Study Hacks Blog

Immersive Single Tasking

A few weeks ago, I wrote about an intriguing application of virtual reality: helping knowledge workers achieve hyper productive states.

To be clear, when I say “productive,” I’m not referring to the efficient processing of the types of shallow tasks that computers will one day soon automate (think: emails and administrative drudgery).

I’m instead talking about wringing the most possible value out of your brain as you work deeply on important objectives. In other words, the type of effort that’s becoming increasingly valuable in our 21st century economy.

I called this application of virtual reality immersive single tasking. In this post, I want to provide some more details about the key principles that I think will allow virtual reality to unlock this vision of hyper productivity.

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A Pioneer Pontificates

Jim Clark knows how to create valuable things. He’s one of the few people in the recent history of American business to start three different billion dollar companies.

Clark also knows about technology: all three of his billion dollar companies were Silicon Valley startups.

We should, in other words, take his thoughts seriously when he discusses productivity in the digital age, which he did, a few years ago, in an interview with Stanford president John Hennessy (see above).

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The Deliberate Creative

Last month, Scott Barry Kaufman posted an article titled “Creativity is Much More Than 10,000 Hours of Deliberate Practice.”

Kaufman was responding to Peak: Anders Ericsson’s recent book on expert performance.

At the core of Kaufman’s critique is the idea that deliberate practice does not work well for “almost any creative domain” [emphasis his].

As he summarizes:

Deliberate practice is really important for fields such as chess and instrumental performance because they rely on consistently replicable behaviors that must be repeated over and over again. But not all domains of human achievement rely on consistently replicable behaviors. For most creative domains, the goals and ways of achieving success are constantly changing, and consistently replicable behaviors are in fact detrimental to success.

This discussion caught my attention because my day job is the quintessential creative endeavor. As a theoretical computer scientist, I solve math proofs for a living. To conjure something that makes it past the brutally competitive peer review process in my field usually requires an original approach that makes progress where other really smart people have been stuck.

This reality is why I’m able to draw with some confidence from a well of personal experience when I note that I strongly disagree with Kaufman.

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Ready Thinker One

Earlier this month, I demoed the HTC Vive virtual reality system. I was impressed. The Vive uses wall-mounted sensors that track your movements as you walk around a virtual space and interact with it using handheld wands.

The effect can be quite immersive.

At one point in the demo, I found myself in a small science lab. I could walk around and explore whirring gadgets on shelves. On a whim, I crouched down and peered under a sink and examined the pipes underneath.

It’s a scene straight out of Cline…but with less Dungeons and Dragons references.

Yesterday, however, I had a revelation about this technology. After giving a speech about deep work, I participated in a discussion with local entrepreneurs. Someone asked me what role virtual reality might play in supporting deep work.

A light bulb went off in my head. The answer was clear: potentially a lot!

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The Deep Life of Edwin Land

Edwin Land is famous for co-founding the Polaroid Corporation, but he’s also known as one of the twentieth century’s most innovative inventors. In addition to his famed work on instant film development, his research on polarizing filters led to many breakthroughs.

“What was Land like?…He was a true visionary,” is how his friend Elkan Bout described him.

What interests me most about Land, however, was his work habits. Here he is in a 1975 interview with Forbes magazine talking about his approach to innovation:

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