Performance Matters - Digital Experiences - 30

The neuroscience
of deep work
In
the
book Deep Work: Rules for
Focused Success in a Distracted World,
Cal Newport defines deep work as
" professional activities performed in a
state of distraction-free concentration
that push your cognitive capabilities
to their limit. These efforts create new
value, improve your skill, and are hard to
replicate. " Its counterpart, shallow work,
is defined as " non-cognitively demanding,
logistical-style tasks, often performed
while distracted. These efforts tend to
not create much new value in the world
and are easy to replicate. "
While these mainstream definitions
tickle our intuition, the neuroscience of
deep work provides an understanding
of the mechanisms at play. There is not
one brain region that is solely
responsible for our ability to focus;
instead, a mix of neuromodulators
(substances that influence the function
of neurons) such as acetylcholine,
dopamine,
and norepinephrine are
essential for maintaining focus and
attaining deep work.1
1 For a deeper dive on this, the Power ON
Power OFF blog has a great explainer in novice
terms, " The Neurochemistry of Focus " (2020).
Acetylcholine is a key neuromodulator
behind attention (i.e., focus), learning,
memory, wakefulness, and motivation.
Acetylcholine is essential for the
execution of deep work. Children have
very high levels of acetylcholine, but
these levels decrease with age, making
it harder to learn new tasks and to
maintain your focus to do so.
Dopamine is vital for enhancing one's
attention, staying focused, and being able
to shift that focus when needed based
on prior learned paradigms. For example,
you know which emails to prioritize at
8 a.m. based on past experiences that
your boss doesn't read emails before 12
p.m. Without this skill, you might waste
time on irrelevant or unnecessary tasks.
Dopamine helps ensure your time is
used efficiently as you switch between
tasks and demands. It has also been
shown that, as stress increases, one's
ability to prioritize and switch between
tasks wanes in correlation with varying
dopamine levels.2
Norepinephrine is a neurotransmitter
with a very similar structure to the
hormone epinephrine, also known as
adrenaline. Norepinephrine is important
for wakefulness,
memory,
2 André Nieoullon, Dopamine and the
regulation of cognition and attention, 2002.
and generally ensuring our brain and
body are ready to take action in times
of need. A sense of " urgency " is needed
to
release
norepinephrine
within
brains to gain the outcome of increased
focus. Norepinephrine also is essential
for boosting one's mental stamina
and/or wakefulness. These impacts
result in improved focus and increased
reaction times.
Together, these three neurotransmitters
are important for maintaining enough
focus to learn new behaviors and
attaining a state of deep work in an
environment that constantly tries to
distract us. For example, increased
norepinephrine will make you feel a bit
agitated or jumpy. This could indirectly
cause you to want to do something else
or change your focus. In these moments,
understanding the neuroscience of
focus can help you push through these
urges to be distracted.
alertness,
With deep practice, we can ultimately
condition our brains for deep work by
promoting the release of acetylcholine
and dopamine. In a virtual working world
where our focus is constantly challenged,
this ability to condition our brains for
long bursts of work is something we
must set aside time for.
The data of
our
deep work
The science clearly tells us that deep
work is the product of a complicated
balance of neurochemistry and behavior.
What can today's data tell us about
" focus time " ?
Here the answer is mixed. We have
an increasingly instrumented suite of
online work tools that provide a seeming
wealth of descriptive statistics about
our workday. Yet, those numbers are not
helpful when they are presented without
the context of behavioral insights. It gets
more complicated still when we realize
that even straightforward measures of
workday performance-e.g., the average
time it takes to reply to an email-
do not always conform to our usual
understanding of " average, " 3
making
reports of such numbers fraught with
qualifications and caveats.
We find ourselves at a curious
intersection where work is increasingly
online, conducted in an environment
which has, in many cases, been designed
3 To further complicate matters, as Barabasi
(2010) explains, the patterns that govern human
activities (like email correspondence) might not
even be amenable to the usual mathematical
treatments of means and standard deviations.
Performance Matters - Digital Experiences

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