have access to something like the Eudaimonia Machine. Perhaps not David Dewane’s exact design,
but, more generally speaking, a work environment (and culture) designed to help us extract as much
value as possible from our brains. Unfortunately, this vision is far from our current reality. We
instead find ourselves in distracting open offices where inboxes cannot be neglected and meetings
are incessant—a setting where colleagues would rather you respond quickly to their latest e-mail
than produce the best possible results. As a reader of this book, in other words, you’re a disciple of
depth in a shallow world.
This rule—the first of four such rules in Part 2 of this book—is designed to reduce this conflict.
You might not have access to your own Eudaimonia Machine, but the strategies that follow will
help you simulate its effects in your otherwise distracted professional life. They’ll show you how to
transform deep work from an aspiration into a regular and significant part of your daily schedule.
(Rules #2 through #4 will then help you get the most out of this deep work habit by presenting,
among other things, strategies for training your concentration ability and fighting back encroaching
distractions.)
Before proceeding to these strategies, however, I want to first address a question that might be
nagging you: Why do we need such involved interventions? Put another way, once you accept that
deep work is valuable, isn’t it enough to just start doing more of it? Do we really need something as
complicated as the Eudaimonia Machine (or its equivalent) for something as simple as remembering
to concentrate more often?
Unfortunately, when it comes to replacing distraction with focus, matters are not so simple. To
understand why this is true let’s take a closer look at one of the main obstacles to going deep: the
urge to turn your attention toward something more superficial. Most people recognize that this urge
can complicate efforts to concentrate on hard things, but most underestimate its regularity and
strength.
Consider a 2012 study, led by psychologists Wilhelm Hofmann and Roy Baumeister, that
outfitted 205 adults with beepers that activated at randomly selected times (this is the experience
sampling method discussed in Part 1). When the beeper sounded, the subject was asked to pause for
a moment to reflect on desires that he or she was currently feeling or had felt in the last thirty
minutes, and then answer a set of questions about these desires. After a week, the researchers had
gathered more than 7,500 samples. Here’s the short version of what they found:
People fight desires
all day long. As Baumeister summarized in his subsequent book,
Willpower (co-authored with the
science writer John Tierney): “Desire turned out to be the norm, not the exception.”
The five most common desires these subjects fought include, not surprisingly, eating, sleeping,
and sex. But the top five list also included desires for “taking a break from [hard] work… checking
e-mail and social networking sites, surfing the web, listening to music, or watching television.” The
lure of the Internet and television proved especially strong: The subjects succeeded in resisting these
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: