Patterns of Success for the Working World Archives - Page 3 of 16

The Concrete Satisfaction of Deep Work

January 26, 2023June 21, 2014

Deep Work as Soulcraft I recently reread Matthew Crawford’s 2009 book, Shop Class as Soulcraft. Though Crawford’s primary goal is to make a philosophical case … Read more

My Deliberate Quest to Read Proofs Faster

January 26, 2023June 16, 2014

Deconstructing Theory

As a self-observant theoretician, I’ve learned that my research success depends on two intertwined factors: (1) my ability to digest and understand diverse results in my field; and (2) my ability to persistently attack good problems once identified.

Through practice over the past few years, I’ve become adept at the second factor. My deep work hours per week are quite high and have recently led to a correspondingly high rate of producing publishable results.

A nagging concern of mine, however, is that I’m not as good with the first factor. Indeed, I’m often frustrated with how long it takes me to digest interesting new results (and how often I end up aborting the process).

This concerns me because in my field voracious reading is required to keep the pipeline of good problems full.

What’s going wrong?

Don’t Fight Distraction. Make It Irrelevant.

January 26, 2023June 5, 2014

The War on Attention My friend Dale (whose Ancient Wisdom Project blog you really should read) recently pointed me toward an interesting David Brooks column. In … Read more

Deep Habits: My Office in the Woods

January 26, 2023May 28, 2014

Fashionably Deep A reader sent me the above image. She implied that it represents a logical conclusion to my ever intensifying quest for depth. I’m … Read more

Should We Work Like Novelists?

January 26, 2023May 17, 2014

The Habits of a Writer As I continue to clear out my queue after my end-of-semester blogging hiatus, there’s another article to mention that recently … Read more

Why Didn’t Dan Kois Quit Facebook?

January 26, 2023May 16, 2014

The Facebook Cleanse Earlier today, one of the most read articles on Slate was titled “The Facebook Cleanse.” It was authored by Dan Kois, a … Read more

Richard Feynman Didn’t Win a Nobel by Responding Promptly to E-mails

January 26, 2023April 20, 2014

Feynman’s Faux Irresponsibility Around 38 minutes into the above interview, the late physicist Richard Feynman describes an unorthodox strategy for defending deep work: “To do … Read more

Work Accomplished = Time Spent x Intensity

January 26, 2023April 8, 2014

laptop-outside

The Straight-A Method

In the early 2000’s, I was obsessed with study habits. The obsession began with my interest in performing well at Dartmouth, then eventually evolved into a (surprisingly popular) book.

Something I uncovered during this period is that high performing undergraduates, as a general rule, seem to internalize the following formula:

Work Accomplished = Time Spent x Intensity

This formula helps explain why some students can spend all night in the library and still struggle, while others never seem to crack a book but continually bust the curve. The time you spend “studying” is meaningless outside of the context of intensity. A small number of highly intense hours, for example, can potentially produce more results than a night of low-intensity highlighting.

(This is how I avoided all-nighters, for example, during my three year stretch of 4.0’s as an undergraduate.)

From Campus to Corporation

I’m mentioning this phenomenon because of the following observation:

The above formula applies to most cognitively demanding tasks.

In other words, intensity affects the productivity of a knowledge worker as much as it helps the GPA of a college student.