here succinctly: All of my time and attention are spoken for—several times
over. Please do not ask for them.
To further justify this policy, Stephenson wrote an essay titled “Why I Am a Bad
Correspondent.” At the core of his explanation for his inaccessibility is the following
decision:
The productivity equation is a non-linear one, in other words. This accounts
for why I am a bad correspondent and why I very rarely accept speaking
engagements. If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long,
consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. But as those
chunks get separated and fragmented, my productivity as a novelist drops
spectacularly.
Stephenson sees two mutually exclusive options: He can write good novels at a
regular rate, or he can answer a lot of individual e-mails and attend conferences, and
as a result produce lower-quality novels at a slower rate. He chose the former option,
and this choice requires him to avoid as much as possible any source of shallow work
in his professional life. (This issue is so important to Stephenson that he went on to
explore its implications—positive and negative—in his 2008
science fiction epic,
Anathem
, which considers a world where an intellectual elite live in monastic orders,
isolated from the distracted masses and technology, thinking deep thoughts.)
In my experience, the monastic philosophy makes many knowledge workers
defensive. The clarity with which its adherents identify their value to the world, I
suspect, touches a raw nerve for those whose contribution to the information economy
is more complex. Notice, of course, that “more complex” does not mean “lesser.” A
high-level manager, for example, might play a vital role in the functioning of a billion-
dollar company, even if she cannot
point to something discrete, like a completed
novel, and say, “This is what I produced this year.” Therefore, the pool of individuals
to whom the monastic philosophy applies is limited—and that’s okay. If you’re
outside this pool, its radical simplicity shouldn’t evince too much envy. On the other
hand, if you’re inside this pool—someone whose contribution to the world is discrete,
clear, and individualized
*
—then you should give this philosophy serious
consideration, as it might be the deciding factor between
an average career and one
that will be remembered.
The Bimodal Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling
This book opened with a story about the revolutionary psychologist and thinker Carl
Jung. In the 1920s, at the same time that Jung was attempting to break away from the
strictures of his mentor, Sigmund Freud, he began regular retreats to a rustic stone
house he built in the woods outside the small town of Bollingen. When there, Jung
would lock himself every morning into a minimally appointed room to write without
interruption. He would then meditate and walk in the woods to clarify his thinking in
preparation for the next day’s writing.
These efforts, I argued, were aimed at
increasing the intensity of Jung’s deep work to a level that would allow him to
succeed in intellectual combat with Freud and his many supporters.
In recalling this story I want to emphasize something important:
Jung did
not
deploy a monastic approach to deep work. Donald Knuth and Neal Stephenson, our
examples from earlier, attempted to completely eliminate distraction and shallowness
from their professional lives. Jung, by contrast, sought this elimination only during the
periods he spent at his retreat. The rest of Jung’s time was spent in Zurich, where his
life was anything but monastic: He ran a busy clinical practice that often had him
seeing patients until late at night; he was an active
participant in the Zurich
coffeehouse culture; and he gave and attended many lectures in the city’s respected
universities. (Einstein received his doctorate from one university in Zurich and later
taught at another; he also, interestingly enough, knew Jung, and the two shared several
dinners to discuss the key ideas of Einstein’s special relativity.) Jung’s life in Zurich,
in other words, is similar in many ways to the modern archetype of the hyperconnected
digital-age knowledge worker: Replace “Zurich” with “San Francisco” and “letter”
with “tweet” and we could be discussing some hotshot tech CEO.
Jung’s approach is what I call the
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