Concentrate!

DEEP WORK:
Rules for focused success in a distracted world
By Cal Newport
Piatkus. 296 pages. £14.99
ISBN 978 0 349 411 903

This is a secular book about the benefits of being able to concentrate hard at work.

It is a recommended text at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, because if ever anyone needed to be able to immerse themselves fully in their work it is preachers grappling with Scripture to prepare sermons to feed the souls of God’s people.

The author defines deep work in terms of the equation High quality work = (Time spent) x (Intensity of focus). This kind of work is truly fruitful. But it’s hard. So, especially in today’s digital world of emails, texts, and social media, it is easy for ‘busyness’ to replace deep work. Responding to a trail of emails may make a worker look busy, but it’s rarely truly productive. Deep work will require shutting down distractions for a good chunk of time. The idea of the ‘open office’ gets the thumbs down. We do need to interact with others and exchange ideas, but much more we need seclusion to be truly productive.

The opening chapters of the book sing the praises of deep work. Evidence is produced to show that focused concentration is linked to happiness. The ground-breaking work concerning everyday psychology carried out by Csikszentmihalyi and Larson in the 1980s showed that ‘the best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile’. Messing around in free time might bring a superficial enjoyment, but this kind of concentration makes life feel substantial.

Strategies for higher yield

The book opens up the fact that people are drawn to and have to fight distractions all day long. (Is this part of our fallenness?) In combating distractions the author recommends the idea of setting routines and sticking to them. He comes up with six helpful strategies. It is interesting to note that in the way God has set up the world, with night and day, weekly day of rest, years, etc, that the implication is that he intends us to be creatures who embrace fixed schedules of productivity rather than bridle against them. He even encourages ‘an internet sabbath’. Digital technology has many positives, but we need to be suspicious of the distracted world it tends to generate. ‘Research revealed that constant attention-switching online has a lasting negative effect on the brain.’ People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They are chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task in hand.

At a time when it is taken for granted that the connectivity of digital technology is nothing but positive, this book from a thorough academic provides a helpful corrective. One is reminded of the advice of the Puritan John Flavel to Christians: ‘Remember, it is not hasty reading, but serious meditating upon holy and heavenly truths, that make them prove sweet and profitable to the soul.’