This post covers the fourth and last lesson in the Deep Work series. I don't have the ambition to revisit the meaning of this whole saga with a few final sentences suddenly illuminating a clearly coherent direction between seemingly unrelated pieces of advice. There was no masterplan and there will be no eye-opening conclusion. My hope is that some bits of this adrift stream of information reached your inner world and planted there the seeds for new personal journeys. Regardless of whether you'll just throw these words in the nearest mental garbage can or you'll actually cherish them for years to come I wanted to express my graditude to you reader. Logic tells me that if you're reading this introduction you've likely read the previous ones as well (and hopefully what followed the introductions too): you've come quite far and before taking the last step of this questionable but nonetheless shared excursion into productivity space I shall say thank you.

The last idea that we're going to discuss comes from the same chapter that interested lesson #2 and lesson #3, which - you know by now- covers "rule #1: work deeply. At the time when I first read about it I had already envisioned an heuristic (gloriously named "the fuck-up day") which precisely matched the concept. It is a mix of joy, surprise and excitement finding your own thoughts or intuitions put into clean words and embedded into an orderly logical explanation by a complete stranger. Of course Newport's implementation differs from mine and probably neither of them will work for you. If you'll ever come around trying it yourself (highly recommended) you'll end up realising the idea in your own way.

At its core the method is simple and surprisingly effective. The insight is that our minds (as well as our bodies) need a periodic shutdown to function properly when they're regularly exercised or kept under strain for long periods of time. This is not some weakness to be defeated with practice: it's physiological, it is part of the machinery. Your car's tires need pressure check every once in a while, and for how humbling the comparison with a piece of rubber and carbon may be, your mind and body are not an exception. Newport provides plenty of evidence in support of this theory: I'll only discuss my favorite one here.

The attention restoration theory (ART) claims that spending time in natural environments can improve our ability to concentrate (compared to hanging out in the city). First proposed in the 1980s by the University of Michigan psychologists Rachel Kaplan and Stephen Kaplan, ART is based on the concept of attention fatigue. Focusing on something requires what ART calls "directed attention". They claim that this resource is finite: If you exhaust it, you’ll struggle to concentrate. In a paper from 2008 they discovered a significant impairment of the ability to focus in a group that had been asked to take a walk in the city compared to one that had instead been directed to a park. One hypothesis is that navigating through the busy city streets requires a consistent level of directed attention, while walking in the countryside keeps the mind stimulated without requiring directed attention.

So what is the point here: should you pack your stuff and drive away until you're surrounded by wilderness than pitch your tent there - #countrylife?
Newport believes the implications of ART to expand beyond the benefits of the natural world. At the heart of it all is the idea that it is possible to restore our (highly valuable) ability to focus by assigning some time to a "relaxing activity", i.e. an occupation that does not require concentration. It doesn't have to be nature, but it must be something that charms you enough to avoid taking a break from the break to check emails. The more pressuring your duties (think of an approaching deadline) the harder it will be to separate from them, and the more you will unknowingly need to do it. In Newport's words:

I find the concept fascinating: that in the end achieving some goal is not about practice and will power, but instead it is about learning to let go. Once you accept that your resources are finite what is left is to decide what to spend them on, and to drop the rest.

Now it's time to see how you could go about integrating this periodic shutdown into your routine.
Newport suggests a strategy that we shall call the evening shutdown: "no after-dinner email check, no mental replays of conversations, and no scheming about how you'll handle an upcoming challenge". The method is straight-forward: set a hard, non negotiable time limit to your workday and then shut down work thinking completely. It doesn't have to be after dinner, and it actually doesn't have to be in the evening at all. To this seemingly simple advice Newport adds the suggestion to adopt a shutdown ritual, i.e. a sequence of actions to be performed always in the same order to initiate the shutdown period. It might sound "cheesy" but it can actually make a difference. See, probably the main difficulty with the evening shutdown solution is that even if you decide to stop working your brain will likely keep going back to your pending tasks. A shutdown ritual is a way to tell your brain that it is safe to release work-related thoughts for the rest of the day. The ritual idea is based on what is known as the Zeigarnik effect, named after the psychologist who discovered it the early 20th century, and a related recent study presented in the paper "Consider It Done!" by Roy Baumeister and E.J. Masicampo. The effect describes the ability of incomplete tasks to dominate our attention, which may make the idea of any kind of prolonged break seem a mirage. However, in the study mentioned above the two researchers discovered that simply making a plan for the unfinished work could significantly reduce the effect's impact. Treasuring the implications of this finding, Newport advises to include tasks review and planning into a shutdown ritual, to make it easier for your mind to let go off work for the rest of the day.

Now, as I anticipated above, I had reached a similar conclusion on my own. Working everyday, morning to evening, with no pre-set limits, I noticed an inevitable decline in efficiency of my work hours: I was not actively distracting myself, perhaps picking up the phone or letting the YouTube recommendation system express itself freely in my watched history. No, I was doing my job: I was sitting at the desk, with my pen, books, notebooks; nothing missing, except my focus. I would find myself sometimes reading the same sentence multiple times, slowly (and very loudly in my head like my neurons had suddenly turned deaf). In essence, the usual configuration would stop working. Noticing this as a regular and frequent pattern in my work week, I decided to experiment with a counter-measure: completely shutting off all activities for 24 hours a week. The rest of the days have no limits on the working hours, i.e. I could potentially work all night if need be. I called this the fuck-up day. To my surprise, it worked like magic. I could stay motivated and focused throughout the week and I discovered that in the absence of downtime 6 days were actually more than enough to complete all my weekly tasks. And of course, having gained a day a week entirely for myself, I was especially content with the new arrangement. There is a disclaimer for the workaholics, and for those who make of their hobbies a second job. This trick is only effective if you actually pull the plug and let go during your fuck-up day. Relax. Turn off all the alarms, remove stress sources of any kind, just be. As the name says, you have to live the 'fuck-up day' as 24 hours in which you're allowed to 'fuck-up' all the rules and let go of all your duties. Take that part of your self that is still an unruly kid and let it choose what to do. It should be simple, if it's not then you're not doing it right.

Now let's look at the difference with what Newport says and let's wrap this lesson up. The main idea, constituting the core of both the strategies that I've just presented to you, essentially says that you should periodically carve some time work-free off your routine, to let your focus restore. There is a very fundamental difference with accidentally taking the evening or the day off because you have no more work to do or you're just too tired. And that is the planning component. Both the evening shutdown and the fuck-up day are an integral part of your routine: you know in advance that you're going to have this time for yourself, and there is a symbolic line separating your work from your leisure. I believe in a way the planning prepares your mind to the shutdown, so that when the time comes it is ready to fully let go. Now Newport suggests a daily shutdown, I instead use a weekly one. You might want to use a bi-weekly one (?) or look instead at a monthly range. However you do it, what matters is that you actually do it, meaning that you sit down and plan it wisely. Don't fool yourself: set realistic goals, adapt the rule to your routine as it is today, not as you'd want it to be (we can work on that another time).

This closes our lesson, and, as we've just learned, when you're done, be done! Thank you for your time and good luck with your personalised productivity journey.