By Charity S. Peak, Ph.D. (Independent Consultant)

True confession: I’m addicted to shallow work. I wouldn’t say I’m a procrastinator as much as I am someone who prefers checking small things off my list or clearing my inbox over engaging in more complex tasks. I know I should be writing and researching. It’s just as much of my job as teaching or administrative duties, but I get to the end of my day and wonder why I didn’t have time for the most critical component of my promotion package – scholarship.

It turns out I’m not the only one suffering from this condition (far from it), and luckily there is a treatment plan available. It begins with metacognition about how one is spending time during the day, self-monitoring conditions that are most distracting or fruitful for productivity, and self-regulating behaviors in order to ritualize more constructive habits. Several authors offer suggestions for how to be more prolific (Goodson, 2013; Silvia, 2007), especially those providing writing prompts and 15-minute exercises, but few get to the core of the metacognitive process like Cal Newport’s (2016) recent Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Newport, a professor of computer science at Georgetown and author of 5 books and a blog on college success, shares his strategies for becoming a prolific writer while balancing other faculty duties.

Newport claims that deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It is arguably the most difficult and crucial capability of the 21^st century. Creative thinking is becoming progressively rare in our distracted world, so those who can rise above shallow work are guaranteed to demonstrate value to their employers, especially colleges and universities. In order to be creative and produce new ideas, scholars must engage in deep work regularly and for significant periods of time. Instead, Newport argues that most people spend their days multitasking through a mire of shallow work like email, which is noncognitively demanding and offers little benefit to academia, let alone an individual’s promotion. In fact, he cites that “a 2012 McKinsey study found that the average knowledge worker now spends more than 60 percent of the workweek engaged in electronic communication and Internet searching, with close to 30 percent of a worker’s time dedicated to reading and answering e-mail alone” (Newport, 2016, p. 5). Sound like someone you know?

The good news is that if you carve out space for deep work, your professional career will soar. The first step is to become metacognitive about how you are spending your time during the day. One simple method is to self-monitor how you use your work days by keeping a grid near your computer or desk. At the end of every hour throughout your day, record how much time you actually spent doing your job duties of teaching (including prep and grading), writing and research, and service. Like a food diary or exercise journal, your shallow work addiction will become apparent quickly, but you will also gain metacognition about when and under which conditions you might attempt to fit in time for deep work.

Once you have a grasp of the issue at hand, you can begin to self-regulate your behavior by blocking off time in your schedule in which you can engage in a deeper level of creative thinking. Each person will gravitate toward a different modality conducive to an individual’s working styles or arrangements. The author offers a few choices for you to consider, which have been proven to be successful for other scholars and business leaders:

• Monastic: Eliminate or radically minimize shallow obligations, such as meetings and emails, in an effort to focus solely on doing one thing exceptionally well. Put an out-of-office response on your email, work somewhere other than your workplace, or take a year-long sabbatical in order to completely separate from frivolous daily tasks that keep you away from research and writing. Most teaching faculty and academic leaders are unable to be purely monastic due to other duties.
• Bimodal: Divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else. During the deep time, act monastically – seek intense and uninterrupted concentration – but schedule other time in your day for shallow work to be completed. One successful scholar shared the possibility of teaching a very full load one semester but not teaching at all during the next as an example of engaging deeply in both critical duties.
• Rhythmic: Also called the “chain method” or “snack writing,” create a regular habit of engaging in deep work, such as every morning before going into work or at the end of each day. Blocking off one’s calendar and writing every day has been proven to be one of the most productive habits for scholars attempting to balance their research with other duties (Gardiner & Kearns, 2011).
• Journalistic: Fit deep work into your schedule wherever you can – 15 minutes here, an hour there. Over time you will become trained to shift into writing mode on a moment’s notice. This approach is usually most effective for experienced scholars who can switch easily between shallow and deep work. Inexperienced writers may find that the multitasking yields unproductive results, so they should proceed cautiously with this method.

The key is to do something! You must ritualize whichever method you choose in order to optimize your productivity. This may take some trial and error, but with your new-found metacognition about how you work best and some alternative strategies to try, you will be more likely to self-regulate your behaviors in order to be successful in your scholarly pursuits. If you try new approaches and are still not engaging in enough deep work, consider joining a writing group or finding a colleague to hold you accountable on a regular basis. Again, like diet and exercise, others can sometimes provide the motivation and deadlines that we are unable to provide for ourselves. Over time, your addiction to shallow work will subside and your productivity will soar… or so they tell me.

Resources:

Gardiner, M., & Kearns, H. (2011). Turbocharge your writing today. Nature 475: 129-130. doi: 10.1038/nj7354-129a

Goodson, P. (2013). Becoming an academic writer: 50 exercises for paced, productive, and powerful writing. Los Angeles: Sage.

Newport, C. (2016). Deep work: Rules for focused success in a distracted world. New York: Grand Central Publishing.

Silvia, P. J. (2007). How to write a lot: A practical guide to productive academic writing. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.