I read Deep Work in an afternoon on audio which is how I am justifying reading a book that isn't on my bookshelves…again.
This came up on my radar because in homeschool mom circles there is a big push for getting it all done. I mean we all admit we cannot get it all done, but we are constantly trying to come up with a new way, a new method of organizing ourselves and our work for it to be wrangled. A friend of mine read Sertillange’s The Intellectual Life and she wanted to throw it across the room. He says, “you can do this in as little as two hours a day.”We really do not have two hours a day; we don't have five minutes. I am writing this while grading cheese to make macaroni for a passel of five children in the next room we need to have reading lessons, memory work and play dates and laundry done. So all of this gets done well outside of respectable.
To the book
Newport recognizes that our current society bribes you into stealing your own attention and thatto get anywhere with intellectual work we actually have to step away from modern values. He explains his own early days as an academic trying to publish while also having a family and working. He needed to organize this time and structure his life.
Newport references Carl Jung’s step away from all of his practice duties and to build his own tiny castle so that he could formulate himself and the ideas needed to combat Freud. The mental work needed to happen, and it had to happen in an expeditious and financially efficient way. The financially efficient way was to actually build a castle out in the middle of nowhere that he could just shut himself up in.
So in someways I agree with the wide wide world that Newport's book does not work for moms. I am not gonna be able to go off for a free weekend or fly to Zimbabwe and back and get deep work done or retreat into a deep hidden hobble that no one else gets to touch. However I think that the idea of organization and expediting tasks to do can work and that we can take those things that must be done in houses to work out the broad strokes.
Then we can execute on those plans and tasks during the day and free up time for intellectual work as we are raising our children so that we can be mentally involved with the things we are bringing to them and the conversations that need to happen.
This is actually an inversion of his idea that the important work has to be done off onto the side and with the less effective tasks taking the rest of the time. I think that for moms we need to separate these out so the detailed concentration oriented work is done outside of our highly intense effective days.
For intellectual work we may need to build the muscles like John Milton and retain the things we want to learn inside us, digest them to the point of reproduction, and then keep that in our heads until we can dump it out on paper. Moving a chunk at a time.
But Newport reminds me it is not time that we lack but the discipline to use it. And that a little leaven raises the whole bunch.
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