Energise your business and career by switching your computer off

In his book Deep Work, the author Cal Newport describes the importance of being able to focus on tasks that require intense concentration in a distraction-free environment. Strategy, organisational design and ideation are all examples of deep work tasks — and they are all vital for individual and organisational prosperity. By way of contrast, administration, status updates, and many project and diary management tasks might be classed as shallow work. Important, yes — but rarely transformative in terms of personal or business performance.

Remote working should offer an opportunity to enhance the amount of deep work we do. There is less office-centric minutiae to distract us. Our colleagues have reduced visibility around our minute-to-minute activities, leading (in theory) to greater autonomy. Using the myriad digital tools at our disposal, we can toggle our availability on and off at will. 

All of this should enable us to carve out more time for deep thought — the kind of creative problem-solving on which breakthroughs are built.

Instead, most organisations seem to have done a great job of using the digital tools at their disposal to replicate traditional office life as closely as possible. Meetings have shifted to Zoom and Teams; workshops to virtual whiteboards; admin tasks to VPNs. 

Already there are signs that this isn’t helping people perform at their best. Many people work longer hours than they did while in the office — and complaints of feeling “zoomed out” are now commonplace. Mental health and productivity are themselves huge issues, but in the longer term it is the lack of deep work that compromises an organisation’s true potential.

In fairness, given the political and economic circumstances in which we all find ourselves, there are rational explanations for this. Stressed businesses tend to demand more of their people. And organisational development takes time and requires experimentation. Equally, nothing changes if nothing changes. Remote working can support a deep work revolution in your own firm — you just need to take action.

Here’s how.

Switch off for one hour per day — every day

Start by ensuring that you set aside one hour each day in which you have no calls, meetings, or other distractions. This should not be a lunch or break time — it needs to take place in actual working hours. The chosen hour also needs to fall as early as possible: energy tends to get depleted as the day wears on.

Warning: you will need to put guns around this time.

Do not fill this hour with a “big project” or objective, or set ambitious KPIs for it. Instead, start by taking a step back from your day-to-day work. Let your mind wander. Consider what’s going well, and what might be improved. Ponder your and your colleagues’ performance. Perhaps consider a problem that’s been niggling at you for a while. Start drawing mind-maps — or, even better, record your thoughts and have them transcribed, which fires off different parts of the brain. An hour isn’t a lot of time — it’s not really enough for proper deep work — but at this stage it’s forming the habit that counts.

The discipline here is twofold. One, you are carving out time away from the endless thrum of office life in order to think. Without this, problems don’t get solved, or solved fast enough. Two, you are starting to practice creativity: the art of finding original answers to difficult questions. This type of work is non-linear, unpredictable, even chaotic. It is not “work” as many of us recognise it, in the sense of being logical and time-bound. But creative thinking underpins deep work — and it is vital for success in today’s economy.

Scale the behaviour

As your one-hour-per-day habit takes hold, start to discuss its impact with your colleagues. Talk to them about the insights you’ve had, the things that you have made happen, and the benefits that you have felt in terms of energy level and productivity.

Encourage them to try this behaviour for themselves. If you run a team, you might want to foster a discussion about how you can support each other in this endeavour — by agreeing, say, whether there are shallow work tasks that can be set aside in order to create that all-important one hour per day.

If you encounter nay-sayers, suggest that you record the time being spent in this way, so that you have a record of the cost, and that you assess what tangible results have been achieved through it in 6-12 months’ time. There is no harm in measuring impact in this way — indeed, it’s a healthy discipline. But, given the non-linear nature of this type of work, a long test period is essential.

Make systemic change

Bob Geldof famously doesn’t allow his team to start looking at their emails before 3pm. This is a good example of systemic principles that enable deep work.

What systemic changes might your organisation be able to make? There is a time and place to start having this conversation — and it’s when you and your colleagues are convinced by personal experience that the benefits of removing shallow work far outweigh their costs.

When you have built a sense of momentum in yourself and with others, pick your moment to ask the following question: “what would happen if we got serious about building an organisation that is peerlessly good at deep work?”

You will already have discovered that setting aside one hour a day for creative thought hurts no-one and compromises nothing. You can now set out to prove that the same holds true if you were to compress all shallow work into one or two hours per day — and watch your organisation soar.

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