Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World(11)
When we step back from these individual observations, we see a clear argument form: To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. Put another way, the type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work. If you’re not comfortable going deep for extended periods of time, it’ll be difficult to get your performance to the peak levels of quality and quantity increasingly necessary to thrive professionally. Unless your talent and skills absolutely dwarf those of your competition, the deep workers among them will outproduce you.
What About Jack Dorsey?
I’ve now made my argument for why deep work supports abilities that are becoming increasingly important in our economy. Before we accept this conclusion, however, we must face a type of question that often arises when I discuss this topic: What about Jack Dorsey?
Jack Dorsey helped found Twitter. After stepping down as CEO, he then launched the payment-processing company Square. To quote a Forbes profile: “He is a disrupter on a massive scale and a repeat offender.” He is also someone who does not spend a lot of time in a state of deep work. Dorsey doesn’t have the luxury of long periods of uninterrupted thinking because, at the time when the Forbes profile was written, he maintained management duties at both Twitter (where he remained chairman) and Square, leading to a tightly calibrated schedule that ensures that the companies have a predictable “weekly cadence” (and that also ensures that Dorsey’s time and attention are severely fractured).
Dorsey reports, for example, that he ends the average day with thirty to forty sets of meeting notes that he reviews and filters at night. In the small spaces between all these meetings, he believes in serendipitous availability. “I do a lot of my work at stand-up tables, which anyone can come up to,” Dorsey said. “I get to hear all these conversations around the company.”
This style of work is not deep. To use a term from our previous section, Dorsey’s attention residue is likely slathered on thick as he darts from one meeting to another, letting people interrupt him freely in the brief interludes in between. And yet, we cannot say that Dorsey’s work is shallow, because shallow work, as defined in the introduction, is low value and easily replicable, while what Jack Dorsey does is incredibly valuable and highly rewarded in our economy (as of this writing he was among the top one thousand richest people in the world, with a net worth over $1.1 billion).
Jack Dorsey is important to our discussion because he’s an exemplar of a group we cannot ignore: individuals who thrive without depth. When I titled the motivating question of this section “What About Jack Dorsey?,” I was providing a specific example of a more general query: If deep work is so important, why are there distracted people who do well? To conclude this chapter, I want to address this question so it doesn’t nag at your attention as we dive deeper into the topic of depth in the pages ahead.
To start, we must first note that Jack Dorsey is a high-level executive of a large company (two companies, in fact). Individuals with such positions play a major role in the category of those who thrive without depth, because the lifestyle of such executives is famously and unavoidably distracted. Here’s Kerry Trainor, CEO of Vimeo, trying to answer the question of how long he can go without e-mail: “I can go a good solid Saturday without, without… well, most of the daytime without it… I mean, I’ll check it, but I won’t necessarily respond.”
At the same time, of course, these executives are better compensated and more important in the American economy today than in any other time in history. Jack Dorsey’s success without depth is common at this elite level of management. Once we’ve stipulated this reality, we must then step back to remind ourselves that it doesn’t undermine the general value of depth. Why? Because the necessity of distraction in these executives’ work lives is highly specific to their particular jobs. A good chief executive is essentially a hard-to-automate decision engine, not unlike IBM’s Jeopardy!-playing Watson system. They have built up a hard-won repository of experience and have honed and proved an instinct for their market. They’re then presented inputs throughout the day—in the form of e-mails, meetings, site visits, and the like—that they must process and act on. To ask a CEO to spend four hours thinking deeply about a single problem is a waste of what makes him or her valuable. It’s better to hire three smart subordinates to think deeply about the problem and then bring their solutions to the executive for a final decision.
This specificity is important because it tells us that if you’re a high-level executive at a major company, you probably don’t need the advice in the pages that follow. On the other hand, it also tells us that you cannot extrapolate the approach of these executives to other jobs. The fact that Dorsey encourages interruption or Kerry Trainor checks his e-mail constantly doesn’t mean that you’ll share their success if you follow suit: Their behaviors are characteristic of their specific roles as corporate officers.
This rule of specificity should be applied to similar counterexamples that come to mind while reading the rest of this book. There are, we must continually remember, certain corners of our economy where depth is not valued. In addition to executives, we can also include, for example, certain types of salesmen and lobbyists, for whom constant connection is their most valued currency. There are even those who manage to grind out distracted success in fields where depth would help.