Tag: deep work

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed woman is queen

Posted on by philipdodson

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Standardised, homogenised, bland and average create huge opportunities for people with rare skills.

The industrialised machine over the past 100 years has become so sophisticated at standardising everything for maximum efficiency that it has created not just standardised products and services but standardised people too with their education system, workplace and society.

The working life for vast numbers of the human race on the planet has become a series of dull, shallow and repetitive tasks. We sort data like human routers and servers.

Those who do not follow the rules, those who are brave enough to do something different, to create ‘art’, to do deep and meaningful work are increasingly going to be at an advantage.

Most people have lost the cognitive skills to do deep work. Many simply have had too much time glued to email, social media, and ‘click porn’ on the internet, to be able to spend any meaningful periods of time engaged in deep, thoughtful, creative and substantial work. The art and skill of deeper work have died in a glut of swiping from one piece of content popcorn to another.

Those who can do deep work are becoming a rare commodity and as the standard model human gets replaced by AI that can do their shallow work, then the people who can work deeply will be highly sought after.

The woman who can work deeply will become queen, the man who can work deeply will become king. In the land of the blind shallow knowledge worker, the one-eyed deep worker will be the one who matters.

Any benefit

Posted on by philipdodson

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It is interesting in society that we have adopted, as Cal Newport describes it in his fabulous book ‘Deep Work’, an ‘any benefit’ approach to deciding to do something or use an app or spend time. It is part of the mainly shallow activity that we have now become conditioned to engage in.

All it needs is a benefit and we adopt it. It has become a sales tactic especially once companies have paid a team of ‘experts’ to say ‘drinking x is good for y’. Drink it whatever other consequences it might have, it has a benefit.

Jumping off a cliff has a benefit, free falling at high speed is exciting. Although it has many other more definite downsides.

Often, what we all miss in this process of ‘any benefit’ selection is to start to analyse the downsides. We fail to go deeper.

What if we took our two most important current work goals or our 2 most important personal goals and weighed up doing something or using an app etc against them? Perhaps, then we can go beyond an ‘any benefit’ view to better assess how we might use our time to move forward towards our important work and personal goals.

Simple have ‘a benefit’ is not enough and we’ll end up being busy doing stuff regardless of our goals.

If we are to create enough time to do the really important valuable work, then we have to reduce the amount of time we allocate to shallow things and create time to do the deeper more meaningful things.