Deep Work Experiment

What would the Warrior-Scholar Project team be able to accomplish if we each blocked off four hours of distraction-free, focused work time every week?

After reading, thinking, and writing about deep work, this was the question I came to.

And after embracing an organization-wide deep work experiment, I have the beginnings of the answer: quite a lot.

The seminal work here is Cal Newport's Deep Work. He hypothesizes: "The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill , and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive."

When we think about productivity, I believe we are implicitly thinking about our potential. If being "productive" means getting something done, the period of time before we get those things done is a period of potential productivity. If we look back at a period of time and can quantitatively or qualitatively say we got things done, we successfully tapped into that potential.

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From a three-dimensional productivity perspective, I find this reframing helpful. We all have potential, both in big and small sense of the word. My line of work — helping veterans kick ass in college — is really about helping people unlock nascent potential. Your to-do list lays out the things you have potential to do, provided you plan and act accordingly. And if you don't get those things done on a certain day, you have potential to get them done the next day. No self-flagellation necessary. Potential is, in a sense, infinite.

Newport argues that tapping into one's true potential requires focused depth. Sure, you could be getting a lot done, but if you aren't spending time working deeply, you aren't actually achieving at peak capacity.

I find that argument compelling. As I thought about how to deliberately build deep worktime into my own schedule, I thought about the schedules of everyone on the WSP team. If deep work is necessary for me to achieve my potential, wouldn't the same be true for all of them?

So, I started building a policy that would be prescriptive enough to actually lead to organizational change but flexible enough to adapt to the needs of each team member.

We already have no internal meeting Wednesdays (and after a reset about a year ago, we actually stick to that), so the easiest thing would be to require deep work on Wednesdays.

But that didn't sit right. Wednesdays have been valuable because everybody is working but not formally meeting with each other, and we've realized that we can get a lot done communicating as needed over Slack. I didn't want to interrupt that with mandating no communication deep work those days.

I also didn't like it because of what it mean for the remaining days, which would remain unchanged. Part of what I like about implementing deep work is that it serves as a forcing function to consider other things pushing on your schedule. If you have to carve out a certain amount of time for deep work, that time has to come from somewhere.

I settled on the following proposal:

• Every team member is expected to have at least four hours of focused deep worktime blocked on their calendar every week, but no one would be monitoring exactly how many hours were on each calendar (I loathe calendar policing)
• Time blocked on Wednesdays doesn't count towards the four hours
• The recommendation is to block this time in chunks no shorter than two hours, as it's hard to get into a flow state if you only have one hour
• Supervisors should coordinate with their direct reports to align on chunks of time that are blocked off, as there's value in ensuring teams have some available time throughout the week to connect with each other without treading on each other's deep worktime
• Team members can spend deep worktime however they want, but they are strongly encouraged to close email and Slack and to work on something that requires focused brain power

I shared the proposal with my executive team, and then with our team of directors. After incorporating modest feedback, we rolled this out to the entire team. As an aside, this review and feedback process of exec --> directors --> full team has been really beneficial.

When experimenting with new policies, I'm a fan of actually treating them as experiments. I said that we would be trying this out for four weeks, and then we'd collect feedback and data to assess if we should continue.

I knew some folks were nervous about the prospect of going dark for a period of time each week, and my encouragement was to reflect on that feeling. If pausing notifications for a couple hours a day twice a week isn't possible, we have something else to address in the workflow and culture.

I put together a short survey for all team members to complete towards the end of the initial experiment, which ended up running a bit longer than planned. More than half of the team completed the survey, and all were in favor of continuing the policy, with only a few suggesting small tweaks.

The word "permission" came up a lot in the feedback. Team members appreciated and benefited from the permission to shut off lines of communication for designated periods of time and to not feel guilty for doing so. Those chunks of time tangibly contributed to better work product and more proactive planning.

One person wrote, "*chanting* Never end deep work! Never end deep work! :)"

For WSP, the answer is clear: deep work is here to stay. We are edging closer and closer to our collective potential.

My question to you: why not run an experiment of your own?