Deep Work: Escaping the Cult of Busyness

February 12, 2026 · By Julien Poulin

Virtue #6 is Industry.

Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.

— Benjamin Franklin

We modernize this as Deep Work.

Why the rebrand? Because "Industry" today has been corrupted. We confuse activity with productivity. We prize the person who sends emails at 11 PM, the person who is always "slammed," the person who multitasks in meetings.

Franklin would call this idleness.

Pseudo-Work vs. Real Work

If you spend 8 hours replying to Slack messages, attending status meetings, and shuffling Trello cards, you have been busy. But have you been useful?

Franklin’s standard is strict: "something useful."

Useful work moves the needle. It produces value. It usually requires hard, sustained concentration. It is writing the code, drafting the strategy, designing the building.

The other stuff—the "coordination tax"—is necessary in small doses, but it tends to expand to fill the available time.

Deep Work is the state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit. It creates new value, improves your skill, and is hard to replicate.

Cutting Off Unnecessary Actions

Franklin’s advice to "cut off all unnecessary actions" is the key to deep work.

You cannot do deep work if you are checking your phone every 15 minutes. The "context switch penalty" is real—it takes ~23 minutes to regain full focus after an interruption.

If you are interrupted 3 times an hour, you are statistically never focused. You are operating in a permanent state of cognitive shallow water.

The goal is not to work more hours. It is to work denser hours. 4 hours of Deep Work is worth more than 12 hours of distracted shallow work.

Pseudo-Work vs. Real Work

Cutting Off Unnecessary Actions

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