DEEPER WORK
EPISODE 014: DEEPER WORK
Our deep work is the stuff that most important to us, our legacy stuff, the soul-level stuff for which we do our creative work in the first place, and many of us aren’t getting it done because we’re growing in the little details. Episode 14 is a discussion about 3 practices that might help you get back the time you need to feed the muse, give her some breathing room, and then put her to work. Ultimately we need both ideation time and creation time, and I’m hoping these ideas will give you a little more freedom to carve those out. Let’s talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
I don’t mean to name-drop but I got an email from Seth Godin the other day. Seth is a thought-leader in the world of business and marketing, a New York Times best-selling author many times over, and I had sent him an email asking about his greatest struggle as a highly-productive creative entrepreneur. I was hoping for some generous, pulling-the-veil-back kind of reply, some kind of short quotable wisdom with which to encourage you. What I got, instead, was 3 words.
This is what he wrote: I am swamped.
That’s it? Three words? Had Seth Godin just blown me off? I mean, he’s not known for being loquacious, but 3 words? I don’t want to make it sound like he’d know me from Adam but in a previous email, equally short now that I think about it, he told me to keep making magic. Seth Godin told me to keep making magic! That meant he thought I was already making magic! Was this the start of the bromance I had always hoped for?
But this one felt dismissive. I’m swamped? It hurt deep. The bromance was over.
And then I realize he’d given me exactly what I had asked for. It was right there, that was his struggle. He wasn’t blowing me off. He was being honest. The other thing I had asked was, how do you deal with that struggle on a day-to-day basis. He’d answered that too. He said no.
Saying no more than you say yes is one of the secrets to being creative and productive. It’s not sexy. Yes is sexy. Yes is generous. And many of us are Yes-ing our way into distraction, exhaustion, and the kind of creative flow that’s more like a trickle. I’m David duChemin, this is episode 14 of A Beautiful Anarchy, let’s talk about it.
Music/intro
I’ve talked before about being swamped, and the ways in which we get overwhelmed. In episode 02 I compared the flood of requests and distractions, like the email Seth got from me, to a great wave that hovers over us, keeping us tending to all the little things in hopes the boat doesn’t fill with water and capsize, all while keeping us from getting the more important work done. It’s a very real threat, and as you do more and more of the work that is truly you, and you begin to get in the flow and find whatever measure of success you’re seeking, it gets worse, not better.
I don’t really want to rehash the great wave metaphor or the need to say no. I want to look at the other side of that: the need to say yes to your best work, the work that Cal Newport in his book, Deep Work, calls, well, Deep Work. I like to think of it as core work. The stuff closest to me, the work that all the other stuff supports. If you’re not familiar with Cal Newport, I suggest you look him up. He’s an important voice to people like us who create, and have important work we need to be doing. At first glance he’s also a bit of an unlikely voice to the creative world. His author pic shows an unsmiling, unassuming guy, someone who’s probably good at math and wears chinos. And there’s nothing wrong with that, he’s just clearly not the “hey, look at me!” artsy kind of guy. He doesn’t look like the creative type. In fact, neither does his resume. He’s a computer science professor at Georgetown University in Washington DC.
But creativity is not the exclusive domain of the arts, and reading Newport it’s really clear that he gets people like us. After writing a couple books specifically for college students about being better college students, he wrote a book called So Good They Can’t Ignore You, with the provocative subtitle: Why Following Your Passion is Bad Advice. Based on the subtitle alone I was prepared to hate the book, but I finished it with the conviction that this was a guy worth listening to, a guy who had his hands as much in the real world as in the world of ideas. So when Deep Work came out I bought it the moment I read the subtitle: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.
This isn’t a book review. But I think the idea that we all have core work, the most important work without which all the other stuff doesn’t really matter, is critical. Actually, the idea itself isn’t critical so much as our willingness to say yes to that work and do whatever it takes to protect it.
Most of us do not do this well. We create our work in the margins. We do it in whatever time is leftover. Newport argues, and I’m right beside him on this, that we need to carve out blocks of time to do that deep work. Big chunks of undistracted time. I’ve found this to be true over 25 years of day-in and day-out creativity, so I want to give you 3 ways you might do this without the need to live the life of a hermit, 3 different blocks of time, some version of which will transform your creative life.
The first is a daily buffer that’s 30 to 60 minutes long. Get up a little earlier, do it with your morning coffee, but leave the phone in other room, or put it in your bag with the ringer off. Sit somewhere quiet and analogue. Read a poem. Flip through an old journal, or write in your current one. Make a list of the next ten projects you’d like to do, or the next three books you want to write, or the next 5 steps you need to take to get the current work done. This is ideation time. It’s the time you need to feed your brain ideas and ruminate on them without other distractions. It’s time to wonder, to probe deeper questions, and to re-calibrate the parts of you that are probably too busy the rest of the day to hold one coherent thought for very long. This is not the time for calendars and emails and social media. It’s time to take stock of the raw materials you’ll use in your deep work and to let your muse breathe a little.
The second is a weekly buffer that’s 3-4 hours long, or more if you can pull it off. One block each week when you can DO the stuff that’s most meaningful to you. 4 hours in the studio to paint, to throw a pot, to get out there with your camera, to DO YOUR WORK. The rules are the same as your daily time. No digital distractions, no answering the phone, the door is closed, the kids stay out, it’s just you and the muse. You need this chunk of time. You need the time to quiet down, for the creative flow to ramp up, and once there, you need a meaningful chunk of time to use that flow and see where it leads. Anyone who regularly experiences that flow knows how fast the time goes. Don’t sabotage yourself with one-hour blocks and hope that’s enough. It might be. You might be the exception, but I’d bet against it. And if you can do good work in an hour, imagine what you’ll be able to do in 4. Every week. No exceptions. This is sacred time for you and the muse to get in the ring and hash things out.
The third is a yearly block that’s measured in days. Only you can know what’s possible but imagine what you might get done in a 4-day long weekend away from everyone and everything. Imagine what you’d get done with a week. A Think Week has become a necessary part of the creative lives of people like Bill Gates, who twice a year takes one week in seclusion to do undistracted thinking and ideation. Steve Jobs took Think Weeks. So does Mark Zuckerberg.
Seclusion and longer blocks of time aren’t a new idea; productive and creative people have been doing this for centuries. The keys are solitude and a freedom from distraction. Days to think and work and be free from the million little draws on our attention. Imagine the freedom you could find by going somewhere beyond the signal, in a place where the phone doesn’t ping, and the you’re not always one email away from every person that wants a piece of you. For some of you that’s terrifying, but there must be part of you that acknowledges how needful that time is, how good it would feel to be alone with your muse for a while, to get some deep work done, to start the novel, to write the songs, to be in the studio for a few days of work and play and nothing else. This time is time to move forward, to gain momentum, not just maintenance which is what all the smaller stuff is.
Think Weeks aren’t a vacation. They’re a self-directed week of ideation and re-calibration, and getting shit done. For them to work I think you probably need some structure. My own times like this allow me 8 hours of sleep, and the rest of the time is carved into 2-3 hour blocks. I read a couple books in some of those blocks. I plan and write lists and brainstorm in some of them. And I sit and write in others. And in the breaks you could go for a walk, take a swim, or make lunch. Just don’t pick up the phone to check in with the world. If you must do that, do it at dinner or the end of the day so it doesn’t distract you.
You can do this collaboratively too. Corwin and I get together for a monthly 2-day retreat we’ve been doing for over 12 years. Corwin is, alternately, my manager, assistant, producer, travel partner, business collaborator, and friend. For years we’ve been meeting regularly for a block of time we’ve called the Think & Drink. The idea at first was that we’d wander town for 2 days, drink beer at different pubs and restaurants and come up with ideas, pitching them to each other, turning them on their heads, and making a lot of scribbles in our notebooks between pints of beer.
Over the years the drinking has slowed down, replaced by doing. Now we alternate between ideation for a couple hours, and putting those ideas into action, re-working, re-writing, changing what needs to be changed. These 2 to 3 day blocks are by far the most productive times over the year. They are put on the calendar and do not get changed. When I was hospitalized 8 years ago after shattering both my feet, we kept at it, Corwin would fly 4 hours to work with me for 3 days, then going home. Every month. We’ve done it in the remotest parts of Kenya, in Italy, the America Southwest, on planes and on boats, in 5-star hotels and tents. Almost nothing is allowed to get in the way, it’s that productive. When I think about my deep work efforts in business, they follow the same pattern I’m suggesting for other creative deep work: dedicated blocks set aside in small, medium, and larger chunks of time that are zealously protected.
However you do these things, and whether you do them at all is up to you. What is certain is that all of us can be doing better, deeper work, if we do more than acknowledge that we’re swamped, and we set time aside to do more than just bail the boat to keep us from sinking. Put it on the calendar, move things around, negotiate with your partner, talk to the kids. Telling them Mom needs time to be her best self and do her best work, only teaches them to do the same. Having a Dad that values his time and his work and models that for them isn’t taking away from the kids, it’s giving them the gift of a father who is less distracted and firing more often on all cylinders. It teaches the people in our lives that legacy matters to us. That the work of our hands and our hearts is not a frivolous side-hustle, but an important part of who we are.
We’re all swamped. You’re not alone in this. But you alone are the only one who will guard and protect your core work. Seth Godin taking time to answer my email in depth would have gotten me closer to me doing my work, but it wouldn’t get him closer to doing his. Seth is responsible for his core work, not mine. I respect Seth now more than ever. And I’ve been reminded that saying yes to my core work necessarily, and often, means saying no to the demands of others, as good as they might be. You must protect that core work and the time needed in which to do it.
It’s up to us. The world isn’t going to give you a break and stop sending emails. Facebook isn’t going to let up in its demands on your time, if anything it’ll only ramp up your addiction. It’s up to you and it’s not going to happen by accident, or spontaneously. Yes, be generous with your time, be spontaneous, but know that we all need time, focused and alone, to do our best work, and we’ve all got to create that time and guard it jealously.
Thank you for joining me. If you’re enjoying A Beautiful Anarchy I’d be so grateful if you’d leave a review on iTunes or where you choose to listen. If you’ve got comments or questions I’d love to hear them, you can get in touch by sending an email to talkback@abeautifulanarchy.com. I publish A Beautiful Anarchy 3 weeks out of 4, but you can get your fix on those 4th weeks by subscribing to On The Make, a monthly kick in the creative pants sent straight to your inbox. You can subscribe by going to ABeatifulAnarchy.com, scrolling to the bottom of the page and telling me where to send it. I’ll also send you a copy of my short eBook, Escape Your Creative Rut, 5 Ways to Get Your Groove Back, and every month I’ll draw the name of one subscriber to whom I’ll send a signed copy of my book, A Beautiful Anarchy. Thanks so much for being part of this. Until next time, go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0