The Grand Gesture

Newport describes it in Deep Work alongside rituals: where a ritual makes depth routine, a grand gesture makes one piece of deep work feel too important to waste. His best-known examples are J.K. Rowling, who checked into a hotel suite in Edinburgh to finish the last Harry Potter book, and Bill Gates, who periodically stepped away from daily business for think weeks devoted to reading and reflection. The mechanism is psychological rather than practical. A hotel room is not necessarily a better desk than your own, but once you have paid for it, travelled to it and told people about it, the work matters more to you, and you are far less likely to spend the time on email. The change of setting also strips away the cues that usually pull you into shallow habits. The gesture does not have to be expensive or exotic; what makes it grand is that it is unusual for you and costs something you notice. Its limit is that it is occasional by design: repeated every week, it becomes an ordinary routine and loses its force. For most people the best arrangement is a steady ritual, plus a grand gesture saved for the few projects that deserve it.