Welcome to episode 142 of the Nerd Journey Podcast [@NerdJourney]! We’re John White (@vJourneyman) and Nick Korte (@NetworkNerd_), two Pre-Sales Technical Engineers who are hoping to bring you the IT career advice that we wish we’d been given earlier in our careers. In today’s episode we discuss part of the first rule of deep work, delving into tips for supporting the structure and execution of deep work.
Original Recording Date: 10-02-2021
Topics – Book Discussion Format and Some Reminders, Deciding on Your Depth Philosophy, Creating a Ritual, Grand Gestures and Collaboration
00:59 – Book Discussion Format and Some Reminders

* This is part 2 of our review of Deep Work by Cal Newport. If you missed part 1 where we discussed what deep work is and its importance, check out Episode 141.
* This book came to our attention in two ways:

* Josh Duffney spoke about his use of deep work in Episode 123.
* We did a book goals episode earlier in the year that mentioned Deep Work as one of Nick’s goals for the year – Episode 108. He had read it some time close to the Josh Duffney episode but decided to read it again when John suggested we do a review of the book and its concepts.

* Here’s a reminder of Cal Newport’s definitions:

* Deep work – "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."
* Shallow work – "Non-cognitively demanding tasks that are often done while distracted which are easy to replicate and do not create a lot of value in the world"

* An update on the format of this show

* We originally thought we would cover all of part 2 of the book in this episode, but since there are many practical tips to discuss, there will be a few more episodes in addition to this one.
* We’ll summarize a part of the book and then answer the following questions:

* Do I believe this?
* Does this apply to me?
* Does this make me want to change behavior?
* What will I change as a result?

* We’re trying to model how we want to read books from this point on which are impactful to our careers and will likely do this from time to time.

* Part 2 of the book starts with rule # 1 – work deeply.

5:50 – Deciding on Your Depth Philosophy

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Rule # 1 is work deeply, and that’s extremely general.

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Ideally we would all have workspaces that enable us to do deep work, but that isn’t the case. With so many distractions, it is quite the opposite.
Decide on Your Depth Philosophy

* The monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling involves radically removing or minimizing the distractions that would take one away from deep work.

* Examples in the book are of people who went to a dedicated space away from the rest of the world (which probably is not that realistic for us).

* The practitioners of the bimodal philosophy of deep work scheduling divide their time between a period of monastic-like deeply focused work and a period of engagement without a priority on that focus.