Number of words: 852

Consider a 2012 study, led by psychologists Wilhelm Hofmann and Roy Baumeister, that outfitted 205 adults with beepers that activated at randomly selected times (this is the experience sampling method discussed in Part 1). When the beeper sounded, the subject was asked to pause for a moment to reflect on desires that he or she was currently feeling or had felt in the last thirty minutes, and then answer a set of questions about these desires. After a week, the researchers had gathered more than 7,500 samples. Here’s the short version of what they found: People fight desires all day long. As Baumeister summarized in his subsequent book, Willpower (co-authoredwith the science writer John Tierney): “Desire turned out to be the norm, not the exception.”

The five most common desires these subjects fought include, not surprisingly, eating, sleeping, and sex. But the top five list also included desires for “taking a break from [hard] work… checking e-mail and social networking sites, surfing the web, listening to music, or watching television.” The lure of the Internet and television proved especially strong: The subjects succeeded in resisting these particularly addictive distractions only around half the time.

These results are bad news for this rule’s goal of helping you cultivate a deep work habit. They tell us that you can expect to be bombarded with the desire to do anything but work deeply throughout the day, and if you’re like the German subjects from the Hofmann and Baumeister study, these competing desires will often win out. You might respond at this point that you will succeed where these subjects failed because you understand the importance of depth and will therefore be more rigorous in your will to remain concentrated. This is a noble sentiment, but the decades of research that preceded this study underscore its futility. A now voluminous line of inquiry, initiated in a series of pioneering papers also written by Roy Baumeister, has established the following important (and at the time, unexpected) truth about willpower: You have a finite amount of will power that becomes depleted as you use it.

Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it’s instead like a muscle that tires. This is why the subjects in the Hofmann and Baumeister study had such a hard time fighting desires—over time these distractions drained their finite pool of willpower until they could no longer resist. The same will happen to you, regardless of your intentions—unless, that is, you’re smart about your habits.

This brings me to the motivating idea behind the strategies that follow: The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limitedwillpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration. If you suddenly decide, for example, in the middle of a distracted afternoon spent Web browsing, to switch your attention to a cognitively demanding task, you’ll draw heavily from your finite willpower to wrest your attention away from the online shininess. Such attempts will therefore frequently fail. On the other hand, if you deployed smart routines and rituals—perhaps a set time and quiet location used for your deep tasks each afternoon—you’d require much less willpower to start and keep going. In the long run, you’d therefore succeed with these deep efforts far more often.

And yet, these open office designs are not embraced haphazardly. As Maria Konnikova reports in The New Yorker , when this concept first emerged, its goal was to “facilitate communication and idea flow.” This claim resonated with American businesses looking to embrace an aura of start-up unconventionality. Josh Tyrangiel, the editor of Bloomberg Businessweek, for example, explained the lack of offices in Bloomberg’s headquarters as follows: “Open plan is pretty spectacular; it ensures that everyone is attuned to the broad mission, and… it encourages curiosity between people who work in different disciplines.” Jack Dorsey justified the open layout of the Square headquarters by explaining: “We encourage people to stay out in the open because we believe in serendipity—and people walking by each other teaching new things.”

For the sake of discussion, let’s call this principle—that when you allow people to bump into each other smart collaborations and new ideas emerge—the theory of serendipitous creativity. When Mark Zuckerberg decided to build the world’s largestoffice, we can reasonably conjecture, this theory helped drive his decision, just as it has driven many of the moves toward open workspaces elsewhere in Silicon Valley and beyond. (Other less-exalted factors, like saving money and increasing supervision, also play a role, but they’re not as sexy and are therefore less emphasized.)

This decision between promoting concentration and promoting serendipity seems to indicate that deep work (an individual endeavor) is incompatible with generating creative insights (a collaborative endeavor). This conclusion, however, is flawed. It’s based, I argue, on an incomplete understanding of the theory of serendipitous creativity.

Excerpted from page number 98-100 of “Deep Work” by Cal Newport.