最近非常受困于无法深度工作这件事，作为一个需要写稿的人，每天白天却面临着开不完的会和回不完的邮件、Skype、钉钉，以至于一点也抽不出白天的时间来写作。
我原先觉得，我司不喜用微信是天大的好事一桩，因为这意味着绝大多数消息无需即时回复，且微信上可能要说几十条的事，邮件可能两三个来回就能说完，省时又高效。但后来发现，正因其高效，谁都能快速找到你、邮件你，于是每天千丝万缕千头万绪，随着工作效率越来越高、邮件回得越来越快，邮件的数量反而呈几何式增长，愈发地回不完。
会议也是同理，明明自己现在干活越来越快，却发现被卷入的项目也是几何形增长，会议也激增，一些长期项目，领导喜欢每周一会来对齐进度，监督推进，甚至一些头脑风暴会也可以达到一天一开的强度，routine与ad-hoc交织，非常容易陷入麻木的忙碌，说是头脑风暴，其实根本来不及找到思考的缝隙。前阵子甚至已经有好几次上班时间心悸到需要深呼吸的情况。
由于还加入了许多需要和欧美长期沟通的项目，我的晚间时间也常常七零八落，一天过去，并未见大量成果，但累得不行。
我在做记者的时候，一天可以在4个稿子的不同阶段里切换，自认为并非一个不擅长multi task的人，但当很多信息shallow至极却又不得不回，一天横跳的项目和工作内容多如牛毛时，我感觉自己濒临极限——不是工作无法完成的极限，是担心自己从此只会shallow无法再deep thinking的极限。
对于当下的我而言，<Deep Work>这本书是极其对症的。
书中列举了几个明确的shallow work obligations，包括status meetings, memos, PowerPoint, etc.这些几乎都是我日常的一部分。最近曾有一周暴走，是我一个经常合作的同事的小孩生病，频频请假，以至于我那周和另一名略junior的同事一共完成了5套PPT——其实本来是3套，奈何有一套未到ddl时，就发生了两次需求重大变化。
本周也是，一个十分初期的项目，每日都有三个团队沉陷其中，上午开会，下午迭代方案PPT，第二天早上再开会，下午再迭代…如此重复了连续5天。
可能对于组织会议的人，听presentation点评proposal（此处中夹英带贬义哼）是对其最高效的工作方式，但三个团队连轴转，其结果就是每天的PPT/Excel/Word都是没法入眼的粗糙半成品，而且在本身工作就几乎饱和的情况，硬插进来这样一个项目，我相信也会导致其他工作的交付延期或质量下降，何以为哉？
另一个具象化场景就更让我发笑：
Consider the frustratingly common practice of forwarding an e-mail to one or more colleagues, labeled with a short open-ended interrogative, such as: “Thoughts?” These e-mails take the sender only a handful of seconds to write but can command many minutes (if not hours, in some cases) of time and attention from their recipients to work toward a coherent response.
在书里写明之前，这种三五不时的“thoughts”邮件就是我日常的一部分，且每每收到我都觉得很好笑。正如书中所说，这样一封邮件对于发送者只需几秒，是他们处理完邮件的表示，但对接收方——发送者大概永远也意识不到、也不想意识到他们花了多少时间来回复这样一封没头没尾的邮件。
A little more care in crafting the message by the sender could reduce the overall time spent by all parties by a significant fraction. So why are these easily avoidable and time-sucking e-mails so common? From the sender’s perspective, they’re easier.
嗯哼。
邮件本应比即时通讯如微信更容易说清事儿，其背后有着深度思考的体现，但这种不仅把邮件当微信用、甚至带着些许傲慢的做法，把提效工具用到降效，要我说，或许说本末倒置也不为过。
书中开篇第一章节叙述了deep work的价值和shallow work的副作用，对我而言并无太大意义。当我迫切地找到这本书、翻开这本书的时候，我已是受够了被shallow obligations折磨得没有时间going deep的程度。
一方面，即使从工作角度，我还是需要写稿，尽管我已经练就了能随时打开文档、随时写一点的本领（正如这篇文章也是我在睡前和回家地铁上分了N次敲出来的），但我仍不想同时打开多份文档或邮件，我经常告诫着自己“处理完A我就写稿”“开完B会我就写稿”，但那个写稿的文档常是从上班开到下班也未见一字动静，这种体验十分挫败。
更重要的是，我总需要归纳、总结、沉下心来碰撞思维的时间，无法像许多人那样觉得邮件回完了就可以下班了、今天的稿子交了明天的事明天再说——陷入那样只看今朝的状态，是极容易觉得自己每天都忙忙碌碌，一月或一年回首时发现自己一事无成的。
而对于创意类的项目，也会发现，有的同事因为日常忙碌，创意的来源停留在看看其他人做什么-照搬的表层，但事实上，必须拿公司多维度的信息去碰撞那些创新主题和形式，才能真正形成让人眼前一亮的创意，这种方式也比照搬更具可持续性，而这背后需要的不仅是时间，更是连续性的思考。也许是我道行不够，我做不到像写稿子那样每天随时写几行，就能打得进去。
所以我的问题不在于要去认识Deep Work的价值，而是受困于求而不得。
好在这本书提供了一些小方法，我正在工作中积极尝试。
比如为了避免自己反复横跳，我开始尝试把一些事务以集中化的时间处理，比如在每天午饭前和下班前仅两次查看需要我审批的邮件和OA，避免干会活去批几个东西再回来干会活而导致的精力损失。
这种精力损失常常单个活动无意识、日积月累却耗费惊人。
By seeing messages that you cannot deal with at the moment (which is almost always the case), you’ll be forced to turn back to the primary task with a secondary task left unfinished. The attention residue left by such unresolved switches dampens your performance
另外，在8小时以外的时间，我开始把需要加班的事放在统一且整块的时间里完成，把业余生活放入另一个时间段。
譬如过往我常常因为自己稿子没写完，到家就开始写稿，往往会因为刚回家进入不了工作状态，拖拖拉拉，到了较晚时间才进入zone，而那时候往往会收到海外每日的监测报告，在一通回复后，临近睡觉时间（否则第二天起不来），继续写稿也不是，停笔又不甘心——从结果看，仿佛我从回家起满心满眼就是工作，但大多数时间和精力都浪费在了切换与挣扎上。
看了这本书之后，我干脆撒开，回家先做自己的事，通常是健身、做饭、看书/写作三选一到二，到了10点开始写稿，写一个多小时或会遇上监测，回复完成后会把当日收到的所有邮件全部处理一遍，然后麻溜睡觉——看起来我在写稿上花的时间更少了，但这种方式让我的生活更富节奏，心态更从容无拉扯；而从产出看，和之前的做法也几乎没有差别。
在书里，这一做法事关至少两个tactic，其一是给自己设定真正的下班时间，到点就对工作电脑shut down——因为我每晚必须回复海外同事的报告，我将自己的强制shut down设定在大约7、8点到家，到10点左右的这段时间，2个多小时，作为喘息。
另一个tactic，是作者驳斥一些教人深度工作的理论，他们会说，你应该每周抽出多少时间来专程深度思考，但从统计上来看，这并不能给人们的生活带来多大改变，作者说这就好比让减肥的人每周抽出一天只吃健康食物，收效甚微，甚至会给他们造成平时就可以胡吃海塞的错觉。
他的建议是，把深度工作变成一种习惯，策略反过来：
Schedule in advance when you’ll use the Internet, and then avoid it altogether outside these times.
每晚两个小时的自由时间，就是我的Internet use time，他的建议和过往专家的相比，简直就是轻断食与欺骗餐的区别。
不过我本身就不喜欢社交媒体，因此不太会将这段时间用来use the Internet，作者还建议schedule a walk during your workday specifically for the purpose of applying productive meditation to your most pressing problem at the moment——这可能更接近我的安排，不过比起walk，我还是更喜欢读书、做饭来自我沉浸，如果要运动，大多都是直接上中高强度XD我果然还是喜欢有效率的生活。
作为一个无法改变上面想法也不打算立时当刻就要换工作的人，这些节奏的调整是我最快能够尝试的改善举措，而另一方面的尝试，或在于如何更快地在不同内容——大至项目，小至邮件——中切换，减少精力损耗。
无论时间再怎么分成整块，我再怎么能够爽快麻利地在一块块任务中游走，多块分布的状态是不会改变的，随着年龄增长，块数也注定会与日俱增，或许我后面还会去看一看<Thinking, Fast and Slow>。
很不可思议吧，以前最被我瞧不上的self-improvement book，如今竟能有切实的启发，并且成为我认为最适合读原版的存在，助我语言和智识提升一举两得。
<Deep Work>一书里曾经这样“夸夸”自己的读者：
As a reader of this book, you're a disciple of depth in a shallow world.
我如今就想恬不知耻地把这一赞美承接下来，成为一个虔诚的disciple of depth，来对抗这个shallow world :)
网图
书摘：
Introduction
>> Jung built a tower out of stone in the woods to promote deep work in his professional life—a task that required time, energy, and money.
>> The ubiquity of deep work among influential individuals is important to emphasize because it stands in sharp contrast to the behavior of most modern knowledge workers—a group that’s rapidly forgetting the value of going deep
>> “On good days, I can get in four hours of focus before the first meeting,” he told me. “Then maybe another three to four hours in the afternoon. And I do mean ‘focus’: no e-mail, no Hacker News [a website popular among tech types], just programming.”
>> . I’m comfortable being bored, and this can be a surprisingly rewarding skill
Chapter 1: Deep Work Is Valuable
>> The first are micro in scope and focus on the personality traits and tactics that helped drive this trio’s rise. The second type of answers are more macro in that they focus less on the individuals and more on the type of work they represent.
>> In this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital
>> Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy 1. The ability to quickly master hard things.2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.
>> This ability to learn hard things quickly, of course, isn’t just necessary for working well with intelligent machines; it also plays a key role in the attempt to become a superstar in just about any field—even those that have little to do with technology.
>> push his current skills to their limit and produce unambiguously valuable and concrete results.
>> The dependence of these abilities on deep work isn’t immediately obvious; it requires a closer look at the science of learning, concentration, and productivity.
>> These business professors do not live the cliché of the absentminded academic lost in books and occasionally stumbling on a big idea. They see productivity as a scientific problem to systematically solve—a goal Adam Grant seems to have achieved.
>> I argue that his approach to batching helps explain this paradox. In particular, by consolidating his work into intense and uninterrupted pulses, he’s leveraging the following law of productivity:High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)
>> when you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task. This residue gets especially thick if your work on Task A was unbounded and of low intensity before you switched, but even if you finish Task A before moving on, your attention remains divided for a while.
>> It might seem harmless to take a quick glance at your inbox every ten minutes or so. Indeed, many justify this behavior as better than the old practice of leaving an inbox open on the screen at all times (a straw-man habit that few follow anymore).
>> Even worse, by seeing messages that you cannot deal with at the moment (which is almost always the case), you’ll be forced to turn back to the primary task with a secondary task left unfinished. The attention residue left by such unresolved switches dampens your performance.
[Yes that happens almost every day]
>> If you’re not comfortable going deep for extended periods of time, it’ll be difficult to get your performance to the peak levels of quality and quantity increasingly necessary to thrive professionally. Unless your talent and skills absolutely dwarf those of your competition, the deep workers among them will outproduce you.
>> A good chief executive is essentially a hard-to-automate decision engine, not unlike IBM’s Jeopardy!-playing Watson system. They have built up a hard-won repository of experience and have honed and proved an instinct for their market. They’re then presented inputs throughout the day—in the form of e-mails, meetings, site visits, and the like—that they must process and act on. To ask a CEO to spend four hours thinking deeply about a single problem is a waste of what makes him or her valuable. It’s better to hire three smart subordinates to think deeply about the problem and then bring their solutions to the executive for a final decision.
Chapter 2: Deep Work Is Rare
>> the push for content producers of all types to maintain a social media presence.
>> although our current embrace of distraction is a real phenomenon, it’s built on an unstable foundation and can be easily dismissed once you decide to cultivate a deep work ethic.
[sounds cool]
>> if he managed to spend only thirty seconds per message on average, this still added up to almost an hour and a half per day dedicated to moving information around like a human network router. This seemed like a lot of time spent on something that wasn’t a primary piece of his job description.
>> The result: He discovered that Atlantic Media was spending well over a million dollars a year to pay people to process e-mails, with every message sent or received tapping the company for around ninety-five cents of labor costs.
>> Even though we abstractly accept that distraction has costs and depth has value, these impacts, as Tom Cochran discovered, are difficult to measure.
>> just because it’s hard to measure metrics related to deep work doesn’t automatically lead to the conclusion that businesses will dismiss it.
>> consider the common practice of setting up regularly occurring meetings for projects. These meetings tend to pile up and fracture schedules to the point where sustained focus during the day becomes impossible. Why do they persist? They’re easier.
>> they let the impending meeting each week force them to take some action on a given project and more generally provide a highly visible simulacrum of progress.
>> consider the frustratingly common practice of forwarding an e-mail to one or more colleagues, labeled with a short open-ended interrogative, such as: “Thoughts?” These e-mails take the sender only a handful of seconds to write but can command many minutes (if not hours, in some cases) of time and attention from their recipients to work toward a coherent response. A little more care in crafting the message by the sender could reduce the overall time spent by all parties by a significant fraction. So why are these easily avoidable and time-sucking e-mails so common? From the sender’s perspective, they’re easier.
[Exactly!!!我的嘴替]
>> our society was sliding into a troubling relationship with technology. We were, he noted, no longer discussing the trade-offs surrounding new technologies, balancing the new efficiencies against the new problems introduced. If it’s high-tech, we began to instead assume, then it’s good. Case closed.
[This is exactly what we're experiencing every day]
Chapter 3: Deep Work Is Meaningful
>> Knowledge work exchanges this clarity for ambiguity. It can be hard to define exactly what a given knowledge worker does and how it differs from another: On our worst days, it can seem that all knowledge work boils down to the same exhausting roil of e-mails and PowerPoint, with only the charts used in the slides differentiating one career from another.
>> The world of information superhighways and cyber space has left me rather cold and disenchanted.
>> “Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.
>> Deep work is an activity well suited to generate a flow state (the phrases used by Csikszentmihalyi to describe what generates flow include notions of stretching your mind to its limits, concentrating, and losing yourself in an activity—all of which also describe deep work).
>> Any pursuit—be it physical or cognitive—that supports high levels of skill can also generate a sense of sacredness.
>> Your work is craft, and if you hone your ability and apply it with respect and care, then like the skilled wheelwright you can generate meaning in the daily efforts of your professional life.
>> the specifics of the work are irrelevant. The meaning uncovered by such efforts is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in craftsmanship—not the outcomes of their work. Put another way, a wooden wheel is not noble, but its shaping can be.
>> You don’t need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work.
>> If you cultivate this skill, you’ll thrive professionally.
Rule #1: Work Deeply
>> explore the intersection between the conceptual and the concrete.
>> “[The lack of circulation] is critical because it doesn’t allow you to bypass any of the spaces as you get deeper into the machine.”
>> We instead find ourselves in distracting open offices where inboxes cannot be neglected and meetings are incessant—a setting where colleagues would rather you respond quickly to their latest e-mail than produce the best possible results. As a reader of this book, in other words, you’re a disciple of depth in a shallow world.
>> you’re a disciple of depth in a shallow world.
[今日最棒赞美]
>> one of the main obstacles to going deep: the urge to turn your attention toward something more superficial.
>> I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.
[酷！！]
>> removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you’re going to go deep.
>> replace the visual aid of the chain method with a set starting time that you use every day for deep work.
>> Any time he could find some free time, he would switch into a deep work mode and hammer away at his book.
[这是我最想练就的]
>> waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan. In fact, perhaps the single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration.
>> it’s not just the change of environment or seeking of quiet that enables more depth. The dominant force is the psychology of committing so seriously to the task at hand.
>> The key is to maintain both in a hub-and-spoke-style arrangement: Expose yourself to ideas in hubs on a regular basis, but maintain a spoke in which to work deeply on what you encounter.
>> if you keep interrupting your evening to check and respond to e-mail, or put aside a few hours after dinner to catch up on an approaching deadline, you’re robbing your directed attention centers of the uninterrupted rest they need for restoration. Even if these work dashes consume only a small amount of time, they prevent you from reaching the levels of deeper relaxation in which attention restoration can occur.
>> Any work you do fit into the night, therefore, won’t be the type of high-value activities that really advance your career; your efforts will instead likely be confined to low-value shallow tasks (executed at a slow, low-energy pace).
[哎，sometimes true but it's hard to stop or quit with ddl ahead]
>> To succeed with this strategy, you must first accept the commitment that once your workday shuts down, you cannot allow even the smallest incursion of professional concerns into your field of attention.
[要做到这个，可能不得不早睡、然后早起check email，要额外时间停止是不可能的…但可以把这些时间还给晚上的自己，还一部分就可以]
>> To end the ritual, I use this information to make a rough plan for the next day. Once the plan is created, I say, “Shutdown complete,” and my work thoughts are done for the day.
>> This ritual ensures that no task will be forgotten: Each will be reviewed daily and tackled when the time is appropriate. Your mind, in other words, is released from its duty to keep track of these obligations at every moment—your shutdown ritual has taken over that responsibility.
[I did this very often but still cannot stop resolving in my mind. Need a commander like "shutdown complete" to truly shut it down. Let's give a try]
>> When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done. Your average e-mail response time might suffer some, but you’ll more than make up for this with the sheer volume of truly important work produced during the day by your refreshed ability to dive deeper than your exhausted peers.
Rule #2: Embrace Boredom
>> push his understanding closer to his cognitive limit.
>> If every moment of potential boredom in your life—say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives—is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the “mental wrecks” in Nass’s research, it’s not ready for deep work—even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.
[Horrible!!]
>> Schedule in advance when you’ll use the Internet, and then avoid it altogether outside these times. I suggest that you keep a notepad near your computer at work. On this pad, record the next time you’re allowed to use the Internet. Until you arrive at that time, absolutely no network connectivity is allowed—no matter how tempting.
[从“轻断食”到“欺骗餐”的转变哈哈]
>> scheduling a walk during your workday specifically for the purpose of applying productive meditation to your most pressing problem at the moment.
[I prefer cooking than walking]
Rule #3: Quit Social Media
>> value is value: If you can find some extra benefit in using a service like Facebook—even if it’s small—then why not use it? I call this way of thinking the any-benefit mind-set, as it identifies any possible benefit as sufficient justification for using a network tool.
>> There’s a lot of communication in my life that’s not enriching, it’s impoverishing.”
>> when it comes to your relaxation, don’t default to whatever catches your attention at the moment, but instead dedicate some advance thinking to the question of how you want to spend your “day within a day.”
Rule #4: Drain the Shallows
>> shallow work obligations—no status meetings, no memos, and, blessedly, no PowerPoint.
[xs，PPT是shallow work]
>> Now comes the important part: Divide the hours of your workday into blocks and assign activities to the blocks
>> To keep things reasonably clean, the minimum length of a block should be thirty minutes
>> tasks that leverage your expertise tend to be deep tasks and they can therefore provide a double benefit: They return more value per time spent, and they stretch your abilities, leading to improvement
>> e-mail. This quintessential shallow activity is particularly insidious in its grip on most knowledge workers’ attention, as it delivers a steady stream of distractions addressed specifically to you.
[更可怕的是，中国的职场普遍觉得email都不够高效，回复不够及时，需要用微信或者能显示“已读”的钉钉，ridiculously fragment time and make the world shallow]
生词表：
>> touch petulant 难以取悦的
>> thwarted 挫败的
>> scarcity 稀缺性
>> quelling 抑制，平息
>> serendipity 意外发现美好事物的运气，机缘巧合
>> serendipitous creativity 偶然的创造力
>> fungible 代替的；可取代的
>> Busyness as Proxy for Productivity
>> anachronistic 不合时宜
>> rapt attention 全神贯注
>> foolhardy 鲁莽的
>> Monastic 修道院
>> succinctly 简洁地
>> In retrospect 回想起来
>> frenetic work 疯狂的工作
>> insidious 阴险的
>> curmudgeon 脾气坏的人
>> plausible priority 合理的优先级
>> cold turkey 突然戒断
>> bushels of e-mails
>> The Tyranny of E-mail
>> coerced 强迫
>> avoid the grueling schedules 避免紧张的日程安排
>> precipitously 陡然
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