CDWC #35 - Deep Work in Writing, Editing, and Coaching
CDWC #35 - Deep Work in Writing, Editing, and Coaching
Reflecting on the connection (or its lack) between deep work, writing, editing, and academic coaching
We're always reflecting on how our editing and academic coaching adds value to the world. We think a big piece of it has to do with helping people find deep work. This is a pretty good piece of a mission statement.
Cal Newport outlined deep work in his 2016 book:
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.
In contrast, shallow work is:
Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.
Newport argued that shallow work has consumed knowledge workers with an endless barrage of distraction and triviality. Since 2016, social media, recommendation algorithms, and advertising-driven internet content have gotten even better at harvesting and fragmenting our capacity for sustained attention.
This barrage of distraction has has robbed us of the ability to enjoy the rewards of a hard day's cognitive work. The hunger for deep work is palpable. We think we can help.
Deep Work and Writing
Writing is ideally deep work. Every writer dreams of that sort of undistracted, retreat-like calm where ideas can take shape. But we all know that most writing happens under external pressures of all kinds, and with the ever-present distractions of emails, texts, social media, and/or coworkers.
The route to deep work is straightforward but long. It takes time to let the mind settle and collect into a state of readiness for deep work—often much longer than we'd like. In our experience, the typical time to really settle the mind is about 20 minutes. That's the first step. Then, once settled, we must feel around for that brain-wave that's challenging but not too challenging. This takes time too; we cannot say how long. It's intensely rewarding to be in the flow of writing. Sometimes it feels endlessly sustainable, but we all know that the flow can be fragile: an unexpected phone call, a delivery, a small crisis to manage, a funny meme, or an irritated email might be all it takes to bring us right out of the zone.
It's hard to regain the flow once it's lost. There seems to just be something primal about our attention that doesn't allow quick re-orienting to deep work. And the more distracted we get, the more frustrating the process gets. It needs to be said: settling the mind is skilled work, and it depletes our limited resources.
Our coaching work so far has involved collaborative searching with our clients for ways to afford deep work against some real barriers to it. We coach what we know, so we help grad students remember their (often vast) capacity for deep work that has been undermined by the overwork of academia, financial stress, systemic barriers, anxiety, and endless distraction. We think we help by sharing what worked for us and what didn't, by validating the struggle, and in saving our clients time as they search for that minimal viable setup with which to finish the dissertation.
Deep Work and Editing
Our editing value-add is more straightforward. If you, as a writer, have been working deeply, we can help you work more deeply. For writers and academics, there are two goals: write a lot and to write well. Figuring out how to do both is your deep work; everything else is comparatively trivial. There's no inherent reason for editing to be deep work for every writer. Division of labour is our friend.
Writers have to make endless decisions in their work, so it's no wonder that the editing step feels like one set of decisions too many. Decision fatigue is real, and we think that writers write best when they're not harried by urgent but comparatively minor decisions. Those things throw writers out of their zones.
Editing may not be first-order creative work, but it is sometimes second-order creative work. It involves empathy, imagination, and a certain kind of passion for clear, actionable suggestions so that the first-order creative work can shine through. We mingle our labour with writers not to diminish their work, but to offer breadcrumb trails into deeper work. Sometimes, we think of editing work as converting a writer's free-floating anxiety into a set of specific problems for them to solve and feel good about.
The Collective Attention Deficit Disorder
We think our work helps. But let's be real: the onslaught of shallow work is a systemic issue. No small group of people can turn back the tide of social media, hyper-connectivity, distractions, pressures, and the mess of the working world. Huge fortunes depend on harvesting our attention in order to produce "engagement" and "eyeballs on ads". But we shouldn't become passive and pessimistic. In response to the madness of the modern internet, we must all do our part to reclaim our attention, almost as a spiritual practice. That broad project will help all of us find deeper work, deeper rest, deeper relating, and deeper feeling.