2021-04-01 The Difficulty of Dep

There are two major difficulties to doing deep work: quantity and quality.

We don’t do enough deep work. Shallow work is usually easier and appears more urgent. Some of this is inflicted from the outside as colleagues and managers add to our to-do list without thinking of the costs. But much of it is self-inflicted. We fail to do the deep work that creates a legacy because it’s easier to toss emails back and forth instead.

We don’t do deep work for long enough. Large, uninterrupted chunks of time are what we need. Drucker himself recognized this fact:

To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive, therefore needs to be able to dispose of time in fairly large chunks. To have small dribs and drabs at his disposal will not be sufficient even if the total is an impressive number of hours.

Yet, as Drucker observed, plans and intentions aren’t going to work. It’s easy to chastise yourself about not getting enough deep work done. But it’s another thing to consistently do it, week after week.