Help Yourself #9...

I did it again...ended up with a business book. Deep Work:Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport.

I had put this one on hold at the library a long time ago. I pulled the recommendation from a newsletter I read. The interview with the author made it sound like it was focused on how to get into that flow state of working. How to tune out distractions to allow for more creativity to come. Which I really liked the sound of. 

It's really easy to find 300 other things to do when I really was planning on sitting down and writing. Even now I could switch over to Facebook or do a quick Google search or maybe play a word game on my phone...there is always something within reach that seems like it might be more engaging. But once I get writing, once that moment of flow starts, there's not much I'd rather be doing. I love looking at the end result of rows and rows of words on the screen. Or reading the story I just wrote from top to bottom and seeing that it does hang together, it does make sense, it's entertaining. So how can I get my mind into that state easier and quicker? 

That's what I thought it was going to be. 

It was not. It was more about how to be the best, most productive, worker bee in the hive. Which almost all business books are. I mean, that's the point of them right? But when you think you are getting a book on creativity (the newsletter I found the book in) and you get one on late stage capitalism and how to let it steal the joy from every fucking thing...well...

What useful information did I get out of it? Not a lot. I mean, there were the common sense things, don't check your email while you are working on something that requires deep thought. Don't have your IM program constantly running. Just put up an out of office response on those things when you are working so people know not to expect a reply. Book a room in an expensive hotel to encourage you to finish your project early. (JK 'I'm a Problem' Rowling did that to finish Harry Potter and he thought it was a great idea. Because most of us can book a $1000 a night hotel to write) As you can see a lot of his ideas were geared toward a certain level of worker and income level. 

And they weren't even realistic for that. I mean, Brent could turn off his email and his IM and just tell people he was unavailable while he worked on things, but I don't know that it would allow him to work on them for long before they let him go. He has to be available incase something needs taken care of right now. We even have two different types of vacations, we have REAL vacations where he leaves his phone off and his computer at home and Intel vacations where he mostly doesn't work, just a few meetings and phone calls. And he's not even at the VP level. They never get real breaks.

The book also suffered from what all business books do. They are moments in time. This one was written using business world examples that just don't work anymore. I mean Jack Dorsey was still running Twitter, Nate Silver hadn't lost his shine and the pandemic hadn't happened. 

He was very anti-Zoom style meetings (video conferencing, because he was writing pre-pandemic when Zoom wasn't a commonly known program). Very anti-digital communication as a whole. He called it all shallow. Do you want deep or do you want shallow? I feel like the pandemic must have been really hard for him. There was no in person. It was all digital. And if you hadn't already learned how to make digital work for you? Well...good luck. 

What would I have gotten from it in my 20s? Confused... You mean to tell me that I am going to carry my phone with me all the time, but I won't use it to make calls, I'll use it like a...reference library/movie theater/post office/video game service? What? Yeah, too much current technology for my 20 year old brain to be able to make the leap. The idea of having to turn off all of the digital distractions to work wouldn't really register. Maybe equating it to taking the phone off the hook? Maybe?

It was a book on Deep Work that could have used a deep edit. Way too long. Way too in love with his own ideas. Not really all that helpful. 

Side note time....

One of the things he really hates is social media. Calls it a waste of time. And on one hand I absolutely agree that it can be a giant time suck and managing it is really hard. But one of his suggestions to show how useless it is is to log off of Facebook for a month (crazy! Who would do such a thing?) and then when you log back on see how much you really missed and he guarantees that it won't be anything much. And when you log off don't tell anyone and then you will see that nobody even missed you. The connections are too shallow and superficial to count. 

This man has never had a Facebook account and wears that badge proudly. Which is fine. I know a few people who haven't. But to speak on how shallow it is without ever having used it struck me as so unbelievably condescending. And then of course, his diatribe about how your connections to people online aren't real. That if you disappear for a month they won't even notice. Well...yeah they will. Or at least some of them will. And just like it would be a dick move to ghost your friends and family in "real life" it's a dick move to do it online. Tell people so they don't worry. Because, sorry dude, you can make real deep connections with people online. 

His take is that there is no way to get to know someone just by writing things down. And, of course, I found this to be laughable. I think you can get to know someone even better by writing back and forth. You get time to think about what you want to say. You can share stories. You can share jokes. You can share pictures. You can write down the most personal details of your life and post them in a blog...

Or you know, something like that...

It's not unusual for people who have not made deep friendships with others online to not understand how it happens. It's not unusual for those people to use terms like "real world" or "real friends" when talking about it. But it still doesn't mean I like it. Like I said, it's so condescending. "Do it the way I do it or it's lesser." 

Oh fuck you. 

So yeah...this was not the book for me. Too long. Not really that helpful. And also insulting. But other than that...