We all need an “out-of-country” day for deep work
a.k.a. Cal Newport’s bimodal deep work
Angela Duckworth, on advice Daniel Kahneman gave her about her time:
And Danny Kahneman said, “Well, on Thursdays you’re out of the country.” And it took me a beat to figure out, like, what the heck he was talking about. He’s like, “Well, you’re not available on Thursday. You’re out of the country.” And I was like, “No, I’m not. How could I be out of the country just for one day?” And the point was […] that you should have as sacred certain full days where you are effectively out of everyone else’s reach. In that time, you can be creative, you can sustain your concentration.
Cal Newport calls this the bimodal philosophy of deep work (Newport 2016), deep work being “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit”:
The bimodal philosophy believes that deep work can produce extreme productivity, but only if the subject dedicates enough time to such endeavors to reach maximum cognitive intensity—the state in which real breakthroughs occur. This is why the minimum unit of time for deep work in this philosophy tends to be at least one full day. To put aside a few hours in the morning, for example, is too short to count as a deep work stretch for an adherent of this approach.
Just before Kahneman comes up, Stephen Dubner reads from Paul Graham’s Maker’s schedule, manager’s schedule (Graham 2009), on why a meeting costs a maker more than its hour:
[People who make things, like programmers and writers] generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.
When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. […]
For someone on the maker’s schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.
Under the attention economy, being able to do deep work is under threat more than ever, and the out-of-country day is one practice to combat that. I’m trying to apply it myself: I’ve been making my Fridays the out-of-country day. And I share Angela’s practical difficulties:
For about a week, I think, I was like, “I’m going to be in France on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and you can’t talk to me.” But then, of course, someone is like, “I really need to talk.” And I’m like, “Okay, except for 9:00, then I’ll be in Philadelphia. But after that, I’m in France! I’m in France from 10:00 am on.” And so, you know, it just encroached.
Right now I still check email and other forms of communication on Fridays. Perhaps I should remind myself to treat it more seriously, and put myself in “airplane mode”.
Now, in the age of AI agents, we have a version of the attention-economy problem that does not come from social media. Agentic engineering is commonly used in my profession, and to work with an agent, you type, wait for the response, read it, and do it again. It is REPL-like, but now it is mutual! Who’s doing the read–eval–print loop? Humans and AI agents, from both sides! And what do you do while you wait? Perhaps you interact with another agent instance. This is a recipe for doom scrolling in the age of AI agents, just that your scrolling may be between a few AI agent sessions.
And for this, airplane mode can’t save you. This is probably a topic for another time.