3. Routines & Rituals for Deep Work

Welcome back to this short mini-course on Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Here’s what we’ve covered so far:

• 1. Deep Work vs Shallow Work
• 2. The Four Rules of Deep Work

Here’s what we’re covering today:

Routines + Rituals for Deep Work

That brings me to the motivating idea behind the strategies that follow: The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration. If you suddenly decide, for example, in the middle of a distracted afternoon spent Web browsing, to switch your attention to a cognitively demanding task, you’ll draw heavily from your finite willpower to wrest your attention away from the online shininess. Such attempts will therefore frequently fail. On the other hand, if you deployed smart routines and rituals—perhaps a set time and quiet location used for your deep tasks each afternoon—you’d require much less willpower to start and keep going. In the long run, you’d therefore succeed with these deep efforts far more often.  — Cal Newport

If you want to get serious about living the deep life, you need to create routines and rituals to consistently create high-value work.

There are four different approaches (or “depth philosophies”) for making this happen.

Take a look at each depth philosophy below and figure out which approach is optimal for you.

1.
Monastic Philosophy

Think of a monk in a monastery—removed from the little distractions of normal life. You’re essentially unplugged from the matrix and focused. Of course, this isn’t for everybody. But it can lead to super-high levels of productivity if you can manage to make it work in your own life.

2.
Bimodal Philosophy 

This is my personal favorite depth philosophy. In this mode, you alternate between a monastic approach and a normally engaged mode. Carl Jung alternated between a very engaged therapy practice (and social life) in Zurich, and a totally removed retreat house in the woods for when he had to go into monk mode for research and writing.

3.
Rhythmic Philosophy

The basic idea here is captured in Jerry Seinfeld’s “chain method” habit of writing a joke every day. In this mode, we’re less attached to a particular schedule and committed to having a “rhythm” of consistently creating—where, like, Seinfeld, we don’t want to break the chain of successfully showing up and completing our daily deep work.

4.
Journalistic Philosophy

In this mode, like a journalist who’s ready to write on a deadline whenever the situation arises, you weave deep work into your schedule whenever you can. 

Actionable insights

• Reflect on your habits and work/job-structure in order to find your own depth philosophy—is it Monastic, Bimodal, Rhythmic, or Journalistic? Which one of the four resonates most with you?
• The key to optimizing your own work is to find a philosophy that works for you, and to then ritualize it: Great minds don’t deploy rituals to be weird; they do it because success in their work depends upon their ability to go deep—and to do so consistently. No one accomplishes anything extraordinary without pushing themselves to the max.

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