Deep Focus at Work

Deep
Focus
at Work
How to Get Focus, Keep Focus,
and Work Smarter as a Team
Cameron Conaway
Deep Focus at Work | Introduction 1
Deep Focus at Work picks up where Cal
Newport’s Deep Work leaves off, with
clear, actionable advice on focus for
teams. Get reading, and get working
on what truly matters.”
—BRIAN HAZARD,
recording artist known as Color Theory
Deep Focus at Work provides

a workable model for developing
habits of focus and bringing them into
the workplace.”
—JOHN RAMPTON,
founder of Due.com and contributor to Entrepreneur
Deep
Focus
at Work
How to Get Focus, Keep Focus,
and Work Smarter as a Team
Copyright © 2016 Flow

Contents
Introduction 6
Chapter 1: What is Deep Focus? 13
Chapter 2: Why Deep Focus is the Key

to Success at Work 19
Chapter 3: Barriers to Getting Focused at Work,

and How to Overcome Them 25
Chapter 4: Deep Focus for Working Teams 42
Exclusive Interview with Cal Newport 49
About the Author 53
About Flow 54
With a colleague you will concentrate
harder than if alone because you don’t
want to fall behind or otherwise lose
the thread of thought.”
— CAL NEWPORT,
MIT professor and author of Deep Work
Introduction
Searches for “productivity apps” and “mindfulness” are rising.

The term “stay focused” is searched for in Google over 22,000
times each month. In the past few years, entire publications have
been built around the idea of productivity hacks—tips and tricks
we as individuals can use to do things better and faster.
What does it all mean? Did we miraculously become more inter-

ested in productivity and staying focused, or is there something
under the surface propelling these interests?
Well, get this:

According to research from Dr. Gloria Mark at the Universi-
ty of California, the modern office worker only gets 11 minutes
of uninterrupted work before there’s a distraction.
11 minutes.
That’s barely enough time to hone in and really get started

on something. For many of us, entire work days are essentially
a repetitive series of just getting started.
Which means that any progress we make at work comes in bite-

sized increments—fragments of focus so small that the process
of trying to get focused accounts for the lion’s share of our time
at work.
What if we could flip the prevailing model? What if the bite-sized

increments were the process of trying to get focused, and the li-
on’s share went to actually being focused?
How might that change our personal productivity, how our com-
pany progresses, or even how we live our lives?
Some of those distractions every “The modern office worker only

11 minutes, of course, are natu- gets 11 minutes of uninterrupted
ral and beyond our control, but work before there’s a distraction”
many are part of an onslaught
that we haven’t yet figured out
how to deal with.
A social media marketing manager, for example, may need just

five minutes to craft a tweet and send it out, but before they
know it 30 minutes have passed because they lost their focus or,
rather, they allowed their focus to drift and latch onto a trending
hashtag about a political issue they’ve been following.

Then there are the progressive companies who, in the sake
of “transparency” and breaking free from the stigma of drab cu-
bicles, are building gorgeous open layout offices equipped with
foosball tables, espresso bars, and the opportunity to see and
hear everything everybody does.
You might be thinking, Well, aren’t there links between worker pro-
ductivity and the aesthetics of an environment?
Absolutely there are, but it’s often far easier to let the aesthetics
we like undermine the productivity we want.
Cal Newport, author of Deep Work (read our exclusive interview

with him at the end of this book), uses this simple metaphor
to compel us to strike a better balance: Would you operate an as-
sembly line at 50% capacity for no other reason than that you like
the aesthetics of a slow-moving assembly line?
And let’s not forget this: Even as research shows multitasking

gives us the feeling of being productive without actually being pro-
ductive, it continues to become entrenched as the accepted norm
in the business world.
We at once praise the CEO who wears all the hats and can meet
with clients while emailing and skateboarding, while feeling
somewhere deep in our gut that something about being able
to simultaneously do everything doesn’t quite make sense.
So instead of staying focused on a single task, and doing a great

job at it, we try in vain to emulate the wildly successful do-every-
things that are held up as the perfect model.
The result?

We juggle this and we juggle that, and we do meh on all of it.
Hey, if we only get 11 minutes before an interruption, it makes

sense that we try to cram as many things into those 11 minutes
as possible.
Right?
Right, except for the kind of important part about how our
brains actually don’t work that way.
According to the Society of Neuroscience, trying to focus on more

than one task splits the brain. Not literally, of course.
When we commit to a single task or really need to focus, our

prefrontal cortex takes charge. It spans the left and right sides
of our brain, and it works together to help us perform optimally
at whatever we are staying focused on.
When we attempt to multi- “Multitasking gives us the feeling

task, however, our prefrontal of being productive without
cortex is forced to split its en- actually being productive.”
ergy and work independently.
Research suggests that some
of us can manage this quite
deftly, but that when we shoot
for three tasks (say, we’re following that Twitter hashtag, while
jotting off an email and thinking about our talking points for an
upcoming meeting) things typically go haywire.
We often entirely forget one of the three tasks, and the chance we
make a major error on any one of the tasks jumps threefold.

Ever misspelled the name of an important client you were email-
ing, or forgot to attach the attachment you referenced? There’s
a good chance it’s because you weren’t giving that email your full
attention—both sides of your prefrontal cortex.
So why do we do this, even when we know better?
For starters and to put it quite bluntly: Because it’s easier. Achiev-
ing focus and staying focused at work (we’ll explore this in great-
er detail later) takes a tremendous level of commitment—both
at the individual and team level.
Distracting ourselves? Yeah, not so much.
Then there’s the elephant in the room. And by that I mean

the screen you’re reading this from.
The computers and devices us “knowledge workers” love and

depend upon for our work are also, innately, interfaces of mass
distraction.
They’re perhaps the single greatest source of distraction ever in-

vented, actually.
We know how to use them better than ever, but can the same be
said for our ability to cut through the increasing distractions they
present in order to focus on what we need to get done?
Maybe, but only if we take our ability to get focused while using
them as seriously as the people who are, right now, engineering
clever new ways to use these interfaces as portals that lead to our
attention.

For too long our want for greater productivity and the ability
to stay focused has remained in a bubble of individuality. We kick
ourselves upon realizing we just spent 20 minutes mindlessly
scrolling through Instagram, and when we’ve kicked ourselves
enough times we eventually become one of those 22,000 “stay
focused” searches each month.
But here’s the deal: We all struggle with it, and the struggle only
deepens when we continue buying into the idea that we’re alone.
In fact, that feeling of being alone in the struggle for focus is one
reason why so many “productivity hacks” out there are geared
towards how we can improve our focus as individuals.
First, know this: You’re not alone.
Second, understand this: Many of us wanting to really dial-in our

focus want to do so in the context of our time at work… which is
time spent within often highly-complex team dynamics.
And when did we become aware of how challenging it can be

to focus? It likely wasn’t that time we tried for a relaxing vacation
in a secluded mountain cabin and discovered… those darn crick-
ets and birds and squirrels are just so annoying!
We probably discovered our struggle in the context of where most

of us really want to focus: At work.
To put it differently, the struggles we all have in regard to staying

focused do not take place after work hours and when we’re all
alone, they take place when we’re at work—often on a team—and
are trying our best to contribute and be as productive as we possi-
bly can.

After all, as Cal Newport says, “Humans are wired for craftsman-
ship.” Regardless of the reason, most of us, if given the choice,
would choose to maximize our skills rather than waste them.
Which is a great thing, because we do have a choice.
Here in Deep Focus at Work, we’ll separate the wheat from

the chaff to discover the individual ways we can get focus and
keep focus. We’ll explore the concept of deep focus—something
we’ve all experienced—and we’ll highlight some ways (many
of which are incredibly obvious) that we can tap into it and even-
tually turn it into a habit.
Throughout all of this we’ll dive into the relatively unexplored

terrain of staying focused in the context of working as part
of a team, and we’ll let this single question be the torch that
lights our way:
How can we bring deep focus into our workplace?

Chapter 1
What is Deep
Focus?
Feel familiar? Let's break the habit.

The easiest way to understand deep focus is to recall the times
you were in it. It may have been just a few minutes ago as you
gave your full attention to reading the introduction of this book,
without distraction, from start to finish.
Or it may have been last week at work, when the pressure

of a looming deadline allowed you to achieve three straight hours
of glorious focus in order to deliver a report precisely when your
team needed it.
Focus is that state we all know well. Some of us may use the term
from positive psychology, flow state, while others may adopt
phrasing such as “in the zone” that is so commonly used to de-
scribe athletic performance.
Regardless of what we call it, that period of being fully immersed

in whatever we are doing is something we’ve all experienced and
all, in one way or another, rely upon in order to learn, fully expe-
rience life, and perform to the best of our abilities.
Your decision to read this book means focus is something you

take seriously. But it also means you recognize focus not just
as something that happens—the state itself—but as something
you can cultivate and improve upon.
Deep focus, then, pairs what you intuitively know and have expe-
rienced with focus, and applies a layer of depth to it. Therefore,
what we’re talking about here is far closer to those three glorious
hours than to the few minutes of focus it took you to do the dish-
es.
Deep Focus at Work | Chapter 1: What is Deep Focus? 14

A single thought, right where we want it.
It’s important, when thinking about deep focus, to realize the es-
sence of it is not an either/or; it’s part of a continuum.
The intellectual exercise of trying to pinpoint exactly what deep

focus is and when it occurred (is it 4 minutes of concentration,
or 40?) isn’t something we’re concerned with here. We’re more
concerned with the doing, and the strategies we can use to make
that doing a habit we can call upon as individuals and as teams
at work.

In trying to define deep focus by wrapping time parameters
around it, we pigeonhole what it can be and create unnecessary
expectations that only divert our attention from where it should
be.
With all of that out of the way, what is deep focus?
Are you prepared for this incredibly complex and difficult to un-
derstand definition?
Deep focus is an extended period of time where you focus on pre-

cisely what you want to focus on.
That’s it. No more, no less.
As stated earlier, most of us would choose to maximize our skills

rather than waste them. When we’re working on a project, for
example, we would choose to have the results of that project rep-
resent the maximum capacity of our current skillset.
This means the only limitation, in the moment of whatever we’re

working on, is not what we know but how we use what we know.
Let this settle in:
In the moment of our work, what matters is not what we know

but our capacity to use what we know.
When we think about our work in the future, we can envision

having a different and perhaps more developed set of skills.
And when that time comes, what we envisioned may actually be
the case.

But in the moment, when the blank word document that we
must somehow transform into our quarterly marketing report
is shining in all its blankity blankness, when the work we need
to do is right in our face and not going anywhere until we step up
and own it, getting focused and staying focused is the only way
to bring our A game.
This is how we use all that we know. Or, as Cal Newport put it,
how we “wring every last drop of value” from our current intel-
lectual capacity.
Understanding deep focus by bringing an awareness to what it

feels like, why it matters, and where we most need it is the foun-
dation for everything else we’ll discuss in this book.
So before moving on to Chap- “In the moment of our work,

ter 2, we recommend taking what matters is not what we
10 minutes to complete this know, but our capacity to use
mental inventory. what we know”
If possible, write down a few

short notes for each as the pro-
cess of writing tends to allow for
a deeper level of absorption.

What does deep focus feel like to me?
Why does deep focus matter to me?
Where exactly do I most need deep focus?

Chapter 2
Why Deep
Focus is
the Key to Success
at Work
Unfocused individuals do not a good team make.

There’s a lot of talk about why we can’t stay focused at work. And
you better believe there are a million list articles (okay, give or
take a few) about how we can wrestle our focus back from the tyr-
anny of workplace distractions.
But this focus on the solution leapfrogs over an unspoken as-

sumption that we’d be remiss not to highlight here:
Why is focusing at work important in the first place?
Specifically, why is focusing at work so important that, for what-

ever reason, many of us don’t seem to think our natural ability
to do so is adequate?
It’s here where we get to the heart of something interesting.
For most of us, focusing at work is so important because we real-

ize it is crucial for our success.
Obvious. But why?
It comes back to that principle of being able to use what we know.

Without the ability to get focused and remain focused, what we
know has little value because we can’t achieve the state necessary
to use it.
Think about it. If your team is made up of super smart individu-

als, that’s pretty great. Each individual member has an incredi-
ble skill set. But your team dramatically hinders its potential for
performance if all of you super smart people can’t get in sync and
focus together.
Deep Focus at Work | Chapter 2: Why Deep Focus is the Key to Success at Work 20
Having all of the ingredients for a given recipe, even perfectly
measuring out all of those ingredients, does not mean the recipe
will turn out as you hoped.
In sports video games that allow you to create your own roster,
for example, it makes sense to stack that roster with the highest
rated players in the game. The mechanics of the game will read
those ratings, and if you run a game simulation your stacked
team will dominate all other teams.
But reality doesn’t bear this out so cleanly.
Teams in sync aren’t born, they’re made.
So often the richest sports teams will grab many of the best play-
ers, including the league’s best at each particular position. But
they don’t always win the championship.
“They just couldn’t get in Teams in sync aren’t born,

sync,” coaches will say. But they’re made.
often this is code for either
the players couldn’t put their
focus where they needed to or
they focused too much on them-
selves and too little on their team’s overall performance.
Or think about how you landed your current position. There’s

a good possibility you had to beat out many other highly-qual-
ified candidates. With this realization, and especially during
those first few weeks or months on the job, many of us want
to prove to our new employers (and often ourselves) that they
made the right choice.
How do new employees most often do that?
Typically not by running out and acquiring all types of new skills,
but by ratcheting up their level of focus and wringing “every last
drop” out of what it is the company saw in them in the first place.
And how about this: You’re in a typical B2B or B2C company, and
the product or service you’re offering is vying for attention in ei-
ther a crowded market or a market where, if you’re the lone wolf
and have something that truly meets a market need, others are
hungry and nipping at your heels.
In the case of the crowded market, how do you stay ahead? Of-
ten by honing in on a particular segment of the market that your
product or service is truly perfect for. In other words, choosing
where to focus and then focusing.
And as the lone wolf, staying ahead of the game and grabbing
that first big share of the market before others do demands loads
of focus—focus to perfectly develop your offering, focus on mar-
ket projections, focus on what your competitors are doing.
So why is focus the key to success at work? Because, to be frank,

it’s the only way to use what you know and for your company
to compete, get ahead, and then stay ahead.
And why is deep focus the key to success at work? Because it’s
the only way to truly reach individual levels of mastery and it’s
the only way to take your team from average to consistently func-
tioning at an elite level.
Let’s also not forget to mention a hugely important but underrat-

ed factor: We all get immense satisfaction from knowing that we
can do something really well.
This means that a lack of focus can quickly cascade into a lack
of confidence, which leads us to frantically search for morsels
of wisdom in cheap productivity list articles that were developed
more for SEO purposes than to actually provide any value.
For some of us, our instinct may be to blame our lack of skill,
but it’s first worth asking ourselves if our inability to focus is
at the root of the problem.
After all, focus is the foundational element necessary both

to learn a skill and to then use that skill.
If we were in those video games, our off-the-chart ratings in, say,
coding, might mean we’d be rockstars when the game simulated
the results.
But in the workplace, of what value are our skills if we can’t stop
ourselves from checking email every 5 minutes?
Not only does success at work depend upon our need to hold
focus, but in this age of increasingly flexible and remote jobs—
where far more weight is placed on what we get done rather than
on how long we were clocked in to do it, deep focus is the key
to opening up vast portions of our life to be spent in ways other
than work.
With some research suggesting that humans spend 30% of their

lives working, increasing our ability to engage in disciplined,
deep focus in this modern work age could mean we’re able to re-
duce that figure significantly.
Which of course means more time with our families, pursuing

other hobbies, or otherwise having greater control over how and
where we spend our time.
But these high hopes and potential lifestyle changes can’t be

achieved by swallowing a pill.
Barriers abound, and we can’t do “Of what value are our skills if we
anything about them until we can't stop ourselves from
know what they are. checking email every 5 minutes?”
Let’s dive in.
Chapter 3
Barriers
to Getting Focused
at Work, and
How to Overcome
Them
Barriers to getting focused (and staying focused) at work come in

a variety of forms. Over the years, we’ve found it’s easiest to break
these into 5 groups and an easy-to-remember acronym that
serves as a reminder for what blocks our deep focus practice:
BLOCC
Brain
Lifestyle
Office layout & culture
Commitment
Communication
Let’s take it from the top.
Brain
The first barrier we need to face head-on is the one inside our
head. In his piece for The New York Times titled Addicted to Dis-
traction, productivity thinker Tony Schwartz put it like this:
The brain’s craving for novelty,

constant stimulation and immediate
gratification creates something called
a ‘compulsion loop.’”
Deep Focus at Work | Chapter 3: Barriers to Getting Focused at Work, and How to Overcome Them 26
That is, as we feed and fulfill the craving, our brain demands
more of what we’re feeding it in order to reach the same level
of satiation. It’s a similar concept to that of an addict, who in-
creasingly needs more of a drug to reach the same level of effect.
It’s important to hold this information alongside compelling new

research suggesting that many of us are addicted to the very in-
terfaces we most often associate with our work.
Computers (and smartphones, tablets, etc.) provide all-day in-

stant access to novelty, as well as constant stimulation and im-
mediate gratification whenever we need it.
A study from Deloitte found that we check our phones 46 times

per day (and for those between 18-24 this number jumps to over
70—with signs pointing to that number only growing higher in
the near future).
Similarly, a survey from Adobe found that the average white-col-

lar worker spends 6 hours per day just on email—and this doesn’t
include time spent on social media, platforms that Cal Newport
refers to as “ad engines hand-crafted to be as distracting as possi-
ble to transform your hours of attention into revenue.”
Schwartz continues:
Endless access to new information also
easily overloads our working memory.
When we reach cognitive overload,
our ability to transfer learning
to long-term memory significantly
deteriorates. It’s as if our brain
has become a full cup of water and
anything more poured into it starts
to spill out.”
In other words, just as multitasking provides us the feeling of be-

ing productive without actually being productive, endlessly ac-
cessing new information gives us the feeling of learning without
actually allowing for learning to take place.
He stumbled on his own addiction upon opening a book

(the physical kind) and realizing he simply couldn’t focus enough
to finish the first paragraph.
Through habit, he had hardwired his brain to flit back and forth
between reading online, clicking out of ads and pop-ups, check-
ing the ever-changing traffic numbers on his company’s website,
shopping, browsing multiple tabs, and checking social media.
When it came time for deep focus, to make the serious com-
mitment of reading words on a page over an extended period
of time—and to giving himself solely to that act—he just couldn’t
do it.
While it may be an extreme example, part of Schwartz’s story has

probably rang true for all of us at some point (and in all likeli-
hood will continue to do so on a more regular basis unless we
make the choice to do otherwise).
Nicholas Carr says it this way in his book, The Shallows: What
the Internet is Doing to Our Brains,:
The net is designed to be

an interruption system, a machine
geared to dividing attention.
We willingly accept the loss
of concentration and focus, the division
of our attention and the fragmentation
of our thoughts, in return for
the wealth of compelling or at least
diverting information we receive.”
So what’s the answer? How do we at once balance the recognition
of how easy it is to be distracted while, for work-related purposes,
use the very things that most easily distract us?
Below are 3 strategies to get you started, but know this first step
of simply being aware of the issue is the most important. As you
progress through B L O C C, let each challenge and solution pre-
sented percolate a bit. That is, return to the ideas (or sections in
this book) in future days, weeks, and months.
Granting these ideas our full focus now is great, but this percola-
tion stage—sitting with the ideas before taking action—according
to research from Professor Adam Grant at the University of Penn-
sylvania, often leads to our own personal creative awakenings.
Ultimately, while our team at Flow has found some solutions

that have worked wonders for us over the years, and we’re happy
to share them, we also believe empowering you to find your own
solutions is a crucial part of deep focus development.
And if you’re so inclined… share with us what solutions you came

up with by sending an email to Focus@GetFlow.com. We won’t
share your solutions—or any of your information—with our au-
dience unless you give us permission to do so.
Okay, now to those 3 strategies for achieving deep focus

on the machines that often disrupt our ability to focus.
1. If possible, and we ask you to seriously consider this, strive

to respond to email at two dedicated periods of time during
the day. So let’s say you choose 9am and 3pm. Rather than check-
ing email upwards of 50 times all throughout the day, you’ve
granted yourself two periods of time to respond. When you check
at 9, allot a given amount of time to respond. This could be from
9 to 10am, and then from 3 to 4pm. Outside of these times, you do
not check email.
2. Shut off WiFi when you’re entering a period of deep work,

and switch it on only when you seriously need it. The “always
on” WiFi signal means our deep focus can easily be interrupted
by checking a few social media platforms and otherwise dart-
ing mindlessly through the internet. For many of us, when we’re
starting to feel tired or feeling our focus fade, we’ll “take a break”
by, for example, combing through our Facebook feed. This can
make it difficult to reclaim focus. A far better way is to break by
actually breaking—taking a walk or otherwise getting some time
away from the computer.
3. Keep your desktop(s) clean. As with #2 above, when our atten-

tion begins to wander we often feed this wandering by casting
our eyes (and attention) elsewhere. For many of us, a cluttered
desktop (both our actual desktop and those on our computers)
filled with notes and files entirely unrelated to what we’re try-
ing to focus on can be a great source of distraction. In many
Zen monasteries, for example, the monks, partly in an attempt
to achieve their deepest levels of focus, will sit facing a blank wall
(rather than facing their community or the zendo).
Lifestyle
This one, at least on the surface, is far easier to understand than
the mechanics of what’s happening with our brain.
Our current lifestyle—both the internal things we can control

and the external things we can’t—contribute significantly to how
we achieve optimal levels of focus at work.
Take, for example, the fact that you’re simply not all that thrilled
about the work you’re doing. This makes it all the more difficult
to really commit yourself to going deep.
So rather than focusing on the quarterly marketing report that

you find insatiably boring, you may vacuum the house, or make
another cup of coffee, or find something to do other than what
you know you need to do.
Again, this is where choice comes in.
Though it can be awfully difficult, especially when our existing

habits have wired our brains to do otherwise, to carve out the pe-
riod of deep focus necessary to get our work done, buckling down
and just doing it can mean freeing up significant time and energy
that we can spend in whatever way we choose to spend it.
The alternative to this is one you may know well: That exhaustive
sense that you’ve been working all day when in actuality you’ve
only truly worked for a few hours (but you’ve had work on your
mind all day and therefore feel like you’ve been working all day).
Remember this: Our “lifestyle” is part of our work, not something

entirely separate. Deep focus, therefore, doesn’t just help make
you better at your job, it helps make you better at whatever it is
you want to be better at.
One way to buckle down is to provide a reward for yourself and

hold yourself to the results. When you cut through the distrac-
tions, entered deep focus, and banged out quality work you’re
proud of, for example, find a way to reward yourself by taking
advantage of the time you likely freed up in your schedule.
The other side we need to keep in mind as it relates to lifestyle

are the external qualities of our lifestyle—unexpected health
complications, friends needing our help, the joys and challeng-
es of raising children. Deep focus can feel like a pipe dream
to the single parent trying to focus while two kids are running
around the house. This is okay, and entirely natural. Part of this
process of improving our ability to get focused and stay focused
is separating what we can control from what we can’t.
What we can control, we will try to control. What we can’t con-

trol, we will let go of trying to control.
This “letting go” part is especially important because of this:
Focus is a finite resource. What we waste of it cannot be re-

claimed.
As we did in Chapter 1, we recommend you detach from this book

for a moment in order to jot down some responses to the follow-
ing questions.
Rather than spend considerable time on this, try to embrace nov-
elist Jack Kerouac’s idea of “First thought, best thought.”
Whatever arises first, get it down:
What distractions at work can I do a better job of

having control over?
What distractions at work do I simply have to find

a way to accept?
What recurring distractions at work can I immediately

take action on?
Welcome back. Upon finishing this book, we encourage you to go
back through your responses to really flesh out the ideas.
Next up in B L O C C:
Office layout & culture

As mentioned briefly in the introduction, there is a movement
afoot to dismantle the old traditional office cubicle and replace it
with hipster new open layout designs.
Those of us who have been in the game long enough know those
open layouts aren’t all they’re
cracked up to be. While they "Focus is a finite resource.
offer a layer of transparen- What we waste of it cannot be
cy and visibility well beyond reclaimed."
what the cubicle can do, this
comes at a cost to our ability
to remain focused.
The cubicle has become synonymous with dull desk job, but
the inventor, Robert Propst, who referred to it as the “Action Of-
fice,” designed them in the 1960s to optimize for team focus.
Forget the dreary gray felt and forget any soul-sucking days
you may have spent enclosed in them. Propst, who worked for
the office furniture firm Herman Miller, developed cubicles in
response to the open layout style that existed at the time and that
many today, in the name of radical transparency and coolness,
are working hard to return to.
The separation of cubicles allows for focus, and those who have
kept that basic idea are working to expand upon it with updated
versions that have a mix of open layout collaborative spaces for
team focus, standing desks, and areas designed for individual
deep focus.
So while the sleek, open office layouts may seem new, they’re ac-
tually just a throwback to the '60s.
And most of them are environments (as Propst knew so well) al-
most perfectly built for distraction—you can see what everybody
is doing at any moment, who just went to the bathroom, and who
seems to be, for the love of all things holy, entirely unable to stop
scratching their head.
Such layouts—while there are of course inherent positives such

as the feeling of connectedness—can also become breeding
grounds for collaboration collapse, where teammates disman-
tle all silos and place unnecessary reliance on collaboration
as the ultimate, and sometimes only, path to productivity.
How to break through? Depending on your position, it’s import-

ant to either voice your concern or shape your office for mixed-
size ways of working.
Creating areas for dedicated individual and small-team focus

(either through cubicles or even through putting up simple cur-
tains, as Ethan Bernstein of Harvard Business School revealed
through his research) can go a long way in allowing a culture
of focus to spread and teams to work smarter.
Lastly, it’s important to note that office layout plays a major role
in office culture. Where focus is valued—even if merely valued
through physical walls—a sense of respect for this type of focus
can permeate throughout the workplace.
An office that feels like a party all the time… well, it can make it
quite difficult to go deep. This becomes especially the case when
fused with Parkinson’s Law—the theory that work expands to fill
the time available for its completion.
In other words, if you’ve given your team six weeks to complete

a project, there’s a good chance they’ll take six weeks to com-
plete that project—even if they could have banged it out in half
the time.
This isn’t something sinister on their part, in many ways it’s hu-
man nature. But some managers erroneously see a way to cut
through this by simply making ultra-tight deadlines… asking
their teams to complete a project in half the time they would nor-
mally allot for it.
A far better solution is to create a culture of deep focus in your

workplace, where your employees value focus, have found ways
to achieve states of focus as a team, and complete projects based
on this shared set of values within the workplace culture.
How to do this? Through a combination of commitment and

communication of that commitment.
First up:
Commitment
By now you know that focus at work demands commitment. Our
brains are craving distraction, certain lifestyle elements are pull-
ing our attention, and perhaps our workplace is ill-equipped for
achieving states of deep focus.
But what does commitment look like beyond telling ourselves we

want it?
Here are 4 ways we’ve found to turn the commitment in your

mind to a habit in your life:
1. Start small and start anywhere. Deep focus at work need not
begin with those 3 glorious hours we mentioned earlier. And get
this: It need not even happen at work. By starting small and, say,
committing to practicing deep focus 30 minutes a day for 3 days
a week, we can begin to rewire our brains to shutting everything
else out except for what we want to allow in. This can happen
at home, and like Tony Schwartz, it can happen through the sim-
ple practice of dedicating time to a particular book.
2. Track it. As with achieving any other goal over a period

of time, tracking your progress can be an excellent way to rein-
force your commitment and keep bending it toward becoming
a habit. There are tons of tools to do this, but perhaps the most
tried-and-true way is simply using pen and paper and updating
your progress in a notebook or on your monthly calendar.
3. Share it. The psychology of why we share, especially on so-
cial media, is an intriguing new field that is emerging. Much
of the research suggests that we share because it reinforces who
we want to be (and who we want to project we are). If you’re com-
mitted to focus, think about a person you may want to share this
commitment with—perhaps someone who has helped support
you through previous commitments, or maybe even someone
who would be interested in joining you on this focus journey. If
you can find a colleague in this regard, brilliant. You’ve just taken
the step from personal commitment to collective commitment,
and that’s where deep focus can really spread into the workplace
culture.
4. Build carefully, stay steady. It can be easy, in the excitement

of our deep focus commitment and the empowering taking-back-
our-life feeling it can provide, to reach too far, too soon. After
that first week of nailing your 30-minute goals, for example,
build carefully and as necessary. A jump to 2 hours a day may not
be appropriate or even necessary. Lastly, strive not to beat your-
self up. Even if you miss a few days in a row, just being aware that
you missed those days means the commitment is still top-of-
mind and that you are still driving towards your goal becoming
a habit.
This leads us to the final C in B L O C C:
Communication
Remember in the introduction when we talked about the feeling
that we’re alone in this struggle for focus?
Part of crushing that stigma is communicating your struggle and

commitment to addressing it with your colleagues. It’s one thing
to share your commitment with that friend or spouse who has
and will always support you, but it can be quite another to have
the vulnerability to open up to a colleague.
After all, the majority of us most want to focus at work, and if

we’re developing our skills at home and at the individual lev-
el but trying to apply them in the workplace as though we were
at home, we may be setting ourselves up for additional barriers.
So, how to get the ball rolling at your workplace?
A great way to start is by sharing with a single colleague this

book, or some article you read, or even about how you read Cal
Newport’s book Deep Work and thought they’d find it interesting.
Your effort to communicate your commitment and interest in

focus need not immediately sweep across your entire work-
place. That’s not how social change, and indeed that is what we’re
talking about here, ever happens.
It happens when a single person believes in an idea enough to act
on that idea, and then shares this with another, and if all goes ac-
cording to plan the sharing continues and an individual commit-
ment blossoms into collective commitments.
If you truly believe you’ve found a way to improve your focus,

and that this effort is positively changing how you work at work,
why hide it? Let your colleagues know, and your team will grow
better and stronger as a result.
Chapter 4
Deep Focus for

Working Teams
Trying is only enough...

You’re practicing deep focus as an individual, and as a result
you’ve been able to form new habits. As your confidence devel-
oped you progressed through B L O C C enough to begin commu-
nicating your commitment with members on your team.
You’ve done the hardest part of the work, but what’s the best way
to ensure that the habits you’ve formed can begin to change your
workplace culture?
Here are three ways our team at Flow has been able to build our
individual commitments into collective commitments and then
into team habits so ingrained we barely think to do them any-
more.
1. Take team size seriously. Deep focus can quickly lose its legs
when teams are huge and the completion of a seemingly simple
task has to go through too many people.
Our own research at Flow has aligned with other research in

the field to find this:
5-7 member teams are typically the most productive.
This number tends to be where workplace productivity peaks; it’s

just the right amount of smart minds and different perspectives,
without becoming a distracting party or a time-consuming drain
just to make basic decisions.
Evaluate the size of your 5-7 member teams are typically

teams, and the nature of your the most productive.
work, and see if you can bring
them down to an optimal size.
Deep Focus at Work | Chapter 4 Deep Focus for Working Teams 43

Many times, and it’s entirely natural to do this, we think that
as projects become more complex our teams must grow in order
to meet those complexities.
But there’s a good chance we can meet those complex projects

more efficiently not by growing a team but by splitting it up.
...when paired with strategy.

2. Assess task focus and project focus. And realize that all deep
focus at work is not created equal.
Sometimes, we’re losing focus in the moment, at the task lev-

el. This is when we’ve decided exactly what we’re going to work
on, but we just can’t bring ourselves to get it done. This is a loss
of task focus.
We often blame ourselves for losing task focus, and in most cas-
es, we are completely correct. It’s also somewhat easy to combat:
We figure out a way to improve our concentration or motivate
ourselves, and we return to the task.
Within task focus, there are two types of attention that you need
to be aware of. There’s top-down attention (or, if you’re all sci-
ence-y, overt orienting), which is goal-oriented—and likely what
you’re diving into when you select your task, or pick up your pen
to write. It’s also known as voluntary focus.
Top-down attention’s archenemy is the other type of attention,

known as bottom-up attention (science-y: covert orienting). This
type of attention is kicked into gear by your cat scratching you
unexpectedly, or a loud car-horn outside of your window. It’s
what kills task focus.
When viewed this way, task focus’s enemy is quite simple (and
endlessly complex): the distractions of covert orienting. Slay
the distraction(s), and get task focus.
But then there’s project focus. If lost task focus is the inability
to hunker down and complete a task, lost project focus is the in-
ability to even pick that task.

It’s you getting to work in the morning, sitting at your desk, and
clicking around between the emails you need to answer, your
to-dos you need to do, and your ongoing discussions that you
need to push forward... and not being able to make a judgment
on what most needs your time.
Good project focus is being able to take stock of all the potential
paths you could go down at any given time, and selecting the sin-
gle most important or pressing task without hesitation. This
means your team must be aligned in such a way that you all know
precisely what path to go down.
Keeping project focus is like writing a novel: It’s not a single act
of concentration, but several of them working in concert.
Robin Kwong, Special Projects Editor at The Financial Times, be-

lieves project clarity at the outset is paramount. Kwong makes
sure each individual member of his team, before beginning any
project, knows exactly what they should work on, when they
should work on it, and why they are working on it in this particu-
lar order.
It seems simple, but this team-based ability to seriously organize

task and project focus before pursuit of the larger goal means that
each member of the team can establish deep focus because they
know precisely what they should be working on.
This strategy works for Kwong in one of the world’s preeminent

business and economic newsrooms, it works for us, and we be-
lieve it (or some variant thereof) will work for you.
3. Establish focus signals. This one can be as fun and creative

as it is important. Once your commitment to deep focus is roll-
ing, it’s important to have ways for your team—especially if

you’re working in an open layout—to easily and quickly know
whether or not individuals and teams are in deep focus.
For some teams, they identify this simply by wearing head-

phones. If an individual is wearing headphones, it’s a signal
to their team that they are going deep.
Another focus signal can simply be sitting and working together.

In an open layout office, members of a team within a tech compa-
ny may be spread all over the workplace. They may communicate
through an app. But to avoid shoulder nudges from other mem-
bers of the company, and otherwise make sure everybody knows
that they’re focusing with their team, creating a signal by sitting
together can do the trick.
As we have remote employees at Flow, and as many of our cus-

tomers do as well, we needed a way to create a focus signal that
worked for everybody. So we created a switch within our app
called “Focus Mode.” When an individual switches it on, all em-
ployees at the company know that that employee is focusing.
Messages won’t be delivered to the focusing teammate until Fo-
cus Mode is switched off.
The possibilities for creating focus signals are limited only by

your creativity, but we’ve found them to be a crucial component
for simultaneously achieving and communicating the state of fo-
cus we’re in.

A Few Words Before the Cal Newport Interview
By reading this book, by making a commitment to deep focus,

you are building your capacity to be a bridge—a bridge that can
change how your workplace views and values the practice of fo-
cus.
In this modern economy, with technology pulling for our at-

tention in new ways, focus is the future. Those who can sustain
their focus will be most equipped to pivot when their position
demands it. They will be most equipped to learn new skills, and
most equipped to lead teams through distractions and toward
success.
By focusing on focus, you are building yourself into a leader and

an influencer. You are honing your skills to take back control
of your life where you can, and recognizing those important mo-
ments when it’s best simply to let go and enjoy the ride of life.
At Flow, we believe focus is the future. Regardless of if you ever

use our product, we’re grateful to know we’ve got you and other
deep focus ambassadors out in the world—cutting through dis-
tractions and building great murals of focus with the million lit-
tle pieces.
Thanks for reading, and enjoy the following interview with Cal
“Deep Work” Newport.

Building
the Focused Team
Exclusive Interview with Cal Newport,
author of Deep Work
— Cameron Conaway | Editor at GetFlow.com/blog
Cal Newport’s book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Dis-
tracted World, fundamentally changed the global conversation
around productivity.
Deep Focus at Work | Exclusive Interview with Cal Newport: Building the Focused Team 49
Through a fusion of research (Newport is a professor at George-
town University), historic and modern examples, and personal
experience, Deep Work tore through the current state of multi-
tasking mania to make a compelling argument for what he sees
as the unheralded skill of the 21st century: Focus.
We caught up with him to see how focus—that period of intense

concentration we often view as purely an individual pursuit—can
be built into teams at work.
CC: Let’s say the CEO of a tech company gives every employ-
ee a copy of Deep Work, and they all love it. How do you
see the company, and even the individual teams within it,
building deep work practices into their workplace culture?
What are a few ways the employees can form a bridge from
the book to their day-to-day work?
Newport: In my ideal workplace, everyone would have a target

deep work number for each week which describes their ratio
of deep work to non-deep work hours for that week. The key,
however, is [knowing] that even the quickest glance at an
inbox can render an hour of non-deep work. Deep work really
requires completely unbroken concentration to generate its
full effects.
The discussion in the company, at all levels, would be about

how close people are coming to hitting their targets and what
changes need to be made to close these gaps.
You’d be surprised how many seemingly immutable ele-
ments of workplace culture can quickly change once you
have targets that you believe in and are trying to hit.
CC: “Focus” tends to connote images of meditating Zen masters

and novelists retreating to cabins deep in the woods. How
can focus be an integral part of collaborative teamwork?
Newport: A group of people working together synchronously

on a problem can become an act of incredible depth. I call
this the whiteboard effect in honor of the common un-
derstanding in mathematical fields that when you work
at a whiteboard with a colleague you will concentrate harder
than if alone because you don’t want to fall behind or oth-
erwise lose the thread of thought. So with that in mind, I’m
very much in favor of small teams sitting together and push-
ing each other to make progress on something hard.
CC: For many marketers, using social media is an integral part

of their job. What strategies would you suggest, as they en-
ter into platforms that have been engineered for distraction,
to help them stay true to the rules for focused success?
Newport: First things first, I’ll emphasize my strong stance

on social media which is unless it’s specifically your job
to use social media (e.g., to sell things) then quit. These
are ad engines hand-crafted to be as distracting as possible
to transform your hours of attention into revenue. If you’re
a serious person who wants to create serious things you
should show more respect for your time and attention.
If you do have to use these tools for your job you need to put
in place an incredibly rigid schedule for when you log in
to do your work. If you get in the habit of checking social
media often—say, whenever you’re bored—you’ll rewire
your brain to the point where it expects these regular distrac-
tions, making it nearly impossible to accomplish deep work
at a high level when the time comes to do so.
I don’t mean to be too alarmist, but to me, social media

to someone who makes a living with their mind is what junk
food is to a professional athlete. The athlete could make
a hundred excuses about how they only eat junk food in
moderation, and how they try not to eat it every day, or how
a little bit of junk food is just a fun distraction… but it’s typi-
cally easier to just say, “I don’t eat junk food.”
The same is true of Facebook.
CC: Open office layouts are hot right now, and promoted by pro-
gressive companies who want to show how fun and transpar-
ent they are. But such layouts, where everybody can see and
hear everything regardless of whether it pertains to them, can
also be the perfect environment for distraction. What advice
do you have for how to stay focused in such an environment?
What structural changes would you recommend?
Newport: Open offices are a terrible innovation. They make it

nearly impossible for people to achieve states of depth so
everyone ends up operating with reduced cognitive capaci-
ty. It’s like running all the equipment in an industrial factory
at 50% capacity just because you like the aesthetics of a slow
moving assembly line.
If you’re in one of these environments, try if at all possi-

ble to have regularly scheduled deep work blocks outside
the open office.
About the Author
Cameron Conaway is an award-winning journalist and poet who
has covered pressing social issues from nearly 20 countries. As
he was always writing from different places—in the air, under
bamboo huts, in seemingly infinite coffee shops—he was forced
to develop his own habits of focus.
However, it wasn’t until he attended a meditation retreat with

Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh that he realized how pervasive dis-
tractions could be. Since then he’s been thinking about how the
focus habits he developed as a journalist and meditator could be
applied to teams at work.
Deep Focus at Work | About the author 53

Flow is simple project management software that helps creative
teams move faster and ship great work.
In a crowded field, we’ve separated ourselves from the noise not

by offering more but by radically delivering less—less distrac-
tions and less interruptions.
We’ve done this by placing a premium on focus, both in how we

do our own work and in how our product allows our customers
to do theirs.
This focus on focus, in an industry of disruptive and seemingly

endless alerts and notifications, means that teams from
Apple, TED, and Harvard University, among many others, use
Flow to stay focused and get things done.
Working with such elite companies and institutions inspires us

to be better, and to consistently deliver to the standards they de-
mand of us. In other words, when a team decides to use Flow we
see it as their offering us a beautiful gift to be better than we are.
It’s in the spirit of their giving that we’ve decided to put this book
together. Sharing what we’ve learned with whoever is willing
to read is one way we can give back.
At Flow, we think secret sauces are overrated and sharing is un-

derrated. May you take from this book what works for you, dis-
card what doesn’t, and always strive to focus on what matters
most.
Deep Focus at Work | About Flow 54

Illustrations by Jacob Dewey
CC: The life hacks, productivity and mindfulness movements
are booming, but most of the content out there feels superfi-
cial—cheap list articles with clickbait headlines. Deep Work
(and your blog) cuts through all of that with real-world ex-
amples, theoretical underpinnings, and science. Still, what’s
under the surface? Why are so many of us hungry for focus?
Newport: Humans are wired for craftsmanship. To focus hard

on creating the best possible thing you can generate a deep
sense of satisfaction. To flit back and forth between emailing
and Twitter, while “jumping on calls” every 20 minutes, is
significantly less satisfying.

getflow.com | Copyright © 2016 Flow

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Chapter 1: What is Deep Focus? 13

Chapter 2: Why Deep Focus is the Key

Chapter 3: Barriers to Getting Focused at Work,

Chapter 4: Deep Focus for Working Teams 42

Exclusive Interview with Cal Newport 49

About the Author 53

Searches for “productivity apps” and “mindfulness” are rising.

What does it all mean? Did we miraculously become more inter-

Well, get this:

That’s barely enough time to hone in and really get started

Which means that any progress we make at work comes in bite-

What if we could flip the prevailing model? What if the bite-sized

Some of those distractions every “The modern office worker only

A social media marketing manager, for example, may need just

Deep Focus at Work | Introduction 7

Cal Newport, author of Deep Work (read our exclusive interview

And let’s not forget this: Even as research shows multitasking

So instead of staying focused on a single task, and doing a great

Deep Focus at Work | Introduction 8

Hey, if we only get 11 minutes before an interruption, it makes

According to the Society of Neuroscience, trying to focus on more

When we commit to a single task or really need to focus, our

When we attempt to multi- “Multitasking gives us the feeling

Deep Focus at Work | Introduction 9

So why do we do this, even when we know better?

Distracting ourselves? Yeah, not so much.

Then there’s the elephant in the room. And by that I mean

The computers and devices us “knowledge workers” love and

They’re perhaps the single greatest source of distraction ever in-

Deep Focus at Work | Introduction 10

First, know this: You’re not alone.

Second, understand this: Many of us wanting to really dial-in our

And when did we become aware of how challenging it can be

We probably discovered our struggle in the context of where most

To put it differently, the struggles we all have in regard to staying

Deep Focus at Work | Introduction 11

Which is a great thing, because we do have a choice.

Here in Deep Focus at Work, we’ll separate the wheat from

Throughout all of this we’ll dive into the relatively unexplored

How can we bring deep focus into our workplace?

Deep Focus at Work | Introduction 12

Feel familiar? Let's break the habit.

Or it may have been last week at work, when the pressure

Regardless of what we call it, that period of being fully immersed

Your decision to read this book means focus is something you

Deep Focus at Work | Chapter 1: What is Deep Focus? 14

The intellectual exercise of trying to pinpoint exactly what deep

Deep Focus at Work | Chapter 1: What is Deep Focus? 15

With all of that out of the way, what is deep focus?

Deep focus is an extended period of time where you focus on pre-

That’s it. No more, no less.

As stated earlier, most of us would choose to maximize our skills

This means the only limitation, in the moment of whatever we’re

Let this settle in:

In the moment of our work, what matters is not what we know

When we think about our work in the future, we can envision

Deep Focus at Work | Chapter 1: What is Deep Focus? 16

Understanding deep focus by bringing an awareness to what it

So before moving on to Chap- “In the moment of our work,

If possible, write down a few

Deep Focus at Work | Chapter 1: What is Deep Focus? 17