Deep Work Needs Deep Investment.
Edition #135
Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
The ContraMind Code provides you with a system of principles, signals, and ideas to aid you in your pursuit of excellence.
The newsletter shares the source code through quick snapshots for a systems thinking approach to be the best in what you do.
The Code helps you reboot and reimagine your thinking by learning from the best and enables you to draw a blueprint on what it takes to get extraordinary things done. Please share your valuable thoughts and comments and start a conversation.
Take a journey to www.contraminds.com. Listen and watch some great minds talking to us about their journey of discovery of what went into making them craftsmen of their profession to drive peak performance.
Four Mental Health Principles From The Ancients.
This is an excellent article by Dr. Andrew Hartz (thanks to Peter Boghossian) on what we can learn from ancient philosophers and texts that still remain relevant today to tackle rising mental health issues worldwide.
Here are some interesting thoughts shared by Dr. Andrew Hartz for you to think about and reflect on:
Living Life With Balance: Excess is a common source of both mental and physical illness. Excessive eating or excessive dieting, excessive laziness or excessive exercise, excessive rumination or excessive avoidance—each could play a role in throwing the body or the psyche out of balance.
Acknowledging That Experiences Come and Go: The human brain and the nervous system are built to feel every emotion. We can expect all of them to come and go over the course of our lives. We feel an emotion, respond as needed and then, when it’s time, let it go. Put another way, our lives involve the full range of experiences, and we can expect them all to come and go in their time.
Connecting to Good Qualities and Good Actions: Meaningful connections with others require good qualities such as gratitude, authenticity, assertiveness and forgiveness. These qualities are important for fulfilling careers and families. They help people weather anxiety, stress, depression, anger, loss and fatigue. They can also help people avoid pursuing things that are more likely to make them suffer in the long term, such as envy, revenge, narcissism, and hollow desires.
Avoiding Distorted Self-Talk: Most psychiatric diagnoses are related in some way to distorted self-talk. Depressed people may have an internal monologue telling them they’re bad at everything, the world is bad, or everything is hopeless. Taming the monkey mind requires wisdom and awareness; otherwise, people can rush to conclusions, make assumptions, take things personally that aren’t, slip into perfectionism or make other errors in judgment that can contribute to life problems.
Read the entire article here.
Multitasking Doesn’t Work. So, Why Do We Keep Trying?
In this conversation by Stephen Dubner on Freakonomics Radio, the topic of dwindling attention and distraction due to multitasking is explored. So, what happens when you multitask and how does it affect your attention span?
Some thoughts shared in this conversation can encourage you to unmultitask. Here are some questions and answers from research that are put forth:
Is there some called productive and unproductive multitasking? For example, we usually walk and talk on our mobile phones. How does that affect your attention? According to David Strayer, when you multitask on two activities that require effort and application of cognitive abilities, attention is disturbed.
At the workplace, you will find a multitude of software on your PC that seeks your attention and constant interruptions from colleagues, clients, etc. According to David Strayer, his research shows that these do indeed affect productivity as you switch from one task to another. Therefore, he advocates focusing on one task at a time.
Attention is a scarce and valuable resource. However, distraction is cheap and common. Hence, distraction wins over attention all the time.
If you think computer systems multitask, you are mistaken. They don’t multitask in reality. The speed of processing leaves you with a feeling that there is multitasking.
According to Gloria Mark, Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, the faster people switch attention, the greater their stress. She reiterates that people who multitask live in a delusion that they are productive!
Prof. Gloria Mark mentions that multitasking creates more errors, increases switching costs( more time to settle when switching between two tasks) and increases stress.
In another interesting perspective, Prof. Gloria talks about the Zeigarnik Effect, which found that ‘people remember interrupted tasks around 90% better than those that they had been able to complete undisturbed.’
There is a cohort of supertaskers—maybe the top 1%-2.5% who are extremely good at multitasking. The frontal parts of their brain are more efficient than others. However, most people cannot transfer the deep expertise built on one task to another.
Olivia Grace, Product Manager with Slack, agrees that multitasking is a myth! Tech products create ‘induced demand’, which leads to more activity that can help you achieve your tertiary goal but will not help you achieve your primary goal.
Developing ‘meta-awareness’ of knowing what you are doing is essential. Asking questions like ‘Do I need the phone now?’ or ‘Is it critical for me to check the email now?’ can help you develop meta-awareness.
It is vital to make automatic actions less automatic, raise your conscious awareness, and transform these actions into ‘intentional’ actions—practice forethought.
Attention is directed to our goals, and we can lose track of them. It is essential to keep reminding ourselves of our goals. Taking sufficient breaks and spending time in nature could help improve your attention span.
Companies can think of instituting a ‘quiet time.’ Read email in batches. Why not have systems that will send emails only three times a day? Companies could consider the pros and cons of adopting right-to-disconnect laws.
Understand the potential downsides of algorithms. Reduce screen time, and parents need to be role models for their children when using media like emails, digital devices, etc. A media literacy program can go a long way in helping people better understand the potential positives and negatives of them.
JAMSETJI TATA: How The Legend Built Tata (Taj Hotel, TATA Tea, Air India, And Tanishq) | Harish Bhat
It’s rare to watch and listen to the history of legendary Indian entrepreneurs who have not just built companies, but an institution one can be proud of. There is a lot of talk and chatter about John D Rockefeller and Henry Ford but not much about India’s first business visionary, Jamsetji Tata. The story of Jamsetji Tata is inspiring and a masterclass on building an enterprise that can last beyond a founder’s lifetime - in this case, more than 150 years, to be precise!
Here are some key moments that can instil your interest to watch this video:
How Jamsetji Tata was an entrepreneur with a purpose.
The visionary way Jamshetji TATA structured his company with Tata Trust and Tata Sons as a core part of the ownership structure across TATA group companies. This is a case study, by itself, on how to marry business purpose with company structure.
Delineating ownership from professional management is vital for the long-term growth of any enterprise.
The story of how The Tata Memorial Hospital was created and how it serves patients needing cancer care is fascinating.
When Jamsetji TATA wanted to build India’s first integrated steel plant, the pains he took to travel to the US and walk into the offices of Charles Page Perin and ask him to travel to India in those days to help him build a steel plant were inspiring.
Pioneers like Jamsetji Tata have one thing in their DNA - To remain doggedly persistent.
Jamesetji was interested in reading and how reading gave him a window into the world. He also enjoyed travelling to learn and observe the best people, technologies, and companies worldwide. Finally, he spent a lot of time thinking about the industrial projects he was putting up, etc.
You can watch the video by clicking on the above link.
Deep Work Needs Deep Investment.
If you try to multitask, work without purpose, or do anything in excess, you will have little chance of accomplishing anything valuable or significant. This is really where you need to embrace and practice deep work.
Cal Newport is credited with coining the term "Deep Work," which he defines as a state of distraction-free concentration when one's brain works at its maximum potential.
What are some examples of deep work? Some examples include researching, writing thoughtful content, playing a musical instrument, analysing data, developing strategy, reading a book, having an ‘involved’ conversation with your colleague or family, practicing anything you want to be good at or improving your skill - sports, medicine, driving, speaking, cooking, exercising, trekking, bird watching, fixing a gadget etc. What you will see common in all this is the focus, effort, and investment of time needed, which can help you understand the difference between deep and peripheral work.
Intent, Intensity, Attention And Time - Key Ingredients To Deep Work
While multitasking is celebrated and recognised in the workplace, it creates an intent-to-impact deficit gap.
To accomplish any meaningful work, you must first develop a deep intent for doing it. Without an investment of deep intent, a piece of work may be completed on paper, but whether that has created an impact is the real question you need to ask yourself. It is not uncommon to see this around us. Intent requires deep thinking about the problem, applying multiple perspectives, analysing the consequences, assessing the skill capability and effort required to get that work done, etc. Intent requires a deep commitment and not a cursory approach to getting things done. Intent requires your mental investment, leading to conviction and persistence to make it happen. Intent does not always translate to results immediately. Hence, the relentless pursuit of accomplishing it requires intensity.
Without investment in intensity, you will not have the energy to move things forward. When intent is not accompanied by intensity, the intent remains only as a desire or an idea. Intensity is getting things done daily, regardless of the positive or negative results.
To achieve this intensity, you need attention, which comes from focus and without distractions. You need to invest your full attention to do deep work, and attention requires an investment of uninterrupted time, especially over long and extended periods.
When you deal with excesses and keep continuously switching between tasks, deep and meaningful work is rarely possible. Therefore, it seems the formula for deep work that can create an impact looks like this:
Deep Work = Intent + Intensity + Attention + Time
Some lessons we learnt from this week’s missions:
Excesses are a common source of both mental and physical illness.
People who multitask live in a delusion that they are productive.
Pioneers have a purpose and are doggedly persistent.