Sitting in my room, I was searching for advice on how to succeed in tech interview preparation. This is a never ending journey as every single person in this field has something unique and different to comment on the approach to the daunting process. However, I came across a Medium article by Arjun Madgavkar, “How to Study for Software Engineering Interviews as a New Grad”, that piqued my interest and ultimately halted my search. His interview prep timeline was interesting and exciting to read, but that’s not what I loved about his post.
In Step 1 of his plan, he lists non-CS reading materials that should be completed before studying, specifically Deep Work by Cal Newport. I researched what this book was about, and the results of that answered a long-time question of mine that had plagued my mind ever since the Covid-19 pandemic began: how do I learn to do uninterrupted work with complete focus? I immediately bought the book off of Amazon and have read all of Part I of it so far. My experience reading this book has been truly enlightening and exceptional, particularly due to Cal Newport’s ability to back up his claims with heavy, relevant evidence. I’m writing about deep work in today’s blog because I think now, more than ever, it is the answer to how to accomplish one’s goals and aspirations in a distracted society.
I will first introduce deep work and provide examples of people who have incorporated it into their lives, and then provide personal thoughts on the subject itself and its necessity in the tech industry.
So, what is deep work? Well, to put it in a mix my own words and those of Cal’s, it is an activity completed with one’s complete concentration and undivided attention that pushes one’s mental and physical capabilities in a healthy way. I’m sure many of you have experienced this when you’ve entered a “flow” state, a state of being where one’s focus is on a singular activity. It’s an experience like no other, where there’s a voice constructed by your thoughts telling you the right steps to take to accomplish that task.
If you look at the traits of successful people, a common one among them is the ability to detach from society and engage in continuous work. One person that Cal presents in his book is a psychiatrist named Carl Jung. Carl constructs a retreat in a village named Bollingen to seclude himself from his lectures and busy life in Zurich so he can focus on his goal of understanding the unconscious at a much deeper level. His daily routine consisted of waking up at 7 AM and eating a big breakfast, followed by a 2 hour deep work session of writing about his research, and concluded with afternoon walks or meditation. By adopting this temporary lifestyle for a set duration of time, this was a major contributing factor towards him becoming one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century.
Another example of people emboldening this approach are Japanese groups participating in “recluse culture”. I first encountered this phenomenon when I visited the MET, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City. There was a Japanese art exhibit that portrayed many paintings of common citizens becoming a recluse to escape their hectic lives and resort to nature. The drawings consisted of bamboo trees, houses near the water, and people completing simple tasks, such as fetching food or building shelter. Even though this was a relatively simple and easy-going lifestyle, a lot of these people engaged in rich self-analysis about their lives and derived happiness from focusing on completing these activities with a deep work approach.
These two examples reinforce a common theme that deep work results in positive results for everyone, regardless of whatever approach they choose to engage in this process.
Tying this concept into the tech industry today, we are constantly bombarded with emails, texts, and notifications that may heavily obstruct us from engaging in deep work. By having software developers or any other professionals in this industry not being able to perform deep work can result in overall negative impacts for a company, whether that’s in the form of revenue losses or productivity dips. I would love to say that the solution is to remove these forms of communication from someone’s daily work routine. Realistically, this isn’t possible. I knew that there has to be a success story of a company that has incorporated some form of the deep work philosophy.
So I kept reading and came across an example that Cal brought up which put everything into perspective for me: Leslie Perlow, a Harvard Business School professor, tested the culture of connectivity, where one is expected to read and respond to emails quickly, at the Boston Consulting Group. She was able to convince the executives to change the work habits of their employees by taking one day out of the workweek off, no connectivity of any sort. At first, employees were scared that they would lose their clients and their career would be detrimentally impacted. However, as a result of participating in this change, they enjoyed their work more, developed better communication skills, and learned more about the intricacies of their work.
Although Cal didn’t expand more on what they did on this day, I’m assuming that these employees were able to uninterruptedly recollect their work or personal thoughts from the week, engage in deep analysis of their client’s cases, or take the day off to do something that was productive and joyful to increase their overall happiness, which places them in a better mental state to start next week’s work with more energy and focus. I’m not sure if BCG still continues to implement this, however it proves to be a win-win situation for client satisfaction and employee happiness.
So why don’t other companies follow this, especially tech? Well, most companies follow the path of least resistance, where they will tend to pursue behaviors that are easiest to engage in at the moment, rather than focus on behaviors that don’t have immediate clear feedback. In tech, this is especially common due to the pressure to keep servers online and infrastructure intact every second of the day, and if any obstruction is presented to them, they need to be able to react quickly in order to save millions of dollars. However, tech companies need to place more emphasis on instilling a deep work approach if they want to retain the highest quality of software products and services.
Specifically, this needs to be a consistent among software developers’ work lives. Programming is a very intricate and meticulous art that requires developers to regularly think outside the box. It consists of deploying new frameworks, algorithms, or features that take intense focus and time. If a programmer’s day consists of time allocated more towards meetings vs development, it will result in more time and obstacles to deliver high quality code. I propose a workweek where there is one day where there are no meetings so that developers can dedicate their time towards system design, architecture solutions, or just coding. At my internship right now, my team already implements this approach by dedicating Fridays as that day and it has worked out fantastically. During other days in the week, I experience residual attention from meetings or information that distract me during times where I need to read AWS or Golang documentation and program accordingly. However, on Fridays, I’m able to structure my day how I please and section off deep work sessions without any interruptions.
I hope that this post shed some light on the importance of incorporating deep work into your life. I’m still working out all the kinks of it, so I’m definitely not an expert. It’s very tough to think about how to structure it into your busy lives, and deep work itself can be mentally taxing as well. From analyzing the Japanese “recluse culture”, I found that many of these people who engaged in extreme isolation which results in long-term harmful effects on their health. As a result, I truly believe that your approach towards introducing deep work in their lives is an incredibly personal one and must be carefully constructed due to its dependence on a multitude of factors that only you know about. Taking this into account, it will definitely result in profound effects on your happiness and satisfaction with your careers.
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