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The best strategy for earning tenure is deceptively simple: do deep work on promotable tasks on a regular basis. It’s simple because it’s fairly easy to understand why those who employ this strategy tend to have strong tenure files. It’s deceptive because implementing this strategy is hard.

Cal Newport defines deep work as “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate” (Deep Work, 3). Research tasks like reading, writing, constructing and running experiments, and coding and analyzing data are examples of deep work in academia.

By contrast, shallow work is “non-cognitively demanding, logistical style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate” (Deep Work, 6). Tasks such as reading and sending email, doing committee work (e.g., faculty governance, graduate admissions), attending meetings, completing paperwork, organizing conferences, and grading are examples of shallow work in academia.

Here is the bottom line: deep work is how you get high-quality publications, and high-quality publications are how you get tenure. Despite this, many tenure-track faculty spend far too much time on shallow tasks, and fail to prioritize deep, promotable work. If you find yourself in this situation, it’s not because you’re not cut out for academia—it’s because you’re human, and being human is hard.

The lure of shallow work

The problem for faculty is that shallow work is abundant in academia, and doing it is often enticing. Shallow work is a good avoidance strategy when insecurity or uncertainty make doing deep work emotionally difficult.

Grading or completing paperwork for an international conference you plan to attend next semester is a great distraction when the mere thought of reading the referee report on a recent R&R fills you with dread and anxiety.

When you start feeling guilty because you said you’d start writing at 9:00am but it’s already 10:30, shallow work is always there to help you feel busy even when you’re not accomplishing much.

Why stare into the abyss that is the grant proposal you’re supposed to be writing (which triggers your imposter syndrome) when you could feel highly productive and competent by zeroing out your inbox?

In his distinctively existential time management book Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman argues that we succumb to distractions like shallow work and social media because we want to “flee something painful about our experience of the present” (103). When you sit down to work on something that’s important to you—a data set, a book proposal, a journal article—you are “forced to face your limits, an experience that feels especially uncomfortable precisely because the task at hand is one you value so much” (105). In other words, your research is something you value, but there is no guarantee that you will achieve the results you want.

The data might not support your hypothesis, the book proposal might not be accepted, the journal article might not be published, your work might fall short of perfection, or might be harshly criticized, and so on and so on. We confront these possibilities—and therefore our limited control over how our lives go—every time we sit down to do our work.

Confronting our limited control is deeply unpleasant. It’s no wonder that we try to avoid it by giving into distraction (extra points if the distraction makes us feel like we have the control we desire, as shallow work often does).

But pre-tenure faculty are in trouble if they don’t recognize shallow work (especially shallow work that feels productive) as a clever procrastination strategy—a bulwark against our fear of failure—or do not appreciate the importance of working deeply (because they underestimate what distraction is costing them). The bottom line is that doing deep work on a consistent basis is how you’ll earn tenure, which is why it’s crucial for tenure-track assistant professors to push through their discomfort and prioritize deep work from day one.

Why deep work matters for pre-tenure faculty

Newport, a professor of computer science at Georgetown University, and an extremely prolific writer, identifies two reasons why deep work is valuable: (1) it helps you learn hard things quickly, and (2) deep work helps you produce at an elite level. Here’s why assistant professors on the tenure track need to do both.

Pre-tenure faculty must learn hard things quickly

Being a productive researcher requires faculty to learn hard things quickly.

First, being a productive researcher requires the ability to learn hard things. Whether you are working on a project that grew out of your dissertation, or are embarking on a new line of research, high-quality scholarship requires the ability to consume vast amounts of information (books, journal articles, data sets, etc.), synthesize it, and then generate novel conclusions from it.

Though we don’t often think of it as such, the research process just described is one of intensive learning (i.e., one of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, or skills). Moreover, the learning involved in the research process is hard (otherwise you wouldn’t need a PhD to do it). Deep work—that is, work done in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit—is how this learning happens.

Second, being a productive researcher requires the ability to learn hard things quickly. Research institutions often expect faculty to produce around 10 high-quality, peer-reviewed publications before tenure. If you go up for tenure at the beginning of your sixth year, that means you need to publish about two articles per year on average (or fewer articles and a book manuscript).

Producing this quantity of high-quality of scholarship while fulfilling your other work responsibilities (e.g., teaching new courses, applying for grants and fellowships, supervising and advising students) means that faculty must consume vast amounts of information, synthesize it, and generate novel conclusions from it at a breakneck pace. When done regularly, deep work is how faculty can learn at the pace their job requires.

Pre-tenure faculty must produce at an elite level

Merely having a sufficient number of publications isn’t enough to get tenure. Those publications also need to be of sufficient quality. To earn tenure at most research institutions, you need to publish original, cutting-edge research in well-respected venues (e.g., high impact journals, prestigious university presses). In other words, you need to produce at an elite level.

Even the most talented researcher in the world could not achieve these results while checking their email or Twitter every 10-15 minutes. To publish at an elite level, you’ve got to hunker down and focus for extended periods of time on a regular basis. High-quality scholarship cannot be produced in a state of semi-distraction; it requires intense concentration—that is, deep work.

Promotable work on the tenure track

In The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women’s Dead-End Work, Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lisa Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingard identify three features of promotable work. First, such work is instrumental to increasing the “currency” of an organization. Second, promotable work is visible to others. Third, promotable work often requires specialized skills.

At most colleges and universities, only two types of work are promotable: research and teaching. The former is more promotable than the latter in the following sense. Having abysmal teaching evaluations might prevent you from earning tenure, but, at many institutions, if your publication record is strong, you can earn tenure while being a mediocre teacher. Moreover, without a strong publication record, having stellar teaching evaluations (and a teaching award, and glowing letters from former students and colleagues) isn’t going to rescue your tenure file.

Research and teaching are promotable because the currency of institutions of higher education is reputation, and this institutional reputation increases in proportion to the research productivity and teaching excellence of their faculty (or by hacking U.S. News and World Report Rankings, but I digress). Both research and teaching are visible, and require specialized skills.

But a lot of the work that faculty do in academia is non-promotable—that is, work that may be important, but does not matter for tenure and promotion to associate professor. Non-promotable work typically involves little depth: serving on committees, assisting with special projects (e.g., organizing a holiday party or alumni event), undergraduate advising, etc.

Although deep work and promotable work often align, there are exceptions. Some non-promotable work is deep. For example, reviewing a journal article or book manuscript is deep but non-promotable work.

To be done well, this work must be pursued in a state of undistracted concentration. Moreover, it often pushes your cognitive capacities to their limit (peer review involves processing complex information); creates new value (in the ideal case, your feedback improves the research under review, and it is published); improves your skill (every time you do it you get better at evaluating scholarly work, and you sometimes learn how to improve your own abilities as a researcher); and is hard to replicate (this work must be done by highly trained experts).

Despite all of this, and despite the importance of peer review, it is not a promotable task. Although reviewing scholarly work requires specialized skills, it is not visible (peer review is typically anonymous) and your doing it does not increase the reputation of your university. You can referee journal articles and book manuscripts until the cows come home, but it won’t earn you tenure.

For this reason, it is important to prioritize deep work that is promotable. In addition to limiting the time you spend on shallow work before tenure, you should also limit the time you spend on deep, non-promotable work.

3 ways to prioritize deep, promotable work

Schedule it

The best way to ensure that deep, promotable work happens on a consistent basis is by putting it into your calendar first, and sticking to your schedule. In this blog post, I wrote about time blocking (time blocking is a way of intentionally structuring your daily and weekly schedule so that specific “blocks” of time are dedicated to completing a specific task or group of tasks), I suggest that you identify those hours of the day during which you are naturally most energetic, alert, and productive (your “deep-work zone”) and protect these hours from teaching and shallow work.

Most people reach the point of diminishing marginal returns after about four hours of deep work, but you can do less than that and still make a lot of progress if you schedule blocks of deep work on a regular basis (e.g., two hours, first thing in the morning, Monday-Friday). Remember that it’s possible to write a lot by writing a little consistently. For example, writing 200 words/day, five days/week, for 14 weeks (an average semester) is 14,000 words!

Minimize distractions

Because doing deep work can be uncomfortable—it triggers feelings of insecurity and lack of control—we often look for distractions. Do yourself a favor and make distractions harder to find.

Silence or turn off your phone and put it somewhere outside of your field of vision (e.g., in a desk drawer or under a stack of papers). Turn off desktop notifications. Put an automatic reply on your email so that others know not to expect a response from you until later.

Work in your office with your door closed, or find a quiet location where colleagues and students can’t find you. (A certain Guggenheim-winning psychology professor at Northwestern works in a secret location on campus—one that my husband discovered accidentally—that is not his office so that he is not interrupted.)

Use an extension like StayFocused to deter unwanted internet use.

Make sure you have enough food and water to sustain you without a trip to the fridge, or the vending machine (this was a favorite distraction strategy of mine in graduate school—I loved those mini bags of Famous Amos cookies!).

Embrace discomfort

Burkeman argues that the reason most anti-distraction strategies ultimately fail is that they don’t get to the root of the problem. “What we think of as ‘distractions’ aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation” (107).

This diagnosis resonates with me, and I think Burkeman is getting at something important about why it can be so hard to focus on work we very much want to accomplish. The remedy, he argues, is to mitigate your urge to be distracted, rather than eliminating the things you use to distract yourself from your uncomfortable feelings of insecurity or anxiety:

The most effective way to sap distraction of its power is just to stop expecting things to be otherwise—to accept  that this unpleasantness is simply what it feels like for finite humans to commit ourselves to the kinds of demanding and valuable tasks that force us to confront our limited control over how our lives unfold. (108).

So, instead of justifying your pursuit of shallow work on the grounds that the conditions for the deep work aren’t right—that you need to postpone deep work until a day or time when you might find the “peaceful absorption in a difficult project” (108) that you desire—you’ve just got to accept that feelings of discomfort when working deeply are probably unavoidable. Embrace those feelings and let them remind you that you are working on something that you care about.

tl;dr

The most straightforward way to ensure that your tenure file is strong is to prioritize deep, promotable work by consistently doing research in a state of distraction-free concentration. Shallow work like email is alluring because it allows us to feel productive while providing a distraction from uncomfortable feelings of insecurity and anxiety that often accompany our attempts to work deeply. But giving into the temptation of shallow work too often will undermine your success on the tenure track. You can ensure that you work deeply on promotable tasks on a regular basis by scheduling blocks of time for deep work, minimizing distractions while working deeply, and embracing the discomfort you feel when doing deep work on things that matter to you.