Interruptable work I’ve been thinking a lot about deep and shallow work - and experimental work. My issue is that I’m most often working at a desk that’s within eye-line of a research laboratory. Interruptions are frequent, as well as part of the environment. Safety issues, urgent purchase orders, and experiment troubleshooting (just to name a few) are activities that cannot be tightly scheduled. They will come up throughout the day: when a connection comes loose, a chemical is found to be decomposed, or a reaction doesn’t go to plan. Trying to delay these until the next available time-block is not appropriate - whether it poses a hazard, delays a planned experiment, or derails an experimental time-line. My point is that within the working life of a research chemist, things don’t always go to plan. Time-blocking a session for deep work is great for teaching, processing data, reading literature, or writing. But now that I’m mostly back in the office/laboratory, these deep work sessions are being more regularly interrupted.

In Deep Work, Cal discusses four philosophies of working: Monastic, Bimodal, Rhythmic, and Journalistic. I work best in the Rhythmic philosophy. I schedule regular sessions to make significant progress on my projects. Outside of these sacred blocks, I am still able to make progress. For example, I ran an experiment today. After the half hour setting everything up, I could leave it for half an hour before it needed intervention. I could not completely leave it out of my mind, so do not feel I was in a true ‘deep work’ session, but I was able to make progress on some manuscript revisions I’m working on. I used the idea I discussed in the last post, and set a timer for 28 minutes. I could then concentrate pretty well on the task at hand. When the timer went off, I made sure to update my notes on what I had done, and what I was up to (including highlighting the last sentence I had written). This allows me later to pick up where I had left off without too much cognitive load.

This work is deep as it is important, cognitively demanding, and moves the needle in terms of progressing my career. However, it is also discrete and can be broken into smaller chunks. That lets me work on a small chunk during a period that I know I could be interrupted at any time. I’m finding that this strategy, while not ideal, allows me to reserve the tasks that need longer sessions for my scheduled deep work hours.

If you’re in a similar position, I recommend deciding whether your work is interruptable or dedicated. Then reserve deep work sessions for the dedicated work.