Doing the Deep Work of Education: 3 Reasons It's Needed, 3 Ways to Get Started

2/27/2022

by Heather M. F. Lyke

A simple Google Search or a scroll through a social media feed from an educator, and it’s easy to confirm that this is a hard year—a hard year that follows two previously hard years. This is a truth that has not alluded us here at Third Eye Education: simply explore some of our articles from this past year to confirm:

"Rethinking Education: Using the Pandemic as Inspiration for Innovation," May 2021
"My First Year of Teaching, Again and Again," August 2021
"Saving Students & Saving Ourselves," December 2021
"Meandering Through the Messy Middle, Searching for Solid Ground," January 2022

In the past year—particularly, over the past few months—there is one phrase we hear over and over from educators: We just don’t have enough time.

Yep. That tracks. Over the course of a school day, teachers have classes to prep for, labs to set up, emails to answer, students to follow-up with, make-up assessments to give, test scores to analyze, poor student choices/behaviors to address, copies to make, coffee to drink, emails to answers, bathroom needs to attend to, parents to call, papers to grade, meetings to attend, assignments to create, messes to clean up, referrals to follow up on, chapters to preview, grades to update online, club meetings to facilitate… and those are only the basics. Not to mention what happens when the classroom phone rings: Can you cover __ class during your prep hour? Could you attend this IEP meeting in place of __ since he is out ill today? FYI, there will now be a mandatory after school meeting.

So the day finishes with work undone; which means that teachers take the work home with them, or they stay late to finish it, or they feel guilty that they did neither of the two. Little of this refuels the soul, little of this is why teachers went into the field, and none of this is sustainable for the long term.

While too much to do in too little time may be a truth universally acknowledged in our field, it’s not one to embrace. In Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport, readers learn that you must “treat your time with respect” (227) and ensure there are many opportunities to do deep work, or “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration” (3).

Considering how little time educators have, the likelihood is low that most Third Eye Education readers will have time to complete Newport’s book in the near future (maybe once summer arrives), I bring you the following key reasons and applications for educators:

3 Reasons Why Deep Work is Needed

It increases job satisfaction.
Counterintuitive though it may be, “jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because…they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it” according to the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Newport 84).

Hungarian psychologist Csikszentmihalyi is perhaps most famous for his work on flow states, which is outlined here along with how educators can utilize this concept in classrooms:

Newport notes that a state of “flow generates happiness” and that “deep work is…well suited to generate a flow state” (85). Therefore, to increase satisfaction with work, educators may wish to find more opportunities for deep work, just as educational leaders may wish to remove/limit the many barriers that can get in the way.

It increases the ability to learn new things.
It is not uncommon to hear that “the educational system is broken” nor that someone would like to lead a new initiative but they “just don’t have the energy.” If we want to try new things, if we want to fix broken systems, then we have to have a capacity to learn new and hard things.

Newport notes that “to learn requires intense concentration” (34); yet, we often try to squish it into 10 minutes at the start of a staff meeting, 30 minutes of table conversation in a room where other groups are also talking, or 45 minutes of PLC session that is filled with interruptions by emails or visitors. But learning requires “deliberate practice”: attention “focused tightly on a specific skill you’re trying to improve or idea you’re trying to master” (35) for long periods of time.

The educational system we are working in right now needs change, but to learn and apply what is needed to make that change, we first must ensure there is time for deep work.

It increases productivity.
Deep work pushes past that concept that being busy is being productive. “Doing lots of stuff in a viable manner” isn’t the aim (64). Instead, when deep work is embraced one identifies what tasks are most important and ensures they can be completed during periods of high concentration.

If one has “clarity about what matters” it then “provides clarity about what does not” (62), and knowing the difference allows one to focus on the work that will have the greatest impact. In turn, productivity—at least the productivity around what matters most—is enhanced.

3 Ways to Reclaim Time to Do Deep Work

Take control of your tasks.
Newport notes that the “key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and to add routines and rituals into your working life,” to “minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration” (100).

Some routines to try:

Batching your work, or scheduling like tasks together, can help with concentration. Batching “hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches” (39) allows focus to be sustained when it’s needed most. Likewise, batching together smaller tasks, like replying to emails or phone messages, allows those smaller, distracting items to be checked off so they will not pull attention away from more important tasks.
Schedule your day. “Divide the hours of your workday into blocks and assign activities” to each block (223). By using Newport’s recommendations, but altering them to work for educators, such a schedule might look something like this:

Shutdown work at the end of the day. Newport notes that “a strict shutdown ritual that you use at the end of the workday” is beneficial and that those interested in doing more deep work should craft “a series of steps you always conduct one after the other” (151). This might look like, at the end of every workday, (1) doing a final check of email, (2) straightening up your desktop, (3) grabbing your empty lunch bag, (4) verbally saying “done” and then (5) shutting off the classroom lights and locking the door. This creates an opportunity for your work-brain to turn off since incomplete tasks can dominate our attention, but “we don’t need to complete a task to get it off our minds;” rather, we simply need to “make a plan” for how it will be completed later (152-153).

Limit distractions.
Some of what Newport suggests when it comes to limiting distractions doesn’t fit in education. For instance, as much as I would love to try his “Don’t Respond” method for dealing with email, I don’t think that would go over well with the staff, parents, students, and community members who email me frequently. Nonetheless, here are some ideas to do work in the education field:

Turn off email notifications during prep hours. For me, it’s the *da-ding* noise of each email hitting my inbox that distracts me, so I mute my computer when I’m doing deep work. I also turn my cellphone on to its “do not disturb” setting during the workday.
Come in early/stay late a few days a week. Since school days are filled with distractions, consider batching tasks that need focus into times when students and colleagues are less likely to interrupt. This could also look like a half-day that you work from home on the weekends. However, be careful not to do this too often: you need down time too (see “Build capacity for future focus” below).
Work outside of your classroom/office: make yourself harder to find. Personally, I love that “coffeehouse feel” I can get in the secondary Media Center, so if I need to really dig into a task, I simply leave my office and make it harder for interruptions to find me, while still knowing if it’s an emergency someone will track me down.
Lock your door, maybe even add a note that says something like, “from 'X' time to 'Y' time I am unavailable because I am focusing intently on providing students with quality feedback, planning engaging lessons built on best practices, or doing a deep dive into what research says will make my students learning experiences more valuable. If this is an emergency, please ; otherwise, please stop by later or send me an email.”

I know there are those who might scoff at some of these suggestions, usually with the argument that we need to be available for our students at all times. While that may be true in some cases, for most of us setting and sharing boundaries like these is a way to teach students time management as well as a way to model the importance of focused work. Setting boundaries lets us become even more available for students in those times when we are not engaged in deep work: these boundaries allow us to be more focused while working with students, as we know our other tasks have already been, or are scheduled to be, completed.

Build capacity for future focus.
Perhaps this is the most counterintuitive of the ways to reclaim time and embrace deep work. To focus deeply, one must also have time allotted for boredom, reflection, meditation, and creativity: this is the yin that balances out the yang of deep work.

In Deep Work, Newport notes that he doesn’t “work at night and rarely on weekends;” yet, during the fall of 2011 to the fall of 2014 he published 20 peer-reviewed articles, won two highly competitive grants, published a book and wrote the bulk of another all while being a full-time professor at Georgetown. His ability to sequester work to Monday through Friday, and to finish each day by 5:30 PM, actually provided him with stronger focus; knowing he had limited time enhanced his productivity and allowed him, upon getting home, to be more present as a spouse and father.

Some ideas for reclaiming the downtown needed to do deep work while at work:

Say no to requests that don’t align with the deep work you are already doing or planning to do.
Do work at work by using some of the strategies outlined above. Leave your to-be-graded pile on your desk, keep your laptop at school, and end your day with a clear plan for tomorrow. This allows downtime to begin the moment you leave work until the moment you return.
Stay off Social Media, which can pull you back into thoughts of work. A simple post by a coworker, or a shared article about teaching, can have your brain back at work in no time. Instead, allow yourself a small window to engage on social media, if you must engage at all.
Schedule downtime by taking an art class, signing up for a yoga class, or meeting a friend for coffee.

By putting into practice some of what Cal Newport recommends, we might be able to make educational change happen faster and achieve more ideal outcomes. Whereas, as Henry Ford is attributed with saying: "if we keep doing what we have always done, we will always get what we have always gotten."

Now, with all of that said, I have just spent two hours doing deep work by focusing on this article (awesome!)—but I did it on a weekend (not so awesome)… So, that is a change I will need to make going forward.

In honor of my own suggestions above, I am now going to turn off this laptop and take a nice long soak in a warm bath so I can better focus on work when I arrive back at school on Monday.

Heather M. F. Lyke is the Director of Teaching & Learning for Dover-Eyota Schools and author of numerous articles focusing on quality education.