Here's a task you can try today. Sit down with something - a project, task, or even a book you want to read and focus on it without doing anything else for the next 90 minutes. That means no chatting with colleagues over instant messenger, no reading your emails, and no touching your phone the standard average of 2,617 times a day.
While doing something like that may seem simple enough on the surface, the truth is that many of us are struggling to engage in work practices that aren't constantly hopping from one platform to another. According to Cal Newport, an assistant professor from Georgetown University, the ability to concentrate on "deep work" could be essential to ensuring productivity and efficiency in any workplace environment.
What is Deep Work and Shallow Work?
We're living in a world that's packed full of distractions. Even in the average office, you've got countless sources of collaboration available to you, and that often means flicking through different channels like email, instant messaging, and even video chat several times a day. This means that we're always jumping between tasks, instead of focusing on them one at a time.
To put it into perspective, if you decide to sit down for an hour and brainstorm how you're going to tackle a problem, then you work on one of the ideas that you come up with, that could be an example of deep work. On the other hand, if you reply to a bunch of emails, catch up on some instant messages, and then switch to a video call, that could be "shallow" work.
The truth is that most of the things we do every day are "shallow" work. There's no avoiding that. No-one can do deep work all the time, and if you're constantly performing shallow tasks and never addressing the important things, then you're not going to be very productive either.
