WARNING:
DO NOT LET THIS ARTICLE DISTRACT YOU FROM YOUR DEEP WORK
TLDR:
Deep Work is what you thrive on as a problem-solving Engineer.
Deep Work needs discipline but we get better at it if we practice the habit.
Be responsible for your mindset and environment.
Insist that your manager and organisation hold your Deep Work sacred.
The habit of Deep Work is what will make you valuable as an Engineer.
The Thinker:
Coding is Deep Work, requiring focus without distraction. Coding can be exhausting, it carries a heavy cognitive load, balancing many abstract thoughts simultaneously in order to turn complex business requirements into an optimal solution. Something that not only solves the problem now but anticipates other problems in the future, hitherto unknown. It's really hard to do but it can be a joyful experience for a Software Engineer, deeply in flow, time passing unnoticed, heightened pattern recognition, and that dopamine reward when are able to translate those abstract business requirements into cohesive and well-structured lines of code.
A People First Engineering approach is about recognising the need to create the right conditions for the Engineer to do the Deep Work which gives birth to that flow experience.
The demands on the modern Software Engineer are manifold - often they face constant interruptions, unrealistic time pressures, draining meetings, and noisy or uncomfortable environments. Auguste Rodin's sculpture of 'The Thinker' whose original representation was of an image of Dante, pondering at 'The Gates of Hell' is an apt illustration of the disruptive pressures which often afflict a Software Engineer - how can anyone think deeply in such hellish chaos?
As Rodin said, "What makes my Thinker think is that he thinks not only with his brain, with his knitted brow, his distended nostrils and compressed lips, but with every muscle of his arms, back, and legs, with his clenched fist and gripping toes". A Software Engineer will relate to this as they contort every sinew of their body to reach that breakthrough moment of coding creativity. The FLOW state is one of deep embodiment.
During the Covid Pandemic of 2020/2021, many parents were asked to ‘home school’ their children. If you’re a Software Engineer tackling hard coding problems with the needs and demands of young children, you may be very familiar with the experience of ‘Coding at the Gates fo Hell’. The experience of mothers will undoubtedly be different to fathers, depending on your children’s expectations around parental roles, and of course, your home setup would be a huge factor - many Engineers were working in the same room as their families or in an awkward set-up in a room not suitable for working.
One of the goals of this People First Engineering project is to understand and reveal the best ways to balance all of the demands on a Software Engineer in order to create the highest probability of enabling Deep Work to happen. How can Software Engineers help themselves into the flow state, and how can their environments be structured to best facilitate the conditions for Deep Work.
Engineers need the right conditions for Deep Work, they can't code at The Gates of Hell.
Creating the conditions for Deep Work:
Delving further into Deep Work, I’ve consulted thinking from the acclaimed authority in the area, Cal Newport, author of the playbook for Deep Work - “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World”.
We certainly do live in a ‘Distracted World’, pinged with notifications from multiple media sources, bombarded with calls for our attention, atrophying our brain’s capacity for focus. For Gen Z 'Zoomers' the urge to check your phone every few minutes is arguably pathological. Social media isn't free, you pay with your time, attention, and the emotional hijacking it often creates.
Personally, I really struggle to concentrate when there are distractions. My children are so used to my struggles to concentrate when they are playing or fidgeting in my vicinity that they bought me a mug with this special inscription for Christmas:
Deep Work is defined by Newport as:
"Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate."
Deep Work is where we derive the most meaning in our are lives. “Your work is craft, and if you hone your ability and apply it with respect and care, then like the skilled wheelwright you can generate meaning in the daily efforts of your professional life.” - this will be highly relatable for Software Engineers.
A few hours of Deep Work is worth countless hours of shallow work. Shallow work can make you look busy, we fill our 9 to 5 days with emails, instant messages and meetings - a constant state of unproductive 'busyness'. Busyness is anethema to Deep Work.
Newport defines Shallow Work as "Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate." - Some might find Newport's definition of 'Shallow Work' a little condescending - what about the important work people do in the service industry, or care work for example? To say that noncognitive demanding work does not create new value is quite a value judgement.
Newport urges us to commit to habits and routines to increase the probability of the emergence of the state of mind where Deep Work will emerge. "The key to developing a Deep Work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration."
Experiencing Deep Work is like training in a Gym - The myelin wrapping around the most frequently fired neural circuits in your brain will become thicker in order to cement a skill. We learn by making neural connections in our brain, repetition and practice causes those connections to be hardened through myelination. Myelin sheaths increase the speed of impulse propagation along the axons of neurons without needing to increase axon diameter. Myelin allows for highly complex yet compact brain circuitry. With Myelination, a circuit fires more effortlessly and effectively.
Avoid task switching - it limits the potential of myelination of important things were learning. We need to have focused time on a single task. Software Engineers know all too well the feeling of being distracted. You're working on something deep and engaging when all of a sudden there is a distraction, maybe someone needs help or you have an urgent bug to fix. Your previous thinking is now lost, wasted.
Understand that people naturally apply The Principle of Least Resistance, we gravitate to the easiest tasks. We fake 'Busyness' as a proxy for productivity. As Engineers, we risk returning to the industrial indicator of productivity, being “busy doing nothing, but different to the day before” if we don't have clear indicators of what it means to be productive or valuable in our work.
Newport claims to dedicate 3 to 4 hours a day, five days a week, to Deep Work, batching the unavoidable shallow items into small bursts around the periphery of his schedule.
How to ensure Engineers have the Deep Work time they need:
Firstly, as with many things, the support from the organisation and its leaders is foundational. Organisational alignment is key to Engineer success. From there, we can borrow from Timothy Leary, the pioneer in psychedelic research in the 60s, and stress the critical influences of both Set and Setting:
1. Support from our Organisation, Leaders, and Managers
A culture of Deep Work practices within Engineering will prove beneficial for the wider organisation in terms of the quality and quantity of solutions delivered by teams. A Deep Work culture should be embedded into a People First Engineering department, if this is not the case then the prevailing cultural norms should be contested.
The organisation should support Engineers in knowing themselves, and how they enter into Deep Work - is it first thing in the morning or late at night? Be flexible and adaptable as long as the Engineer is able to keep their commitments.
Ensure it is culturally acceptable to ‘go dark’ and disappear into Deep Work, agree clear criteria, boundaries and responsibilities.
Allow people to block off time in their calendars for Deep Work
Regularly review people’s Deep Work time with them. How much time were they able to dedicate to Deep Work? What went well? Where did we fail? What needs to change?
Make Deep Work a sacred thing.
Talk regularly about the importance of Deep Work and FLOW to make it permissible and normalised.
Create a consistent way for people to signal they are in Deep Work and only interruptable for genuine emergencies.
Ensure sufficient opportunities for Deep Work, challenging tasks are distributed equally among the teams.
Help your Engineers to avoid task switching, and promote a philosophy of Continual Improvement in pursuit of Operational Excellence to reduce wasted manual TOIL and bottlenecks in the process of creating software.
If you regularly find your Engineers to be ‘Coding at the Gates of Hell’ then you must realise you are destroying their resolve, you are wasting talent and as predicted by Conway’s Law, the code they produce will reflect the chaos they experience.
Companies should recognise and value Deep Work as 'The Superpower of the 21st Century' and provide sufficient support, training and space for Deep Work to emerge.
2. Our Mindset:
It is the responsibility of the Engineer to be in the right mindset. We need to be aware of our mind wandering and be vigilant in bringing it back. Block out clear time boundaries, when Deep Work is the ONLY thing you’re doing - ensure it is marked in your diary. As a Software Engineer, you can distinguish yourself from others through life-long periods of deliberate effort and deliberate practice, ensuring you get feedback so you can tweak and adjust your attention as you go.
Creating Deep Work time is your responsibility.
Good intentions are not enough. You MUST schedule in the time for Deep Work - make habits, routines and rituals.
Deep Work is a commitment you must make to yourself if you want to be an elite craftsman of Software Engineering.
Commit to resisting social media - set a specific time later in the day if you really need to catch up.
If there are things on your mind, things you need to do, or relationship issues on your mind then write them down and commit to dealing with them outside of your Deep Work, rather than have them nagging at your mind.
Go into your Deep Work session with clear goals, a clear purpose in mind.
Be uncompromisingly selfish for the period.
See yourself as akin to an important writer, philosopher, craftsperson of the past.
Have the means to capture the unrelated ideas that emerge in your mind while engaged in Deep Work - have a notepad to write down these tangential thoughts so they can be dealt with later and no longer need to distract you.
Ensure you do Deep Work regularly, daily if possible, if only for 30 minutes - build your Deep Work muscle through regular practice.
Remember Deep Work will build self-control and resilience. Don’t give up if you are derailed during a session - practice getting yourself back into the flow. Remember you are building the habit, some sessions may not yield the desired outcome, but stick with it and repeat.
Exercise before your Deep Work session to help settle the mind and encourage the release of BDNF, Brain-Derived Neurotropic Factor to aid cognitive and learning competencies. See Research via John Ratey.
Find opportunities to treat everyday demands with a Deep Work mindset. If you're doing a code review, or if you're asked to do a trivial task, do it with full commitment, with a singular focus, with a learning outcome in mind.
3. Our Environment Setting:
There will always be constraints over the amount of control we have over our environments so the following should be used to generate ideas, rather than being purely prescriptive:
Treat your Deep Work setting as sacred, reaching your potential as an Engineer will require many sessions of truly Deep Work over time.
Increase the perceived importance of your Deep Work time - invest in a special chair, put effort into making your workspace set-up just right.
Ensure the people around you know you’re entering Deep Work - Wear headphones in the office to signal your Deep Work intent, or if at home set some time boundaries for when you’ll need some peace and quiet.
Put the phone on silent, lock the damn thing up somewhere or put it in another room
Go 'dark' on Slack.
Let others know you're temporarily unavailable, give clear timeframes.
Turn off notifications.
Wear noise-cancelling headphones with non-distracting music.
All of man’s misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room - Blaise Pascal
In today's distracted world, many of us are unable to be by ourselves in silence. Even in the times when Blaise Pascal wrote his 'Pensées', in the 1670s people were riddled with a disquietened, irritable, restless mind seeking distractions.
Distraction is therefore a universal human condition. Pascal was following a life of asceticism, and abstinence from sensual pleasure, following his conversion to Christianity. But still, it seems he was tempted by distraction. He was quite right in his view of the wandering and distracted drives of the human mind - we must be forever vigilant in taming our inner wanderings when we are deep focused work.
Those ‘Flash of Lightning’ Insights:
When you’re stuck on a problem, more Deep Work isn’t necessarily the answer. Sometimes you need to step away from it and free your mind. Do something entirely different - listen to some music, go for a walk or a run, take a shower, have a casual chat with colleagues. Often a breakthrough happens when you least expect it, trust your unconscious mind to make the connections and lead you to the answer you seek.
Creativity Research suggests that a flash of insight is based on many creative ideas over time. Indulge in creativity as a process, take in a wide variety of inputs, expose yourself to a variety of perspectives, and don't force it. Breakthroughs don't necessarily happen during focused Deep Work, but Deep Work helps to build a variety of concepts in your mind as a foundation for creativity. See Keith Sawyer on Unlocking Your Creative Genius:
Build in time for rest and physical exercise, Deep Work should not be an open-ended slog, commit to a hard cut off time or shut-down routine - you need downtime to enhance your Deep Work efforts, let new thoughts emerge, make new connections and integrate your learnings.
Deep Work Retrospectives:
It’s important to reflect and tweak your Deep Work protocol. Create a Cadence of Accountability - a check-in retrospective with yourself or with a colleague to reflect on your Deep Work experiences. Record your experience, what worked well, what didn’t work, what you might change. You will fail - Deep Work is a practice, the more you diligently indulge in Deep Work, the better you’ll get - remember the myelin.
If you're not getting sufficient Deep Work time then insist on it as a fundamental need in order to develop and grow as a professional so you can add the most value to the organisation. Bring this up in the one-to-ones with your Manager.
Closing thoughts:
It is clear that Deep Work is something that is worthy of our attention and critical for high performing Engineers. It’s something we should hold as sacred, cherishing our time to develop our craft and become better at Deep Work the more we practice it.
An organisation is failing its Engineers if they are chronically ‘Coding at the Gates of Hell’. Equally, an Engineer who is not taking responsibility for their mindset or their environment will never be able to do the repeated bouts of Deep Work required in order to reach their full potential.
Deep Work is where we learn, where we create new value. Deep work is becoming increasingly rare in today's distracted world, and therefore increasingly valuable. If you want to increase your earning potential as a Software Engineer you will do well to practice Deep Work.
It is also worth remembering the deeply satisfying FLOW state that we crave as Engineers can only be experienced if we commit ourselves fully to Deep Work.
But perhaps there’s something more important than Deep Work, and that is purpose. If you are driven by purpose, doing what you love, do you even need to think about creating the conditions for Deep Work - do you not just fall naturally into this hypnotic state?