(With a hat tip to Kate Eltham, who recommended this one to me)
For the last few years, there’s been a certain tendency among writers and knowledge workers of my acquaintance to get very enthusiastic about Cal Newport’s Deep Work. I totally understand that impulse on an intellectual level, and I’ll admit to finding it an incredibly useful book in the early stages of my PhD, but I suspect it’s not the transformative work its recurring recommendations make it seem. I know plenty of folks who bounce of Newport’s advice and tome; as my friend Kevin once put it, the underlying message of a Cal Newport book often seems to be “how great is Cal Newport?”.
The fundamental argument that drives Deep Work — make time for distraction-free focus on projects that really matter — is actually great, which is probably why it’s got so much cache. Where it loses me is the specific approaches Newport lays out to achieve this blessed state, and his fundamental belief that a commitment to Deep Work is going to make you superhuman.
The issue with the advice is relatively simple: Newport works under the assumption that the behaviours and habits that led him to excel in his chosen field of knowledge work as an academic are equally replicable in all other contexts, examining none of the fundamental assumptions and privileges associated with his success. Which has largely governed my own engagement with it: the specific practices Newport recommended were great when figuring out how to thrive within the university landscape at the start of my PhD; outside it, I barely use anything Newport recommends.
Wherein we reach the core paradox of Deep Work: the argument is significant, the advice is…well, not. I suspect very few of the folks who lionize this book are following Newport’s system for getting deep work done, aside from cutting back on social media (and, honestly, you can skip to Newport’s actually-worth-reading Digital Minimalism for that — a superior work because the internet-adverse Newport is forced to engage with professionals who actually use social media and understand it, and therefore offer advice far more practical than “don’t use it”. It’s amazing how much more useful Newport is when his philosophies are forced to interact with practices that aren’t his own).
At this point, you may be asking the question, “Why is Peter talking so much about Deep Work when he’s recommending Four Thousand Weeks?”
It’s simple: I suspect Four Thousand Weeks is the book most people think they’re recommending when they lionize Deep Week. Oliver Berkman is a recovering productivity-junky who is doing a deep mediation on the realities of time and finite lifespans, and how they interact with our capacity to do important things and manage our lives.
The bulk of the work is basically a prolonged argument about why productivity-focused systems and tomes aren’t working, how capitalism has pushed our concepts of work, pleasure, and focus around, and what we’re meaningfully facing every time we choose to procrastinate.
The book isn’t particularly prescriptive — essentially sidestepping the fundamental problem of Newport — and by the time Berkman does lay out some practical steps and questions to ask yourself, they’re still focused on being adaptable to your individual circumstances and acknowledge that life is messy, full of conflicting priorities, and requires an acknowledgement that you’ll never do everything and no system will ever make that possible.
Four Thousand Weeks is confronting, awkward, and sometimes overly-earnest, but it’s definitely highly recommended. I picked it up on the suggestion of my friend Kate and basically spent a day immersed in the text making notes and cursing the moments of self-recognition. Here’s a quote I found really interesting, if only because of the chill that settled over me the moment I read it:
One vivid example of how the capitalist pressure towards instrumentalising your time saps meaning from life is the notorious case of corporate lawyers. The Catholic legal scholar Cathleen Kaveny has argued that the reason so many of them are so unhappy – despite being generally very well paid – is the convention of the ‘billable hour’, which obliges them to treat their time, and thus really themselves, as a commodity to be sold off in sixty-minute chunks to clients. An hour not sold is automatically an hour wasted. So when an outwardly successful, hard-driving lawyer fails to show up for a family dinner, or his child’s school play, it’s not necessarily because he’s ‘too busy’, in the straightforward sense of having too much to do. It may also be because he’s no longer able to conceive of an activity that can’t be commodified as something worth doing at all. As Kaveny writes, ‘Lawyers imbued with the ethos of the billable hour have difficulty grasping a non-commodified understanding of the meaning of time that would allow them to appreciate the true value of such participation.’9 When an activity can’t be added to the running tally of billable hours, it begins to feel like an indulgence one can’t afford. There may be more of this ethos in most of us – even the non-lawyers – than we’d care to admit. Burkeman, Oliver. Four Thousand Weeks (pp. 134-135).
Writers and freelancers don’t operate on the same billable hours system, and we’re certainly not so well paid, but I’ll be damned if that doesn’t describe the way my thinking warps in the periods where I’ve found myself making a living from writing alone.
Highly, highly recommended for any creative who feels like they’re constantly overwhelmed. and don’t feel like they’re making any progress.
Purchase Links: Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Berkeman
