What is deep work?
3 min read

Deep work is a mindset, an attitude to work and life, that helps increase the value of what we -as knowledge economy individuals- produce.

• Deep Work
• What Is The Alternative To Deep Work?
• What Are The Benefits of Deep Work?
• Workli And Deep Work

Deep Work

Deep work is defined¹ as:

Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

Deep work is an ability that requires both practice and the right tools to develop it. However, once you achieve deep work mastery, your productivity (and quality of life) is greatly enhanced. By honing your concentration habits and by focusing intently on one thing at a time, you will achieve flow and thus bring more and better value to the world

What Is The Alternative To Deep Work?

The alternative to deep work is what probably you are already doing: a constant shifting of attention between low value activities like answering emails, checking social media channels such as twitter or facebook. The opposite of deep work, also known as “shallow work” or “busy work”, may take many forms including attending too many meetings or poorly organised ones, answering phone calls, being hooked to chat messaging apps such as Slack, Whatassp, Telegram, etc.

The lack of depth that results from shallow work impairs our capacity to be in the moment and fully present; it impedes the state of flow that knowledge professionals need to consistently produce true value.

Moreover, shallow work, rapidly alternating between activities, and the constant switching between various non-cognitively demanding tasks, produce a false sense of accomplishment and are also a cause of anxiety. After a full-day doing busywork, your “to do list” will have many ticked items in it. However, those items will be mostly meaningless and would have not advanced your important goals. And, because of that, shallow work will cause you a deep seated restlessness, because -at the bottom- it does not provide meaning to our lives.

What Are The Benefits of Deep Work?

Deep work has many benefits but the top three are these:

1. You will be more valuable: to be valuable in today’s knowledge economy you must perform at your very best and that is a task that requires depth, concentration and focus, the very signature of deep work.
2. The quality & quantity of what you produce will increase: by ditching inconsequential activities that vie for your attention, your newly mastered deep work skill will help you contribute more and better value to the knowledge economy.
3. Your life will be more meaningful: as you produce more and better stuff and as you become more valuable to society, your life will feel more meaningful and full of purpose.

Workli And Deep Work

Because we are passionate about deep work and productivity we built a different kind of project and team management tool; we built the only platform in the market that has deep work as it central ethos. With Workli we will guide and help you improve your deep work habits while at the same time you will have access to a project and team management tool built to help you focus on the projects that really matters when they really matter.