When I had my time off work in January one of the first books I did on recommendation from someone was Deep Work by Cal Newport. Deep Work is an extraordinary piece of writing which was produce by Newport back in 2013 and something I am sure has been referenced heavily in Simon Sinek’s book, Leaders Eat Last.
Deep Work is an essential read for anyone who wants to get more quality out of the time they spend on administrative or knowledge work. It explains and understands the toxic nature of the current interruption society that we live in and references heavily and scientifically the detriment to that interruption in concentration and the quality of work produced.
It has been controversial and has its critics but it’s a real game changer and an eye opener that allows you to examine the way you work yourself. But the point of this blog is not to review Cal Newport’s book - although I would recommend anybody who reads this to get it on audiobook – the point is to try to explain the toxic nature of interruption, of what we allow into our lives by stealth which, on examination, we would not allow.
The analogy is given by Sinek in his book and it is the air traffic controller… Imagine that you’re flying on an aeroplane from New York to Seattle. It’s a brand new aeroplane, state of the art with all possible safety mechanisms in place. Two experienced pilots at the helm with 1,000s of hours of flying experience, 100s of safety drills carried out. Calm weather with no sign of difficulties or problems on the flight. The flight is at 33,000ft, air speed is 525mph, somewhere on the ground far in the distance is a man sat in a room with no windows tracking your flight, providing vectors and navigational references to keep things safe. He has 10 years experience and is highly trained – you are flying in his airspace that he is responsible for. His mobile phone is sat on his desk. He is not irresponsible or crass enough to check the mobile phone as he is talking to you but in between providing you vectors and navigational references he checks for texts and emails, that’s not unreasonable is it? He then provides references to another plane and checks his emails again. Does that seem reasonable to you? Because it doesn’t seem reasonable to me. Would you be happy that the guys flying the plane check their emails and texts or would your prefer that they waited until they had stopped flying the plane to do that? Would you be happy that, in a short 5 minute break from flying the plane in the cockpit, they took a message from their wife that upset them and broke their concentration?
I can tell you, as a dentist working in practice, that almost all the guys that work for me take their phones into surgery. So between patients they check their emails (and some of them have been known to take phone calls while patients are in the surgery) If it’s not acceptable for the air traffic controller or the pilot, is it acceptable for us? And extrapolating that out – if you’re trying to concentrate on doing your job, at what price is the interruption of a message or an email or Facebook post? Newport will explain in his book if you take the time to read or listen to it, that it takes approximately 30 minutes to get back into the stage of quality deep working following a single interruption. How many times are you interrupted per day? Therefore how likely is it that you’ll ever get back to Deep Work?
How much quality are we missing out on? How much brilliance, how much contribution because we allow the interruption time and time and time again all through our working day. For me it’s time to switch off. Switch on when I want to check it and switch it off when I don’t. That’s actually why I have an aeroplane mode on my phone because I don’t go on an aeroplane that often. I am fed up of hearing a ping on my phone and rushing to look at it only to be told by Apple that I have another software update to click onto my phone so that it will make my phone slightly more obsolete so that I will buy another one!
So, as I’ve said before in a previous blog, please excuse me if I don’t answer my emails or texts or voicemails on the same day. I am probably working on a patient or meeting with my team to try and make the practice better or talking to my kids or riding my bike – none of which I want to be interrupted in by something that is no so important or urgent. It’s time we had a conversation about this and time everybody understood that for all of us to be universally accessible at all times is just plain unsustainable.
Blog Post Number - 1193
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