Knowledge at Work - Episode 2
Deep Work
The Future of Work topic we would like to first introduce is Deep Work. The topic comes from author Cal Newport, below is a high-level overview of his book Deep Work.
Deep Work
"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." - Cal Newport
Ideas
Cal frames the Deep Work concept through three Ideas.
Deep Work is Valuable
In our increasingly complex world, there is value in performing work that stretches your limits. The more time you can spend on the most difficult work, the more productive and profitable / promotable you will be.
Competition from artificial intelligence and offshoring makes it is critical that we continue to learn and build our skills. As these threats replace the value we provide to clients and employers, we need to be developing skills that will remain valuable.
The easy work will be the first to go. If we spend time performing this work, we will become replaceable. To stay ahead, we need to spend time investing in learning more difficult skills. Those skills will allow us to create value in the future. The best way to build those skills is to block out time to work on developing them.
Deep Work is Rare
Our world is overrun with distractions and shallow work. Your time is likely to be consumed with low level work that creates very little value. Much of this work is necessary but should not be the focus of your effort.
The dominant distraction Cal is referring to is email. More broadly the idea that we are all always available plays into this as well. We associate fast response with better service and in a service industry better service should be the goal right? The issue becomes providing service at the expense of quality.
This is one area where the historic factory environment worked better. A factory worker would not be asked to turn their back on a machine to open mail? Why do we expect knowledge workers to jump from technical work to customer service so frequently?
Deep Work is Meaningful
We all know how hard we work and the impact of that work. When we spend the majority of our time on shallow work, we recognize that we are not making an impact. Happiness and job satisfaction come from making a difference, not from responding to menial emails.
For the accounting profession one of the more difficult aspects of the deep work concept is that much of the work currently being performed is very shallow or can be perceived as such without the right context.
Preparing a tax return on its own does not feel meaningful, it feels like the compliance that it is. This does not mean we should stop preparing tax returns, but we should seriously consider how we frame that work. As we talk about our work, we can focus more on helping clients pay their fair share. As we plan the work of our talent, we can include them in the client meetings, so they understand the meaning in their work.
Rules
Work Deep
In order to work deeply, you need to embrace the concept and put in effort to create the space for deep work to happen. This may mean blocking out time on your calendar or it could mean working with your manager to shift responsibilities around so you do not have to perform some shallow work. Each person is different so experiment and find what works best for you.
In order to work deeply you will need to work to create the opportunity to work deeply. Communications is critical in applying this rule. If you want to work deeply from 8:00 till noon a few days a week, you need to communicate that to people who may depend on you.
Of the four rules this is the one that most needs buying from all three of our segments. Talent needs to understand their personal work style and needs. Management needs to find ways to balance the needs of their talent. The organization then needs to create systems that create the space for deep work.
Embrace Boredom
Deep work is mentally challenging. Like an athlete needs recovery time, so does your brain. Your work life will include deep and shallow work, you will also need to find time for inactivity. Instead of filling open time with the internet, embrace being bored and not having constant stimulation.
We have all taken an internet break during a busy day. It is easy to think that a couple of minutes surfing the web and reading an article about something not work related is a break. The reality is it is a continued stimulus to your brain. To be our most productive we need to find balance.
Three possible buckets to balance might be deep work, shallow work, and breaks. Remember deep work is mentally straining. We can not sustain deep work; at some point we will need a break. A key to avoiding burnout is knowing when you need a break from work and learning how best to rejuvenate.
Quit Social Media
For the vast majority of us social media serves as entertainment. The core problem is that its addictive nature makes it difficult to limit use. Social media also requires focus and has a mental cost to its consumption.
Similar to rule three, we think of social media as a break, in reality it costs us focus. The addictive nature of social media makes quitting difficult. This is another area where balance is important, if you find social media allows you to stay connected to friends and family find ways to consume it responsibly.
One of the larger dangers with social media is if you also use it professionally. Checking to see if your work social media is performing creates the risk of getting sucked into using it more broadly. If you use social media as part of your job find ways to manage how you do those tasks to minimize distraction.
Drain the Shallows
We will never eliminate shallow work, but we can make changes to shift our primary focus away from shallow work towards deep work. This is incredibly difficult due to the Deep Work is Rare concept. Our world is focused on shallow work. We need to invest time into mitigating or automating shallow work.
Accounting firms give us a good way to think about this rule. Deep Work can be thought of as chargeable hours this is work that creates value that the organization will be able to bill to clients. Shallow work is the other work that needs to be done but is not generating value.
Some exceptions to this would be research and training. These are not always chargeable to a client but they develop skills so talent can advance to more valuable work.
Where this rule is especially applicable is to gathering the information needed to perform the work. This is shallow work that would be an ideal target for automation.
Closing
As we think about this concept in the context of a professional service firm, Deep Work has the potential to grow the staff and the organization. But for this to happen we need to address distraction and shallow work. The most obvious source of distraction for a professional service firm is clients. Of course, without clients there is not firm, but they also serve as the biggest impediment to getting the work done.
For most accounting engagements, your customer is also the supplier on the project. To provide advice, complete a tax return, or perform attestation, the client needs to provide materials and access to information. This creates an interesting dynamic where your supplier and customer are the same entity, but can have different motivations depending on which of these roles they play at any given point in time.
A significant impact of this is talent limited by not having the materials needed to complete a job. Often, talent will shift from preparing the work project to chasing information. Waiting for all the materials is likely impractical. To help keep talent working deeply, we need to craft systems to catalogue what is needed. Instead of making the shift from the deep work of preparing the work to shallow work of requesting documents, we create a system so we can stay deep then switch later to time when we focus on shallow work.
So how can a firm embrace a Deep Work mentality? Lets look at the role each of our three parts in the process.
Talent
Recognize that you are both susceptible to this and a potential cause of this. To leverage working deeply, ask for blocks of time where the expectation is that you are not responding to incoming communications. During these times focus on the most important projects assigned to you and do nothing else. If you encounter a roadblock and need additional information to move forward, make a note of what is needed and who can provide it to you. Do NOT reach out to the person to request the information. Move onto other aspects of the project and continue to make as much progress as possible.
Document your progress, track how much progress is made both in your Deep Work times and your traditional work times. If you want to convince others that this is a better way to work, gather data to show its impact. This can be difficult, in your deep work blocks you may get more projects further in the process, but fewer projects completed. Your next traditional work block may be more communications focused than before, this is completely normal. The cost is not in making progress nor is it in communicating. The cost is in the switch between these different tasks.
Experiment with different lengths of time and times of day. You may find that your optimal deep work schedule is in the morning or afternoon. Many people accept that their deep work blocks will be in the evening. If customers are not calling in to ask questions after 5, then this creates a natural time of easier focus. When you find your optimal deep work schedule share it with your manager.
If you run into an issue where more training is needed to know how to perform a task, add that to your list of information needed. Traditionally, this is where you would create some of the switches. If you routinely ask your manager for answers, they are not going to be able to focus on their projects. To help them better manage their focus we recommend some solutions below. You can do your part by scheduling time with them to cover specific issues. Sending an invitation with some details will help them prepare to help you or offers them an opportunity to accelerate answering your question if needed.
Management
As with many of these topics, management gets stuck in the middle. You will need to think about your own deep work blocks and those of your talent. If you skipped the Talent section, go back and read it, unless your role is solely managing people you will likely benefit from blocking time to work deeply on projects.
Once you discover your optimal deep work times look at the remainder of your schedule and block out times for office hours. This concept comes from higher education but makes sense as a tool for managing knowledge workers. Ideally, these hours will be scheduled consistently each week. During office hours your door is open, and you are available for questions or conversations. If talent has a specific request, they can schedule a time during your office hours.
Part of managing a knowledge worker team is using the different personalities on your team to provide the coverage you need. If your team all thrive doing deep work in the morning, you may need to find ways to stagger their deep work sessions. Alternatively, you may provide coverage by being the main point of contact in the mornings so your team can be focused. This can be a difficult balance and it is critical to remember that your role as a manager is to get the most out of your team. As this applies to deep work the main effort is around scheduling and prioritizing.
We will talk about work flows in another piece, but another issue that can impact deep work is the proper workload. Clear expectations and priorities will help your talent better schedule their workloads. You may need to regularly schedule deep work sessions for yourself to tackle this effort.
Organization
If there is a commitment to providing talent with opportunities for deep work, the organization needs to build systems to facilitate and protect that. The biggest hurdle will likely come from customer requests and demands. There are a couple of strategies to help address this.
First, is setting expectations. If your organization uses a long and technical engagement letter that is not the place to communicate expectations. Part of your customer onboarding process should be a discussion and commitment to expectations. It is important that this be a two-way street and that the organization is prepared to meet its expectations.
Keep in mind that your customer is also your supplier. This can create complex expectations, but the organization cannot complete work if it does not have the needed materials. On the flip side, no customer wants to receive a constant flow of requests with quick deadlines. Where possible try to consolidate requests and points of contact.
These expectations should also be clearly communicated with your talent and management. This allows them to waste less time figuring out which project to focus on next. Scheduling work is a shallow activity, it adds little value and can take lots of time.
Expectations can also be set at the customer level. Allow customers to make a choice in this process. Tighter expectations for the organization should be reflected in the price. If the organization can only handle a certain number of top expectation customers it is acceptable to show it as a sold out option.
Second, is systems to allow greater flexibility. Under talent we talked about making lists of things that are needed. The organization should have a system in place to collect these where everybody can see what is needed. In a latter piece we will talk about crafting a Digital HQ, which will serve some of this purpose.
Leveraging these lists of needed items, the organization can make it easier for people to pull items from the list and make requests, or for a specific job to be created to deal solely with chasing information. This can work with the expectations framework as well. Top level customers may have an expectation that the partner in charge will be their sole point of contact. Lower expectation levels may agree to interact with a pooled email account, another topic we will cover later as we discuss the role of email.
One way to think about this is to see documents and information as a logistical problem. We do not want to treat knowledge workers the same way as physical labor, but we can leverage some industrial design to our processes. At a factory, labor would have a method to flag low inventories, but they would probably not order the supplies.
On the flip side of the documentation comes the outputs and client demands. Our two tools can help address this as well.
Being able to point to an expectations document helps defuse unreasonable demands. The client who submits their tax information two days before the deadline should know if that is enough time for their return to be completed. Again, some clients you may agree to that standard of service, others may require it to be extended. Expectations can also be used to communicate what questions will be addressed and who will address them.
Clearly documenting these expectations, then makes it easier for talent to prioritize their response to your customers demands. If expectations are difficult for the organization to meet, this is a signal to adjust the expectations.
One final point as it relates to deep work and the organization. If the organization is committed to embracing this method of work, it needs to carefully balance the workload and client counts. Deep work is like exercise, people need to balance it with less strenuous activities. Requiring talent to operate at this higher level for extended periods creates burnout. As we see the talent pool shrink, successful organizations will maximize their talent over the long term. Running a knowledge worker sweatshop might be profitable in the short term, but the cost to replace talent will quickly undermine the organization. Providing talent an environment where they can apply their talents to earn an equitable salary creates an everybody wins situation.