the flow and get my work beyond the shallows.
I’m David duChemin, this is Take Me Deeper, episode eight of A Beautiful Anarchy.
Music / intro
The work of most creative people runs the gamut from the trivial day to day tasks that are necessary but rather shallow, to the vital and deep, the stuff we hope might endure. That gamut includes everything from emptying the dishwasher, posting to Instagram or heading out to staples to buy more pens, to sitting down to write or locking yourself into the studio so you can work on your latest photographs. Much of it, like the emails and the need to update your Etsy store or blog, isn't exactly the stuff we dream about when we think about the work of creating. It’s necessary, but if we’re not careful it can be the stuff that dams up the river and blocks the flow. We could spend our life in the shallows.
Where I think we get into trouble is when we mistake the necessary but shallow stuff for the real work of making our art, or if we’re not confusing one with the other we’re letting one get in the way of the other. Last year I noticed something had started to go off-kilter in my work life and that was the slow shift away from my most important work, the work I hope one day to be part of my legacy - my photography and, increasingly, my writing. which was getting pushed aside by an avalanche of lots of little things. Many of them good things. But none of them very deep.
What i’ve learned is that our most important work, the deep work, doesn’t happen accidentally in the margins of our lives, but in large chunks. Chunks that are large enough for flow to happen. Chunks that are big enough that we have room to make mistakes and re-direct our efforts. In other words we need time to get that work past the obvious and into deep waters. In Episode 03 I talked about time and some of the simple ways in which we can reclaim larger chunks. At some point I’ll tackle the subject in greater depth, but if you missed that episode, it’s there for the listening. We need blocks of time, not slivers. But I can sit for 2 hours and get an astonishing amount of nothing done. We also need focus and solitude.
Focus is a resource that’s getting harder and harder to protect as more and more demands are made on us, and as we allow ourselves to fragment our attention into smaller and smaller pieces. Despite a rash of articles citing so-called research over the last ten years, our attention spans, or our capacity to pay attention, are not getting shorter. But the things to which we are trying to pay attention are growing as fast as our continued belief in our ability to multi-task and deal meaningfully with several things at once, despite the real, actual research that shows we can’t. More to the point, there is no such thing as productive multi-tasking.
There is no shortage of obstacles to living a fulfilling, productive, creative life, and if we’re being honest, many of our obstacles are self-inflicted. The need to get a lot of things done drives many of us to multi-task, asking our brains to do something for which they don’t have the capacity, splitting our attention and not only getting less done, but sabotaging our ability to do better creative work. I know this because in an effort to prove that multi-tasking COULD be done I did some research and I kept bumping into hard evidence that proved otherwise and ultimately realized I was getting a lot done but it wasn’t getting done as well as I knew it could be. it was becoming quantity over quality, and that’s not what I want my legacy to be.
Multi-tasking or attention-splitting of any kind, has serious adverse affects not only on our work but on ourselves. In 2011 a study coming out of the University of California San Francisco showed that multi-tasking negatively affects our short-term memory. It also leads to loss of focus and anxiety, and an increased inability to think creatively, Multi-tasking prevents us from getting into a state of flow, and causes us to make more mistakes and be less productive. In other words, you CAN multi-task, but it is killing your ability to do your best work. Your deeper work is suffering.
It might be time to kill the distractions and treat your attention like the valuable and limited resource that it is in creative work. I’m still learning to do this but it has been a long time since I’ve allowed the attention-stealing notifications on my phone or laptop. When I sit down to write, the ringer on my phone goes off, I turn the phone over so I can’t see the screen, and I write far better and longer and with more flow than I could ever do with the constant notifications. Even when we don’t respond to the incoming texts and calls and emails, when we see them come in, they pull us out of flow. They make demands on our attention and they dilute the focus we need to do our deeper work.
While I’m doing this deeper work I find I need about 2 hours uninterrupted for it to be meaningful. That means no phone calls, no social media, no emails, none of those “I’ll just check to see if…” moments that you look up from 45 minutes later wondering what you picked the phone up for in the first place. Do it the way you need to, but know that if you want to do your best work, it needs to be done undistracted. The brain is a wonder but it can’t deal with competing things at the same time. These days this is a choice we need to make with strategies that we must intentionally put into play. By default everything is set to maximum distraction.
The other obstacle that we’re facing more and more is a loss of solitude. We’ve never been so connected. Our minds have never been so exposed to other minds. as much as we need collaboration and a variety of inputs, the loss of significant, meaningful alone time puts us at risk of losing individuality and independent thought. It’s not a coincidence that the great minds of history all took great pains to do their work alone, and sought solitude as a regular and uninterrupted part of their creative process.
Solitude isn’t only being in a room without other people, it’s being in a space where your mind isn’t talking to other minds. In other words, there’s no benefit to being alone with your work if you’re interacting with others online or texting. The point is focus. If you want flow, you need focus. True solitude gives your brain time to think about your work, and the problems that you are trying to solve, without being pulled into the thoughts and concerns of other minds, even when you’re all talking about you and your work. It gives you time to develop your ideas beyond the most obvious thoughts and solutions, to really process your own thinking, thinking that will make your work a reflection of you and not merely the homogenous result of crowdsourcing. At the risk of looking like that luddite who’s always whining about social media, the equivalent of that old guy yelling GET OFF MY LAWN - let me suggest that this is yet another area in which our intentional use of that tool is needed to keep us from going off the rails.
As a photographer this new tech makes it easy and too-tempting to make a series of photographs, do some edits, and post it all online for public consumption in less time than it used to take to rewind a roll of film and put a new one in. The same is true of writing or anything else that can be consumed digitally. The danger of this is that we’re asking others to weigh in with opinions on our work before we’ve had a chance to form our own opinions about that work, before we’ve had a chance to live with those images and react to them, allowing them to give us new ideas and direction. It takes time to know whether this image or that is a final image or merely a sketch image that will lead to stronger work, to deeper work. And when we put it out there, whether we call it done or not, we’re not giving ourselves, or our work, the chance to incubate a while without the input of others.
Input can be good, but the kind of feedback we get when we ask the internet is always a mixed bag at best. When we ask everyone with an opinion what they think of our work, they’ll tell us. But we have no idea if these people have any taste whatsoever, any experience with the creative process, or any willingness to try to understand what we’re trying to accomplish with our work before they sound off on it.
Expose your work to enough people, and the feedback will be so wildly all over the map and varied that it will be useless and give you nothing but a sense that some people like it and some people don’t. That’s not new, and it’s not helpful.
Your most important work is your deep work. The book, the body of work, the new album, whatever core thing you do, and the biggest threat to your deep work is the shallow stuff. The little things that fill the time needed to do the bigger things. As more and more of that little stuff demands our attention and time, allows us the impression that getting it done is the same as doing our real work, the more possible it is that we’re neglecting the bigger projects, the things on which careers, reputations, and legacies are actually built. We could all spend a year running in circles chasing the little things and get to the end of that year without accomplishing anything more than maintenance. No legacy work, nothing larger than a few really great emails and Facebook posts. No one is going to look back at their Twitter feed and their to-do lists and see it as meaningful creative work.
When’s the last time you set time aside to do your best work free from distractions? When’s the last time you made it a priority and yelled “Hold my calls!” even if that means turning the phone off yourself? Is the frustration over doing less of the work that stirs your soul and makes you happy, is it because you’ve never called that work out as important, if only to you? Could it be that you’ve seen all the work in your creative life as equal, so the stuff that gets done is always and only the urgent things that clamour loudest for your attention, while the real work sits quietly in the back waiting for you to give it the time and attention, the focus and the solitude that it needs? if you won’t make that happen, if you won’t take that work deeper, who will?
Those are my questions. If you’ve got questions of your own I would love to hear them and have a chance to discuss them. If you go to ABeautifulAnarchy.com you’ll find an easy way to ask questions and make this a little more of a dialogue than the rather one-sided conversation it is now. I’d love to hear from you. Thank you so much for joining me. Go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0