You know that feeling when you sit down to do important work and three hours later you've answered emails, scrolled through Slack, organized your desktop, and somehow ended up watching a YouTube video about how penguins sleep?

Well, this is the shallow end of the productivity pool — the polar opposite of deep work.

Most of us are drowning in surface-level tasks. We mistake motion for progress and busyness for productivity. We convince ourselves that juggling seventeen browser tabs while fielding endless notifications is just what modern work looks like.

That’s not working, though. It’s just skimming.

The most valuable work happens when you go deep, deep, deep.

Deep work isn't just extended focus time (though that's part of it). It's about diving below the surface noise to where your brain can actually think, create, and solve complex problems. 

It's where breakthroughs happen, where you produce work that matters, and where you remember why you chose your career in the first place.

What Is Deep Work?

Deep work is cognitively demanding activity that’s performed in a state of distraction-free concentration. It pushes your cognitive capabilities to their absolute limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate without the right know-how.

Deep work is the difference between swimming laps in a pool versus floating around in the shallow end. Both involve water, but only one is actually swimming…or any form of cardio activity. 

Deep work isn't just focusing really hard, though. It's sustained, uninterrupted concentration on cognitively demanding tasks. 

Writing a novel is deep work. Answering emails is not. 

Solving complex coding problems is deep work. Attending meetings is almost always not.

The "deep" part matters. This isn't about checking items off a to-do list or powering through busy work. It's about engaging your brain's full capacity to produce work that's valuable, rare, and meaningful.

Yet, as you can imagine, most people spend their entire careers in the shallow end without realizing there's a deeper potential out there.

Why Deep Work Matters (Now More Than Ever)

The ability to focus deeply is becoming rarer and more valuable — which (depending on your nature) is either terrible timing or the opportunity of a lifetime.

Most of your competition have voluntarily destroyed their attention spans. The average worker checks email 36 times per hour and switches between apps over 1,100 times per day. Their brains are basically scrambled eggs at this point.

Yet, the economy increasingly rewards rare, high-skill work that can't be outsourced or automated. Writing thoughtful analysis, solving complex problems, creating innovative solutions — these all require major mental effort that shallow work simply can't produce.

Maybe that’s why Meta is poaching OpenAI employees for millions of dollars?

In a world addicted to the shallow end, going deep is an undeniable advantage.

The question isn't whether deep work works. It's whether you'll take the time to master it or wade in complacency. 

8+ Deep Work Techniques to Take You Below the Surface

These aren't productivity hacks or time management tricks. They're specific methods to train your brain for sustained, cognitively demanding work.

The deep work techniques below build on each other. Some help you prepare for deep work, others help you practice it, and a few help you protect it from the shallow forces trying to drag you back to the surface.

Here's how to go deeper:

  1. Attention Residue Management — Clear mental clutter before diving deep
  2. The Deep Work Ritual — Create consistent conditions for sustained focus
  3. Time Blocking — Protect deep work time like your career depends on it
  4. Progressive Depth Training — Build your focus muscle gradually
  5. The Shutdown Ritual — Separate deep work from everything else
  6. Productive Meditation — Think deeply while moving your body
  7. Digital Minimalism for Deep Work — Choose tools strategically, not randomly
  8. Batch Processing — Group shallow tasks to protect deep time

1. Attention Residue Management

When you switch between tasks, part of your attention gets stuck on the previous task. That's attention residue. 

Before starting deep work, do a "brain dump": write down everything on your mind, check off any quick tasks, and close unnecessary tabs. 

It might feel like procrastination, but it’s actually preparation. Research shows that clearing attention residue can improve cognitive performance in the following deep work session.

2. The Deep Work Ritual

Your brain craves predictability for deep work. 

Design a ritual that signals "it's time to go deep": same location, same time, same setup routine. This might be brewing coffee, clearing your desk, and putting on noise-canceling headphones. 

The ritual itself doesn't matter all that much — consistency does. 

When your brain recognizes the pattern, it automatically shifts into deep work mode without wasting mental energy on decisions about how to start.

3. Time Blocking

Protect deep work time like your career depends on it...because it kind of does.

Block specific times for specific deep work, and treat these blocks as unmovable appointments. Start with 90-minute blocks (the natural limit for most people's sustained attention). Put it on your calendar, silence notifications, and tell people you're unavailable. 

If you don't aggressively protect this time, shallow work will expand to fill every available minute. Every time.

4. Progressive Depth Training

Your brain is like any other muscle — you can't go from couch to marathon runner overnight. Start with 30-minute deep work sessions (or even much shorter) and gradually increase. 

Track your focus breaks: when does your mind start wandering? Push just slightly past that point each time. Most people can't sustain deep focus for more than 20 minutes initially, and that's fine. 

The goal is just to build the mental stamina to go a little bit deeper than yesterday.

5. The Shutdown Ritual

Separate deep work from everything else. Your brain needs a signal that deep work is over and it's safe to think about other things. 

Create a shutdown ritual:

  • Review what you accomplished
  • Plan tomorrow's priorities
  • Literally say "schedule shutdown complete" (yes, out loud)

Yep, it’s weird. But it works to achieve the Zeigarnik effect. Without a clear end, your deep work sessions will bleed into everything else, making both your work and your life feel chaotic and unfinished.

6. Productive Meditation

Take a problem you're working on and think about it while walking, running, or other rhythmic physical activity. This is different from multitasking. You’re using movement to access deeper thinking

Your body handles the automatic movement while your mind can wander into complex problem-solving territory. 

Darwin did his best thinking on his daily walks. You might not be trying to be like Darwin, but you might as well steal (some of) his techniques.

7. Digital Minimalism for Deep Work

Every app, notification, and digital tool is fighting for your attention…and most of them are winning. Digital minimalism means being absolutely ruthless about which tools actually serve your goals. 

Turn off all non-essential notifications. Use website blockers during deep work sessions. Ask yourself: "Does this tool directly support my most important work, or is it just making me feel busy?" 

If it's the latter, delete it.

8. Batch Processing

Shallow work will nibble away at your deep work capacity all day long if you let it. 

Instead, batch similar shallow tasks together: answer all emails at once, make all your phone calls in one block, handle administrative tasks in dedicated time slots. 

This prevents the constant task-switching that destroys your ability to go deep. It’s basically quarantining the shallow stuff so it can't infect your deep work sessions.

Let Deep Work Take You…Deeper

You now have a bucket’s worth of deep work techniques that can transform your work from shallow busy-work to high-value output. 

But here's the ugly truth: reading about deep work is shallow work.

So, let’s apply our principles and get started. 

First, pick one technique that resonated most. That might be finally time-blocking your calendar, or it could be creating a shutdown ritual. Maybe it's admitting that your digital tools are working against you.

Next, get started. Don't attempt a 4-hour deep work session tomorrow. Try 25 minutes with one technique. 

Let teeny-tiny successes build momentum until they’re unstoppable inertia-driven snowballs.

Subscribe to Hold That Thought for more strategies that cut through the noise and get to what actually works — because surface-level thinking only gets surface-level results.