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> Cal Newport said it best in his book Deep Work: the ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increas

> Cal Newport said it best in his book Deep Work: the ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive. The people who cultivate that skill, stay up late at night while everyone is asleep so they don’t get distracted. Then they come in late because they need sleep like every one else. As a consequence, deep thought workers are seen by their immediate and responsive counterparts as obtuse, eccentric, or worse: lazy and unable to manage their time. This really comes down to the workers dilemma. Do you spend your time marketing your self to others and letting people know your accomplishments, or do you spend the time doing work that will benefit others? Deep thought workers will bias heavily towards work that will benefit others. This benefit is often non-obvious deep thought workers will run the risk that their peers, that are more connected and more reachable, will take the credit for the results.

robinsonrc 6y ago
Why is getting up early not considered?
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Some do. My father did. But it's just as bad, because then you're seen as leaving early. Or you don't leave early, and are working more hours, which has a cost.
  - tanseydavid 6y ago
    My personal experience is that the notion "I will go in early today and leave at an appropriately early time," fails to work out as planned 90-95% of the time. But I really can only blame myself for this.
    - EvilEy3 6y ago
      Pre corona I was arriving at 7~ and leaving at 15. You can definitely do it.
      - elwell 6y ago
        It almost seems easier to pull off if you leave exceptionally early (3pm or earlier). E.g., if you leave at 4:15pm, that doesn't give any reminder that you started early.
      - sillyquiet 6y ago
        Same. This was my schedule too, and maybe I got lucky in my workplace, but after socializing about it, nobody had any problem with the leaving earlier part. Was easy too, 'can we meet at 4:30' 'Hmm, I come in pretty early, and like to get out the door by 3:30, can we do it earlier?' was a typical exchange. Also, depending on your office arrangement your team-mates just know you get in early when they always see you in the office when they get in. But, ymmv, I am sure it varies from workplace to workplace.
      - wsinks 6y ago
        You have the discipline to use the 24 hour nomenclature all the time. I applaud you! I had to read this twice, and loved it so much I had to comment
  - matwood 6y ago
    I find early better for few reasons, but primarily because not all work hours are the same. Waking up, working out, then immediately doing deep work before checking my phone, internet, or anything else almost feels like a super power. The best work hours of my day are actually spent working, and are almost never interrupted. Even if I do have to attend a late meeting or something, my brain is in the wind down mode and shouldn't need to wind back up. This means it's easier to fall asleep, and repeat the next day. I used to do the stay up late thing, and while work did get done, it's nowhere close to what I get done in the morning.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  I have tried this. Woke up at 1AM and went to bed at 7PM for one internship. The challenge was that there are very rarely obligatory early morning events. There are often late day events and issues. If I wake up early, I can't stay until 9PM without being miserable. But something requiring me until 9PM is far more likely than something at even 8AM.
  - SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
    Why not something less extreme? I start work at 6-7 and that usually buys me a couple of really productive hours before people start popping up. It also means you can still do things at 9PM without compromising your sleep patterns too much.
  - matwood 6y ago
    1AM is extreme. I wouldn't even call that waking up early, more like just staying up all night. When I was in high school I worked 10PM to 7AM, and that was terrible. But, I was able to, at a young age learn exactly how much sleep I need and what it took for me to sleep (pitch black darkness - eye mask). Now, I consider 5-6AM early and that's when I typically wake up - haven't used an alarm in years.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    Depends, I know have to work with people in India. Me getting up at 7am best matches their work hours.
- pitaj 6y ago
  A lot (most?) people find staying up late easier than getting up early. Also, if your waking hours are say 0800-2300 then you can easily work late and move your leisure time to the morning without changing your sleep schedule.
  - paublyrne 6y ago
    > Also, if your waking hours are say 0800-2300 then you can easily work late and move your leisure time to the morning without changing your sleep schedule. Not necessarily. Early birds like me find it difficult to work in the evenings, despite being technically awake. I find it way easier to get up early than to stay up late, which can actually feel like torture sometimes. As for the split, I've read it's more like 10% for each extreme with the majority in the middle, though I can't find a reference, and I suspect it's very hard to actually know.
- ryanmarsh 6y ago
  Some do, although many deep workers circadian rhythms naturally skew later. There's plenty of research on this you can find.
- elliekelly 6y ago
  I can stay up working as late as I'd like - when I'm done with my deep focus is entirely up to me. When I get into the office early the end of my deep focus is entirely out of my control. It ends when my coworkers decide to come in and start bothering me.
MattGaiser 6y ago
> the people who cultivate that skill, stay up late at night while everyone is asleep so they don’t get distracted. This is what I like about work from home. I can use the distracting and busy day to sleep and deal with admin tasks like email and work until 3AM instead if I really need to get stuff done.
Swizec 6y ago
> Do you spend your time marketing your self to others and letting people know your accomplishments, or do you spend the time doing work that will benefit others? I like the luck surface area analogy for this. Take a rectangle. Side A is "Quality of work". Side B is "How many people know about it". The surface area – A*B – is your luck and opportunity. If you do amazing work and nobody knows about it, your luck is zero. If you do terrible work and everyone knows about it, your luck is zero. A square would be equal balance of A and B, which is okay but not to everyone's liking. You can get the same surface area with 2A and 0.5B. You can get a huge surface area with 2A and 1B. For HN types, optimizing for big A and just enough B is easiest. We tend to err on the side of not enough B.
- beckingz 6y ago
  The conjoined rectangle of success.
  - mszcz 6y ago
    That just made my day!
  - birdyrooster 6y ago
    Damn you for beating me to this joke format. And I’m not deleting it.
    - beckingz 6y ago
      Do we expand the rectangle to have a dimension for speed?
- wrigby 6y ago
  I really like this model - thanks for sharing! A professor of mine drilled into us the idea that much of life is luck, but as he said (and I believe he was quoting someone else here) "the harder I work, the luckier I get."
  - 6y ago
groby_b 6y ago
If you work on a team, being reachable is part of your work. There are (few) opportunities for solo thinking, and Cal is lucky to find one. I hope you find one for yourself. But as a team, the answer "I can't reach the expert because they secluded themselves" is not acceptable. Because as a senior figure on a team, you job is to become a force multiplier for others, not a solo force. Not to do work that magnanimously benefits others, but work that makes others better. You need occasional deep work time, sure. But the whole "I must disconnect from everything, always" thing does not work for any social endeavor - and most meaningful things are of a scope that requires a team. I wish I had a better answer here, because I too like thinking quietly for long times - but I also see that I fulfill a useful function when I'm reachable, and ultimately, you get paid for usefulness to the larger endeavor. (This points strongly towards solo/entrepreneur tracks if isolation is your only useful mode of work, but even then, you'd be well advised to find a partner who handles the people parts)
- Joeri 6y ago
  As a technical team lead I’ve struggled more than once with the trade off between getting meaningful deep work done for myself and getting others on with their work. Over the years I’ve come to realize it is not as clear cut of a trade off. Teams can be coached to be self-reliant and to distribute knowledge effectively, so that they have fewer urgent questions. I try to proactively take myself out of the critical path as much as possible. Documenting thoroughly is one way. Another is to use channels for question-asking and encouraging the use of the channel instead of dm. There’s a higher chance a person can answer who is not interrupted, and because everyone passively follows the channel the knowledge is shared more effectively. Decision-making is always the tricky part. Junior devs need constant handholding and it is more about a lack of lived experience than a lack of knowledge. You need enough senior devs so that the load of constant micro-decisions for the juniors can be spread around. The thing is that getting to the point where there is enough time for deep work is a process that takes time and that is easily undone by team churn. IMHO the only way to sidestep the matter entirely is to have a lieutenant who handles all the urgent matters, but I’ve only had that once and in retrospect it was hardly a fair situation.
- FalconSensei 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
I did exactly this early in my career: Stayed up late, got work done outside of business hours, suffered the consequences. Later I started being more assertive about my time. Meeting request in the middle of my core work hours? Decline as busy, suggest to move it to a lunch meeting or offer to call the person after working hours (Everyone chooses lunch meeting instead of after hours). People tapping me on the shoulder to ask a question while I'm wearing headphones? Before they can speak, I politely say that I'm in the middle of something I need to finish and ask if it's urgent. It's rarely urgent, but people quickly learn that it doesn't pay off to interrupt me. Constant deluge of Slack messages? I set a status that I was busy but would be available to chat during certain hours. When I'm pinged, I quickly respond that I'm in the middle of something but I'll get back to them later. The key was to realize that taking charge of my own time didn't have the negative consequences I thought it would. In my mind, I thought declining people's meeting invites or refusing to prioritize other people's demands would end my career, so I let people walk all over my schedule. Reality couldn't have been further from the truth. Nearly everyone was very understanding and very few people interpreted my responses as rude. Obviously you need to be polite and professional, no matter how aggravating the interruptions are. Carving out dedicated meeting and socializing time was also important. It's unlikely that I'm going to sit in one place for 8 straight hours anyway, so allocating two blocks of time each day for meetings and catching up was helpful. Making it predictable and communicating it to others made it easy for everyone else to understand. I even marked it on my shared calendar.
- hinkley 6y ago
  > People tapping me on the shoulder to ask a question while I'm wearing headphones? Before they can speak, I politely say that I'm in the middle of something I need to finish and ask if it's urgent. It's rarely urgent, but people quickly learn that it doesn't pay off to interrupt me. You can often shorten this to, “can you come back in fifteen minutes?” This is less likely for them to try to pick your brain about whether their problem is urgent or not. Of course it depends on who is asking. If the head of IT is standing there, and you don’t usually hear from IT, then it could be something bad. If your intern looks like they just set the building on fire, also might be important.
- 6y ago
dqpb 6y ago
Just move to the east coast and work for a company on the west coast. Problem solved.
- iamthirsty 6y ago
  From OP: > The people who cultivate that skill, stay up late at night while everyone is asleep so they don’t get distracted. So I don't think that solves the problem if everyone in your office is still awake during your (later) prime working hours, although it does solve the waking up later issue.
hintymad 6y ago
I also read Cal Newport and am pursuing the ability to perform deep work. In the meantime, I notice that the marginal return of deep work in a big enough company is questionable, especially for high-level ICs. A high-level IC spends most of the time in discussion and meetings, and people expect such person to make quick decisions or to assert influence within a single meeting. Therefore, the most influential ICs are those who have strong intuition and strong communication skills. Deep work can still pay off, but one needs to go really deep on both big pictures and on technical depth. I mean Wernher von Braun deep or Jeff Dean deep, which very few people possess. Maybe this is not about deep work, but about how challenging it is to be an IC.
- nondave 6y ago
  What does IC mean here?
  - kawfey 6y ago
    Individual contributor.
  - adamesque 6y ago
    individual contributor (aka someone judged on their own work output, not the output of a team like a manager or director)
    - posed 6y ago
      I first read it as Integrated chip, lol.
  - augustk 6y ago
    Integrated circuit? https://blog.mitchjlee.com/2020/your-writing-style-is-costly https://blog.mitchjlee.com/2020/your-writing-style-is-costly
    - hintymad 6y ago
      My bad. You’re right, and thanks for the link. Unfortunately the window for editing is closed.
throwaway888abc 6y ago
Really well formulated. Love your explanation and pointers of worker dilemma.
pc86 6y ago
You're making huge assumptions that a) people who cultivate this skill are late night folks and not morning people; b) people who cultivate this skill are unable to do deep work during the day; c) even ignoring the fallacies in A and B, that these folks' counterparts are blind to their accomplishments and assume they're lazy because they come in late; d) that someone cannot be capable of both completing meaningful deep work and be lazy and unable to manage their time.
- chrisweekly 6y ago
  I am living proof that it's possible to change from a night owl to an early riser. I used to stay up till midnight or 1am as often as not. By nature? and lifelong habit, for over 40 years I was in the "stay up late, sleep in to compensate" camp. But a couple years ago someone I respect and admire challenged me to reset the pattern. I started setting a daily alarm and jumping into a brief ice-cold shower at 5am. It only took a few days to acclimate, and nearly everything about my days changed for the better. I need 7h of sleep so if I'm not lights-out by 10p, I "sleep in" to 530 or 6. I recommend it highly. The time I spend between 5-7a is, almost without exception, much better spent than 10p-12a would ever have been. YMMV but my point is, being a "morning person" can be a choice.
  - balfirevic 6y ago
    > I used to stay up till midnight or 1am as often as not. That's not a night-owl (midnight I mean, 1am might barely be).
    - chrisweekly 6y ago
      Fair enough. But FTR the 12-1a habit was itself a form of restraint against my prior tendency to stay up much later than that -- as a parent of school-aged kids, w/ no plausible option to sleep past 7a or so. Staying up till 3 or 4 and getting less than 4h sleep would've been a non-starter.
      - balfirevic 6y ago
secfirstmd 6y ago
This so explains me. Struggle to concentrate in day times but at night I'm laser focused. Staying up late and only getting up later in mornings. Which for whatever reason most organisations and people are awful at accommodating. At most organisations I've been part of I've adding some of, if not the, highest value on projects, ideas etc by far. However they never see that and focus on the stupid morning stuff so often.
watwut 6y ago
In tech, people who were late are rewarded. And in fact, you can do deep work at morning a much as late, there is literally no one in tech startup at the morning.
ysavir 6y ago
This is not a fair portrayal. This is one way to go about it, and a way which avoids the problem while running up other costs. And there are better ways. Better ways such as keeping your phone in another room. Building the discipline to not be checking email or other sites frequently throughout the day (on phone or in the browser). Muting notification sources. And ultimately, taking control of your time. The people that struggle with deep work are the people that struggle with unplugging, and/or live with a fear of missing out. Conquer this, and cultivating this skill becomes a much more manageable and achievable challenge.
dmingod666 6y ago
Not disagreeing with you entirely, but deep work can be done in office hours as well. Nice noise cancelling headphones, schedule a chunk of 1-1.5 hours, go "do not disturb" in chat and don't check mail during this time. You can get decent amount of work done in one block. Try to get 2-3 of these blocks during the day, that would be pretty decent. You could use a Pomodoro timer app if you want to track the blocks. Manic time is also a great app, it keeps track of all the windows you have active, so then you can go back and tag the chunks of your time and do an analysis on when you went down a rabbit hole and for how long.
- billti 6y ago
  I agree with this. As a manager I have a lot of meetings and few long stretches for 'deep work' in my day. Yet when I take on some work that truly absorbs me, I find the time for it. Non-essential meetings get postponed, email/Teams can survive an hour or two without a response, HackerNews will still be there at the end of the day ;-) , etc. I do feel like a lot "distractions" in work hours are avoidable. Some of them are just habit or a dopamine fix or procrastination - kind of like checking Facebook or Twitter on your phone when something else isn't focusing your attention fully.
hazeii 6y ago
As Harry Truman said [0], "It's amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit". [0] https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/harry_s_truman_109615 https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/harry_s_truman_109615
bluGill 6y ago
The problem with deep thought is you can waste a lot of time thinking about something that is no longer important. If your project is doomed to be canceled for reason outside your control there is no difference in output between someone who does nothing (ie should be fired for lack of work) and someone spends his days working hard. Those who do better networking tend to be onto those trends. They will find out about opportunities where 10 minutes of focused work will net a large [sale, or other win for the company] for the. 10 minutes of the right work can be far more valuable than a whole month of deep focused work. (though that 10 minutes probably builds on - and takes credit for - someone else's months of deep work) There is no clear win here. However if you like to be a deep focus person you should force yourself to spend some time every week figuring out the pulse of the company so you are at least doing useful work.
- 1123581321 6y ago
  There's a Richard Hamming quote, along those lines, that I like. I do keep in mind he was surrounded by brilliant and stimulating people at Bell Labs. Some closed door or deep work is necessary to shut out the truly unproductive aspects of modern office work. Doing this without seeming rude is an art. "I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame."
t-writescode 6y ago
The way you describe the harm it causes to the employees sounds, to me, like a managerial problem. My company has several of those "works late, comes in late" employees, and none of them are seen as lazy. We have managers that recognize and re-enforce to the other teams the work that we do and the people we unblock and the wins that we're able to make. I just completed one of my own reviews where I was lauded loudly as a person that unblocks other people - while my own official tasks are relatively light because my primary task has become unblocking others - and a coworker was recently promoted due to her weird, off-hour work. Why? Management understood our strengths and re-enforces them, protects us from nay-sayers and rejoices openly about the work that we do. That way, we can keep working in the areas we're good at, in the way we're good at it, and we're given the recognition for our work through our managers. With a good manager, you shouldn't have to be constantly trumpeting your own skill, they should be revealing it for you. Managers, and I'm sure many of you are here on Hacker News, this is one of your many, many jobs.
screye 6y ago
> The people who cultivate that skill, stay up late at night while everyone is asleep so they don’t get distracted Haha, I feel so called out. I have been up for 2 days straight at this point, and it has been incredibly productive. Sometimes I wish I could summon my ability to do deep work during the day, but it is just so hard with all the meetings and ideations (I love them too, but can't stay up 24x7). My body can't take this kind of late-night abuse anymore, so I feel like I am running on borrowed time. Hopefully I will learn to do focus work in the day at some point. Has anyone here successfully made that transition ?
- danielheath 6y ago
  I have; I found that when in a (physical) space where I could guarantee nobody would interrupt me, I can work like it’s night.
jariel 6y ago
Brilliantly true. I've found that it is possible to do during the day, but you kind of have to put your phone away, and also clamp down on browser. HN is unfortunately a distraction! Make yourself 'feel' like it's a Monday or Friday Holiday, where nobody is in the office, so they can't bother you, but it's not a 'weekend' either. Those days are productive.
eloisius 6y ago
I agree with this sentiment. Even if you manage to get to bed at an early time, it seems like the modern workplace still doesn’t reward deep focus. It rewards frequent context switching, being constantly available to answer pings in slack, providing updates to managers just “checking in” with you, attending tons of meetings, and being able to juggle numerous things going on at once. I can adapt to all that, but the 1-2 hours of actual work time I could squeeze out of any given day didn’t allow for much deep focus.
at-fates-hands 6y ago
>> As a consequence, deep thought workers are seen by their immediate and responsive counterparts as obtuse, eccentric, or worse: lazy and unable to manage their time. Literally just had this on my year end review. I won't go into the useless stack ranking the company I work for uses, but none of my project work was ever late (it was actually either right on time or early) but because I'm a night owl and do a majority of my work off hours, I'm considered "unavailable" when other regular folks need to get a hold of me because I'm not online at 7am like everyone else. Yet any issues are resolved in a timely manner regardless. I literally got a lower rating because my manager said there was a "lack of effort" during business hours and that other team members said I was "aloof" and "not present" during long managerial meetings. I had to spend most of this week refuting what my manager wrote on my review since if I decided to move departments, other managers will look at it since its a typical process managers to do when hiring internal candidates. Pulling in copious amounts of documentation to refute what he was saying cost me a days work, but in the end, I had no other choice. I'm still bitter about the whole thing.
- freebuju 6y ago
  Part of being an employee means towing the company line. Even when you don't feel like it. It's a sham you are collectively expected to endure. Is it any wonder that the most successful employees are the ones who succeed in reading and adjusting themselves to this requirement? That said. I feel and connect with your rant at a personal level. For reasons I won't share on this post. I know you didn't ask for any advice and yours is just a rant. Based on your review and what you say i.e you had to spend a day just to refute it. It would be wise to increase interviews with other prospective employers and other professional opportunities. Your efforts are much better spent where they are valued a bit more than this.
- unixhero 6y ago
  Walk slower or quit. The efforts you have put in have not been apprechiated.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
michaelcampbell 6y ago
> The people who cultivate that skill, stay up late at night while everyone is asleep so they don’t get distracted. cite? Your implication as stated above I believe has not been proven. Doesn't Cal go into some detail about people who have cultivated this skill; perform deep work, and then only do it for "normal" (or even more often, far less than "normal") work hours and thus have the rest of the working day to do whatever else they enjoy?

robinsonrc 6y ago

Why is getting up early not considered?

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
Some do. My father did. But it's just as bad, because then you're seen as leaving early. Or you don't leave early, and are working more hours, which has a cost.
- tanseydavid 6y ago
  My personal experience is that the notion "I will go in early today and leave at an appropriately early time," fails to work out as planned 90-95% of the time. But I really can only blame myself for this.
  - EvilEy3 6y ago
    Pre corona I was arriving at 7~ and leaving at 15. You can definitely do it.
    - elwell 6y ago
      It almost seems easier to pull off if you leave exceptionally early (3pm or earlier). E.g., if you leave at 4:15pm, that doesn't give any reminder that you started early.
    - sillyquiet 6y ago
      Same. This was my schedule too, and maybe I got lucky in my workplace, but after socializing about it, nobody had any problem with the leaving earlier part. Was easy too, 'can we meet at 4:30' 'Hmm, I come in pretty early, and like to get out the door by 3:30, can we do it earlier?' was a typical exchange. Also, depending on your office arrangement your team-mates just know you get in early when they always see you in the office when they get in. But, ymmv, I am sure it varies from workplace to workplace.
    - wsinks 6y ago
      You have the discipline to use the 24 hour nomenclature all the time. I applaud you! I had to read this twice, and loved it so much I had to comment
- matwood 6y ago
  I find early better for few reasons, but primarily because not all work hours are the same. Waking up, working out, then immediately doing deep work before checking my phone, internet, or anything else almost feels like a super power. The best work hours of my day are actually spent working, and are almost never interrupted. Even if I do have to attend a late meeting or something, my brain is in the wind down mode and shouldn't need to wind back up. This means it's easier to fall asleep, and repeat the next day. I used to do the stay up late thing, and while work did get done, it's nowhere close to what I get done in the morning.
MattGaiser 6y ago
I have tried this. Woke up at 1AM and went to bed at 7PM for one internship. The challenge was that there are very rarely obligatory early morning events. There are often late day events and issues. If I wake up early, I can't stay until 9PM without being miserable. But something requiring me until 9PM is far more likely than something at even 8AM.
- SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
  Why not something less extreme? I start work at 6-7 and that usually buys me a couple of really productive hours before people start popping up. It also means you can still do things at 9PM without compromising your sleep patterns too much.
- matwood 6y ago
  1AM is extreme. I wouldn't even call that waking up early, more like just staying up all night. When I was in high school I worked 10PM to 7AM, and that was terrible. But, I was able to, at a young age learn exactly how much sleep I need and what it took for me to sleep (pitch black darkness - eye mask). Now, I consider 5-6AM early and that's when I typically wake up - haven't used an alarm in years.
- bluGill 6y ago
  Depends, I know have to work with people in India. Me getting up at 7am best matches their work hours.
pitaj 6y ago
A lot (most?) people find staying up late easier than getting up early. Also, if your waking hours are say 0800-2300 then you can easily work late and move your leisure time to the morning without changing your sleep schedule.
- paublyrne 6y ago
  > Also, if your waking hours are say 0800-2300 then you can easily work late and move your leisure time to the morning without changing your sleep schedule. Not necessarily. Early birds like me find it difficult to work in the evenings, despite being technically awake. I find it way easier to get up early than to stay up late, which can actually feel like torture sometimes. As for the split, I've read it's more like 10% for each extreme with the majority in the middle, though I can't find a reference, and I suspect it's very hard to actually know.
ryanmarsh 6y ago
Some do, although many deep workers circadian rhythms naturally skew later. There's plenty of research on this you can find.
elliekelly 6y ago
I can stay up working as late as I'd like - when I'm done with my deep focus is entirely up to me. When I get into the office early the end of my deep focus is entirely out of my control. It ends when my coworkers decide to come in and start bothering me.

MattGaiser 6y ago

> the people who cultivate that skill, stay up late at night while everyone is asleep so they don’t get distracted. This is what I like about work from home. I can use the distracting and busy day to sleep and deal with admin tasks like email and work until 3AM instead if I really need to get stuff done.

Swizec 6y ago

> Do you spend your time marketing your self to others and letting people know your accomplishments, or do you spend the time doing work that will benefit others? I like the luck surface area analogy for this. Take a rectangle. Side A is "Quality of work". Side B is "How many people know about it". The surface area – A*B – is your luck and opportunity. If you do amazing work and nobody knows about it, your luck is zero. If you do terrible work and everyone knows about it, your luck is zero. A square would be equal balance of A and B, which is okay but not to everyone's liking. You can get the same surface area with 2A and 0.5B. You can get a huge surface area with 2A and 1B. For HN types, optimizing for big A and just enough B is easiest. We tend to err on the side of not enough B.

beckingz 6y ago
The conjoined rectangle of success.
- mszcz 6y ago
  That just made my day!
- birdyrooster 6y ago
  Damn you for beating me to this joke format. And I’m not deleting it.
  - beckingz 6y ago
    Do we expand the rectangle to have a dimension for speed?
wrigby 6y ago
I really like this model - thanks for sharing! A professor of mine drilled into us the idea that much of life is luck, but as he said (and I believe he was quoting someone else here) "the harder I work, the luckier I get."
- 6y ago

groby_b 6y ago

If you work on a team, being reachable is part of your work. There are (few) opportunities for solo thinking, and Cal is lucky to find one. I hope you find one for yourself. But as a team, the answer "I can't reach the expert because they secluded themselves" is not acceptable. Because as a senior figure on a team, you job is to become a force multiplier for others, not a solo force. Not to do work that magnanimously benefits others, but work that makes others better. You need occasional deep work time, sure. But the whole "I must disconnect from everything, always" thing does not work for any social endeavor - and most meaningful things are of a scope that requires a team. I wish I had a better answer here, because I too like thinking quietly for long times - but I also see that I fulfill a useful function when I'm reachable, and ultimately, you get paid for usefulness to the larger endeavor. (This points strongly towards solo/entrepreneur tracks if isolation is your only useful mode of work, but even then, you'd be well advised to find a partner who handles the people parts)

Joeri 6y ago
As a technical team lead I’ve struggled more than once with the trade off between getting meaningful deep work done for myself and getting others on with their work. Over the years I’ve come to realize it is not as clear cut of a trade off. Teams can be coached to be self-reliant and to distribute knowledge effectively, so that they have fewer urgent questions. I try to proactively take myself out of the critical path as much as possible. Documenting thoroughly is one way. Another is to use channels for question-asking and encouraging the use of the channel instead of dm. There’s a higher chance a person can answer who is not interrupted, and because everyone passively follows the channel the knowledge is shared more effectively. Decision-making is always the tricky part. Junior devs need constant handholding and it is more about a lack of lived experience than a lack of knowledge. You need enough senior devs so that the load of constant micro-decisions for the juniors can be spread around. The thing is that getting to the point where there is enough time for deep work is a process that takes time and that is easily undone by team churn. IMHO the only way to sidestep the matter entirely is to have a lieutenant who handles all the urgent matters, but I’ve only had that once and in retrospect it was hardly a fair situation.
FalconSensei 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

I did exactly this early in my career: Stayed up late, got work done outside of business hours, suffered the consequences. Later I started being more assertive about my time. Meeting request in the middle of my core work hours? Decline as busy, suggest to move it to a lunch meeting or offer to call the person after working hours (Everyone chooses lunch meeting instead of after hours). People tapping me on the shoulder to ask a question while I'm wearing headphones? Before they can speak, I politely say that I'm in the middle of something I need to finish and ask if it's urgent. It's rarely urgent, but people quickly learn that it doesn't pay off to interrupt me. Constant deluge of Slack messages? I set a status that I was busy but would be available to chat during certain hours. When I'm pinged, I quickly respond that I'm in the middle of something but I'll get back to them later. The key was to realize that taking charge of my own time didn't have the negative consequences I thought it would. In my mind, I thought declining people's meeting invites or refusing to prioritize other people's demands would end my career, so I let people walk all over my schedule. Reality couldn't have been further from the truth. Nearly everyone was very understanding and very few people interpreted my responses as rude. Obviously you need to be polite and professional, no matter how aggravating the interruptions are. Carving out dedicated meeting and socializing time was also important. It's unlikely that I'm going to sit in one place for 8 straight hours anyway, so allocating two blocks of time each day for meetings and catching up was helpful. Making it predictable and communicating it to others made it easy for everyone else to understand. I even marked it on my shared calendar.

hinkley 6y ago
> People tapping me on the shoulder to ask a question while I'm wearing headphones? Before they can speak, I politely say that I'm in the middle of something I need to finish and ask if it's urgent. It's rarely urgent, but people quickly learn that it doesn't pay off to interrupt me. You can often shorten this to, “can you come back in fifteen minutes?” This is less likely for them to try to pick your brain about whether their problem is urgent or not. Of course it depends on who is asking. If the head of IT is standing there, and you don’t usually hear from IT, then it could be something bad. If your intern looks like they just set the building on fire, also might be important.
6y ago

dqpb 6y ago

Just move to the east coast and work for a company on the west coast. Problem solved.

iamthirsty 6y ago
From OP: > The people who cultivate that skill, stay up late at night while everyone is asleep so they don’t get distracted. So I don't think that solves the problem if everyone in your office is still awake during your (later) prime working hours, although it does solve the waking up later issue.

hintymad 6y ago

I also read Cal Newport and am pursuing the ability to perform deep work. In the meantime, I notice that the marginal return of deep work in a big enough company is questionable, especially for high-level ICs. A high-level IC spends most of the time in discussion and meetings, and people expect such person to make quick decisions or to assert influence within a single meeting. Therefore, the most influential ICs are those who have strong intuition and strong communication skills. Deep work can still pay off, but one needs to go really deep on both big pictures and on technical depth. I mean Wernher von Braun deep or Jeff Dean deep, which very few people possess. Maybe this is not about deep work, but about how challenging it is to be an IC.

nondave 6y ago
What does IC mean here?
- kawfey 6y ago
  Individual contributor.
- adamesque 6y ago
  individual contributor (aka someone judged on their own work output, not the output of a team like a manager or director)
  - posed 6y ago
    I first read it as Integrated chip, lol.
- augustk 6y ago
  Integrated circuit? https://blog.mitchjlee.com/2020/your-writing-style-is-costly https://blog.mitchjlee.com/2020/your-writing-style-is-costly
  - hintymad 6y ago
    My bad. You’re right, and thanks for the link. Unfortunately the window for editing is closed.

throwaway888abc 6y ago

Really well formulated. Love your explanation and pointers of worker dilemma.

pc86 6y ago

You're making huge assumptions that a) people who cultivate this skill are late night folks and not morning people; b) people who cultivate this skill are unable to do deep work during the day; c) even ignoring the fallacies in A and B, that these folks' counterparts are blind to their accomplishments and assume they're lazy because they come in late; d) that someone cannot be capable of both completing meaningful deep work and be lazy and unable to manage their time.

chrisweekly 6y ago
I am living proof that it's possible to change from a night owl to an early riser. I used to stay up till midnight or 1am as often as not. By nature? and lifelong habit, for over 40 years I was in the "stay up late, sleep in to compensate" camp. But a couple years ago someone I respect and admire challenged me to reset the pattern. I started setting a daily alarm and jumping into a brief ice-cold shower at 5am. It only took a few days to acclimate, and nearly everything about my days changed for the better. I need 7h of sleep so if I'm not lights-out by 10p, I "sleep in" to 530 or 6. I recommend it highly. The time I spend between 5-7a is, almost without exception, much better spent than 10p-12a would ever have been. YMMV but my point is, being a "morning person" can be a choice.
- balfirevic 6y ago
  > I used to stay up till midnight or 1am as often as not. That's not a night-owl (midnight I mean, 1am might barely be).
  - chrisweekly 6y ago
    Fair enough. But FTR the 12-1a habit was itself a form of restraint against my prior tendency to stay up much later than that -- as a parent of school-aged kids, w/ no plausible option to sleep past 7a or so. Staying up till 3 or 4 and getting less than 4h sleep would've been a non-starter.
    - balfirevic 6y ago

secfirstmd 6y ago

This so explains me. Struggle to concentrate in day times but at night I'm laser focused. Staying up late and only getting up later in mornings. Which for whatever reason most organisations and people are awful at accommodating. At most organisations I've been part of I've adding some of, if not the, highest value on projects, ideas etc by far. However they never see that and focus on the stupid morning stuff so often.

watwut 6y ago

In tech, people who were late are rewarded. And in fact, you can do deep work at morning a much as late, there is literally no one in tech startup at the morning.

ysavir 6y ago

This is not a fair portrayal. This is one way to go about it, and a way which avoids the problem while running up other costs. And there are better ways. Better ways such as keeping your phone in another room. Building the discipline to not be checking email or other sites frequently throughout the day (on phone or in the browser). Muting notification sources. And ultimately, taking control of your time. The people that struggle with deep work are the people that struggle with unplugging, and/or live with a fear of missing out. Conquer this, and cultivating this skill becomes a much more manageable and achievable challenge.

dmingod666 6y ago

Not disagreeing with you entirely, but deep work can be done in office hours as well. Nice noise cancelling headphones, schedule a chunk of 1-1.5 hours, go "do not disturb" in chat and don't check mail during this time. You can get decent amount of work done in one block. Try to get 2-3 of these blocks during the day, that would be pretty decent. You could use a Pomodoro timer app if you want to track the blocks. Manic time is also a great app, it keeps track of all the windows you have active, so then you can go back and tag the chunks of your time and do an analysis on when you went down a rabbit hole and for how long.

billti 6y ago
I agree with this. As a manager I have a lot of meetings and few long stretches for 'deep work' in my day. Yet when I take on some work that truly absorbs me, I find the time for it. Non-essential meetings get postponed, email/Teams can survive an hour or two without a response, HackerNews will still be there at the end of the day ;-) , etc. I do feel like a lot "distractions" in work hours are avoidable. Some of them are just habit or a dopamine fix or procrastination - kind of like checking Facebook or Twitter on your phone when something else isn't focusing your attention fully.

hazeii 6y ago

As Harry Truman said [0], "It's amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit". [0] https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/harry_s_truman_109615 https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/harry_s_truman_109615

bluGill 6y ago

The problem with deep thought is you can waste a lot of time thinking about something that is no longer important. If your project is doomed to be canceled for reason outside your control there is no difference in output between someone who does nothing (ie should be fired for lack of work) and someone spends his days working hard. Those who do better networking tend to be onto those trends. They will find out about opportunities where 10 minutes of focused work will net a large [sale, or other win for the company] for the. 10 minutes of the right work can be far more valuable than a whole month of deep focused work. (though that 10 minutes probably builds on - and takes credit for - someone else's months of deep work) There is no clear win here. However if you like to be a deep focus person you should force yourself to spend some time every week figuring out the pulse of the company so you are at least doing useful work.

1123581321 6y ago
There's a Richard Hamming quote, along those lines, that I like. I do keep in mind he was surrounded by brilliant and stimulating people at Bell Labs. Some closed door or deep work is necessary to shut out the truly unproductive aspects of modern office work. Doing this without seeming rude is an art. "I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame."

t-writescode 6y ago

The way you describe the harm it causes to the employees sounds, to me, like a managerial problem. My company has several of those "works late, comes in late" employees, and none of them are seen as lazy. We have managers that recognize and re-enforce to the other teams the work that we do and the people we unblock and the wins that we're able to make. I just completed one of my own reviews where I was lauded loudly as a person that unblocks other people - while my own official tasks are relatively light because my primary task has become unblocking others - and a coworker was recently promoted due to her weird, off-hour work. Why? Management understood our strengths and re-enforces them, protects us from nay-sayers and rejoices openly about the work that we do. That way, we can keep working in the areas we're good at, in the way we're good at it, and we're given the recognition for our work through our managers. With a good manager, you shouldn't have to be constantly trumpeting your own skill, they should be revealing it for you. Managers, and I'm sure many of you are here on Hacker News, this is one of your many, many jobs.

screye 6y ago

> The people who cultivate that skill, stay up late at night while everyone is asleep so they don’t get distracted Haha, I feel so called out. I have been up for 2 days straight at this point, and it has been incredibly productive. Sometimes I wish I could summon my ability to do deep work during the day, but it is just so hard with all the meetings and ideations (I love them too, but can't stay up 24x7). My body can't take this kind of late-night abuse anymore, so I feel like I am running on borrowed time. Hopefully I will learn to do focus work in the day at some point. Has anyone here successfully made that transition ?

danielheath 6y ago
I have; I found that when in a (physical) space where I could guarantee nobody would interrupt me, I can work like it’s night.

jariel 6y ago

Brilliantly true. I've found that it is possible to do during the day, but you kind of have to put your phone away, and also clamp down on browser. HN is unfortunately a distraction! Make yourself 'feel' like it's a Monday or Friday Holiday, where nobody is in the office, so they can't bother you, but it's not a 'weekend' either. Those days are productive.

eloisius 6y ago

I agree with this sentiment. Even if you manage to get to bed at an early time, it seems like the modern workplace still doesn’t reward deep focus. It rewards frequent context switching, being constantly available to answer pings in slack, providing updates to managers just “checking in” with you, attending tons of meetings, and being able to juggle numerous things going on at once. I can adapt to all that, but the 1-2 hours of actual work time I could squeeze out of any given day didn’t allow for much deep focus.

at-fates-hands 6y ago

>> As a consequence, deep thought workers are seen by their immediate and responsive counterparts as obtuse, eccentric, or worse: lazy and unable to manage their time. Literally just had this on my year end review. I won't go into the useless stack ranking the company I work for uses, but none of my project work was ever late (it was actually either right on time or early) but because I'm a night owl and do a majority of my work off hours, I'm considered "unavailable" when other regular folks need to get a hold of me because I'm not online at 7am like everyone else. Yet any issues are resolved in a timely manner regardless. I literally got a lower rating because my manager said there was a "lack of effort" during business hours and that other team members said I was "aloof" and "not present" during long managerial meetings. I had to spend most of this week refuting what my manager wrote on my review since if I decided to move departments, other managers will look at it since its a typical process managers to do when hiring internal candidates. Pulling in copious amounts of documentation to refute what he was saying cost me a days work, but in the end, I had no other choice. I'm still bitter about the whole thing.

freebuju 6y ago
Part of being an employee means towing the company line. Even when you don't feel like it. It's a sham you are collectively expected to endure. Is it any wonder that the most successful employees are the ones who succeed in reading and adjusting themselves to this requirement? That said. I feel and connect with your rant at a personal level. For reasons I won't share on this post. I know you didn't ask for any advice and yours is just a rant. Based on your review and what you say i.e you had to spend a day just to refute it. It would be wise to increase interviews with other prospective employers and other professional opportunities. Your efforts are much better spent where they are valued a bit more than this.
unixhero 6y ago
Walk slower or quit. The efforts you have put in have not been apprechiated.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

michaelcampbell 6y ago

> The people who cultivate that skill, stay up late at night while everyone is asleep so they don’t get distracted. cite? Your implication as stated above I believe has not been proven. Doesn't Cal go into some detail about people who have cultivated this skill; perform deep work, and then only do it for "normal" (or even more often, far less than "normal") work hours and thus have the rest of the working day to do whatever else they enjoy?